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The last thing we need is yet another hot take on what is going on with Vince McMahon. The allegations are vile, and if true, he deserves to bear the consequences of his actions.
I want to think about something different that comes up a lot when it comes to entertainment and art:
How can I enjoy something that someone so terrible was involved in? There is a long running debate that fits into this: Can you separate the art from the artist?
Sadly, I don’t think there is a hard and fast rule.
In the wrestling world, we all know about Chris Benoit. One of the greatest performers in the 90’s and 2000’s, but after the horrific acts he did at the end of his life, I don’t go out of my way to watch his work. If he is on an older show I watch, I will watch it, but I don’t feel good about it.
As “Dark Side Of The Ring” has brought up the worst aspects of people involved in wrestling, it gets hard to watch some older stuff as you find out about the worst people and how they were behind the scenes.
But, most of them can be avoided, since you can easily say you won’t watch matches by the people involved.
With Vince McMahon, it’s harder. He is baked into the fabric of the WWE at least as far back as 1982 when he bought the company. He was a character, an announcer, the booker and owner. There are some people who, after the revelations, won’t be able to watch anything he’s had anything to do with, and if that’s you, that’s your decision and it’s perfectly acceptable. Unlike what a lot of people seem to think, you get to decide what you can and cannot put up with.
There are other people who will just keep watching as if nothing happened, and again, that’s your decision and perfectly acceptable. Some people can separate art from artist far more than others. The Cosby Show reruns were pulled from a lot of stations, but there are still cable stations that run it.
For myself? It’s something in the middle. I watch older WWE when I have time and want that nostalgic pop. The Austin/McMahon feud? I can still watch that and not think too much about what Vice has done. Same for the older stuff he was an announcer on. I can even take some of the Mr. McMahon character. However, the stuff that goes beyond the “evil boss” into how women were treated, or other times when Vince was trying to be transitive like “Wrestling God” and the like, I am not ever going to watch again. It’s too close to the truth.
That’s my line.
You need to find yours.
You have to do it with all kinds of art. Members of Led Zeppelin and other rock stars of the 70’s slept with underage groupies. Some even wrote songs about it. Elvis started dating his wife when she was 14. Stories come out all the time of writers involved in sexual abuse, harassment and worse, and their books are still on library shelves and book stores. Same for famous paintings and other art. As a fan of old movies, I wince when I see the blatant racism that is in classic movies like Marx Brothers comedies, 1940’s war movies, and even movies like “The Thin Man” felt the need to drop in a racial stereotype as “comedy”.
Warner Brothers has a series of cartoons called “The Censored Eleven” that they pulled from distribution in the 80’s after they decided that showing “Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarfs” wasn’t good for their corporate image. Disney has put “Song of the South” into the vault.
In MY mind, stuff like Vince McMahon making Trish Stratus bark like a dog, the weird sexual stuff with his children, and more should quietly be moved to the vault over the next year or so. But those are my lines I don’t want to cross. Yours will be different. The line for a 22 year old female fan will be different from a 19 year old male fan. A young fan’s mother’s line will be different from a long time fan who watched the Attitude era while in college.
There is only one group that has the final say, and that’s the owners of the WWE, and they will make the decision based on business.
Only you can make that decision for yourself. Can you separate the performer from who they are as a person?
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