Courtesy of Netflix
Vince McMahon is the most important figure in the history of professional wrestling, having transformed a regional business into a multi-billion-dollar World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) goliath. He’s also currently the subject of an ongoing federal investigation into allegations that, since 2006, he paid four women a total of $14.6 million to cover up his sexual misconduct– one of whom, former employee Janel Grant, filed her own lawsuit accusing the mogul of heinous crimes including rape, sharing nude photos of her with WWE headliner Brock Lesner (in order to entice him to re-sign with the company, which he did), and defecating on her during a threesome.
Mr. McMahon, director Chris Smith’s six-part Netflix docuseries (Sept. 25), is a comprehensive portrait of a man and an industry defined by the ever-blurry line between fact and fiction. Featuring the participation of numerous wrestling luminaries (including Hulk Hogan, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, John Cena, Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Undertaker, Shawn Michaels, and Bret Hart), it’s the tale of an ambitious and cutthroat individual who built an empire by creating violent and over-the-top athletic theater from contemporary reality, be it during the politically rah-rah ‘80s or the art-imitating-life ‘90s and 2000s. Even his 2007 “feud” with Donald Trump, culminating in a hair-shaving contest at WrestleMania 23, was an expression of its time–and, as it turned out, of the future, since it presaged the no-holds-barred persona that would ultimately help the real-estate magnate win the presidency.
McMahon was always at the center of the WWE, both as a businessman and as a performer, first as an announcer and then as an on-camera villain (i.e., “heel”) known as “Mr. McMahon,” whom the impresario claims is nothing like him. This alternately celebratory and damning affair, though, suggests otherwise. It posits Mr. McMahon as the all-time greatest wrestling character not only because of the bigwig’s talent, but because his core qualities–narcissistic, egomaniacal, cutthroat, sexually ravenous, and altogether perverted and immoral–were, as with all the best wrestling characters, merely extensions of the person who played him.
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