In her 2023 book Ringmaster: Vince McMahon And The Unmaking of America, author Josephine Riesman coins the term “neokayfabe” to deconstruct the rise of former WWE Chairman Vince McMahon, particularly from the company’s late-’90s “Attitude Era” boom period forward. Given our current political reality, you may have been introduced to the term “kayfabe” through the news or elsewhere. It’s a carny term of disputed origin referring to the illusion that pro wrestling be presented as a legitimate athletic contest (something that actual wrestling fans haven’t believed in a half century or more—sorry, culture snobs) to con “marks” into spending their money. Riesman describes its evolved form, neokayfabe, as the theory that “pro wrestling, with all its spectacle, is a lie—but that the lie encodes a deeper truth, discernible to those few who know how to look beyond what’s in front of them…suddenly the pleasure of watching a match has less to do with who wins than with the excitement of decoding it.”
Transposed to our current hellscape, one might read the idea of neokayfabe as “everything is fake news, except what I decide feels real.” The genius of Ringmaster, and why it should be considered required reading in media literacy and journalism classes worldwide, is that while it serves as a biography of Vince McMahon, the decoded thesis of the book—its own neokayfabe—is the rise of our current President and how he’s used a brand of pro wrestling narrative to amass his own following.
What does any of this have to do with the upcoming AEW Collision show at the UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena on Saturday, March 29? AEW isn’t WWE, certainly—it doesn’t have the cultural cache or mainstream popularity of WWE, and certainly doesn’t have a former CEO whose wife is currently overseeing a dismantling of the Department of Education (probably a point in its favor). But for anyone interested in examining the concept of neokayfabe in real time, pretty much any pro wrestling show offers some anthropological material to dig through while also taking in some legitimately impressive athletic displays. And hell, if you want to just go to a show, drink some beers, and shut your brain off while watching men and women crash into each other at high velocities, AEW is a great option for that too. Creatively, the company’s been on a hot streak, coming to Milwaukee on the heels of one of its most action-packed pay-per-views ever—March 9th’s Revolution—and several weeks of solid TV and plot lines. While Collision is generally AEW’s b-show behind flagship Dynamite, there’s still a very good chance that many of the company’s best stories will be represented.
Want to dig into a feud that plays with neokayfabe by exploring the fan perception of two of the company’s top stars? Long Island scumbag Maxwell Jacob Friedman, a.k.a. MJF, has been beefing with AEW’s emotionally conflicted “main character,” “Hangman” Adam Page, over why the fans have embraced Page instead of MJF. Over the past 18 months, Hangman, distraught over rival Swerve Strickland breaking into his house and threatening his infant child (uh, in case I need to reassure anyone here, this was kayfabe, and unintentionally hilarious kayfabe to boot), has walked a dark path through AEW, turning heel while maintaining he was still a good guy, aghast that the fans responded to that very goofy TV segment by cheering Swerve like crazy (shades of the Bret Hart/Steve Austin double-turn at Wrestlemania 13 in 1997, if you’re old school). Things got so crazy that Page, in a segment that aired the last time Dynamite was in Milwaukee, set fire to Swerve’s childhood home and burned it to the ground, calmly sipping bourbon on a chair in front of the spectacle. (He then won the subsequent lights-out match by stabbing Swerve in the cheek with a syringe filled with some sort of happy-go-night-night juice. Wrestling!)
And yet, there’s a segment of the online AEW fan base that has cheekily declared that “Hangman did nothing wrong,” opting to cheer him through every dark turn he’s taken, slowly turning him back into a redeemed babyface…much to MJF’s chagrin. MJF has taken his own path in and out of the fans’ graces, enjoying a silly bromance with tag partner Adam Cole that warmed fans’ hearts before Cole betrayed Max at the end of the December 2023 Worlds End pay-per-view. (It involved Cole and his other friends running around in black masks for a couple months and tormenting Max, because that’s how adult men behave toward their friends in professional wrestling.)
The layers of neokayfabe come into play when comparing fan perceptions of the two men who portray these characters. Maxwell Jacob Friedman is known as a performer truly committed to the bit, staying in kayfabe as an obnoxious prick online, in public, and anywhere the fans might find him. The “real” Max Friedman is obscured by the character, making him easier to boo. On the other hand, Hangman’s social media presence has by and large reinforced his uber-progressive, heart-on-sleeve “anxious millennial cowboy” character, reinforcing the old pro wrestling adage that the best wrestling characters are the performer’s real personality amped up to the nth degree. Is Hangman really the same guy off camera as he is on? Who knows, but what’s important is that the fans feel like he is, and when it comes to truth, what feels true is often more valuable than what can be empirically proven. Sound like anything we’ve had to deal with in the real world in the last decade? (Note: Your humble narrator dives into this in much more detail over on his blog if you’re at all intrigued.)
With Linda McMahon currently taking a chainsaw to the Department of Education, it feels like the current administration’s embrace of neokayfabe to advance its agenda has finally sunk in to some pundits and posters online; hell, even former WCW writer Bob Mould (coming to Turner Hall April 18!) said to Rolling Stone recently that he’s tried to explain our current President’s appeal to Democrats in the context of pro wrestling, only to be met with dismissive waves. Lest anyone interpret this as a condemnation of the art form, on the contrary—this mess we’re in isn’t necessarily pro wrestling’s fault, rather the fault of we the people who aren’t aware of pro wrestling’s tropes to spot them in a different context. (Of course, we’re also seeing a very reductive take on this phenomenon online—that pro wrestling fans embraced the President because they’re marks who can’t tell fake fighting from real fighting. This is, of course, reductive, insulting, and lazy, and helps no one.)
But again, if getting overly cerebral or politically philosophical about a geek show where performers gig themselves with tiny razor blades to bleed on camera for our entertainment isn’t for you, there are plenty of purely entertaining reasons to check out the March 29 Collision taping. Perhaps you’re taken with AEW World Women’s Champion “Timeless” Toni Storm, who had a psychotic break about 18 months ago and decided that she’s a Norma Desmond-esque starlet from the Golden Age of Hollywood, and is fresh off a long-running feud with a former protege that somehow produced the most queer-friendly love story ever seen on American wrestling television? Is masked lucha libre your bag? Because the high-flying Hologram, Dralistico, and The Beast Mortos (a man wrestling in a giant rubber bull mask who is about to fall in love with wrestling ventriloquist Harley Cameron) have been frequent staples on the show. More of a Japanese strong-style fan? Former New Japan stalwarts Katsuyori Shibata, Kazuchika Okada, Jay White, and future AEW World Champion Will Ospreay are all possibilities to make appearances, defy gravity, or maybe take someone’s head off with a stiff penalty kick or ripcord lariat.
AEW has been a bit of a punching bag lately in the world of wrestling fandom. Attendance has dipped from the initial red-hot years of the company’s existence, and certain creative decisions have perplexed its more ardent critics, but 2025 so far has seen the six-year-old company on the rise. A streaming deal with MAX has put the product in front of fresh new eyes, and the weekly TV product has been much more consistent of late, while the in-ring athleticism never disappoints. Whether you make your way over to the UW-Milwaukee Panther Arena to dissect narratives or to get lost in a night of ridiculous spectacle, you’re guaranteed to likely see some pretty insane shit—and that’s objective truth, not kayfabe.
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