Kayfabe

I really want to be an artist.  I want to be a creator of worlds that are indistinguishable from our own.  I want to push storytelling to its limits and twist it with the real world in ways so that it might as well be reality because when something is indistinguishable from reality, what stops it from being reality.  We use our perception of the world to determine what is real, so when our perception cannot distinguish fact from fiction, the two cease to have meaning because each term only exists to distinguish itself from what falls under the other.  I, of course, am not the first person to want to bring fiction into reality through art, but I was surprised to find one place where this has been attempted.  Professional wrestling is an art form that typically attempts to stay as believable as reality.  Within wrestling there is a code called Kayfabe.  It basically means that if two wrestlers have an onscreen rivalry, that rivalry has to be artificially extended into the real world.  The two people cannot be seen having lunch together because that would break the illusion.  They are understood to be playing characters, but the separation between a performer and their character is much looser in the world of wrestling.  Often times a character is just an exaggerated version of the person that is playing that character, and they can even share a name in a lot of situations.  This makes their real world selves into a part of the art that’s being created through their characters.  I would love to make art that is this intimately bonded with the real world that the two are on equal levels.  A master of this was Andy Kaufman.  He built up a persona for himself as a wrestler that only wrestled women and was “the world’s greatest inter-sex wrestler”.  He maintained this persona in all interviews and convinced a majority of people that this was actually who he was, but it was really all just for the sake of comedy.  Most of the women he “wrestled” were in on the joke and weren’t actually hurt, but the audience did not know this.  Reality is determined by what the audience is allowed to know.  Another example of twisting reality and fiction comes with the book series, “A Series of Unfortunate Events”.  The series is credited to Lemony Snicket though the author’s real name is Daniel Handler.   Lemony Snicket is a character within the world of the series, and this character is expanded upon in other books.  Within the world of the series, the character Lemony Snicket wrote the books that chronicle the lives of the Baudelaire orphans, and so the readers are introduced to the books as having been written by this fictional author.  This allows the reader to further buy into the story and the world being created whereas they’d be taken out of it if they saw that the books that the character Lemony Snicket claimed to write had the name Daniel Handler printed on the cover.  All of these examples are somewhat dishonest, but they all serve a purpose of convincing the audience of the stories they are experiencing.  Usually, when experiencing a story, there are certain walls that are clearly marked and never crossed in terms of what is real and what is not, and in books that line is usually drawn somewhere close to the book’s cover sleeve.  When these expectations of truth are taken advantage of, entirely new levels of immersion can be reached without the audience ever even realizing that they’re being tricked into being more invested.

Author: Jackson Palmer

Jackson Palmer is a student studying literature at the Mississippi School of the Arts. He hopes to use the education he obtains there to write novels, short stories, poetry, and scripts for movies, television, and theater productions. Additionally, he would like to write within a number of genres such as comedy, drama, horror, etc. Some of his favorite writers and influences include Billy Joel, John Steinbeck, and Dan Harmon. He hopes to explore concepts and systems of thought such as existentialism, nihilism, and fulfillment within his writing. He would like to thank you visiting his blog and hopefully reading his work. View all posts by Jackson Palmer