Inside struggleprofessional wrestling, more fashionable than ever thanks to the astonishing couple formed by Donald Trump and Hulk Hogan, the Babyface (or simply the Face), is the good guy, the hero of the ring, and the Heel is the bad guy, the evil destined to being booed by the audience for his evil faces and dirty tricks. Among the many qualifiers that the recent American elections have received, the literary critic of The New York Times AO Scott chose to define them as those of the “triumph of the heels”, those characters who represent sweaty, loud evil and who are hypermasculine and nerdy bordering on parody. For Scott, Americans, and with them half the planet, have succumbed to the charms of antiheroes who began to triumph in the 2000s, with the tormented and charismatic Batman of Christopher Nolan and the troubled, sociopathic and criminal genius Walter White of Break the bad. Perhaps the worst part is that, on this dark path to evil, we have ended up worshiping Joe Rogan. This is what Emily Nussbaum was talking about in the 2000s, who invented the concept of “bad fans” to designate the loyal followers of amoral fictional characters, scoundrels or downright psychopathic maniacs.
But fiction is one thing, even if performed in a ring filled with human fluids and in front of an ecstatic audience, and reality is another. These days I read Malismby Mauro Entrialgo, which explains how deliberate evil has become a form of political propaganda, and which has much to do with the crisis of traditional representation and intermediation, the spread of hoaxes and conspiracies, the triumph of reactionary influencers and coming out of the incel closet. The forms which, as everyone knows, are the limits which contain what we keep deep within us, have been definitively lost. The attraction to evil and the wicked has always existed, it is the first temptation, but if before we accepted that evil must be defeated, now we believe (or an increasingly large majority believes) that its destructive power must triumph. Destructive, because the new evil, which does not even deserve this name and which finds a much better home in the “evil” invented by Entrialgo, is also incompetent, in the manner of Mazón.
