Highlights

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Notice the crowd’s reaction to the Invisible Man vs. the Invisible Stan. The whole debate over wrestling being fake is moot.

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This match is a strange kind of magic, and also a dumb kind of joke that everyone is in on. The total absence of visible wrestlers celebrates the different moving parts of wrestling as an artform.

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The rituals and tropes of wrestling remain even without the wrestlers. It’s the form without the content, or maybe it’s the content without the form.

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Wrestling fans know this is storytelling, and they immerse themselves in the fiction of this world for the duration that the spectacle exists. Watch the fake high-fives during the entrances, or the sympathetic toppling over during the dive from the balcony. Wrestling fans aren’t marks being conned; they are confederates in the magic trick and essential to the illusion.