Headlocks in lockdown: working the at-home crowd

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article draws on media studies and professional wrestling studies to examine how the major American wrestling company All Elite Wrestling (AEW) renegotiated the “liveness” and affective “excess” of crowded, live events during the COVID19 pandemic. I demonstrate how affective and physical work expanded for wrestlers in the pandemic, as AEW developed production strategies to engage at-home audiences without paying in-house crowds. I analyze how AEW employed mediation techniques, such as “canned” crowd sounds and replays, and “cinematic matches” to produce liveness at the same time as wrestlers increased their labor roles, work hours, bodily effort, and physical precarity as they sought to produce the spectacle of excess. This article contributes insights into how producing feelings of being “together-at-a-distance” for television broadcasts required new forms of mediation and additional precarity and labor from professional wrestlers during COVID19.