In it wrestlingprofessional wrestling, more fashionable than ever thanks to the amazing 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 villain, the evil destined to be booed by the public for his evil grimaces and dirty tricks. Among the many qualifiers that the recent US elections have received, the literary critic of The New York Times AO Scott has chosen to define them as those of the “triumph of the heels”, those characters who represent sweaty and vociferous evil and who are hypermasculine and tacky bordering on parody. For Scott, Americans, and with them half the planet, have succumbed to the charms of the 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 Breaking Bad. Perhaps the worst thing is that on that dark path towards evil we have ended up worshiping Joe Rogan. This was what Emily Nussbaum was talking about in the 2000s, who invented the concept of “bad fans” to refer to the faithful followers of amoral fictional characters, scoundrels or outright psychopathic maniacs.
But fiction is one thing, even if it is performed in a ring full of human fluids and before an ecstatic audience, and reality is another. These days I’m reading Malismby Mauro Entrialgo, which explains how deliberate evil has become a form of political propaganda, and which has a lot to do with the crisis of traditional representation and intermediation, the spread of hoaxes and conspiracies, the triumph of reactionary influencers and the Coming out of the incels closet. The forms that, as everyone knows, are the limits that contain what we keep deep down, 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 that name and which finds much better accommodation in the “evilism” that Entrialgo has invented, is also incompetent, in the manner of Mazón.
#Bluesky #lack #malism
