“Let Me In”: Analyzing the Firefly Funhouse Match (2020)

Abstract

The Firefly Funhouse Match is a professional wrestling match between WWE wrestlers John Cena and (the late) “The Fiend” Bray Wyatt at WWE’s Wrestlemania 36 (2020). The present paper attempts to critically analyze the “Firefly Funhouse Match” from a variety of theoretical angles. The match is in essence a dive into the unconscious. Mikhail Bakhtin used the term “carnivalesque” to characterize writing that aims to destabilize the hierarchical status quo. In this sense the Firefly Funhouse Match is carnivalesque because it mocks the dominant/traditional forms of professional wrestling. In a conventional wrestling match, there will be a fixed ring, a referee, a dedicated time-slot, a certain geographical location, and so on. But all these notions are subverted in the Firefly Funhouse match: there is no referee, no linear temporal progression, no fixed ring, no concrete geographical location, and we have frequent changes of time-space. The match turns the hierarchical scale on its head. We also find interconnected chronotopes in the match. The wrestling match explores the differences between grandiose epic heroism and the fragmented postmodern man. The match parodies established character archetypes in professional wrestling, urging us to question the face value of scripted roles. It also contains many postmodern elements, such as intertextuality, magic realism, unpredictability, nonlinear storytelling, deconstruction of a fixed identity, fragmentation and irony.

Keywords

• firefly funhouse match
• professional wrestling
• popular culture
• carnivalesque
• postmodernism