“Nothing that any wrestler, that anybody involved in Wrestling tells you, should be regarded as fact.” – David Shoemaker.
If you grew up watching professional wrestling, then odds are you grew up with Vincent Kennedy McMahon. The daddy of pro wrestling as we know him today, McMahon has been known as a madman, a mastermind, a muscle-clad freak of nature, and a marketing genius, all at once. For the uninitiated, he is just another billionaire running a major corporation, but for those in the know, he plays the character of Mr. McMahon, the evil boss of the WWE whose bizarre behaviour over the years has puzzled, amused and horrified viewers. However, when allegations of sexual misconduct and trafficking came out against Mr. McMahon in 2022, the question everybody started asking was: “is it really just a character?”
Beginning as a straight docuseries about the life of Vince McMahon, the production was forced to course-correct halfway through amidst the allegations against the former CEO. With this in mind, the show does not play out as an investigative deep dive into the case. Instead, the final product is more of a complete history of the WWE that slowly begins to reveal the cracks in the character of Mr. McMahon. Scandals, screwjobs, lawsuits and deaths all point to the possibility that the man and the character very well may be one and the same.
Days before the release of the documentary Vince put out a tweet stating: “A lot has been misrepresented or left out entirely in an effort to… distort the viewers' perception and support a deceptive narrative.” Equally so, in the documentary itself, Bruce Pritchard (a WWE producer who has worked with the company for over five decades) protests: “I didn't think it was balanced at all. I thought it was a gotcha piece.” Though many may have expected it to be exactly that, this could not be farther from the truth.
Mr. McMahon's warts-and-all approach certainly dredges up moments in Vince's life that are less than flattering, but the scandals play just as important a role in shaping him as his successes. For every Wrestlemania-sized triumph, there are allegations and tragedies. So, by simply taking us through the history of McMahon and the WWE in such a straightforward, chronological approach, the documentary shows us things as they happen, allowing us to come to our own conclusions on whether we respect McMahon's success or detest the actions he took to get so far.
What the documentary does best is take us deep into McMahon's psyche. Through interviews with the man himself, we gain limited access into the mind of Vince McMahon. There are some moments where he withholds, such as one segment where he says: “my childhood was what it was. It was difficult. There's fighting, infighting, there's incest,” which is brushed under the carpet and never brought up again just as quickly as the words came out his mouth. It is clear that he is letting us in, but not too much.
The interviews with Vince are where the cracks really begin to show. Though it may be wise to take everything said with a pinch of salt, his reactions to certain situations are eye-opening. It's telling enough when Vince states: “this is business, and there's nothing I wouldn't do for our business,” but things get even darker when, on the subject of the Rita Chatterton rape allegations, he claims: “it was consensual, and actually, had it been a rape, the statute of limitations had run out.”
Though some would like you to believe that these interviews have been deliberately edited to deceive the audience, the documentary makes it clear throughout all six episodes that these interviews were recorded well before the allegations came forward in 2022. It is this knowledge that reveals the most, as many of the claims made in the interviews are not in defense of Vince, but simply become more harrowing with the information we now know.
The argument throughout the documentary is that Vince McMahon and Mr. McMahon are two different people. One is the successful businessman-cum-patriarch of the WWE and the other is an evil character made for television, something we are reminded of almost every episode. Yet, as the show goes on and we begin to form our own opinions, we are not so sure. We aren't the only ones.
It is up to you which stance you take come the end of this series, but it is clear that Vince himself is not sure himself, eventually admitting: “sometimes what happens is performers start believing in themselves. They start believing in their own character. The individual loses all sense of who they really are personally. They become the character. I'm wondering myself now. Which is the character, and which is me?”
If David Shoemaker's quote is anything to go by, this is far from the definitive telling of the Mr. McMahon story. With the lawsuit ongoing, it is highly doubtful that this is the last time the story will ever be told, but this is, for now, the most engaging version of it.
All episodes of Mr McMahon are now available on Netflix.
