When Rich Aucoin headed out across the United States in 2018, via bicycle no-less, he captured a different side of America than we were used to seeing. It wasn’t the land of milk, honey, and liberty they’d paraded around for the last few generations, but the precursor to what has become painfully obvious as the America of 2020. Many saw it coming, but Rich Aucoin committed it to song.
“Kayfabe,” the album’s latest video, and opening track, teaches us a new word and how the lens of reality has been distorted in America, taking on all the theatrics of a staged wrestling match.
As the video points out, “kayfabe” is “(in professional wrestling) the fact or convention of presenting staged performances as genuine or authentic. ‘A masterful job’ of being kayfabe and reality’.” And without even getting our tinfoil hats out we can point to the pageantry of power; the illusions that society has collectively agreed to believe in to hold the country together.
The video was intended to reflect that illusion with a “buddy wrestler video about a Face and a Heel travelling around post-apocalyptic United States, putting on vaudevillian shows for the survivors.” Of course, Aucoin, the consummate video producer that he is, fully intended to pull out the stops and film in the locations he’d actually cycled through… “But,” says Aucoin, “then the pandemic happened. So here is what I shot on my phone with action figures instead.”
Impressively, Aucion captures the story, shot by shot, as a cinematic montage. We’d watch this film. It has the potential to be Mad Max, Robot Chicken, and GLOW all wrapped up into one masterful tear-jerking caper.
But Aucoin’s point, to begin with, was that this isn’t the stuff of Hollywood (unless it is), but what America has become. With everyone glued to their televisions for the last weeks, waiting for the election fallout, who’s to say this isn’t some of the best unscripted reality television of all time?
“There are arguments made that, because of Reality TV blurring the lines between truth and entertainment and then having a star of that world becoming the President of the United States further blurring those lines, that we’re living in a world where truth is dead (at least to a certain percentage of the population),” says Aucoin.
“The arguments continue saying that a fan of wrestling, or a fan of Trump, knows it’s fake but chooses to commit to that truth because of whatever they get from membership; entertainment in the case of wrestling and of existential relief from their problems in the hope for something better with Trump’s fanbase.”
This presidency, if nothing else, has certainly been good for ratings. And you know we’re dying to see Bernie Sanders come out at the last minute with a steel chair when Trump finally refuses to leave the White House. With the way that this last week has gone, it seems like anything is possible.