In “The Rise and Fall of Vince McMahon,” New Yorker writer Vinson Cunningham stares into the sideshow funhouse mirror of American public life and recoils at what stares back: a nation wading chest-deep in a swamp of “public unreality,” where reason drowns and absurdity floats like a bloated carnival prize. He paints a disquieting tableau: one political figure visibly unraveling into cognitive soup while handlers chirp, “Nothing to see here!”—and another candidate howling about alien intruders abducting and gobbling the nation’s household pets. As if things weren’t deranged enough, an assassination attempt unfolds before our eyes—and instead of ducking for cover, the former President rises like a messianic pro-wrestler, bloody and defiant, pumping his fist in glorious kayfabe triumph. In that moment, Cunningham writes, he isn’t just a politician—he’s a character on the WWE stage. And just like that, the cultural script is flipped: he’s the babyface, and his critics are heels.
This unreality show has a ghostwriter, and his name is Vince McMahon. As Cunningham brilliantly argues, the Netflix docuseries Mr. McMahon is not simply the chronicle of a wrestling mogul—it’s a grim allegory for how American storytelling devolved into moral junk food. McMahon, the snarling CEO of WWE, pioneered a brutal formula: distort narrative, vilify truth, exalt spectacle. He didn’t just conquer the wrestling world—he scripted a worldview that has metastasized into the nation’s political bloodstream. The WWE, Cunningham reminds us, is the prototype of reality TV, the primordial ooze from which influencer culture, troll politics, and clickbait populism have crawled.
In McMahon’s moral universe, lying is a skill, cruelty is charisma, and domination is the only virtue. So long as you win—and do it with flair—you’re golden. Sound familiar? This cartoon villainy, once confined to the ring, now governs the debate stage. It infects our civic discourse like a virus in a locker room. Cunningham doesn’t just lament this transformation—he diagnoses it with the precision of someone who’s watched democracy tap out to the roar of an overstimulated crowd.
For Cunningham, Mr. McMahon is a documentary about wrestling in the same way Jaws is about fishing. It’s a cautionary tale about the American mind: how we’ve flattened good and evil into caricature, how we crave cheap catharsis and blood-soaked redemption arcs, how dopamine-dripping spectacle has replaced the hard work of truth and critical thought. WWE fans were just the beta testers—social media made us all marks. And if you think it can’t get worse, Cunningham points you to wrestling’s most grotesque era, the “Attitude Era,” when the distinction between hero and villain disintegrated entirely. No good guys, no bad guys—just degenerates in speedos vying for attention through escalating acts of moral collapse. A decade later, Twitter took notes.
Cunningham’s alarm is more than justified. American politics isn’t just flirting with the WWE playbook—it’s plagiarizing it. We are no longer governed by statesmen but by characters playing to the cheap seats. When every tweet is a finishing move, every debate a promo, and every scandal a setup for the next storyline, democracy isn’t just weakened—it’s kayfabe’d. And Vince McMahon, smirking from his throne of steroid-soaked storylines, already wrote the script.
Cinemorphosis 