In 1991, I sat in front of the television and wept as Sgt Slaughter beat Hulk Hogan with a chair. My brother and I had watched in horror for months as Slaughter and his cronies brutalized Hogan in the lead-up to WrestleMania VII, unwilling to accept my dad’s attempts at consolation. We were kids, and like millions of other Americans, Hulkamaniacs.Thirty-four years later, my son Sebastian, who had just turned seven, stood beside me at WWE SmackDown in Cleveland on July 25, 2025. We watched grown men and women weep as the bell tolled ten times to commemorate Hogan, a day after his death. The moment was surreal. I was grieving the figure who had defined a piece of my childhood, and I was thinking, even then, about what I had spent the better part of a decade trying not to think about: the man behind the character, and what that man had done.Netflix’s new four-part documentary, Real American, takes a partial accounting. But like most documentaries produced in association with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), it ducks the questions that matter most. Watching it didn’t resolve my dissonance.The Performer and the ManThe legendary film director Werner Herzog, a longtime aficionado of professional wrestling, appears in the final episode to offer some philosophical opining on performance.“All of us in a way have a performative life,” he says. “As a father, I am performative. It’s part of human nature, of the human experience.”Symbolic interactionists like George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman troubled the idea of a “true” self decades ago, arguing that social life is essentially theatrical. We all manage impressions and perform versions of ourselves for different audiences. Hogan just did it at a scale most people can’t imagine, and he eventually lost the distance between performer and performance. He didn’t just play Hulk Hogan. He convinced himself he was Hulk Hogan. Terry Bollea more or less disappeared into what some in the wrestling…
