In his essay, The World of Wrestling, published in 1957, Roland Barthes explored professional wrestling as a theatrical performance in which the exaggerated physicality of heroes and villains not only dramatised the struggle between good and evil but actually manifested the mythological dynamic in a way that would reflect the cultural logic of the time.
It was June 6, 2021. A warm night in Miami — some sixty-four years after the publication of Barthes’ essay — when a boxing match between Logan Paul and Floyd Mayweather took place on Don Shula Drive, a two-mile stretch through Miami Gardens where you can find the Miami Dolphins Training Facility, and on the other side of that spectrum, a hot dog stand.
Exactly a year later, Logan Paul would sign a contract with WWE, and even though he would go on to fight the likes of Rey Mysterio, there was perhaps no better elucidation of the hyperculture than in a pay-per-view fight between an undefeated boxing champion and — well — a YouTuber in a bout that even Sky Sports would describe as a surreal showdown.
On that warm night in June where thunderstorms were expected but it quite never rained, I watched Mayweather walk out into Hard Rock Stadium, blasting a track by Lil Uzi Vert. I knew this entrance had already been overshadowed — a little bit cringe even then — if not entirely obsolete in retrospect when compared to the way Logan Paul had first walked out wearing a diamond-encrusted, PSA grade ten Charizard.
The Charizard card that Logan Paul wore that night was a part of the first edition Pokémon Base Set, which was released in the United States by Wizards of the Coast in 1999. Back in the day Charizard became a sought-after card due to its combination of powerful in-game abilities and holographic background.
Today these cards are graded based on their condition by professional grading services like PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator) with Logan Paul’s Charizard receiving a PSA grade ten — the highest possible grade — indicating that the card is in ‘gem mint’ condition with no visible flaws and in the world of collectible cards, a PSA ten Charizard from the first edition Base Set is considered the mythologically-rich, ‘holy grail’ of our time.
Even at a cursory level the Sky Sports Boxing commentary team understood the cultural significance of Logan Paul’s entrance that night, with the commentators observing that it was like the YouTuber — self-described as the biggest idiot on the internet — had found a magic lamp, and for his first wish he’d asked the genie if he could fight Floyd Mayweather. The other commentator on the night quickly interrupted this pithy observation with his own, saying, ‘I think it’s the Pokémon as well.’
It is a story my circle still recalls rather fondly in a world where it has become extraordinarily difficult to make sense of that surreal showdown between celebrities in a culture that today involves parroting our triumph over the logic of good and evil; the progressive announcement that declares (despite the bombs and the genocide) that we’re all so far beyond that now.
What inevitably falls into the vacuum left behind is the story of Logan Paul’s Holographic Charizard. Just as it is — in so many ways — the Charizard that becomes the semiotic key to understanding the logic of a culture that has not necessarily transcended these antiquated spectacles but has likely devolved into the far more surreptitious dynamic of Common vs. Rare, Ordinary vs. Celebrity — a bait and switch on the dismantling of binary oppositions.
No doubt Logan Paul’s Charizard can be analysed through a framework similar to that of Roland Barthes’ methodology with an approach that involves looking at the cultural artefact in a way that uncovers the bread and circuses symbolic of the (hyper)eschatological condition.
In Barthesian terms, the signifier is the card itself — the physical object — the amalgamation of cardboard and ink that gives way to what is signified, which is to say, those meanings associated with the card by way of rarity, value, nostalgia, and status.
Through the semiotic relationship between the signifier and the signified, the Charizard card transcends its status as a mere collectible item to become a myth in and of itself, imbued with layers of meaning that reflects contemporary cultural values and ideologies. The Baudrillardian interpretation is not so much a matter of reflection than it is absorption. Nevertheless, sticking to the Barthesian trajectory the surface reading is perhaps one in which this particular trading card becomes emblematic of a culture steeped in a nostalgic ambedo for the 1990s and early 2000s, a period when Pokémon was at its peak popularity.
For many, the relationship between the signifier and the signified renders the card as an object of complex evocation and yet it is perhaps too obvious to imagine this card as some kind of materially tangible connection to simpler times with the significance of the card going deeper still into a kind of hauntological farsickness — since the Charizard remains an object many wanted and few received — the diamond encrusted embellishments of Logan Paul’s card celebrating Pokémon in a way that should seem incongruous to childhood and therefore deeply sepulchral, dangling upon his hairless chest like a rosary necklace.
What is primarily signified here is collecting as status in a hyperculture that desires most of all the signification of surplus, with Logan Paul owning a rare and valuable card like the Charizard allowing an open flex in a way that seems generationally attuned to a moment where influencer culture is no doubt one in which fandoms live vicariously.
It is this flexing and finessing — signified by way of the PSA grade ten, in addition — that plays into the nature of spectacle and celebrity, especially where the phenomenon of an influencer lifestyle is concerned. Wearing the card as a necklace during a high-profile boxing match transformed the card into a spectacle whereby it made miscible the worlds of pop culture, sports, and social media, only amplifying the symbolic value in which the mythology, tied to the Barthesian approach, becomes one of normalisation.
At the a surface level it is clear that Logan Paul’s walk-in concerned the normalisation of wealth display and yet demonstrably America’s greatest export is myth-making in realtime. Concealed by Logan Paul’s wealth is something as old as The World of Wrestling itself and it is that which Roland Barthes might have detected; that in a way, the whole brand circumambient of a YouTuber remains today one of a heroic narrative, with an influencer positioning himself as a modern-day Jason arriving in Miami Gardens with a golden fleece draped over his shoulders.
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