On September 27th 2026, less than a day after his latest hard-hitting, high-flying match with All Elite Wrestling, Benjamin Satterley – also known as Pac, or earlier in his career Adrian Neville – passed away, aged 40. His sudden loss has been keenly felt across the profession, with fellow pros and fans lining up to pay tribute to someone who couldn’t have been further removed from his in-ring persona. But perhaps the great legacy of the self-styled Bastard should also include re-evaluating what it really means to be a ‘heel’ in the ring, and beyond.
It’s no secret, there are four people involved with Indy Film Library who love talking about professional wrestling, and I know less about it than any of the other three. I’ve talked to each of them about Benjamin Satterly, the fights of his I actually saw, and the huge body of work that he accrued in promotions I have never watched.
I’m glad to have done that, because they all have their distinct takes what made Pac special in the ring, the different choices and reputations he built through his career now cut short. And they also have thoughts on recent events, and how it may or may not tie into wider discussions around health and welfare in wrestling more generally. I won’t pretend that I am anywhere near qualified to discuss either of those points – though in due time, both do need to be talked about.
With that being said, Satterley’s performances have been a big part of my life as a wrestling fan. And I would like to say something about that – especially after the latest episode of AEW Dynamite. It is justifiably now the highest-rated event of all time on CageMatch (essentially Letterboxd for televised wrestling), with the highest-rated promo of all time to boot.
You would need a heart made of stone not to have been moved by the tributes to Pac (Satterley’s in-ring name when wrestling for AEW, and independent promotions) from the beginning. Play-by-play commentator Excalibur introduced the show, choking back tears behind his luchador mask, while commemorating the life of “a Bastard in name only”.
Recalling fond memories of Ben/Pac/Neville (his in-ring moniker at WWE, inspired by his love of The Specials), Excalibur praised a “relentless perfectionist; your favourite wrestler’s favourite wrestler”; and noted him as someone humble, respectful, and who appeared “quiet and reserved” from a distance, until you got him talking about the things he cared about. Those topics ranged from the more obvious – music and, as a proud Geordie, Newcastle United – to things a stereotypical Bastard might be surprise you by gushing over, like his sausage dog, and “the hedgehogs which visit his garden.”
This was topped with the line, “One day we’ll meet again, gannin’ alang the Scotswood Road” – a wonderful and surprising reference to Blaydon Races.
But wrestling, like so many things, is nothing without the fans. And throughout this, and virtually every aspect of the event to follow, what was most touching, was the crowd’s return to the same message.
“He’s OUR Bastard.”
Chants of this kind echoed throughout Pittsburgh’s Peterson Events Center all night. Placards and banners reinforced the message – as did the line of shirts AEW chose to sell, with all proceeds going to the Satterley family.
On the face of it, this might seem like a strange kind of tribute; especially in a form of sporting performance where audiences are stereotypically primed to boo the ‘heel’, the villain, or as Roland Barthes put it in his essay World of Wrestling, ‘the Bastard’ – as some kind of cathartic ideological lust for justice. But while he was presenting as just that, ‘The Bastard Pac’ offered something well beyond this two-dimensional reading of the mass politics at play in wrestling. Something which people could relate to, see themselves in, and process a cold and often hostile world beyond this realm of rope, boards and bleachers.
The Man That Gravity Forgot was not always billed in this way. Most wrestlers go through stints of turning ‘face’ or ‘heel’ at different points of their career, as storylines ebb and flow at their respective promotions.
One heel-turn in his WWE Neville era saw him rebrand as ‘King of the Cruiserweights’ – an aggressive and delusional figure, who regarded the company’s Cruiserweight Championship as his rightful crown. But on exiting the company, and becoming one of the first signees to AEW – which gives more creative freedom to its talent, allows them to construct their own personas, and even swear – the resurrection of Pac also saw him strike on a new character: The Bastard.
Someone with no morals or empathy, a no-frills departure from his earlier aerobatics. Willing to do what it takes to win, without suffering the illusion that those at the top of the sport get there through respectability and sportsmanship. Going up against them requires more than the hope that the rules of the game will see you survive – at least when the external whims of the paying audience, or a company’s ownership are at play.
It’s here that I think the figure of Pac really begins to resonate with people, beyond simply being wowed by his acrobatics. And also, this is where I think it is useful to revisit what it means to be a heel, a villain, a Bastard, in popular culture – because it tells us something interesting about the crowd, as much as the performer.
As already mentioned, Barthes’ essay on wrestling has been something I’ve returned to time and again, every time someone asks me why I “waste my time with that rubbish”.
Don’t make me tap the sign.
“There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.”
There are two things which I have always felt needed expanding on, though. One, is that even if you dismiss wrestling as a sport in the physical sense, it is still fiercely competitive – and to rise through it, it requires performers to out-do one-another, as through the way they interact with the crowd than through their rehearsed battles. And that plays into the second aspect of it – which is that surprisingly often, the way wrestlers find a way to do that, is not by playing the good guy.
According to Barthes’ summary of the phenomenon, crowds attend in expectance of a physical embodiment of ethics – “the gradual construction of a highly moral image”, one which hinges upon the figure of “the perfect ‘Bastard’.”
In Bathes argument, this character’s construction is important for a paradoxical revelry, whereby an audience composed in part of “people who are themselves beyond the rules of society” will cheer for the upholding of a morality that distinctly favours a status-quo that excludes them. The Bastard is therefore “essentially someone unstable; who accepts the rules only when they are useful to him, and transgresses the formal continuity of attitudes”. This inconsistency, “far more than treachery or cruelty, sends the audience beside itself with rage” – and leads to the feeling that there is “nothing more exciting for a crowd than the grandiloquent kick given to a vanquished ‘Bastard’ – and the joy of this punishment can offer the crowd to vent unrestrained contempt at the cheats and charlatans of their own life. But this definition of the Bastard doesn’t do justice to the complexity of wrestling’s performers, or indeed its audiences – at least by modern standards.
First, there is (and possibly always has been) a level of respect earned by wrestlers who the audience come to see are doing right by Wrestling as an art-form. This goes beyond ‘kayfabe’ – and whether we ought to hold the character in contempt or not – to appreciate the artifice they deliver as a hero, or a villain. Someone who can innovate or embellish, while ultimately playing that traditional role well, can become beloved by the crowd, even if they are a Bastard. If anything, in this regard, the Perfect Bastard is someone who an audience are likely to have warmer feelings toward than the idealised Hero.
As well as the fact that, without the Bastard being willing to take the flack, the whole morality play falls apart, that’s also because, second, the line between ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ has become far more elastic in social culture than it once was. That’s in no small part because the mass of the audience has born witness to the way people posing as ‘heroes’ behave – betraying their principles in office; abusing and exploiting everyone beyond it. There is an almost instinctive distrust of anyone who professes to have our best intentions at heart, then. Sometimes, that is a healthy reflex – especially when said Hero defines himself in opposition to a particular Villain – and we are rightfully less willing to accept their definition of who or what a ‘Bastard’ is on that basis.
I would argue the essence of the Perfect Bastard is not nearly as straight-forward as Barthes sets out, then. Pac, the character, and Benjamin Satterley, the athlete-performer, are emblematic of this.
The Perfect Bastard
“He’s OUR Bastard” is not the chant of a crowd merely appreciated of the opportunity Satterly afforded them to bay for blood his, and to cosplay some kind of justice that is utterly absent from their daily realities. It is not even something which we only heard in AEW’s final tribute to the great performer – it was also audible during what turned out, sadly, to be his final match, against Andrade El Idolo, a face whose popularity the company building up for months.
The fact The Bastard was taken into the hearts of so many fans shows an understanding that, at least sometimes, the people we are told to loathe; who are maligned as trouble-makers and rule-breakers; who are portrayed as scary and dangerous because they contradict the norms of the safe and successful; are actually the kind, humble, respectful ones, the people who genuinely embody the abstract qualities we supposedly hold dearest. They love ska, they care for sausage dogs, they marvel when nature visits their garden – and they are still somehow Bastards. Seizing on that ideological contradiction is genius, owning the Bastard label, because wrestling lives and breathes thanks to their dedication, their commitment to the greater construction of meaning, their willing to sacrifice their own self-image in the process.
That is the power of the Bastard. And it is the power of the masses who flocked into arenas, gymnasiums, concert halls and convention centres to cheer for him – who serve as part of the indispensable base of an entire economy, an entire society, and who are regularly condemned as lazy, feckless or irresponsible by the supposed heroes, sitting at the top of the pile.
In that regard, Pac was the Perfect Bastard – both in the sense of his performances, and the ideological satire his character touched upon (and other great heels have also) – but in a way completely alien from Barthes’ original intention of the term. The wrestler, and the man behind him, is however, far more identifiable in World of Wrestling’s closing segment. Evoking that duality and oneness of Satterley in and out of the ring, which so absorbed audiences, Barthes concludes that “when the hero or the villain of the drama – the man, who was seen a few minutes earlier possessed by moral rage, magnified into a sort of metaphysical sign – leaves the wrestling hall, impassive, anonymous, carrying a small suitcase and arm-in-arm with his wife, no one can doubt that wrestling holds that power of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle”. In the ring, he argues “wrestlers remain gods,” because they the key which “unveils the form of a Justice which is at last intelligible.”
When AEW’s memorial came to a close, it repeated a piece of John Moxley’s promo – recorded sitting next to Pac, what would have been hours before his death. It undoubtedly will go down as one of the greatest promos of all time – in terms of both its place in the kayfabe story, and also its context so close to this tragedy. And it reflects something similar. The line stitched into the evocative video montage, was, “There’s two kinds of eulogies at funerals. One of them is, ‘This is what this guy did.’ The other one is, ‘This is who this guy was.’”
As Pac, the things Satterley did, spoke to the guy he was – and to the lived contradictions of many more of us Bastards. That is a powerful example or what people can do for each other, through culture, art, and wrestling.
