Movies v. Sports
II. Counterpoint: Sporting Relevance
III. Final Word: Game 6
Point: The Emptiness of Sports
With what may have been one of the best recent crops of Oscar-baiting films of recent years still lingering in the theaters unseen (including the fantastic Brokeback Mountain, which was the movie everyone was happy to not see this year), many Americans are retreating to full-on couch-potato mode and descending into this absurd phenomenon known as March Madness. Would someone please tell me why sports are still so interesting? On a very basic level, sports are all plot and no story. They are the equivalent of the empty action movie. Every once in a while there is some backstage drama. Perhaps you want to see your team win because they haven’t won since 1918. Even so, it isn’t like any of the players are going to go through profound changes. They may win; they may lose. The rest is just statistics.
The truth of the matter is that sports are a great, dazzling distraction, representative of the impenetrable and unquestioned status quo. It has long ago been noted and remarked with a curiously dismissive gloom that we can never really cheer for a team; in a world where the likes of Johnny Damon can jump ship from one heroic team to that team’s evil arch-nemesis, what does team really mean? A team doesn’t play hard for you or your family. It isn’t trying to make the world a better place. The most you could say for your particular team is that should it win, it would mean more revenue for the city in which that team is based. Even then, it still does not signify more than a few extra hot dog vendors employed a handful of times a year. Sports are as empty as your average game show and emptier than your average reality television show. Compared to most sports broadcasts, The Apprentice is high art, rife with important social commentary. So why do people watch sports?
Watching sports, you do not have to wrap your head around the questions pouring out of thoughtful films like Paul Haggis’s Crash, this year’s winner for Best Picture and a complicated look at race relations boiling over in present-day Los Angeles. Deep personal introspection is not required. Thought is discouraged. The more thinking you do, the more you realize that the team you root for could be the team you’re rooting against this time next year. The more thinking you do, the more you realize that every hour you spend watching sports is an hour not spent examining the appalling tactics of your government, who would very much like you to root for them as blindly as you do your favorite sports team.
You could complain that Oscar season (itself often derided as the superficial, self-aggrandizing codification of a mediocre industry's mediocre products) is over. Movies are hardly that important right now. What, after all, are you supposed to see? Madea’s Family Reunion? Failure to Launch? Hardly. Yet there are good films out there. They are simply flying under the radar.
If you are tired of the crippling avarice of sports stars, you would do well to buy yourself a ticket for Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, in which Chappelle shows just how uncomfortable he is with his wealth and how much he still cares about giving back to people far less fortunate than himself. The film is also directed by Michel Gondry, the man who transformed Charlie Kaufman’s uneven script for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind into a full-on masterpiece of mind-bending science fiction.
Also in theaters is Why We Fight, a powerhouse documentary examining the rise of the American military-industrial complex—as timely and important a way to spend two hours that you’re likely to find.
You could, however, always wait for video. The reason you shouldn’t is that these days, you vote for the world you want with your wallet more than you do with any ballot. This year, Hollywood has produced some of the most intelligent films of the quarter-century. It has taken steps in a responsible direction, and the problem is that the only things Americans went out to see this year were films like The Fantastic Four and The Chronicles of Narnia. It’s all well and good to see such films—I enjoy pure entertainment as much as the next person—but if you want more important films to be shown in your area, you need to vote for them to be shown. You can ill afford to feed the kind of complacency that has resulted in the current mess we Americans call our government.
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Counterpoint: Sporting Relevance
Oour long three week winter of discontent is finally drawing to a close as sporting America gets itself out of its post-Super Bowl rut with its annual gusto known affectionately as March Madness. All praise to whatever Gods or Craven Idols you praise for his/her deliverance from that interminable season where betting on which animated short will be remembered for fleeting seconds.
Sports allows (those of us who have been schooled in the rules of the competition) to have a shared and objective point of reference. It is an equalizer of status, class, race, creed, education, and athleticism. That’s right, athleticism. Sure, on field participation in sports tends to separate out the alpha males from middle management, but watching sports, talking about sports, enjoying sports? These are activities that sissy boys and tom boys can all share in. Sporting is a great equalizer in this country. The only label that matters (your team affiliation, if any) is the one that you ascribe to yourself. No gifted track or remedial dungeons in the sports community. Everybody has an equal opportunity to (feed the coffers of rich athletes and obscenely rich team owners) enjoy the product.
The same cannot be said for the movie industry. For starters, there is no more private modern experience than watching a movie, especially in a theater. I’m African-American so I can get away with a little chit chat, but the vast majority of white people just sit there rapt in silence like they’re waiting for the captain to turn off the fasten seat-belt sign. Even when people do get together to socialize and celebrate their favorite films (like Star Wars fans), polite society calls them a cult, makes fun of their reproductive prospects, and generally disparages their character.
The individualism of the movie industry starts at the top. Movie makers themselves target their films to certain demographics and audiences, which means that by necessity many movies that come out each year are not experiences that I’m even supposed to want to have unless I’m 12 years old and hoping to menstruate. I’ve seen many films that were clearly aimed over my head, and many more than were aimed at my ankles, including everything with Julia Roberts in it. Seriously, let’s take the Julia Roberts phenomenon for just a hot second. Am I really supposed to believe that anything involving a skinny bimbo with big lips from Georgia falling into and out of love requires, as my colleague put it “deep personal introspection.” At least if she played basketball I could root for some broad from the Bronx to dunk on her face for 40 straight minutes. At least I could hope for objective proof that she is as terrible at her job as I fervently believe she is. At least I could gamble on it.
To the extent that readers are unmoved by my love thy neighbor view of sporting America, gambling of course is the ultimate triumph of all sports over any movie. Far from being a passive, inactive, couch-potatoing pastime, when hard earned or ill begotten funds are placed on the line online, sports watching becomes a cardiovascular, life altering exercise. Sports becomes not a version of life that you passively observe while stuffing your face with popcorn; it becomes a microcosm of your hopes and dreams and failures that you are actively participating in, while stuffing your face with the far better snack option of nachos.
And there is no better time to witness this “phenomenon” than this glorious time where Academy Award foolishness gives way to the crisp vinyl reality of the swish, the buzzer, the winner counting his profits, and the loser going home to watch movies.
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Final Word: Game 6
To sum up: I began with the points that sports lack substance and social significance. Moreover, to support a team blindly is to support a non-entity in a way that no reasonable person should ever support anything. In contrast, movies are capable (even if they often fall short) of providing fodder for the intellect. Movies are capable of having social significance the likes of which sports can never quite reach.
Elie countered with the arguments that sports provide bonding experiences, whereas movies tend more toward the quiet individual, who is usually not him. He concludes with an ode to sports gambling, which further involves the fan to the detriment of his or her blood pressure and the erosion of his or her bank account. Yet I would contest both these points. In so far as people are brought together by sports, they are also arbitrarily divided. Sports generate useless hatred--between fans of the Yankees and fans of the Red Sox; between Aggies and Longhorns; between citizens of the United States and those of Canada. The ability to gamble on sports is no reason to keep them around; we will always have poker and the roulette wheel. We can also, of course, bet in an Oscar pool, if gambling is that high a priority in our lives.
A problem remains, however: what are we to do with sports movies? Coming soon to theaters around the country is a new film in which Michael Keaton gives a praise-worthy performance as a playwright who skips out on the opening night of his own show to go watch the now-infamous sixth game of the 1986 World Series (the movie is called Game 6). Unfortunately, Keaton plays a Red Sox fan who watches the game in a bar full of Mets fans. Is this high tragedy, or low-brow fluff entertainment? That the script is written by modern literary giant Don DeLillo would suggest that this is one sports film that has more going on than an archetypal underdog story. Knowing DeLillo, though, I'd put my money on it being a not-so-thinly veiled diatribe against the madness of sports fans, especially as far as they get in the way of his limo as he tries to drive through the city. Not that I'm happy about being on the same side as that guy.