[Each of the last
few years, I’ve used the Super
Bowl week to AmericanStudy some sports
histories and stories. This year I wanted to do the same, focusing this
time on sports movies and what they can tell us about American culture and
identity. Be a good sport and share your thoughts in comments, please!]
On the
over-the-top scene that really shouldn’t work, but somehow does.
About midway
through Remember the Titans (2000),
Denzel Washington’s Coach Herman Boone takes the players on his newly
integrated Virginia high school football team (who have gone to Pennsylvania
for training camp) on a midnight jog. The team ends up, to their and the
audience’s surprise, on the grounds of Gettsyburg National Military Park,
where Boone gives a
speech on the Civil War battle and both its continuing resonances in and potential
lessons for the team’s and its community’s struggles with racial discord and
division. The speech and scene ends with Boone’s fervent hope that perhaps, if
the players and team can learn the lessons that the battle’s dead soldiers have
to offer, they can “learn to play this game like men.”
For anybody who
has any sense of the horrific awfulness that was Gettysburg,
or just the horrific awfulness that was the Civil War in general (and I’m not
necessarily disagreeing with Ta-Nehisi
Coates when he argues that the war wasn’t tragic, but it sure was bloody
and awful in any case, and never more so that on days like Gettysburg’s), this
evocation of the battle’s dead for a football team’s lessons feels a bit
ridiculous. For that matter, if we think about the
most famous speech delivered at the battlefield, in tribute to those
honored dead and in an effort to hallow that ground (a phrase that Boone
overtly echoes in his own closing thoughts), the filmmakers’ choice to put
Boone’s speech in the same spot (and I don’t know whether the Gettysburg speech
took place in the real-life histories on which the film is based, but it seems from this article as
if it didn’t and it’s a choice in the film in any case) feels even more
slight and silly in comparison to that transcendent historical moment.
So the scene
really shouldn’t work, not for this AmericanStudier at least—but I have to
admit that it did when I saw the movie, and did again when I watched the scene
to write this post. Partly that’s due to the performances—Denzel is always
Denzel, and the main kids are uniformly great as well (including a young Wood
Harris, later Avon
Barksdale on The Wire). Partly it’s
because great sports films are particularly good at taking what is by
definition cliché (all those conventions I mentioned in yesterday’s post) and
making it feel new and powerful in spite of that familiarity. And partly,
ironically given those Gettysburg contrasts, it’s because of the history—because
this football team and its story does connect to America’s tortured and far too
often tragic legacy of racial division and discrimination, and because the
story and thus the film represents one of those moments when we transcended
that legacy and reached a more perfect union. When sports, and sports films,
are at their best, they have that potential, which is one main reason why we
keep going back to them.
January Recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other sports movies you’d highlight?
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