[Each of the last
six years, I’ve used the Super
Bowl week to AmericanStudy
some sports
histories and stories. This year I’ve decided to focus on sports movies and
what they can tell us about American culture and identity. Be a good sport and share
your responses and nominees in comments for a crowd-sourced weekend post that’s
sure to take home the championship!]
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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