Things that might not work out: sports comedies and society’s ills
The Winter Olympics makes me think of Cool Runnings. People launching themselves down icy storm drains on a tea tray, lanky skiers making V-signs in mid air while they launch themselves down a mountain. In fact, people mainly launching themselves down cold things with the exception of the curling team who wield broomsticks at an unexploded land mine. Each time a group of muscle Marys commit themselves to the equivalent of a frozen water slide on speed, I’m disappointed that there isn’t a fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt shouting abuse, drinking neat whiskey and looking like John Candy. In fact, it might be better if sports didn’t really exist outside of films because people wouldn’t really get hurt. We could learn the lessons as set out by the all-American Sports Comedy and know that, really, all sports are just a metaphor for repression.
It’s a devious medium, I know. I used to think that films like The Mighty Ducks, A League of Their Own and even Jerry Maguire (you can – just about – count it as a sports comedy) promoted the underdog, gave hope to the unstoppable loser and promoted the soft values of gooey-centered liberalism. Overcome difficulties, stay together, play together. It could be a mantra for Relate, except if you think back to the heartwarming staples of your childhood (and the head-soothing hangover fillers of your occasional Sunday), you’ll realise that they aren’t flicking the V to alpha bullies, they’re the beta machinations of the status quo yelling at you to straighten up and fly right.
Take Dodgeball. The premise is quite innocent: Peter LaFleur (Vince Vaughan) has thirty days to raise $50,000 to make good on a mortgage default that threatens to see his bunch of misfit members being bulldozed by Globogym. When holding a carwash doesn’t bring in the hard dollars, the only obvious course of action is to watch 1950s style training videos, enter a dodgeball team coached by a dodgy coach played by Rip Torn. If this were a film review without a spoiler (which it isn’t) I’d state something shitty and trite like: complications abound, proving to the Average Joes that sometimes, winning is more than playing the right shot, it’s about knowing who you’re playing for. Or ‘grab life by the balls’, which is the actual tagline. But it isn’t about seizing figurative team testicles or a modern day parable about not underestimating your opponent in a 92 minute version of David and Goliath starring Ben Stiller. Dodgebal espouses far shallower, boring virtues.
The first – being part of the team means you get to take one for it – focuses around the seeming triumph of team sports over sexuality. LaFleur has to save his gym which is going to be shut down with the legal help of Kate Veatch (Christine Taylor) on behalf of White (Stiller). Because his gym is going to be shut down, LeFleur seeks salvation in dodgeball. Veatch, sick of being hit on by White, is more inclined to join LaFleur’s dodgeball team because it’s opportunistic payback and means that she can kiss girls without being sexually harassed by her employer. And because team sports are obviously magical, Veatch reveals that she is actually bisexual and obviously lusting after Peter. The loser-turned-lothario through cardio formula works equally well for Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s characters in Baseketball. Once again, mortgage foreclosure is the central catalyst for all ensuing action. In brief: unemployed turned homeless friends Coop and Remer (Parker and Stone) make up a new game that doesn’t require hours in the gym to win, argue a bit before they are finally reunited, this time with girlfriends.
The central concern here is not the crude message that you have to be ‘in it to win it’ – exhorting people to sit in semi-darkened isolation alone with their thoughts and a penknife is no formula for larks. It’s just fundamentally annoying to have team games held up as the epitome of everything sexy about human endeavour. That somehow working up a sweat will transform sexuality (mainly female) into something co-operative and appreciative of losers who run fuckawaful gymnasiums for the socially weird. Or transcend fiscal holes as a fast track to solvency and, once again, provide an out for loose spenders who can’t meet their mortgage payments but don’t see long-term unemployment and homelessness as reasons to get a job or prevent them from getting a girlfriend. Perhaps I missed the point. Maybe these films released in 2004 and 1998 are actually messages from the future transcribed into Hollywood treatments about the impending global financial crisis. In that case they’re genius for seeing a future in which foreclosure is possible for every middle class middle American, ultra-scary for suggesting that entering far-fetched national competitions (which probably cost more than the average street in Detroit in 2009 to take part in) are the answer to the economic equivalent of a black hole.
The second overarching piece of evidence that sports comedy equals dark sanction for social ill? The coach figure. It’s not John Candy’s fault that his performance as Irv Blitzer defines the generic archetype (even though he’s only actually starred one sports comedy, Cool Runnings). He’s to be applauded for that. But he can take the blame for covertly championing alcoholism, the implication that if you ain’t playing the game you’re blatantly a washed-up misfit and that despite all evidence suggesting addiction and dependency, the coach is still coach. And being an authority figure means that you should listen to coach at all times, no matter how unsuitable they may be. This logic at large in Dodgeball, where Rip Torn’s coach character is presented as the once mighty, now fallen through the means of latent insanity and wheelchair usage. That isn’t so much worrying but downright discriminatory. However, kudos must be given to the Mighty Ducks for presenting the triumph over adversity narrative via the means of a convicted criminal (drunk driving) put in charge of a children’s ice hockey team as a means of rehabilitation. The flaws in this are self-evident, right?
Which is why I really like Napoleon Dynamite. For all of the film’s weird quietness and heavy anti-hero apathy, it is wise. For it knows that far from winning, the underdog who swallows the doctrine of ‘do team sports well or die’ turn out like weird Uncle Rico, playing with their balls by themselves in the yard.
