Football – Bitch Flicks

Women in Sports Week: The Political Gets Personal for ‘Friday Night Lights’ Jess Merriweather

This is a guest post by Sarah Stringer.

(Spoilers ahead for the last couple of seasons of the Friday Night Lights TV show – if you haven’t seen it already, I’ll wait while you watch all five seasons of the show, then watch the movie and read the book. Trust me; it’s worth your time. Also, warning: links to TV Tropes. Do not click if you have anything else to do for the next 24 hours.)

Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Jess Merriweather in Friday Night Lights

A long time ago, movies, books and TV shows figured out how much emotion there is to harness in stories about sports. Sports are driven by dreams, hope, love, hate, anger, exhilaration and devastation. There’s power in that kind of passion – power that leads Rocky Balboa to knock out the mighty Ivan Drago, and Friday Night Lights’ Vince Howard to throw 60-yard bombs. Portraying them this way is truth in television; heart and love of the game really are major factors in athletic achievements, and it makes for some incredible narratives.

This says something about the fact that so many sports stories (fictional ones, and coverage of real-life ones) are male-dominated. It tells us what depths of emotions society ascribes exclusively to androgens. There are some exceptions to this rule – movies like Bend It Like Beckham, Million Dollar Baby, and A League of Their Own come immediately to mind.

Jess, equipment manager, stands on the field with the football team

For all its well-written female characters and feminist storylines, Friday Night Lights is, overall, not one of those exceptions. It would be unrealistic if it were; it’s about a small Texas town that idolizes its football team, and small Texas towns do not idolize (or, often, have) female football teams. The show offers us complex, three-dimensional female characters like Tyra Collette, Lyla Garrity, Tami Taylor and Becky Sproles, but Jess Merriweather is the only character who demonstrates that love of sport (in a story in which “sport” = “football,” the be all and end all of sport in that town) isn’t reserved for men.

In season four, Jess strode into that hyper-masculine domain with every bit as much passion as the male characters, and the extra savvy, self-awareness, and anger that comes from being a woman in a man’s world. She became a cheerleader because it was the only way for a girl like her to get close to the sport she grew up teaching to her much younger brothers, but as she gets older, that’s not enough for her. Helping her little brothers and running drills with her football star boyfriend isn’t enough; she wants to be involved for herself. She convinces Coach Taylor to let her be an equipment manager, with the intention of someday becoming a high school football coach.

Jess argues with her boyfriend Vince (Michael B. Jordan) in the locker room

Jess’ storyline is consistent with FNL’s aversion to creating caricatures; the people around her are not divided into evil, misogynistic villains and helpful, sympathetic allies. Coach Taylor, the compassionate hero of the show, dismisses her completely at first and has to be talked into giving her a chance. Her boyfriend, Vince, is portrayed as an essentially good guy, but he gets angry and protective when his teammates start messing with her. He was raised in a culture that makes him feel emasculated and threatened by having a girlfriend who handles herself among the boys, and the show realistically portrays Jess’ frustration at having to reconcile her feelings for Vince with the way his issues hold her back.

Also realistic is how personal Jess’ storyline is. She isn’t a feminist crusader; she’s a reminder to feminist crusaders of who they’re fighting for: high school girls who find their dreams limited by rules they didn’t ask for or create. She’s a girl with her own ambitions and goals, and she’s interested in systemic issues only to the extent that they get in the way of those goals. When Coach Taylor tells her there are no female football coaches, she goes home and prints off a story about the first female high school football coach in America (even though, as Coach Taylor points out, it’s only a story because there isn’t a second one). The point of Jess’ storyline is that she shouldn’t have to do this kind of feminist campaigning; the path to her dreams should be no less clear than it would be if she were male.

Jess as a cheerleader

FNL offers us some feminist crusaders; Tami Taylor takes on higher-up perpetrators of systemic injustices on issues of education and abortion and lobbies her husband in defense of Jess’ right to work in football-related jobs. Citing Tami as an inspiration, Tyra Collette ends the series by expressing a desire to go into politics, so she can make a difference on a larger scale. Jess, however, is not in it for the politics. She’s in it for her own rights, and systemic political issues just happen to be in her way.

Jess starts the show defined by her relationships to the male characters; she’s a love interest for Landry Clark and Vince Howard (and a catalyst for issues between the two of them), and her status as a cheerleader makes playing a supporting role to boys a central aspect of her life. However, even when her only important storylines were romantic, she was known mostly for not taking shit from the male characters. In a culture in which most students, especially female ones, let the football players get away with anything, she stands up to Landry for destroying her bike, and calls Vince out on going back to his life of crime.

Jess talks to Landry (Jesse Plemons) at her locker

Jess’ autonomy develops far beyond simply filling a “sassy” love interest role, as her own, independent storyline really starts in season five. She talks to Tami Taylor about her frustrations with going back to being a cheerleader after spending all summer working with her boyfriend, Vince, on his football skills. She refuses to be a “rally girl,” whose job it is to take care of her football player by wearing his jersey and presenting him with baked goods every week.

This is when Jess, with some help from Tami, begs Coach Taylor for a job as an equipment manager. Coach Taylor doesn’t understand why this is important, but he lets it happen. She faces expected sexist jabs that come from being a girl in the boys’ locker room, but what makes her angrier is the way Vince tries to control her and keep her out of there. By the end of the series, her romantic storylines are subplots to her dream of becoming a football coach, just as most of the male characters’ stories are focused on their own dreams.

Jess and Vince

Jess’ other relationships show us how she got the way she is. She grew up poor, and she takes on a lot of responsibility, working long hours at her dad’s restaurant and taking on a parental role to her younger brothers. She gains maturity beyond her years, which shows in all aspects of her life. It’s incredibly refreshing to see a teenage female character who’s emotionally aware and straightforward about her feelings. She breaks stereotypes about game-playing girls by being upfront and honest with Vince and Landry in her romantic relationships and shows similar assertiveness with her father.

All this backstory should leave us unsurprised that Jess is willing to take on the odds and fight for what she wants, as she’s spent her whole life doing that. She fights her father when his hatred for the game of football emotionally harms his son. She fights Vince when he displays juvenile, sexist behaviour, and her refusal to take this from him leads to the end of their relationship. It’s implied that growing up female in a man’s world (and with dreams of existing in a very male-dominated part of that world), and poor and black in a world dominated by the more affluent, mostly white side of town, is what’s made her as strong as she is.

Jess stands with members of the football team

However, one of my favourite aspects of Jess’ character is that she manages to be mature and savvy without being unrealistically stoic, the “strong female character” who shows no real weakness or emotions. Her feelings for the boys she dates are genuine, her love for her brothers and parents is obvious, and most of all, her passion for the game of football is overwhelming. She doesn’t always know the perfect way to fight, and she gets as angry, frustrated, depressed, and excited as anyone else. We see her cry sometimes, and not in the media’s common “it turns out the ice queen is really just an emotional woman all along” way, but in a “she has emotions – strong, weak, positive, negative, often nuanced and mixed, just like all the other male and female characters” way. Her emotions don’t make her weak or unlikable, but realistic and relatable, so you (or, at least, I) can’t help but root for her.

It’s Jess’ ability to be strong while still being emotionally realistic and flawed, and having nuanced relationships while still having her own goals/agenda and an independent storyline, that put her in the rare, coveted category of a truly three-dimensional female character. The fact that her storyline involves struggles against systemic sexism, perpetrated in a realistic way by well-meaning people around her, is icing on the cake to make her a feminist’s dream. We never see Jess score a touchdown, but she’s one of my favourite fictional feminist sports figures.

Sarah Stringer is a psychology student in Ontario, with an interest in the political aspects of pop culture.

Women in Sports Week: ‘The Blind Side’: The Most Insulting Movie Ever Made

Movie poster for The Blind Side

This guest post by Nine Deuce previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on March 23, 2011.

Davetavius and I consider ourselves the world’s foremost authorities on watching movies for reasons other than those intended by their producers. As such, we go way beyond just watching “cheesy” (whatever that means) movies, 80s movies, or kung fu movies (which I refuse to watch but which every dork on Earth has been pretending to like in some attempt at letting everyone know how “weird” they are since Quentin Tarantino’s ridiculous ass popularized kung fu movie fandom as the #1 route to instant eccentricity cred in True Romance) to focus our attention on recently-released romantic comedies, those obnoxious movies in which two assholes just sit around and talk to each other for 98 minutes, and “serious” movies for which people have been given gold-plated statuettes. One can learn an awful lot about the faults and failings of our social system and corporate entertainment’s attempts to sell us its version of culture by watching movies created by and for the anti-intelligentsia, and if one were to try hard enough, I’m sure one could find the string that, if tugged, would unravel the modern world system buried somewhere in a melodramatic Best Picture Oscar contender intended to make people who refer to beers as “cold ones” feel like they’re considering The Big Issues. There was no way we were going to miss The Blind Side.

Spoiler alert: this is the worst movie I’ve ever seen, and I’m going to spoil your desire to see it yourself by writing this post. Also, I may, if I can manage to give a fuck, divulge important plot elements. But it’s based on a true story that everyone has already heard anyway, so who cares.

Sandra Bullock schools Michael Oher in The Blind Side

Let me say up front that I’m aware that I’m supposed to feel sorry for Sandra Bullock this week. She’s purported to be “America’s sweetheart” and all, she has always seemed like a fairly decent person (for an actor), and I think her husband deserves to get his wang run over by one of his customized asshole conveyance vehicles, but I’m finding it difficult to feel too bad. I mean, who marries a guy who named himself after a figure from the Old West, has more tattoos than IQ points, and is known for his penchant for rockabilly strippers? Normally I’d absolve Bullock of all responsibility for what has occurred and spend nine paragraphs illustrating the many reasons Jesse James doesn’t deserve to live, but I’ve just received proof in the form of a movie called The Blind Side that Sandra Bullock is in cahoots with Satan, Ronald Reagan’s cryogenically preserved head, the country music industry, and E! in their plot to take over the world by turning us all into (or helping some of us to remain) smug, racist imbeciles.

The movie chronicles the major events in the life of a black NFL player named Michael Oher from the time he meets the rich white family who adopts him to the time that white family sees him drafted into the NFL, a series of events that apparently proves that racism is either over or OK (I’m not sure which), with a ton of southern football bullshit along the way. Bullock plays Leigh Anne Tuohy, the wife of a dude named Sean Tuohy, played by — no shit — Tim McGraw, who is a fairly minor character in the movie despite the fact that he is said to own, like, 90 Taco Bell franchises. The story is that Oher, played by Quinton Aaron, is admitted into a fancy-pants private Christian school despite his lack of legitimate academic records due to the insistence of the school’s football coach and the altruism of the school’s teachers (as if, dude), where he comes into contact with the Tuohy family, who begin to notice that he is sleeping in the school gym and subsisting on popcorn. Ms. Tuohy then invites him to live in the zillion-dollar Memphis Tuophy family compound, encourages him to become the best defensive linebacker he can be by means of cornball familial love metaphors, and teaches him about the nuclear family and the SEC before beaming proudly as he’s drafted by the Baltimore Ravens.

The Tuohy family prays over mounds of food

I’m sure that the Tuohy family are lovely people and that they deserve some kind of medal for their good deeds, but if I were a judge, I wouldn’t toss them out of my courtroom should they arrive there bringing a libel suit against whoever wrote, produced, and directed The Blind Side, because it’s handily the dumbest, most racist, most intellectually and politically insulting movie I’ve ever seen, and it makes the Tuohy family — especially their young son S.J. — look like unfathomable assholes. Well, really, it makes all of the white people in the South look like unfathomable assholes. Like these people need any more bad publicity.

Quentin Aaron puts in a pretty awesome performance, if what the director asked him to do was look as pitiful as possible at every moment in order not to scare anyone by being black. Whether that was the goal or not, he certainly did elicit pity from me when Sandra Bullock showed him his new bed and he knitted his brows and, looking at the bed in awe, said, “I’ve never had one of these before.” I mean, the poor bastard had been duped into participating in the creation of a movie that attempts to make bigoted southerners feel good about themselves by telling them that they needn’t worry about poverty or racism because any black person who deserves help will be adopted by a rich family that will provide them with the means to a lucrative NFL contract. Every interaction Aaron and Bullock (or Aaron and anyone else, for that matter) have in the movie is characterized by Aaron’s wretched obsequiousness and the feeling that you’re being bludgeoned over the head with the message that you needn’t fear this black guy. It’s the least dignified role for a black actor since Cuba Gooding, Jr.’s portrayal of James Robert Kennedy in Radio (a movie Davetavius claims ought to have the subtitle “It’s OK to be black in the South as long as you’re retarded.”). The producers, writers, and director of this movie have managed to tell a story about class, race, and the failures of capitalism and “democratic” politics to ameliorate the conditions poor people of color have to deal with by any means other than sports while scrupulously avoiding analyzing any of those issues and while making it possible for the audience to walk out of the theater with their selfish, privileged, entitled worldviews intact, unscathed, and soundly reconfirmed.

Kathy Bates wants to fist bump Michael Oher in The Blind Side

Then there’s all of the southern bullshit, foremost of which is the football element. The producers of the movie purposely made time for cameos by about fifteen SEC football coaches in order to ensure that everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line would drop their $9 in the pot, and the positive representation of football culture in the film is second in phoniness only to the TV version of Friday Night Lights. Actually, fuck that. It’s worse. Let’s be serious. If this kid had showed no aptitude for football, is there any way in hell he’d have been admitted to a private school without the preparation he’d need to succeed there or any money? In the film, the teachers at the school generously give of their private time to tutor Oher and help prepare him to attend classes with the other students. I’ll bet you $12 that shit did not occur in real life. In fact, I know it didn’t. The Tuohy family may or may not have cared whether the kid could play football, but the school certainly did. It is, after all, a southern school, and high school football is a bigger deal in the South than weed is at Bonnaroo.

But what would have happened to Oher outside of school had he sucked at football and hence been useless to white southerners? What’s the remedy for poverty if you’re a black woman? A dude with no pigskin skills? Where are the nacho magnates to adopt those black people? I mean, that’s the solution for everything, right? For all black people to be adopted by rich, paternalistic white people? I know this may come as a shock to some white people out there, but the NFL cannot accommodate every black dude in America, and hence is an imperfect solution to social inequality. I know we have the NBA too, but I still see a problem. But the Blind Side fan already has an answer for me. You see, there is a scene in the movie which illustrates that only some black people deserve to be adopted by wealthy white women. Bullock, when out looking for Oher, finds herself confronted with a black guy who not only isn’t very good at appearing pitiful in order to make her comfortable, but who has an attitude and threatens to shoot Oher if he sees him. What ensues is quite possibly the most loathsome scene in movie history in which Sandra Bullock gets in the guy’s face, rattles off the specs of the gun she carries in her purse, and announces that she’s a member of the NRA and will shoot his ass if he comes anywhere near her family, “bitch.” Best Actress Oscar.

Sandra Bullock braves the Black Neighborhood

Well, there it is. Now you see why this movie made 19 kajillion dollars and won an Oscar: it tells a heartwarming tale of white benevolence, assures the red state dweller that his theory that “there’s black people, and then there’s niggers” is right on, and affords him the chance to vicariously remind a black guy who’s boss through the person of America’s sweetheart. Just fucking revolting.

There are several other cringe-inducing elements in the film. The precocious, cutesy antics of the family’s little son, S.J., for example. He’s constantly making dumb-ass smart-ass comments, cloyingly hip-hopping out with Oher to the tune of Young M.C.’s “Bust a Move” (a song that has been overplayed and passe for ten years but has now joined “Ice Ice Baby” at the top of the list of songs from junior high that I never want to hear again), and generally trying to be a much more asshole-ish version of Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. At what point will screenwriters realize that everyone wants to punch pint-sized snarky movie characters in the throat? And when will I feel safe watching a movie in the knowledge that I won’t have to endure a scene in which a white dork or cartoon character “raises the roof” and affects a buffalo stance while mouthing a sanitized rap song that even John Ashcroft knows the words to?

Sandra Bullock reads a story to her child son and Michael Oher

And then there’s the scene in which Tim McGraw, upon meeting his adopted son’s tutor (played by Kathy Bates) and finding out she’s a Democrat, says, “Who would’ve thought I’d have a black son before I met a Democrat?” Who would have thought I’d ever hear a “joke” that was less funny and more retch-inducing than Bill Engvall’s material?

What was the intended message of this film? It won an Oscar, so I know it had to have a message, but what could it have been? I’ve got it (a suggestion from Davetavius)! The message is this: don’t buy more than one Taco Bell franchise or you’ll have to adopt a black guy. I’ll accept that that’s the intended message of the film, because if the actual message that came across in the movie was intentional, I may have to hide in the house for the rest of my life.

I just don’t even know what to say about this movie. Watching it may well have been one of the most demoralizing, discouraging experiences of my life, and it removed at least 35% of the hope I’d previously had that this country had any hope of ever being anything but a cultural and social embarrassment. Do yourself a favor. Skip it and watch Welcome to the Dollhouse again.

Nine Deuce blogs at Rage Against the Man-chine. From her bio: I basically go off, dude. People all over the internet call me rad. They call me fem, too, but I’m not all that fem. I mean, I’m female and I have long hair and shit, but that’s just because I’m into Black Sabbath. I don’t have any mini-skirts, high heels, thongs, or lipstick or anything, and I often worry people with my decidedly un-fem behavior. I’m basically a “man” trapped in a woman’s body. What I mean is that, like a person with a penis, I act like a human being and expect other people to treat me like one even though I have a vagina.