Retrospective: “Age Before Beauty”: The Ongoing Cultural Importance of Aged, Imperfect Builds in Three American Sports Films
Thus far, 2015's two biggest sports films — McFarland, USA and Southpaw — have been emblematic of the usual formulaic imagery in the genre. In McFarland, USA, Kevin Costner resumes the role of America’s favorite sports sage as he coaches a scrappy but talented group of high school cross-country runners to victory against. In Southpaw, Jake Gyllenhaul brings his 8-hour-a-day gym regimen to the rink for a typical “I get knocked down, but I get up again” boxer redemption tale.
When the images of Gyllenhaul and Costner hit the screen in either film, foregone conclusions follow. The same can be said about the imagery in most American sports films (we’ll get to a few in a moment), in which prototypical athletic builds or head coach sagacity immediately register manifest success.
This makes sense — sports entertainment is a microcosmic marketing pitch of American cultures: play by the rules at a high level and you will succeed; when you stop succeeding, bow out gracefully. If there are complications along the way, charisma is the answer.
What if one can’t abide by these principals, but obsessively want to stay in the game anyway? Here, the story gets interesting, and it usually involves an aged, imperfect body image which throws the expected formula for a wicked loop. In so doing, these too rare stories force the audience to ask some questions about preconceived notions of victory, as well as sports obsession.
Slap Shot: To Sustain A Way Of Life, One Has To Imagine.
At first blush, Slap Shot’s story line feels like a cliche. In the film, Charlestown Chiefs’ team captain Reggie Dunlop (Paul Newman) is struggling to save his comically inept semi-pro squad from a looming fire sale.
However, Reggie is not your typical fading great, as is the case with most soft-screwball films in which a once dominant veteran mentors a quirky cast of natural athletes to victory (Major League and even Bull Durham come to mind).
In Slap Shot, there is no argument that Reggie is or ever was a “great” hockey player. Pushing fifty (Newman was 52 when he took the role), Reggie’s defining feature is not as a skilled skater or strategist, but as an old codger who enjoys life on the road with eccentric teammates who aren’t the least bit coachable.
The combination of Reggie’s age, lack of skill, and crappy paychecks blurs the definition of what “hockey” means in Slap Shot. In Reggie’s eyes, “hockey” is less a game of skill that can lead to victory than it is a means toward the only way he wants to live his life.
Reggie can’t win within the lines at his age, so he has to imagine them differently. Consider the following iconic scene, in which Reggie releases the Hanson Brothers — an otherworldy trio of bespectacled, man-child goons signed by ownership on the uber cheap — from the bench. The Hansons represent the height of Reggie’s frustration for a game that has no longer promised to sustain his career under the normal rules.
The Hansons may be doing the moving, but Reggie’s rascally eyes direct the scene. Meanwhile, the younger, rule abiding Ned Braden (sitting next to Reggie) gazes disapprovingly. Ned still has a valuable stake in operating from inside the lines, while Reggie — close to thirty years Ned’s senior — cannot afford this luxury.
It is highly questionable if Reggie could be written today, let alone win his generational battle against Ned. Our currently rigid, information age based understanding of sports leaves less to the imagination, giving way to a tamer and more statistical interpretation of the game both in sports writing and in film.
For instance, take the lightly offbeat but ultimately uninspired Slap Shot offshoot, Goon (2012). Here, Doug Glatt (Sean William Scott) is a “enforcer” who fights against other disruptive goons to maintain order in the rink, and to protect the team’s franchise draft pick. Doug’s brawls are humorous, but they are all confined to a typically linear approach: a playoff bound team, a girlfriend, etc. etc.
Doug has no interest in blurring the nature of the game on any level. In Slap Shot, on the other hand, Reggie’s position well outside the realm of rote imitation lends to the albeit gratuitous violence’s translation into zanier, more figurative terrain.
Yes, Slap Shot depicts brawling at absurd levels of mayhem. But it takes a wily old-timer like Reggie to reveal that when youthful imitation gives way to good old imagination, even the most undesirable conditions can change for the interesting, if not the better. And when we are talking the land of celluloid, isn’t that what we all ultimately crave?:
Big Fan: An Image of the Consequences of Sports Obsession
The obsessive sports fan film isn’t uncommon. However, most feature protagonists in this sub-genre are bathed in glossy images that hide the uglier side of their delusions of grandeur.
In Fever Pitch, Ben (Jimmy Fallon) has such an intense obsession with the Boston Red Sox, he insists on seeing all 162 regular season games either at Fenway Park or on TV. However, this obsession seems less like a serious problem than a major dude-quirk glossed by Ben’s appealing countenance and classroom friendly demeanor; also his attractive, unusually accepting finance guru girlfriend, Lindsey Meeks (Drew Barrymore). In fact, Ben’s obsession with Red Sox nation lends to him a boyish innocence which Meeks, and the audience, find sweet and charming.
This kind of blissful, cosmopolitan, white collar co-existence contributes largely toward marginalizing Ben’s obsessive behavior. There’s a foregone conclusion that despite Ben’s intensely self-involved desire for a long-term relationship within the uninterrupted context of his Boston Red Sox game schedule, he and Lindsey are too perfect a couple not to be together at the end of the film.
In the somewhat more serious Silver Linings Playbook, Pat Sr. (Robert Dinero in a major supporting role) is an obsessive compulsive bookie and high stakes sports gambler who requires that his living room furniture, remote control, and guests be positioned in an exact scheme on Sundays while his wife (Jackie Weaver) toils in the kitchen over “crabby snacks.”
Pat Sr. is teetering on degeneracy, but once again, his obsessions are captured as a quirk nestled in an otherwise perfectly nice suburban home, and blanketed by a family of characters who have their own mental issues (those which the film only lightly threads).
Leading this cast are the film’s two attractive leads, Pat Jr. (Bradley Cooper) and Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence). Notably, that Pat is seen throughout half the film wearing a Philadelphia Eagles jersey serves as a celebration of Eagles Nation and Sunday football. Bradley Cooper in a football jersey may as well be a commercial for NFL Gameday, and it effectively compartmentalizes as a mere plot consideration Pat Sr.’s obsessive degenerate sports betting.
Unlike Ben or Pat, Big Fan’s Paul Aufiero (Patrick Oswalt) is a flabby, 5'3", 36-year-old schlep whose Giants jersey fits him like over-sized pajamas. He works at a parking toll booth, has no romantic possibilities, and still lives with his mother in his childhood bedroom — one adorned with more Giants football posters than even a high school sports geek would think is cool. Paul’s one good friend, Sal (Kevin Corrigan) only exacerbates his obsession. Sal is not a glossily handsome savior who is going to help Paul get his life together. Rather, he’s a lanky, unkempt, slow-witted mid-30s hermit who idolizes Paul’s every comment about the Giants and doesn’t talk to him about anything else.
By keeping the camera on Paul during just about every scene in the film, Big Fan hammers home the reality that he is just an average man living a life of mediocre routines. There is no magical escape for Paul: his insistence on being a super fan doesn’t open the film’s visual spectrum to a Giants victoryon the field, or maybe Paul’s own radio show.
Quite the contrary, Paul is suspended from scene to scene in closed, suffocating spaces; he’s always the “Big Fan” ruling over the margins of society. When he and Sal go to Giants stadium — a trip which they plan with a familiar argot that infers routine — they watch the game through a portable TV in the stadium parking lot. Given that Paul lives with his mother and has a job, it’s fair to argue that he could shell some cash to purchase a nose bleed seat. But Paul doesn’t want to be just another digit among 60,000 other fans. He wants to be the Giants chief authority and voice, and that illusion works better in an empty stadium parking lot.
To some degree, Paul’s strikingly diminutive countenance may feel like a bit of a cop out. He may seem so “Other” that he can’t possibly be representative of your typical “big fan.” But stripped of muscle, material possessions, professional responsibility, and all other readily accepted ordered structures, just how different from Paul is a 24/7 sports culture that already spends countless hours on Fantasy Sports over computer screens and even smaller portable media?
The answer is a whole lot, and maybe not that much at all.
The Wrestler: On Escaping Artificially Maintained Glory
In The Wrestler, faded star Randy “The Ram” Robinson’s wizened face is severely disconnected from his freakish build. Look into Randy’s eyes, and you see a lonely, middle aged man clinging onto a distant past. Look at the rest of Randy’s body, and you see a mismatched machine that’s viciously grappling with athletes half his age at local amateur wrestling events.
Randy’s held together by a grocery list of artificial products designed to fuel his pursuit of All-American glory from yesteryear. On a typical errand run, he shells out rent money on steroids, pills, hair extensions, dye, manicures, tanning booth rentals, you name it.
On one level, Randy can be readily dismissed as a “freak of nature.” But is he really all that different from thousands of entertainers who use non-natural products or digital imaging services to boost performance and improve appearance? Like Randy, much of this country is in a breathless pursuit to preserve the outward appearance of high performance regardless of fundamental internal flaws or health risks.
In a results-orientated society, the final image of youthful attractiveness and perfectly sculpted physique eclipses questions on just how these appearances are cultivated. It’s always the glossy images that prevail over textual warnings of long-term side effects.
Thus, even in modern films which unleash a skeptical take on athletes’ dangerous dietary and training practices, glorious visuals diverge from vitriolic dialect. In Any Given Sunday, two hours of harsh dialogue and even a few harrowing scenes of on field violence still feel like mere procedural rites on the way to the film’s final scenes of triumph. Ultimately the film’s focus gives way to final images of the young, strikingly handsome, multi-million dollar franchise studs — Willie Beaman (Jaimie Foxx), Julian Washington (L.L. Cool J), and Jimmy Sanderson (Bill Bellamy) — as they win a playoff game, unify as a team, and advance their lucrative careers.
In The Wrestler, there is no results-orientated celebration for Randy, save for some late 80s newspaper clippings scattered across his beat-up van. Randy’s face may be artificially tanned and decorated with a dyed hair, but he still can’t hide his wrinkles, weathered eyes, or drooping eyelids.
Ironically, Randy’s chemically souped up body is contributing to a broken life as reflected on his withered mien. He lives in a trailer rental he can barely afford; the money he collects from his local wrestling gigs come in thin envelopes of cash. Save for his daughter, who is more or less estranged from his life, Randy has no other family to rely on.
Even if Randy acknowledges that a more routine, emotionally satisfying existence may be his only path to long-run survival, his artificially fueled body cannot accept these conditions:
Some may say that the The Wrestler is the ultimate anti-American sports film. But Randy’s image-orientated conflict is actually more deeply and universally American than is the case with most sports film protagonists. The enormous, aged Randy is a monstrous symbol of a society torn between an acknowledged need for a slower, more austere culture to preserve its resources, and an obsession with expensive artificial elixirs toward good looks, strength, and applause.
Through Randy, The Wrestler argues that changing one’s direction in life is a by far harder and more complicated battle than the straightforward pursuit of victory. The transition also happens to the totality of our current cultural state after fleeting instances of youth and glory fade.
