Backspot: Behind The Queer Cheerleader
By Anne Gregg
The gay cheerleader trope is nothing new. From the lesbian cult classic But I’m a Cheerleader to the cheerleading mean girls of TV like Santanna Lopez and Cheryl Blossom, gay cheerleaders have a long history dazzling our screens with hyper-feminine excellence. Media has traditionally portrayed cheerleaders as peppy, mean, dumb, and way over-sexualized. Despite being underaged, they are objects of desire and eye candy for the viewer. The cheerleader’s traditional role is only to support male athletes. Elliot Page’s new film Backspot is a peek behind the facade of the effortless hyper-feminine cheerleader and explores the painstaking, borderline abusive world of competitive cheerleading.
Backspot follows Riley (Devery Jacobs), a teenage cheerleader with anxiety as she navigates the world of competitive cheer. Riley is a backspot, the backbone of the team who keeps time for the cheerleaders and is responsible for making sure the flyers (the cheerleaders at the top of the performance) are steady in the air. Riley, along with her girlfriend Amanda, (Kudakwashe Rutendo) and their friend Rachel (Noa DiBerto) are given the opportunity to join the more prestigious team in their town, the Nighthawks, who have had several cheer spots open up due to injury. With two weeks until championships, the girls are subjected to brutal practice schedules and are pushed beyond their limits by their stonecold coach, Eileen (Evan Rachel Wood). Riley is obsessed with cheer. She has panic attacks whenever she makes a mistake or even when she perceives something is her fault. She is a rigid perfectionist who is easily swayed into accepting the abuse from her coach and perpetuates that abuse onto her friends. When a flier falls, Amanda is asked to take her place and she refuses, because she cannot afford to go to the hospital if she’s injured. Riley gets upset with Amanda and threatens to break up with her if she quits. Amanda quits anyway.
Unlike other media with cheerleading, Backspot is focused on the grime and the pain of being an athlete. Instead of focusing on cheering and high flying pep, there are montages of Riley and the girls working diligently to synchronize their movements and their flips. They do pushups while sweat drips off their faces. Blood runs off of them in the locker room from broken noses and horribly bruised and calloused feet. Instead of being filmed in a peppy high-school movie montage, the editing is more similar to a training montage in a sports movie, set to workout music focusing on pain and strength rather than comedy, beauty, and romance. The injuries are gross and the expectation they should be shrugged off is brutal. When the girl that Riley is spotting breaks her nose, she’s worried more about it swelling and not looking perfect than she is about the pain. Perfection is the concern, destroying your body is not. They are flipping and flying and lifting girls in the air, they are exhausted and expected to have the most effortless smile on their face. It’s as practiced as the flips. It’s not innate or a sign of weak femininity, it’s a performance of it.
The cheerleader has become a sex object, the desirable girl for the screen, Backspot converses with these ideas in its own way. When the camera falls on long legs, arms, or feet, its disjointed body parts separate from the body. The editing is more similar to the dizzying abstract patterns of the dancers in Busby Berkely films than it is of the raunchy teen comedy’s leering gaze. When the girls have to get ready for competition, there’s a montage of glittery make-up, smiling lips, and big sparkling bows, but the montage is edited with the same cold seriousness as the earlier cheer practices.
Backspot examines the “girly,” performative aspects of cheer. Riley struggles to smile when she lands or flips or when she is holding a girl up in the air. She is not allowed to make the cheerleading look difficult. It can’t look like she is toughing anything out. Even if she executes everything perfectly if she’s not smiling, she might as well have done everything else wrong as well. In predominantly men’s sports, the athletes grunt, grimace, and growl with anger. Cheerleaders make all their hard work disappear behind the guise of a picture-perfect smile.
The queer cheerleader excels at meeting the hyper-feminine weightless expectation of being effortless, flirty eye candy. Her power comes from her ability to control the male gaze, to challenge it with her lack of interest and her ability to use that gaze to get what she wants. It’s a weapon. The weapon of Riley and her girlfriend doesn’t come from the stereotypical butchness of being strong and rejecting girly things–which is a fine way to be. Backspot isn’t interested in showing cheerleading as either hyper-feminine or hyper-masculine. Riley and Amanda are just teenage girls. They shout showtunes in their car, enjoy slumber parties, working out, and the hard work of cheerleading. Their styles are not extreme. They subvert stereotypes of the cheerleader and even the queer cheerleader by just being teenage girls. Teenage girls who are breaking their bodies to reach perfection.
Depressed and alone after Amanda breaks up with her, Riley sneaks into a gay nightclub to see the Nighthawk’s assistant coach Devon (Thomas Antony Olajide) who performs as a backup stripper to a drag queen (because all good queer movies must have a drag queen scene). After scolding Riley for coming to the club when she is underage, Devon drives her to his apartment and helps her sober up. Riley has a breakdown. She’s convinced she’s not a good enough cheerleader and she’s disappointed with Eileen. Devon tells her that Eileen is human, just like everybody else. Riley has to start demystifying people and get rid of her impossible standards of perfection. Accepting Eileen as a person allows Riley to take more control in her life and step closer to accepting herself as a person, not as a perfectionist.
Backspot shows the humans behind the stereotypical cheerleader and their athletic feats that appear to be effortless. Backspot also shows the humanity of a young girl’s coming of age, the pain of being pushed by idolized adults, and the futile impossibility of perfection.
About the Author
Anne Gregg is a poet and writer from Northwest Indiana. She is an English Writing major at DePauw University and is the editor-in-chief of her campus’s literary magazine, A Midwestern Review. She is a Media Fellow at her university and loves dissecting how LGBTQ+ people are portrayed in film and tv.
