InMedia The French Journal of Media Studies
6 | 2017 Fields of Dreams and Messages The Politics of the Mediated Representation of Sports
Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/831 DOI : 10.4000/inmedia.831 ISSN : 2259-4728
Éditeur Center for Research on the English-Speaking World (CREW)
Référence électronique InMedia, 6 | 2017, « Fields of Dreams and Messages » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 19 décembre 2017, consulté le 27 septembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/831 ; DOI : https:// doi.org/10.4000/inmedia.831
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SOMMAIRE
The Politics of Discourse on the Fields of Dreams Political Messaging and the Mediated Representation of Sports
The Politics of Discourse on the Fields of Dreams: Political Messaging and the Mediated Representation of Sports Daniel Durbin et Yann Descamps
Long Shot: The Prospects and Limitations of Sports and Celebrity Athlete Diplomacy Michael K. Park
Coubertin’s Music: Culture, Class, and the Failure of the Olympic Project Nicholas Attfield
Broke Ballers: The Mediated World of Football and Finance Courtney Cox
Sport in Films: Symbolism versus Verismo. A France-United States Comparative Analysis Valérie Bonnet
Varia
From Rocky (1976) to Creed (2015): “musculinity” and modesty Clémentine Tholas
Conference and Seminar Reviews
21st SERCIA Conference: Cinema and Seriality in the English-speaking World Ann-Lys Bourgognon
The Art of Walt Disney Animation Studios: Movement by Nature Thibaut Clément
Barbie –Musée des Arts Décoratifs Paris Anaïs Le Fèvre-Berthelot
Dependence in / on TV series II (Séries et dépendance: Dépendance aux séries II) Anne Sweet
The Color Line: African American Artists and Segregation – Musée du Quai Branly Clémentine Tholas-Disset
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Book Reviews
Carlos Scolari, Paolo Bertetti and Matthew Freeman. Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 95 pages Mehdi Achouche
Stephen Rowley, Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs: Building Hollywood’s Ideal Communities New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 272 pages Aurélie Blot
Bertrand Naivin, Selfie, Un nouveau regard photographique Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016, 161 pages Karine Chambefort
Christopher Chávez, Reinventing the Latino Television Viewer: Language, Ideology, and Practice Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015, 180 pages Emilie Cheyroux
Ariane Hudelet, The Wire, Les règles du jeu Paris: PUF, 2016, 198 pages Flore Coulouma
Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016, 256 pages Anne Crémieux
Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2015, 400 pages Pierre Cras
Jennifer Guiliano, Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015, 175 pages Jennifer L. Gauthier
Charles J. Ogletree and Austin Sarat, eds. Punishment in Popular Culture New York: New York University Press, 2015, 318 pages Sébastien Lefait
Delphine Letort, The Spike Lee Brand: A Study of Documentary Filmmaking Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015 David Lipson
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (eds.), The Laughing Dead: The Horror- Comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, 272 pages Elizabeth Mullen
Dolores Inés Casillas, Sounds of Belonging. U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy New York: New York University Press, 2014, 220 pages Isabelle Vagnoux
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Daniel Durbin and Yann Descamps (dir.) The Politics of Discourse on the Fields of Dreams Political Messaging and the Mediated Representation of Sports
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The Politics of Discourse on the Fields of Dreams: Political Messaging and the Mediated Representation of Sports
Daniel Durbin and Yann Descamps
Politics from the Field to the Audience
1 In The Laws, Plato claimed that one of the chief ends of athletic contests was the composition and presentation of “speeches of commendation and reproof,” narrative speeches drawn from the competition that could be used by the state to shape the values and actions of the citizenry.1 We know that many of the great rhetoricians of the day, including Gorgias, Lysias and Isocrates, used this platform to deliver often scathing political messages.2 Today, the mediated retelling of sports narratives continues to create political meaning from the events played out on the field. A significant body of sports scholarship has focused on this media-driven discourse and its impact on national and global politics.
2 From the use of the Olympics as a tool for propaganda—from Hitler’s Germany to Putin’s Russia—to the recent resurging political activism of African-American athletes and Donald Trump’s ties with football star Tom Brady,3 the links between politics and sports have been well documented and widely studied. Sport is a global phenomenon whose impact goes far beyond mere entertainment. It expresses and, in performance, embodies moral and cultural values, and it can be a force for change as well as an instrument to control the masses. While sports have always had significant political implications, as the Olympics have shown throughout their history,4 the political dimension of sports spectacle plays out not only on the sports stage, but through media narratives which engage and, at times, shape political discourse.
3 Indeed, the media do not simply broadcast or “show” sports events, they deconstruct the actions on the field or court and reconstructs them, representing, rather than
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showing, the competition. John Fiske argues that there is a difference between the “real” sporting event and “its mediated representation,”5 and this mediated representation is of great significance, for sports take on additional meaning through this process. These meanings are further complicated by the wide array of media through which sports narratives are broadcast. With the explosion of social media, online streaming of sports content, reconstruction of sports in fantasy sports, pay-per- view platforms as well as more traditional means for broadcasting sports narratives, sports stories intersect culture and politics in an ever-expanding number of ways. And, each of these media creates a slightly different message from the sports content, a message shaped by the medium on which it is expressed. In an era when sports leagues use transmedia storytelling to unfold their narratives and develop their brands,6 the media's role in both showing, shaping and using sports needs to be assessed. Even sports reporting goes well beyond reporting. As journalists and broadcasters represent sports events, they create morality plays, send messages, sell products and role models, and even deconstruct the sports space as well as the game itself.7 Sports are not only covered by news media such as newspapers, television, the radio or the Internet. They have also been seized by popular culture. Sports are represented in films, TV shows, and videogames, and enjoy strong ties with other media forms such as music. Beyond the cultural and social dimension of its impact on collective memory, the mediated representation of sports also has a political dimension that this special issue seeks to address.
The Media as Political Platform for Governments and Athletes
4 The mediated representation of sports is often political, especially when sports and their broadcasting are used for political purposes by role players such as governments and athletes. For instance, the Olympics and its broadcasting are brimming with political discourse. In 1938, filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia started a trend in using sports and the media for political propaganda. Political messaging still can be found in the spectacle of opening ceremonies, during which host countries send strong cultural and political messages about themselves.8 These self-celebratory messages reach global audiences through television and the Internet. Olympic fanfares can be used to celebrate a country’s values through the medium of music. John Williams’ fanfares for the 1984 and 1996 Olympics embodied the American pastoral dream as much as the Olympic universal ideal. Recent Olympic bids include a strong political undertone, with politicians leading the way and sports diplomacy being at play through the host cities’ communicating strategies on social media.
5 Athletes also use a variety of media to send their own messages and to shape their public image. Some use books and autobiographies to explore the political dimensions of their stories. For example, John Carlos wrote his autobiography to explain “the symbology” of what was then described as a “Black Power salute” at the 1968 Olympics, seeking to challenge his stereotyped representation by the media of that time.9 Other athletes have performed in commercials that send political messages. Among these, one might count Charles Barkley’s “I am not a role model,” LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Serena Williams’ call for “equality,” and top soccer players “showing racism the red card.” Others express their political views through social media. NFL football player
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Colin Kaepernick uses Twitter and Instagram to give substance to his symbolic protest of the American national anthem and to extend his discourse on issues of race, politics and violence. Some former athletes host talk shows and podcasts to be free to discuss subjects they were not supposed to address as athletes or before the news media. Former NBA player Chris Webber discusses politics at length in his podcast Fearless or Insane with Chris Webber. Moreover, the rise of new media has given birth to new challenges. The links between social media and sports have garnered a great deal of scholarly attention over the past few years, mostly through the prism of fan engagement.10 However, other issues related to social media and sports have emerged recently. The use of social media by athletes as a tool for self-representation is not devoid of a political dimension, especially in the case of athletes who were underrepresented in the media and now send political messages through these new platforms. Also, social media represent a new branding challenge for the sports world. Indeed, sexism and racism are some of the scourges that social media have revealed—or exposed more blatantly.11 Last, new issues have appeared regarding the status of athletes, and especially student-athletes, as representatives of their university’s brand —a role that can sometimes come into conflict with their identities as citizens entitled to their own political views.
The Politics of Representation in the Media and Popular Culture
6 Even when athletes and governments do not explicitly use the media to political ends, the mediated representation of sports has a latent political undertone. Indeed, the way sporting events are announced, filmed, broadcast, and the way athletes are portrayed or pictured can be politically relevant. Among the early scholars to focus on this dimension of sport, Lawrence Wenner explored the political implications of the mediated representation of sports.12 He underlined how the Super Bowl was constructed as an American spectacle.13 Not only does this event become a representation of the American culture, but it can also be turned into a tool of propaganda and soft power for the United States on the global sports and media stage. Another early scholar, Thomas Farrell, wrote of the Olympics as a platform for promoting a rhetorical and political vision of national identity and the challenges nations faced when athletic performance did not live up to the political vision created through media.14 More recently, some radio shows such as Colin Cowherd’s The Herd have developed cultural discourse with a political undertone. Most importantly, the mediated representation of sports allows us to address issues of gender and minority representations. John Fiske proposes that discourse was “a terrain of struggle” in the media.15 Indeed, the visual and verbal discourses articulated through sports in the media do reflect this element of struggle, as they are plagued with issues of sexism and racism.16 In sports as much as in the news, identities can be framed through words and images, thus influencing the collective imagination and having a political impact.17
7 From films to TV shows, music and videogames, sports have also been portrayed in popular culture, and their representation is not limited to the reenactment of athletic performances. Sport is used as a means to address other subjects such as the definition of manhood, the importance of moral values, or the construction of identities. Aaron Baker emphasizes the political dimension of sports in films when he writes that “[they]
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contribute to the contested process of defining social identities.”18 Todd Boyd has examined the strong links between basketball and hip-hop music, and has shown that such links have a strong political undertone.19 Last, David Leonard has brought to light the latent racism that can be found in the representation of African-Americans in TV shows and videogames.20
The (Political) Game behind the (Mediated) Game
8 The rise of the mediated representation of sports has turned sports into a global phenomenon and a multibillion-dollar industry. More importantly, it has considerably raised the impact of sports on society and its collective imagination. Sports contribute both to bringing about change and preserving the status quo when it comes to defining identities or building communities. More precisely, the mediated representation of sports motivates audiences to seek change or hold to the status quo. Therefore, it has political consequences.
9 In his article entitled “Longshot: Sports Celebrity Diplomacy in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” Michael Park explores sport as an instrument of American soft power, referring to Nye’s work and references to Michael Jordan as a soft power figure. Informed by Cooper’s theoretical perspective on celebrity diplomacy, Park’s work extends the celebrity diplomacy discourse into the area of sports celebrities and explores the figure of the celebrity athlete as an instrument of diplomacy. He also expands the discourse on celebrity athletes as antidiplomats, and studies Dennis Rodman’s “basketball diplomacy” efforts in North Korea to examine the power celebrity athletes can have on fostering engagement with other governments. His research underlines the critical part played by the media – old and new – in the making of celebrities, the building of myths, and the rise of American soft power. As Park shows, while basketball can be used as a tool for conveying American soft power – through the NBA, Michael Jordan, or Dennis Rodman – it can also be used by the North Korean regime as a legitimization of the government. The North Korean media accounts of Rodman’s basketball diplomacy underlines the potential limitations of celebrity athlete diplomacy and opens on cautious conclusions when celebrity athletes are used as instruments of engagement. Sport has some diplomatic value as it can start a dialogue between nations. However, the media is key here, as it can help influence the public’s perception of an event, culture, and country, and thus help bridge the cultural and political gap between nations – or widen it.
10 In “Coubertin’s Music: Culture, Class, and the Failure of the Olympic Project,” Nicholas Attfield focuses on the importance of music in Coubertin’s Olympic project. He highlights how Coubertin envisioned sport as a signifying cultural practice, and how music could contribute to channeling, promoting and celebrating the spirit of the Modern Olympics – along with its socio-political message – through aesthetics. Bringing more attention to music and “eurhythmy” in the wake of Brown’s work, Attfield shows that Coubertin envisioned the Olympics as a potential aesthetic experience comparable to “total artwork.” However, by trying to make his Olympic humanism a modern and resounding reality, he failed to acknowledge issues of culture and class, as well as the political use of both music and the Olympics to serve not his Republican ideas but nationalism in the case of the 1936 Olympics. The author underlines the part played by music in the signifying multimedia spectacle of the
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Olympics, and its potential political dimension, when aesthetics is used to promote host countries instead of the Olympic project itself.
11 In her article entitled “Broke Ballers: The Mediated World of Football and Finance,” Courtney Cox examines the first two seasons of TV show Ballers in terms of the sports- media complex, player identity, and the embedded nature of culture and finance using qualitative content analysis, as well as referring to Wodak’s work on characters as social actors. Drawing a parallel between sports films and scripted sports television, while questioning where the latter fits in the interactions between media, sports and society highlighted in Wenner’s Transactional model, Cox argues that TV shows can reflect society – in the creation, production and construction of certain social conditions and/or the restoration, justification, reproduction, transformation or destruction of a certain social status quo. She shows that Ballers examine and reproduce certain social practices, reinforcing ideas about race, gender, class and the world of finance. In a nutshell, the show tends to relay stereotypes about black athletic masculinity without really deconstructing them. It also stages the media’s influence over the sporting world – from television shows and analysts to Twitter and videogames – and their failure to confront issues of inequity. This article examines the political dimension of sports TV shows when these deal with issues of race, class and gender.
12 In “Sport in Films: Symbolism versus Verismo. A France-United States Comparative Analysis,” Valérie Bonnet tackles sports films and their cultural and political dimension, mostly through the projection they offer of the nation which produces them. Indeed, after having questioned the social existence of the sports film genre and defined its attributes and properties, mainly using Altman’s definition of a film genre, the author studies how both nations – France and the United States – project themselves through sports films. She goes on to highlight two very different film industries and productions as regards sport and its use in films. Indeed, the part played by sports is not the same: while it is an entry point in American cinema, a way to promote American values and sell the (Athletic) American Dream, it is somewhat of an element of contextualization in French cinema, as well as an opportunity to criticize the sports environment. In both instances, sports films do have a strong political dimension: they reflect social issues of their times and allow audiences to embrace either a representation of American society as filmmakers would have it perceived or an image of sport as despicable or politically feckless. The paper also broaches the subject of the influence of other media on film productions, as television broadcasting of sporting events and sports reporting in general tend to develop more storytelling than sports films do in the French context. Bonnet argues that the French audience looks for a filmed sports contest, while the American audience is more attached to the symbolic and cultural dimension of sports, thus opposing a French strategy of verismo to American symbolism through sports films – reflecting two different approaches to sports in the media, as well as the political dimension of sports and the political use of sports in films.
13 At a crucial time in the relation between sports and the media, with the renewal of athletes’ activism and the new challenges brought on by social media, this issue offers various articles that seek to deconstruct the mediated representation of sports through the prism of politics. From sports diplomacy and its media coverage to the links between music, politics and the Olympics, and the political dimension of sports TV
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shows and sports films from different cultures, it aims to explore how sports and the way they are represented, convey both straightforward and incidental political messages.
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Baker, Aaron. Contesting Identities: Sport in American Film. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Blociszewski, Jacques. Le match de football télévisé. Rennes: Éditions Apogée, 2007.
Boyd, Todd. Young, Black, Rich, and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip-Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Carlisle Duncan, Margaret, Messner, Michael A. “The Media Image of Sport and Gender.” In MediaSport, edited by Lawrence A. Wenner, 170-185.London: Routledge, 1998.
Carlos, John, with Zirin, Dave. The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011.
Consalvo, Mia, et al. eds. Sports Videogames. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Davies, Laurel R., Harris, Othello, “Race and Ethnicity in US Sports Media.” In MediaSport, edited by Lawrence A. Wenner, 154-169. London: Routledge, 1998.
Durbin, Daniel. “Trumporable Tom Brady”. US News.
Farrell, Thomas B. “Media Rhetoric as Social Drama: The Winter Olympics of 1984.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication. 6 (1989), 158-182.
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Fink, Janet S., Kensicki, Linda Jean. “An Imperceptible Difference: Visual and Textual Constructions of Femininity in Sports Illustrated and Sports Illustrated for Women.” Mass Communication and Society, Vol. 5, n° 3 (August 2002): 317-340.
Fiske, John. Media Matters: Race and Gender in U.S. Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
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Frau-Meigs, Divina. Médiamorphoses américaines. Dans un espace privé unique au monde. Paris: Economica, 2001.
Hall, Stuart ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: The Open University, 1997.
Humbert, Henri, “La presse sportive française et l’encouragement à l’hégémonie masculine (1900-1970).” In Sport et Genre. Vol. 2: Excellence féminine et masculinité hégémonique, directed by Liotard, Philippe, Terret, Thierry, 241-262. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005.
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Kane, Mary Jo, Jefferson Lensky, Helen, “Media Treatment of Female Athletes: Issues of Gender and Sexualities.” In MediaSport, edited by Lawrence A. Wenner, 186-201. London: Routledge, 1998.
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Lavelle, Katherine L. “‘One of These Things Is Not Like the Others’: Linguistic Representations of Yao Ming in NBA Game Commentary.” International Journal of Sport Communication (2011): 50-69.
Leconte, Bernard. “Retransmission sportives et énonciation televisuelle: quand la télévision, sous couvert de reportage sportif, parle de tout autre chose.” In Montrer le sport. Photographie, cinéma, télévision, directed by Veray, Laurent, Simonet, Pierre, 203-210. Paris: INSEP, 2000.
Leonard, David. “‘Live in Your World, Play in Ours’: Race, Video Games, and Consuming the Others.” Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 3, Issue 4 (November 2003): 1–9. DOI: 10.3138/sim.3.4.002
Leonard, David J., Guerrero, Lisa A. eds. African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2013.
Milza, Pierre, et al.dir.Le pouvoir des anneaux. Les Jeux olympiques à la lumière de la politique, 1896-2004. Paris: Vuibert, 2004.
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Riefenstahl, Leni. Olympia. The Complete Original Version [DVD]. Pathfinder, 2006 (1938).
Spivey, Nigel. The Ancient Olympics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Vigarello, Georges. “Le marathon entre bitume et écran.” Communications, 67 (1998): 211-215. DOI: 10.3406/comm.1998.2026
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Wenner, Lawrence A. “The Super Bowl Pregame Show: Cultural Fantasies and Political Subtext.” In Media, Sports, and Society, edited by Lawrence A. Wenner, 157-179. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1989.
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ENDNOTES
1. Plato, The Laws (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), 227. 2. Nigel Spivey, The Ancient Olympics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 191. 3. Daniel Durbin, “Trumporable Tom Brady,” US News.
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marathon entre bitume et écran,” Communications, 67 (1998) : 211-215. DOI : 10.3406/comm. 1998.2026 8. Leni Riefenstahl, Olympia. The Complete Original Version [DVD] (Pathfinder, 2006 (1938)). 9. John Carlos, with Dave Zirin, The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011), 110. 10. Emilio Fernandez Peña, et al. eds, An Olympic Mosaic: Multidisciplinary Research and Dissemination of Olympic Studies (Barcelona: Centre d’EstudisOlimpics, 2011). 11. Neil Farrington, et al., Sport, Racism and Social Media (London: Routledge, 2014). 12. Lawrence A. Wennered, Media, Sports, and Society (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1989); Lawrence A. Wennered, MediaSport (London: Routledge, 1998). 13. Lawrence A. Wenner, “The Super Bowl Pregame Show: Cultural Fantasies and Political Subtext,” In Wenner, Media, Sports, and Society, 157-179. 14. Thomas B. Farrell, “Media Rhetoric as Social Drama: The Winter Olympics of 1984,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 6 (1989), 158-182. 15. John Fiske, Media Matters: Race and Gender in U.S. Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 5. 16. Margaret Carlisle Duncan, Michael A. Messner, “The Media Image of Sport and Gender,” In Wenner, MediaSport, 170-185; Laurel R. Davies, Othello Harris, “Race and Ethnicity in US Sports Media,” In Wenner, MediaSport, 154-169; Janet S. Fink, Linda Jean Kensicki, “An Imperceptible Difference: Visual and Textual Constructions of Femininity in Sports Illustrated and Sports Illustrated for Women,” Mass Communication and Society, Vol. 5, n° 3 (August 2002): 317-340; Henri Humbert, “La presse sportive française et l’encouragement à l’hégémonie masculine (1900-1970),” In Sport et Genre. Vol. 2 : Excellence féminine et masculinitéhégémonique, directed by Philippe Liotard, Thierry Terret (Paris : L’Harmattan, 2005), 241-262; Mary Jo Kane, Helen Jefferson Lensky, “Media Treatment of Female Athletes: Issues of Gender and Sexualities,” In Wenner, MediaSport, 186-201; Katherine L. Lavelle, “‘One of These Things Is Not Like the Others’: Linguistic Representations of Yao Ming in NBA Game Commentary,” International Journal of Sport Communication (2011): 50-69. 17. See Divina Frau-Meigs’ use of the media’s framing of identities and its impact on the public’s perception. Divina Frau-Meigs, Médiamorphoses américaines. Dans un espaceprivé unique au monde (Paris : Economica, 2001), 97-106. 18. Aaron Baker, Contesting Identities: Sport in American Film (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 2. 19. Todd Boyd, Young, Black, Rich, and Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip-Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). 20. David Leonard, “‘Live in Your World, Play in Ours’: Race, Video Games, and Consuming the Others,” Studies in Media & Information Literacy Education, Volume 3, Issue 4 (November 2003): 1–9. DOI: 10.3138/sim.3.4.002; David J. Leonard, Lisa A. Guerrero eds, African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings (Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2013).
INDEX
Mots-clés: Sports, Media, Popular Culture, Discourse, Politics, Representation
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AUTHORS
DANIEL DURBIN Annenberg Institute of Sports, Media and Society, University of Southern California Pr. Daniel Durbin is the Director of the Annenberg Institute of Sports, Media and Society at the University of Southern California. He teaches courses across a broad variety of subjects, including sports, sports media, the social and cultural impact of sports, social movements, classical and contemporary theories of rhetoric, and fashion and media. He has published articles in sports, popular culture, and sports media studies.
YANN DESCAMPS PhD, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 Yann Descamps is a PhD in American studies from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. His thesis dissertation deals with the importance of basketball in African-American popular culture, as well as its representation in the American [email protected]
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Long Shot: The Prospects and Limitations of Sports and Celebrity Athlete Diplomacy
Michael K. Park
Introduction
1 Avery Brundage, former president of the International Olympics Committee, once stated that, “sports are completely free of politics.”1 History, however, reveals that sports have long been utilized for diplomatic purposes, including international boycotts, national propaganda, and as a platform to promote civil rights. Sports diplomacy – the mixture of sport, politics and diplomacy – has been viewed as a component of public diplomacy at all levels.2 Former Australian foreign minister, Gareth Evans, defined public diplomacy as “an exercise in persuasion and influence that extends beyond traditional diplomacy by leveraging a much larger case of players both inside and outside government.”3 If public diplomacy describes the means by which states and non-state actors understand cultures, manage relationships, and influence opinions and actions to advance their interests,4 than sports diplomacy is one of the many means to those ends. However, not all sports diplomacy occurs through official state channels; individual athletes can also contribute to diplomacy efforts, even when their conduct is “incongruent with that of the diplomatic culture.”5
2 While there has been a longstanding history of sports in the diplomatic arena, there has recently been an increased focus on the use and effect of sports and public diplomacy within the context of foreign policy. Recent scholarship on sports diplomacy has included an analysis of sports as a tool for foreign diplomacy;6 a taxonomy for understanding how international sports and diplomacy interact;7 an examination of the limitations of organized sport as an instrument of diplomacy;8 and the public diplomacy opportunities with sporting mega-events.9 However, there is very little scholarship exploring the role of celebrity athletes in either public diplomacy or through non-state sanctioned channels of engagement. While celebrity diplomats such
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as U2’s Bono and actor George Clooney have been the subject of great attention for their influence on international affairs, celebrity athletes, including non-state actors of sport can also be effective diplomacy instruments as part of a nation’s soft power—which Nye defined as the ability to persuade and influence others through the attraction of a nation’s values and culture.10
3 Informed by Cooper’s11 theoretical perspective on celebrity diplomacy, this work aims to extend the discourse into the area of sports celebrities and explores the unique features of celebrity athletes as an instrument of diplomacy. This work is also informed by Vanc’s12 work on celebrity athletes as non-state sanctioned antidiplomats, and critically evaluates Dennis Rodman’s “basketball diplomacy” efforts in North Korea (“DPRK”) as a case study to demonstrate the unique power sports celebrity diplomacy can have toward engagement with even the most reclusive and hostile governments. The regime’s tight restrictions on Western culture, and the fact that cultural invitations and exchanges are so extremely rare, make Rodman’s “basketball diplomacy” efforts particularly significant as a site for critical evaluation. Moreover, this works examines North Korean media accounts of Rodman’s basketball diplomacy and draws on Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reports from the 2013 calendar year for a textual analysis of KCNA’s reporting of Rodman’s “basketball diplomacy.” As a state-controlled media outlet, KCNA reports are ideological, and any reports that covered Rodman’s visits will be analyzed to uncover on how the state-run media contextualized these visits from the DRPK’s perspective. Finally, this analysis sheds light on the potential limitations of sports celebrity diplomacy, and offers cautious conclusions when celebrity athletes are used as instruments of engagement.
4 This paper begins by providing historical context to the volatile geopolitical relations on the Korean peninsula. Since the end of the Korean War, relations between the U.S. and North Korea have been fraught with military tension, and nuclear threats from the North, yet traditional hard power resources has had a de minimus impact in thwarting the regime’s nuclear ambitions and irrational behavior. In order to fully understand the potential value and attraction of sport and celebrity athlete diplomacy to a regime such as the DPRK, a review of the globalization of sport and celebrity athlete at the intersection of communication technology and transnational consumption must be taken into consideration. In order to contextualize sports celebrity diplomacy within the fields of sports and celebrity diplomacy, a review of the emerging field of sports diplomacy scholarship and celebrity diplomacy studies then follows, before an analysis of a case study involving sports celebrity diplomacy.
U.S. – D.P.R.K.: Hard Power Relations
5 Korea has been a divided country since the end of WWII, when the Japanese ended its occupation of the country. At the end of the war, the Soviet Union had stationed troops in Manchuria and northern Korea, and after considering the military and geopolitical implications a Soviet occupation of the peninsula could have on the region, the U.S. had to quickly decide on a post-Japanese occupation plan in Korea. The U.S. subsequently demarcated Korea at the thirty-eighth parallel; U.S. troops would occupy the area south of the parallel, while Soviet troops would occupy the north. The Soviet Union appointed a Korean guerilla commander, Kim Il-Sung, to head its regime in the North, and his rule lasted until his death in 1994, when his son Kim Jong-Il succeeded him. In
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June of 1950, North Korea, backed by the Soviets and Chinese, invaded the U.S.-backed South in an effort to unify the country, leading to the three-year Korean War that ended with an armistice agreement in July, 1953; to date, no official peace treaty has ever been signed.
6 For more than half a century since the Korean War, the North Korean regime has been marked by bizarre—perhaps calculated—behavior on the international front, including acts of terrorism, and continued efforts toward nuclearization. Moreover, since the end of the Cold War and disintegration of the Soviet bloc, North Korea’s economy has imploded, and most of the nation’s public has slid into a state of severe deprivation. Relations between the U.S. and the D.P.R.K. have historically been defined with the use of hard power resources—threats of military force, economic sanctions and limited humanitarian aid. The U.S. and the DPRK have no formal diplomatic relations, and since the 1980s, limited engagement between the U.S. and North Korea have been centered on the security threats posed by the North’s pursuit of nuclear armament. As Victor Cha aptly notes, the world has witnessed reruns of the same nuclear crisis—a North Korean version of Groundhog Day—that begins with international atomic inspectors declaring the North is in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT); North threatens withdrawal from the NPT; the U.S. and United Nations condemn and sanction the DPRK; the DPRK retaliates with further efforts to produce nuclear weapons.13
7 After Kim Jong-Il’s death in late 2011, his youngest son, Kim Jong-un (KJU), was declared the “supreme leader” of the hermetic nation.14 Unlike KJU, the political and ideological aspirations of his father were relatively clear. Kim Jong-Il was concerned about securing a peace treaty as it would guarantee the sovereignty of the DPRK, and was also concerned with garnering respect through recognition of its legitimacy.15 In fact, a visit to North Korea by the President of the United States was highly coveted by the former ruler because in the regime’s view, it would end its “pariah status” and be tangible acceptance of its legitimacy for the world to see.16
8 Much less is known about KJU’s ideological proclivities. While the regime’s recent missile tests and threatening rhetoric mirror the policies and destabilizing actions of the past, there is also some evidence that KJU may be more receptive to Western cultural engagement. As a young student, KJU was enamored with icons of American popular culture, including American sport: he often wore Nike Air Jordans, and spent hours doing drawings of Michael Jordan, whom he “worshipped.”17 There is also an increasing number of Western products that have entered the reclusive nation, from mobile phones and Adidas shoes to Kentucky whiskey.18 Even Disney characters have infiltrated the regime’s highest levels of leadership; costumed versions of famous Disney characters were prominently featured at a gala in honor of KJU’s ascendance as the “supreme leader.”19 Where hard power means may fall short, perhaps there is room for the soft power of sport and celebrity to offer an effective channel towards further engagement.
The Soft Power of Sport: Attraction and Consumption
9 Known as “The Worm” during his colorful National Basketball Association (NBA) career (both on and off the court), Dennis Rodman was an athlete whose aggressiveness and combative nature propelled him to All-Star status in the NBA, where he won several
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championships, including three with the Chicago Bulls. So after a post-NBA career that included “professional” wrestling and serving as commissioner of the Lingerie Football League, how did this public figure worm his way into foreign affairs and become the highest-profile American to meet with Kim Jong Un (KJU), the young leader of North Korea—a country the U.S. has no formal diplomatic relations with? Dubbed “basketball diplomacy” by the media, the meeting was the result of arrangements made between two private media entities, Vice media and HBO, and the North Korean regime. Vice media’s footage revealed a head of state clearly “star-struck” with Rodman’s presence and the celebrity athlete’s appeal and reception by the secretive regime is a reminder of how attractive a nation’s cultural products—as a form of soft power—can be.
10 Although soft power is broadly understood as the ability to shape the preferences of others and align them to your own through the attraction of culture and values, the concept has largely escaped definitional consensus: what exactly constitutes soft power?
11 Joseph Nye defined soft power as the ability to influence others by attraction and persuasion.20 It involves strategies of co-opting rather than coercion by harnessing “intangible resources such as culture, ideology, and institutions.”21 While the concept was originally in reference to American foreign policy strategy, Nye’s concept has gained political and academic currency around the world.22 However, the concept has been labeled as “confusing”23 since it can be argued that a nation’s foreign policy is the mere manifestation of its hard power, and core values and domestic institutions are integral to a public’s culture. Informed by Fan’s approach to the concept, this author holds soft power synonymous with cultural power.24 As Nye points out, “[m]uch of American soft power has been produced by Hollywood, Harvard, Microsoft, and Michael Jordan.”25 Culture can be transmitted in many ways, including the ideas and values America exports into the minds of more than half a million foreign students who study in U.S. universities every year.26 Although the U.S. is a leading site for intellectual and academic exchange, other countries have also taken advantage of soft power forms of cultural exchange, even exchanges with reclusive states. For instance, Canada and North Korea have a knowledge-sharing program where North Korean scholars visit Canada and gain access to desired knowledge and ideas on business and economics.27
12 Nye suggests that attraction is more than persuasion through rational argument, but is also the output of affect and feelings.28 The attraction of soft power may also relate to the fulfillment of needs; it may be based on both or either rational and affective components of culture, values, and/or policies.29 Furthermore, culture can also be transmitted through commerce and the export of cultural products such as entertainment and sports media through their long-arm transnational reach, which today, are frequently co-productions between the state and private civil actors. Soft power may also appeal to individuals and collective non-state actors, in contrast to hard power, which the government primarily controls through military and economic policies.30 As Bially Mattern notes, “soft power is available to any actor that can render itself attractive to another.”31 Furthermore, Nye notes that advanced digital communication platforms has enabled greater scrutiny of states’ actions, and the use of force has become less tolerated in post-industrial societies, leading to the increasing significance of soft forms of power.32
13 Governments, transnational corporations, and private actors continue to tap into the potential of sport as a soft power resource, whether to promote ideological superiority
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or to promote culture abroad. Within this context, sport has become “inextricably linked to a multidimensional matrix of cultural, economic, environmental and political spheres in contemporary social life.”33 Nike’s Phil Knight once proclaimed, “sports has become the dominant entertainment of the world.”34 Regardless of national origin or religious orientation: who doesn’t like sports? In reference to a historic 2015 match between the New York Cosmos soccer team and the Cuban national squad, U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel noted that such events are bringing people together more so than presidents and professional diplomats, “because nothing stops sports fans from enjoying their sports.”35 The global appeal of sports is evidenced by the fact that there are currently over 203 national Olympic committees in the International Olympic Committee, which represents eleven more countries than there are national members of the United Nations.36 If sports were a religion, most of the world’s population would be fervent followers of it. Redeker notes that sports “conjoin the idea of Empire and the idea of the Church, together in the universality and the government of souls.”37
14 According to Walter LaFeber, transnational capitalists such as Phil Knight of Nike and media magnate Ted Turner enabled American media and popular culture to spread across the globe in the late 20th century.38 At the turn of the millennium, American soft power also benefitted from widespread adoption and use of the English language and the global influence of U.S. media products—nearly 80 percent of Europe’s television programs originated in the U.S.39 One of the most pronounced iterations of U.S. soft power in the late twentieth-century was the international popularity of Michael Jordan and his association with Nike—a symbiotic commercial alliance that took hold of the global cultural imaginary. The proliferation of direct-broadcast satellites (DBS) and the budding development of digital media in the 1980s-90s helped turn Michael Jordan into a global icon; he was a brand to be consumed and a promoter of consumption— particularly with products associated with “His Airness”—including Nike, his most lucrative corporate sponsor. LaFeber notes that Jordan’s rise to become the global commercial ideal was fueled by Nike’s massive global advertising campaigns and heavy foreign investment in growing markets like China.40 Global-based advertising increased as Jordan’s athletic accomplishments reached its zenith at the end of the twentieth century. In 1980, the average consumer was exposed to sixteen hundred advertising messages a day; a decade later, it was about three thousand.41 Jordan was also the perfect embodiment of the sports spectacle, transforming sports into “a forum that sells the values, products, celebrities, and institutions of the media and consumer society.”42
15 Jordan’s global appeal aligned with and benefitted from the dynamic forces of American dominated-media, U.S. advertising techniques and the ability of the N.B.A. to penetrate other cultures.43 As LaFeber points out, “U.S. culture changed other cultures more than those cultures changed how Americans lived, thought, and spent their leisure time.”44 However, the global commercial success of Nike, the N.B.A., and Michael Jordan did not arrive without moral concerns and charges that this U.S.-based sports/ media expansion was part of a new post-industrial wave of cultural imperialism. Threats of “Americanization” have long simmered throughout the globe, but as LaFeber points out, it had taken on a new powerful form with the advent of communication satellites and cable, tethered with marketing machines that used sports to promote advertising and the consumption of transnational goods.45
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16 The attraction of American popular culture continues to run deep. American media and communication technology (e.g. Apple, Facebook) remain the most popular around the globe, and after measuring ratings across five continents, CBS’s “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” was named as “the most watched TV show in the world in 2012.”46 In 2014, Paramount’s Transformers: Age of Extinction became China’s top-grossing film of all time, earning over $300 million, less than a month after the film’s release.47 Thanks in part to the NBA’s global push, spearheaded by Michael Jordan’s awe-inspiring performances of the 1990s and the transnational corporatization of sport (e.g. Nike), basketball has increasingly become a universal language understood and admired around the globe. American basketball today has arguably become one of the most influential soft power resources for the U.S. as evidenced by the fact that the world’s most populated country — China — has an insatiable appetite for American basketball. The NBA averages five million viewers a game in China for its television broadcasts, three million more than for U.S. cable broadcasts in 2013.48 Moreover, the “Association” has 80 million followers on its Chinese social media accounts, making it the most popular sports league in China.49 Although the most popular sports teams on social media overwhelmingly include soccer teams, three of the top fourteen include N.B.A. teams, including the Los Angeles Lakers and Chicago Bulls.50
Sports Diplomacy: A Brief Taxonomy
17 Although public diplomacy has several meanings, this paper adopts the view that it describes the ways by which states and non-state actors understand cultures, attitudes, and behavior; build and manage relationships; and influence opinions and actions to advance their interests.51 It can be understood as failing within categories of cultural exchanges, cultural diplomacy and comprises of continuum of activities that extends from state-driven diplomacy to privately-driven intercultural relations.52 Sports diplomacy, as a form of public diplomacy, is thus a unique soft power tool for the spread of a nation’s cultural and political influence by exploiting the universal appeal of sports. Murray and Pigman point out two distinct categories of sports diplomacy: international sport as a diplomatic instrument and international-sport-as-diplomacy.53
18 The first category involves governments using sport as a tool for carrying out public diplomacy. According to Murray, sports diplomacy “involves representative and diplomatic activities undertaken by sports people on behalf of and in conjunction with their governments.”54 It is a practice that uses athletes and sporting events to engage, inform, and create a favorable image among the international community pursuant to achieving foreign policy objectives.55 Participation in international sport exchanges, hosting global sporting events, and achieving international sporting acclaim, are commonly utilized by states in the pursuit of diplomatic objectives. Although sporting events often appear apolitical, they often serve as political and cultural functions, promoting a nation’s values and interests. As Redeker aptly notes, “sports are utilized to increase the imaginary power of the state.”56
19 An early example of sports diplomacy creating a “dialogue between states” is the often- cited “ping pong” diplomacy of the 1970s, in which table tennis matches between China and U.S. led to formal discussions and increased diplomatic relations. More recently, the U.S. State Department’s SportsUnited initiative is illustrative of this type of state- sponsored public engagement through the diplomatic vehicle of sport. As part of a
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“diamond diplomacy” initiative, several professional baseball players travel to countries like Columbia and Panama to connect with the youth and promote American ideals, along with highlighting opportunities to study in the U.S.57 This form of state- sponsored interaction with foreign publics—where governments deliberately employ sport—provides an important platform to export a nation’s values and ideas in to the minds of foreign publics, especially to the non-elite public.
20 Grix & Houlihan investigated how countries are increasingly using the hosting of sports mega-events as part of their “soft power” strategies to successfully alter their image among “foreign publics.”58 Sporting mega events like the FIFA World Cup are sites replete with political and social undertones, including collective identity, ideas of citizenship and democratic values. Emerging economies such as Qatar, host of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, have aggressively used the vehicle of international sport to accelerate their entry to, and acceptance within the world’s mature economies. Through the creation of sporting “academies” around the world, in addition to participating in and hosting international sports events, Qatar has been at the forefront of nation building through sport; a form of nation branding that is tied to how positively people perceive the cultural and political assets of a nation. Such sites are therefore important spaces for mutual exchange and dialogue, and where the countries can project an idealized image of their nation. For instance, China has used international sporting competition to project cultural power and as an instrument to counter the “stereotype of the weak and diminutive Chinese and show how China can compete against the best in the world.”59 Even the reclusive nation of North Korea established a state sports and culture commission in 2012, and has subsequently devoted a large amount of resources to develop elite sporting facilities and training programs with goal of becoming a “sports powerhouse.”60
21 The second category of sports diplomacy—international-sport-as-diplomacy—is “less transparent and more elusive than the first.”61 This category includes both the effects of international sport on diplomacy and the specialized diplomacy of international sport.62 In contrast to nation states employing sport as an instrument of public diplomacy, most international sport competition is generally void of any diplomatic purpose; international sporting competition, however, ‘serves as a form of diplomacy in its own right.”63 The effects of international sport on diplomacy refer to how international sport has direct effects upon diplomatic relations between governments and publics. Murray and Pigman refer to large sporting events, such as the Olympic games, and the impact such an event has on the global public’s imaginary—that “international cooperation is both possible and positive.”64 The specialized diplomacy of international sport refers the multi-actor diplomatic representation and communication that must occur before large sporting events take place. Thus, in order to produce large sporting events and pursue their objectives, international sporting bodies must engage in diplomatic representation and negotiation with several state and non-state actors.65
22 As Giulianotti and Robertson note, the participation of national sport teams in international sports events is highly important in political and symbolic terms and for imagining how the nation is seen across the world.66 Global public perceptions and opinions of nations are often developed by both sporting performance and representation in the international arena. A compelling narrative in the sporting arena can be an impactful soft power resource as “people may be drawn to certain actors, events, and explanations that describe the history of a country, or the specifics of a
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policy.”67 One recent example of the effects of international sport on diplomacy can be seen with the U.S. men’s national soccer team (USMNT) in the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. The USMNT included several players with mixed-racial heritage, most of whom were born outside the U.S. Players like Jermaine Jones, John Brooks, Fabian Johnson, Danny Williams and Julian Green are sons of American servicemen and German mothers, and they spent almost their entire lives outside the U.S.
23 For several of the players, the decision to play for the U.S. as opposed to Germany related to their racial identities. Midfielder Danny Williams publicly expressed his observation that the U.S. has a large number of mixed-race individuals and as a person of mixed-race heritage, he felt “more normal” in the U.S. and “more American than German.”68 Commenting on the issue of race in Germany, Williams stated, “when people look at me in Germany, they know I am not 100% German.”69 Williams’s comments reflect one popular perception of America: the U.S. as an inclusive public driven by its immigrant heritage and a nation that values diversity of national origin. The effects of the representational diversity of the squad, with its immigrant roots and multi-national character, can therefore amplify American values to the world, albeit an idealized image of the nation and society. Soccer is commonly labeled a “game for immigrants,” and it is perhaps fitting that the U.S. team was made up of several immigrants—representing a nation full of them—in one of the world’s most popular sporting events.
24 However, sports diplomacy continues to occupy a somewhat dubious standing within the realm of politics and international relations. As a cultural site and practice, sport is viewed in a “schizophrenic” way: “sport is considered both serious and important but insignificant and trivial at different times, in different contexts and by people representing different interest groups.”70 As Manzenreiter points out, the efficacy of these sporting platforms on foreign relations are difficult to control; meaning is never uncontested in a “global theatre of representation.”71 One of the earliest iterations of American sports diplomacy underscores this point. The 1934 Babe Ruth-led All- American baseball tour of Japan began as a goodwill exchange between two nations on the precipice of war. The two nations shared a love of baseball, and Ruth and his teammates played in twelve different cities throughout Japan. Baseball player Connie Mack publicly summed up the tour’s “success” stating that the trip did “more for the better understanding between Japanese and Americans than all the diplomatic exchanges ever accomplished.”72 Yet Japan was showing signs of a growing nationalist and military agenda, and several weeks after the ballplayers departed to return home, Japan pulled out of the Washington Naval Treaty, which had limited the size of the navies among the major powers.73 After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, instead of chanting “Banzai Babe Ruth,” Japanese soldiers could be heard yelling “to Hell with Babe Ruth!”74
25 Although often perceived as purely entertainment and recreation, sports continue to play a significant role in the relations between nations. While political relations between two nations are often defined by numerous military conflicts and violence, sports can provide a platform for countries to come out of isolation and take a first step toward international engagement. For instance, the cricket rivalry between India and Pakistan is one of the world’s most popular sporting events, and the matches have offered opportunities for “cricket diplomacy” by allowing heads of state to exchange visits. More recently, Britain’s Prince William visited China and used the sport of soccer
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to improve diplomatic relations between the two nations by taking part in a soccer clinic where he reached out to the country’s President, Xi Jinping, telling him: “I also gather you’re quite a football fan.”75 Moreover, participants in sports diplomacy are no longer limited to state-sponsored actors or the formal diplomatic corps. The modern global network society has enabled new actors in diplomacy to arise, including non- governmental organizations and individual non-state actors, such as sports celebrities.
The Cult of Celebrity and Sports Celebrity Diplomacy
26 While the state remains an influential mediator, the nature of sports diplomacy is changing, with non-state transnational actors increasingly playing an influential role in promoting peace, development and how diplomacy operates. Today, mass media has facilitated a dramatic expansion of the sites and means by which sport and celebrity athletes can be both consumed and created. The prevalence and continued influence of celebrity culture reflects global society’s addiction to the “cult of celebrity” and the diverse ways that celebrities are promoted. Celebrities, including celebrity athletes, represent the paradox of being simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, easily consumed by media, but also remote.76 Daniel Boorstin’s seminal work on celebrity highlighted the increased prevalence of celebrity in modern society, which he argued led to the decline in public figures with “heroic” qualities.77 According to Boorstin, the media plays a major role in artificially manufacturing public figures or “human pseudo- events”—individuals who are “well-known for their well-knownness.”78 It is this “well- knownness” and the media attention it commands, however, that can act as a lightning rod for political and social issues, and bring public attention to them.
27 Celebrity diplomacy is also an outgrowth of the communications revolution and as Murray points out, where the state and its diplomats have floundered, “non-state actors have stepped in and proliferated, neatly filing the partial vacuum of responsibility of the state.”79 According to Cooper, celebrity diplomats are individuals that not only possess ample communications skills, a sense of mission and global reach, but enter the official diplomatic world “and operate through the matrix of complex relationships with state officials.”80 Moreover, celebrity diplomacy highlights the adaptive quality of diplomacy; as more celebrities become active in transnational policy making, the political elite also use celebrities to enhance their own credibility.81 As opinion leaders, celebrities also “have the power to frame issues in a manner that attracts visibility and new channels of communication at the mass as well as the elite levels.”82 Non-state actors have also increasingly played an integral role in reconciliation work. For instance, Canada identifies a wide spectrum of public diplomats, including artists, teachers, students, researchers and athletes in addition to professional diplomats.83 Often referred to as “Track II” diplomacy, these non-state actors range from “the messianic to the mad and have affected change to the international relations systems.”84 However, the impact of individual actors who are not agents of state authority have received scant scholarly attention.
28 The study of public figures engaged in diplomacy tends to focus primarily on issues of activism rather than diplomacy. As Cooper notes, celebrity diplomats have no formal training, communicate in a colloquial and undiplomatic manner, and deliver messages to the public via old and new media forms and through mass performances via staged events.85 But celebrity diplomats are not limited by formal diplomatic culture;
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celebrities can go “off-script” and generate controversy through provocative declarations and actions. According to Cooper, celebrity diplomats can be classified into several categories: those with official roles, such as professional diplomats accorded celebrity status such as Bill Clinton and Henry Kissinger, and unofficial roles, such as opinion leaders who advocate or enter activist arenas such as Bono’s Red campaign and George Clooney’s work on Darfur.86 But this is not an exhaustive list, and in the age of social media where private figures can easily morph into online public figures, the scope of public diplomacy can cast a wider net of players both inside and outside government. Everyone has the potential to be an authentic diplomat and “some celebrities deserve to be included as diplomats on their own merit.”87 As Cooper notes, celebrities hail from many different sources, including “true” Hollywood stars, as well as musical stars, and thus the eligible pool of celebrity diplomats must be broadened.88
29 While sport has been used a tool for carrying out public diplomacy, the role and influence of sports celebrities in the sports diplomacy arena has largely gone unexplored. Due to their athletic prominence, celebrity athletes embody cosmopolitanism and global citizenship and thus attract visibility and media attention. 89 But greater media scrutiny also comes with a price. Pigman notes that successful diplomacy requires that players be “PD ambassadors in every respect, in that intense media scrutiny means that their lives off the pitch/court/field are on view just as much as their competitive lives.”90 However, unlike public figures of film and television fame, celebrity athletes are cloaked in a veneer of authenticity and earned acclaim. Sports stars embody the hero with intrinsic value, who is distinguished by their achievements gained through skill and hard work. Through the meritocratic space of athletic competition, a private figure can gain international recognition based on individual merit. Sport offers a forum of “real individuals participating in unpredictable contests” 91 and their athletic achievements “elevates them to unique standing in the eyes of their domestic and international fans.”92 In other words, celebrity athletes have to prove they are worthy of public distinction, which sets celebrity athletes apart from what Boorstin described as a manufactured public figure, or “human pseudo-event.”93
30 Celebrity athletes are also key to the imaginary, and the fact that athletes like Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lebron James are some of the most popular public figures today is “an example of this authority of sport over souls, of its spiritual power.”94 Therefore, while modern celebrities in entertainment are often viewed as exemplars of an “illusory” world of manufactured characters, sporting achievements carry an authenticity that resonates with citizens around the globe. While governments have increasingly engaged in sports diplomacy for the purposes of nation branding, celebrity athletes can also contribute to a country’s diplomacy efforts even when the athletes’ involvement is not a direct result of formal diplomatic engagement.
31 However, unofficial celebrity diplomacy can also run counter to traditional modes of diplomacy. Antidiplomats, as Cooper argues, are celebrities who run counter to traditional modes and qualities of diplomatic culture, which include (1) physical attributes judged to be salient in diplomacy; (2) cautious use of language, to allow plenty of room for interpretation; and (3) a calm tone, with the ability to lower the temperature of debate.95 For instance, Cooper cites music singer and activist Bob Geldof as the antidiplomat archetype, based on Geldof’s behavior and actions against the qualities of traditional diplomatic culture with regard to image, and language.96 Vanc’s work on controversial celebrity athletes as “antidiplomats” highlights the ability of
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such actors to transcend estranged relations through their visibility, “as they draw attention to themselves, their countries and sports through their high media profile.”97 Vanc examined how the constant media coverage of Ilie Nastase’s controversial behavior and achievements on and off the court enabled Nastase to significantly contribute to Romania’s public diplomacy and the nation’s image.98 By employing Cooper’s theoretical view on celebrity diplomacy to sports, Vanc’s work exposed how celebrity athletes as antidiplomats could bring diplomacy benefits to their respective nations.99
32 Informed by Cooper and Vanc’s work on celebrity diplomacy, the following section turns to an analysis of Dennis Rodman’s visits to the DPRK as a case study to examine the attraction and influence sports celebrity diplomacy can have toward fostering diplomatic engagement. The following analysis will focus particularly on Rodman’s first visit in 2013 (February). While Rodman’s first visit was subject to intense global media coverage, and a large North Korean public audience, his subsequent visits received much less media fanfare and access to KJU. Rodman’s second visit in September 2013 was considered a “low key” private affair spent with KJU and his family; his December visit was intended to train North Korean basketball players, but he never met with KJU. 100 There is also an important caveat: sports diplomacy, in its various forms and potential for diplomatic engagement, is not always a unilateral exercise of soft power. It can serve the interests of a ruling party or authoritarian regime—turning from meaningful engagement to co-opted media spectacle—limiting the influence of one’s cultural capital. It is with this premise that the analysis of the case study proceeds.
From Ping-Pong Diplomacy to Basketball Diplomacy: A Case Study
33 Rodman’s first visit to the DPRK in February 2013, dubbed “basketball diplomacy” by Vice Media and Rodman himself, involved several non-state actors, including corporate media (Vice, HBO), former American professional basketball players, and a Hall of Fame sports celebrity. Together, this production used both sport and media spectacle to explore the potential for cultural exchange through sport and to film a segment of HBO’s television program called “Vice.” According to Rodman, his basketball diplomacy visits were meant to exploit his “inside track” with the regime in order to “bridge the gap” toward further engagement.101 He added, “[o]n the subject of the game, I hope it will open doors a little bit around the world.”102 Reflecting on his attempts at “diplomacy,” Rodman added: “[s]ports is the one thing on the planet that could actually heal things at least for a day, two days or a week.”103
34 However, the popular consensus regarding Rodman’s early 2013 visit to North Korea has been read as a way of “producing a television show whose premise is the display of the exotic, bizarre and extreme.”104 A less likely “sports ambassador” for the global public is inconceivable; Rodman meets all the attributes of an antidiplomat, with his bizarre behavior both on and off the court, to his provocative declarations in public. After his first visit, where Rodman had considerable personal interaction with KJU, Rodman gushed that KJU “is like his grandfather and father, who are great leaders”; he later added that he “loved” the current dictator, and “[t]he guy’s really awesome.”105 While Rodman has been publicly vilified for his visits to the DPRK and his provocative statements, a further examination of his unprecedented access to the North Korean
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ruler—one of the few Americans to have done so since KJU assumed power—reflects the reach of American soft power, via the attraction of sport and the sports celebrity. While Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google, was unable to meet with KJU during a visit to the DPRK shortly before Rodman’s arrival Rodman’s reception by the regime as an honored guest and his intimate access with KJU speaks volumes about the reach of the soft power of sport, even with sporting figures as controversial as Rodman.106
35 Aside from international relations scholars and diplomacy professionals, most of the general public is unaware that KJU’s father, Kim Jong-il (Kim), was a voracious consumer of Hollywood films, the N.B.A., and a “student (scholar?) of cinema.” Paul Fischer notes that Kim Jong-il was not particularly astute in economics, bureaucracy or military leadership; but what Kim did have was a sense of “showmanship, of mythmaking and its power. All of which he learned not by studying politics, religion, or history” but from what he “learned from the movies.”107 Kim’s fascination with Western (mostly Hollywood) cinema motivated him to create an international bootlegging network whereby North Korean embassies were directed to “borrow” reels of the newest films and smuggle copies into North Korea.108 The dictator’s obsession with cinema and its ideological power led him to even kidnap South Korea’s most famous film director and actress in 1978, for the purposes of producing films for the North Korean regime.109 To cement his “credentials” as an ideological film theorist, Kim Jong- il also authored a book on cinematic art entitled, On the Art of Cinema, published in 1973.
36 It has also been well documented that KJU and his father also shared a fanaticism with American basketball, particularly with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls—a team that Rodman also played and won championships for. In the 1990s, Kim Jong-Il amassed a large video library of Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls games.110 Tony Ronzone, director of player personnel for the Dallas Mavericks, who has made several trips to North Korea to conduct clinics, recounted Kim’s obsession with basketball: “He’s a huge fan. He’s addicted to it.”111 In 2000, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright visited North Korea and presented Kim Jong-Il with a very personal gift: an N.B.A. basketball autographed by Michael Jordan. “His Airness” was subsequently approached about a goodwill trip to the DPRK; Jordan however, declined the request. As a teenager, KJU openly shared his fanatical interest in basketball, showing up to his Swiss boarding school wearing the most expensive Nike Air Jordan sneakers and a passion for the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers.112
37 While Kim Jong-Il and KJU both harbored a strong fascination with American cultural products, the regime has rarely welcomed cultural exchanges, sports or otherwise with the U.S. One notable departure from anti-American cultural policies was a 2008 invitation to the New York Philharmonic. The Philharmonic’s 2008 visit and concert in North Korea was the first time an American cultural organization had appeared in the country, and the largest contingent of U.S. citizens to appear since the Korean War.113 Interestingly, the country’s leader, Kim Jong-Il, did not attend the concert. In contrast, Rodman’s “basketball diplomacy” visits were treated like high-level dignitary meetings between heads of state, with KJU publicly sitting next to Rodman and later hosting him with a royal dinner feast. Rodman had achieved unprecedented access to the new leader of the DPRK, even without official state capacity, evidencing the attraction and value of the celebrity athlete.
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The Contested Terrain of Sports Celebrity Diplomacy
38 On one hand, this rare opportunity for “basketball diplomacy” has the potential to undermine anti-American or anti-Western sentiment. This reclusive socialist state may use sport as a way of exploring the normalization of diplomatic relations. North Korea harbors cultural ambitions to become a sporting powerhouse, but to do so they must compete in international sporting exchanges, and therefore must engage in diplomatic representation and cultivate diplomatic relationships. In fact, the regime has encouraged its athletes to join as many international sports events in order to “increase national power” and to arouse “self-esteem among the people and making revolutionary spirit prevail in the whole society.”114 In 2014, the DPRK even sponsored its first hearing-impaired soccer team to compete in an international friendly match against Australia in Sydney.115 If the regime wishes to increase their soft power potential through sports, it would be logical for the regime to be more receptive to sports and cultural exchanges with other publics, including democratic publics with a strong sports culture like the U.S.
39 Rodman’s visits, including the intense attention he commanded from KJU and the North Korean media, reflect the importance of sports to the regime, but also the deep attraction of American sports and its celebrity athletes. However, this does not come without its moral tensions, particularly when dealing with a country known to engage in human rights abuses, and such non-state sponsored efforts can run the risk of legitimizing a regime’s authority. What remains unresolved is the extent to which this iteration of soft power—as attractive as it seems to KJU and the regime—leads to increased dialogue and diplomatic influence. Is this just another episode of what Keller contends that celebrity diplomacy has transformed into: diplomacy-as-spectacle?116 While the ex-NBA all-star’s visits in 2013 have been publicly deemed by the media as “basketball diplomacy,” the initial 2013 visit—as media spectacle—may also serve the regime’s own agenda of legitimization, state propaganda, and social control.
40 In the past, visits by prominent U.S. political leaders were transformed into ripe opportunities for the regime to establish a sense of international legitimacy and domestic propaganda. Bill Clinton’s 2009 visit to North Korea as a “private” envoy to help free two American journalists was met by the regime with the fanfare of a state visit. Several images of Kim Jong-Il and Bill Clinton were broadcast to the public through the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea’s state-run news agency; as one journalist notes, several of the images include backgrounds deliberately selected as a form of “totalitarian kitsch” with one purpose: to bolster a dictatorial regime and glorify its leader.117 To further promote the “supreme leader” as a figure to be revered, the KCNA reported that “Clinton expressed words of sincere apology to Kim Jong Il for the hostile acts committed by the two American journalists … [and] conveyed to Kim Jong Il an earnest request of the U.S. government to leniently pardon them.”118
41 An analysis of KCNA news reports covering Rodman’s 2013 visits also reveals how such “pseudo-events” are contextualized in the service of the state to extend social control through media spectacle. A February 2013 KCNA news report dedicates its entire story on Rodman and his fellow basketball players’ visits to a mausoleum and statues of the late Kim Il Sung and general secretary Kim Jong Il, where they reportedly “paid high tribute” and “homage to them.”119 Moreover, a September 2013 KCNA report contextualizes Rodman’s second visit with KJU to further foster a personality cult,
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asserting how “grateful” Rodman is to the “broad-minded, supreme leader” for his hospitality, which represents “an expression of good faith toward Americans.”120 These reports from the North Korean state-run media evince authoritarian-style grandstanding, and like his father before him, KJU appeared to use this sports event to bolster his own standing as the “supreme leader” and project an image of one who is’ internationally respected.
42 While this effort in “basketball diplomacy” reveals the limitations of sport as a soft power resource—including the opportunity to exploit a sports/media spectacle for the ideological needs of the regime—the showcase of U.S. basketball players also offers an alternative discourse to misconceptions that prolong tension between the two nations.
43 Furthermore, this effort in sports diplomacy also exposes the secluded North Korean public to American culture and actual Americans in a goodwill environment, distorting the narrative of the U.S. as a lurking and cultural threat. Although it is highly unlikely that Rodman or even Michael Jordan could convince KJU to dismantle his country’s quest for a nuclear arsenal, Kim and KJU’s fascination with American basketball is indicative of how sports and sports celebrities still transcend borders and cultures— celebrity athletes are admired around the world—and many of them, like Rodman, are American public figures.
44 One journalist pointed out that Rodman’s name “opened doors magically” with the North Korean regime, referring to the warm reception of Vice’s proposal of sending Rodman and other basketball players on a “goodwill” visit to the estranged state.121 At the very least, this form of sport celebrity diplomacy has managed to gain direct access to the leader of one of the most secretive totalitarian states in the world, and opened (albeit a very limited) dialogue between Americans and the North Korean public. The reclusive and secretive North Korean regime has convinced many of its citizens, through mass-mediated propaganda, that the U.S. represents an evil military and cultural threat. Yet sports celebrity diplomacy, such as this “goodwill” visit can work to reduce perceived threats via sports and cultural attraction. Here, sports celebrity diplomacy may even serve as a subversive act in the DPRK. According to local media, the North Korean public was shocked to see KJU embracing Rodman, a tattooed and piercing-clad sports celebrity from America—a country the North Korean public have been taught to loathe and fear.122 Although we should not overestimate sports celebrity diplomacy as an effective instrument in bridging the divide between estranged states, neither should we underestimate how sport and celebrity athletes can be converted to soft power capital to attract and influence foreign publics. It is this attraction that can lead to greater dialogue and a thawing of relations between publics, even estranged ones.
Conclusion
45 Although recent revelations of torture, drone warfare, and intrusive surveillance activities have badly maligned the credibility of the U.S., citizens from around the world continue to follow, consume, and idealize U.S. cultural products, including sports. During his 2015 visit to Cuba, U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel noted that sports were atop a long list of things Cubans said they loved about America. It comes as no surprise that sports—via soccer, baseball and basketball—is being used as an early soft power resource to further thaw relations between the U.S. and Cuba—a historically
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hard power environment, now at the dawn of a new era of rapprochement. In June of 2015, the New York Cosmos soccer club became the first U.S. professional team to play in Cuba since 1978. In March 2016, President Obama capped his historic visit to Cuba with a baseball game between Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays and the Cuban national baseball team—a symbolic “people-to-people” engagement centered on a sport that both countries share a common passion for.
46 Sports diplomacy via the celebrity athlete are a nascent and underutilized soft power resource worth further consideration to bridge dialogue and diplomatic relations between publics, including estranged nations and their heads of state. Public diplomacy efforts are marked by new economic challenges (e.g. China), and ideological challenges from militant Islam and rogue states such as North Korea. It is therefore a critical time to revisit the U.S.’s soft power currency in order to evaluate and utilize it effectively pursuant to legitimizing its actions and policies abroad, and to win the information war against both extremist groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the global public. With a vast array of cultural products encoded with American values and ideals, the U.S. possesses deep reserves in soft power, including the attraction of its global sports teams and celebrity athletes, which can influence international relations due to their universal appeal.
47 Although nations have employed sports diplomacy to bolster their image and brand, this essay explores the unique features of sports celebrities as an instrument of diplomacy. Furthermore, this essay expands Cooper and Vanc’s work on celebrity diplomacy into the realm of celebrity athletes—as antidiplomats—with a case study that examined the attraction and value sports celebrity diplomacy can have toward fostering engagement within the most rigid, hard power environments. Finally, this work also underscores some of the major limitations that this soft power resource poses in the area of public diplomacy. Further research needs to explore how to measure and assess the efficacy of these sports diplomacy strategies for both state- sponsored and private actor initiatives. Another valuable research inquiry could involve a comparative analysis on celebrity diplomats from the diverse fields of entertainment, including sports, music, film and television, in order to uncover if certain fields lends itself to greater credibility and attraction than others. Bibliography
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ENDNOTES
1. Guttman, The Games Must Go On, 195. 2. See Antoaneta. M. Vanc. “The Counter-intuitive Value of Celebrity Athletes as Antidiplomats in Public Diplomacy: Ilie Nastase from Romania and the World of Tennis.” Sport in Society, 17(9) (2014):1187-1203; Murray, Stuart and Geoffrey A. Pigman. “Mapping the Relationship Between International Sport and Diplomacy.” Sport in Society, 17(9) (2014): 1098-1118. 3. Evans and Grant, Australia's Foreign Relations, 66. 4. Geoffrey Cowan and Nicholas J. Cull. “Public diplomacy in a changing world.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 616(1) (2008): 6-8. 5. Vanc, “The Counter-intuitive Value of Celebrity Athletes,” 1187. 6. Robert Redeker. “Sport as an Opiate of International Relations: The Myth and Illusion of Sport as a Tool of Foreign Diplomacy.” Sport in Society, 11(4) (2008): 494-500. 7. Stuart Murray and Geoffrey A. Pigman. “Mapping the Relationship Between International Sport and Diplomacy.” Sport in Society, 17(9) (2014): 1098-1118. 8. Steven J. Jackson. “The Contested Terrain of Sport Diplomacy in a Globalizing World.” International Area Studies Review, 16(3) (2013): 274-284. 9. Jonathan Grix and Barrie Houlihan. “Sports Mega‐Events as Part of a Nation's Soft Power Strategy: The Cases of Germany (2006) and the UK (2012).” The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 16(4) (2014): 572-596. 10. Joseph. S Nye. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs, 2004. 11. Andrew F. Cooper. Celebrity Diplomacy. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2008. 12. Vanc, “The Counter-intuitive Value of Celebrity Athletes.” 13. Cha, The Impossible State, 252. 14. Sang-Hun Choe. “At Huge Rally, North Koreans Declare Kim their Leader.” New York Times. Accessed March 17, 2016. 15. Merkel, “Flags, Feuds and Frictions,” 1815. 16. Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, 439. 17. See Max Fisher. “Kim Jong Eun Inherited an Eccentric Obsession with Basketball from Kim Jong Il.” Washington Post. Accessed December 15, 2016. 18. See Susanne Koelbl. “Advancing Globalization Makes its Mark in North Korea.” Der Spiegel Online. Accessed October 20, 2016. 19. Merkel, “Flags, Feuds and Frictions.” 20. See Nye, Soft Power. 21. Nye, Understanding International Conflicts, 63. 22. See Nye and Wang, “Hard Decisions on Soft Power.” 23. See Fan, “Soft Power: Power of Attraction.” 24. See Fan, “Soft Power: Power of Attraction.” 25. Nye, Soft Power, 17. 26. See Nye, Soft Power.
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27. Kyung-Ae Park. “Can We Engage North Korean with Soft Power?” NK News. Accessed October 16, 2016. 28. See Nye, Soft Power. 29. L.Roselle Alister Miskimmon and Ben O’Loughlin. “Strategic Narrative: A New Means to Understand Soft Power.” Media, War & Conflict, 7(1) (2014): 70-84. 30. Janice B. Mattern. “Why Soft Power isn’t so Soft” In Power in World Politics, edited by Felix Berenskoetter and Michael. J. Williams, 98-119. New York, NY: Routledge, 2007. 31. Mattern, “Why Soft Power isn’t so Soft.” 32. See Nye, “The Information Revolution.” 33. Jackson and Haigh, Sport and Foreign Policy, 4. 34. LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global, 143. 35. Jillian Jorgenson. “Rangel Touts Sports as Better for Diplomacy than Presidents.” Observer News. Accessed October 15, 2016. 36. Steven J Jackson. “The Contested Terrain of Sport Diplomacy in a Globalizing World.” International Area Studies Review, 16(3) (2013): 274-284. 37. Redeker, “Sport as an Opiate,” 495. 38. LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global, 156. 39. LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global, 110. 40. LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global, 65-67. 41. LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global, 68. 42. Kellner, “The Sports Spectacle,” 37. 43. See David L Andrews. Michael Jordan, Inc.: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America. SUNY Press, 2001; see also LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global. 44. LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global, 140. 45. LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global, 142. 46. “Most Watched TV Show in the World is ‘CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.’” Huffpost. Accessed September 12, 2016. 47. Pamela McClintock. “Boxoffice Milestone: ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’ Hits 1 Billion Worldwide.” The Hollywood Reporter. Accessed October 15, 2016. 48. Becky Davis. “China Responds Well to Hardwood Ambassadors.” The New York Times. Accessed November 4, 2016. 49. Becky. “China Responds Well.” 50. Kurt Badenhausen. “Barcelona and Real Madrid Head the Most Popular Sports Teams on Social Media.” Forbes. Accessed February 4, 2016. 51. Geoffrey Cowan and Nicholas. J. Cull. “Public diplomacy in a changing world.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 616(1) (2008): 6-8. 52. See Ali Fisher. “Four Seasons in One Day: The Crowded House of Public Diplomacy in the UK.” Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, New York, Routledge. (2009): 251-261. 53. Stuart Murray and Geoffrey A. Pigman. “Mapping the Relationship Between International Sport and Diplomacy.” Sport in Society, 17(9) (2014): 1098-1118. 54. Murray, “The Two Halves of Sports-Diplomacy,” 581. 55. Murray, “The Two Halves of Sports-Diplomacy,” 581. 56. Redeker, “Sport as an Opiate,” 496. 57. U.S. Department of State. “U.S. Department of State and Major League Baseball and Softball ‘Diamond Diplomacy.’” Accessed October 15, 2015. 58. See Grix and Houlihan, “Sports Mega-Events.” 59. Larmer, “The Center of the World,” 69. 60. Andray Abrahamian. “Inter-Korean rivalry takes the field.” 38 North. Accessed January 5, 2016. http://38north.org/2014/10/aabrahamian100614/. 61. Murray and Pigman, “Mapping the Relationship,” 1106.
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62. Murray and Pigman, “Mapping the Relationship.” 63. Murray and Pigman, “Mapping the Relationship.” 64. Murray and Pigman, “Mapping the Relationship.” 65. Murray and Pigman, “Mapping the Relationship.” 66. Guilianotti and Robertson. “Sport and Globalization,” 51. 67. Miskimmon Roselle and Ben O’Loughlin, “Strategic Narrative,” 74. 68. “German-born Soccer Stars Choose to Play for U.S. National Team.” CNN. Accessed December 14, 2015. 69. “German-born Soccer Stars Choose to Play for U.S. National Team.” CNN. 70. Jackson, “The Contested Terrain of Sport,” 1. 71. Manzenreiter, “The Beijing Games,” 31. 72. Fitts, “Murder, Espionage, and Baseball,” 8-9. 73. Fitts, “Murder, Espionage, and Baseball,” 9. 74. Fitts, “Murder, Espionage, and Baseball,” 9. 75. “Prince William Scores with Football Diplomacy in China. The Daily Mail Online. Accessed November 20, 2015. 76. See Dyer, Stars. 77. Daniel J. Boorstin. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage Books, 2012. 78. Boorstin, The Image, 57. 79. Murray, “The Two Halves of Sports-Diplomacy,” 579. 80. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 7. 81. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 3. 82. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 7. 83. Fen. O.Hampson and Dean F. Oliver. “Pulpit Diplomacy: A Critical Assessment of the Axworthy Doctrine.” International Journal, 53(3) (1998): 379-406; Potter, Evan. H. Branding Canada: Projecting Canada's Soft Power through Public Diplomacy. McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP, 2008. 84. Murray, “The Two Halves of Sports-Diplomacy,” 579. 85. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 2. 86. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 7. 87. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 2. 88. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 4. 89. See Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy and Tsaliki, Frangonikolopoulos, and Huliaras, Transnational Celebrity Activism. 90. Pigman, “Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage!,” 86. 91. Andrews, and Jackson, “Introduction: Sport Celebrities, Public Culture,” 8. 92. Vanc, “The Counter-intuitive Value,” 1191. 93. Boorstin, The Image. 94. Redeker, “Sport as an Opiate,” 499. 95. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 53-54. 96. See Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy. 97. Vanc, “The Counter-intuitive Value,” 1201. 98. Vanc, “The Counter-intuitive Value.” 99. Vanc, “The Counter-intuitive Value.” 100. Maeve Shearlaw. “Dennis Rodman to Go Back to North Korea-Again.” The Guardian. Accessed October 17, 2016. 101. Sang-Hun Choe. “Rodman Gives Details on Trip to North Korea.” New York Times. Accessed March 17, 2016. 102. “Dennis Rodman Makes 4th Trip to North Korea.” VOA News. Accessed July 14, 2016.
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103. Demick, Barbara. “Dennis Rodman Talks North Korean Diplomacy Before an Audience of Cadets at West Point.” Los Angeles Times. Accessed July 14, 2017. 104. Jackson, “The Contested Terrain,” 277. 105. Scott Neuman. “Add ‘North Korea Expert’ to Dennis Rodman’s Resume.” NPR. Accessed October 15, 2016. 106. Scott. “Add ‘North Korea Expert’ 107. Fischer, A Kim Jong-Il Production, 38. 108. See Fischer, A Kim Jong-Il Production. 109. See Fischer, A Kim Jong-Il Production. 110. Mark Zeigler. “The Oddest Fan.” The San Diego Union Tribune. Accessed October 12, 2016. 111. Zeigler, “The Oddest Fan.” 112. See Higgins, “Who Will Succeed Kim Jong-Il?” 113. Daniel Wakin. “North Koreans Welcome Symphonic Diplomacy.” New York Times. Accessed October 12, 2016. 114. Brendan Byrne. “Kim Jong-un Wants North Korea in More Sports Events.” ValueWalk. Accessed September 19, 2016. 115. Susan Choeng. “North Korea’s Hearing-Impaired Football Team Given Rare Honour of Trip to Play Australia.” ABC News. Accessed October 14, 2016. 116. See Kellner, “The Sports Spectacle.” 117. Eric Gibson. “Why Dictators Love Kitsch.” Wall Street Journal. Accessed November 13, 2016. 118. Glenn Kessler. “During Visit by Bill Clinton, North Korea Releases American Journalists.” Washington Post. Accessed September 12, 2016. 119. “Ex-player of U.S. NBA Pay Respects to Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il.” Korean Central News Agency. Accessed December 4, 2016. 120. “Kim Jong Un Meets Ex-NBA Star and His Party.” Korean Central News Agency. Accessed December 2, 2015. 121. Mark Bowden. “Understanding Kim Jong Un, the world’s most enigmatic and unpredictable dictator.” Vanity Fair. Accessed December 7, 2016. 122. Song Min Choi. “Globetrotter Chic Shocks a Nation!” Daily NK. Accessed March 21, 2016.
ABSTRACTS
This paper seeks to explore some of the unique features of sport as an instrument of American soft power. Informed by Cooper’s theoretical perspective on celebrity diplomacy, this work extends the celebrity diplomacy discourse into the area of sports celebrities and explores the unique features of celebrity athletes as an instrument of diplomacy. This work also expands the discourse on celebrity athletes as non-state sanctioned antidiplomats, and examines Dennis Rodman’s “basketball diplomacy” efforts in North Korea as a case study to examine the power celebrity athletes can have—contrary to what one would expect—toward fostering engagement with even the most reclusive and hostile governments. Moreover, this works examines North Korean media accounts of Rodman’s basketball diplomacy, in order to evaluate the potential limitations of celebrity athlete diplomacy and to offer cautious conclusions when celebrity athletes are used as instruments of engagement.
INDEX
Keywords: Sports communication, celebrity diplomacy, sports diplomacy, soft power, sports celebrity diplomacy
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AUTHOR
MICHAEL K. PARK Michael K. Park specializes in media law, communications policy and sports communication. Moreover, his research interests include critical media studies, race and masculinity and public diplomacy. Park's writing has appeared in communication and law journals. His professional experience includes stints at William Morris Endeavor, in Beverly Hills, California, where he worked in the Motion Picture department and the Federal Communications Commission, in the office of FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps. Park recently completed his doctorate at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and is also a graduate of the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
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Coubertin’s Music: Culture, Class, and the Failure of the Olympic Project
Nicholas Attfield
1 In an article for the Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport in 1996, Douglas A. Brown presented a distinctive model for addressing the subject of aesthetics at the Olympic Games. According to this model, the modern Games’ founder, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, had used existing aesthetic theory, and the aesthetic ideas he derived from it, as a means of articulating his vision of sport as a signifying cultural practice.1 Sport, Coubertin wrote in an essay of 1922, ought to be recognised as both the producer of and the inspiration for art; in turning the athlete into a “living sculpture”, it was a source of beauty to be consecrated and celebrated in spectacles and festivals.2 As the last claim begins to imply, Coubertin’s aesthetics of sport was intended to fuse productively with the broader socio-political ideology of his Olympism, itself a philosophy of life uniting body, mind, and will. In coming together to contemplate the sporting body, his Olympic audiences would grasp their universal humanity and the values that they shared – a luminous gift bestowed by the ancient world upon the contemporary one.
2 At first glance, it is perhaps all too easy to assess Coubertin (1863-1937) as a stuffy and rather conservative French aristocrat of the Third Republic, a devoted fan of English public schools and the privileged lifestyle that went with such an education. Yet part of the great value of Brown’s approach is its tantalizing hint of this as a distorting image. One of Coubertin’s specific aesthetic ideas is shown, for example, to be that of eurhythmy (l’eurhythmie), an entrancing form of beauty that arises from the experience of diverse and simultaneous events. For Coubertin, eurhythmy was apparently no preserve of the highly cultured few, but rather an experience more accessible to the stadium-bound masses, precisely because these latter were better attuned to the perception of large ensembles as opposed to fine details. Its creation depended, moreover, not only on events unfolding at the same time, but also on the reflexive presence of the spectator observing them – who thus became both subject and object of the overall experience.
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3 In short, Brown proposes that Coubertin’s eurhythmy be understood as a specifically modern form of beauty, one that casts a critical glance towards the conventional aesthetics of the fine arts. In experimenting with it in practice – both at the fêtes sportives (sporting festivals) linked to motivating Olympic Congresses and at the early Games themselves – Coubertin showed himself to be a kind of modernist, in the sense that he poised antithetical concepts of popular and high culture dialectically against one another and, in so doing, advanced his Olympism as a movement for the transformation of society and culture. This might begin in his contemporary France but, with the gradual transmission of the Games around the globe, it was intended to spread far beyond its initial bounds.3
4 I set this model out so that, in the present article, I might pursue and develop some of the tensions and ellipses inherent within it. Chief among these are the problem of social class and its attendant tastes and cultural forms. After all, Coubertin’s early aesthetic experiments were theorized within the pages of the Revue Olympique, a specialist periodical with minimal circulation; they were subsequently premiered before (and heartily approved by) small groups of donors and those who would become the inaugural membership of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). At the very most, in other words, we might speak of only a few hundred people as engaged in the projects of early Olympism, and we might add that many of these were drawn from the same background of affluence, privilege, and French cultural republicanism as Coubertin himself. For all their modern overtures to the masses and claims to populism, then, aesthetic ideas like eurhythmy were developed and delivered within something of a narrow social and cultural milieu. These were origins that, in Coubertin’s rather patronising and patriarchal view, placed them above the organisational skills and imaginative grasp of the National Olympic Committees – and, in turn, drove him to despair of the failure of his Olympic project as the nascent Games became fully fledged internationally in the early years of the twentieth century.
5 My central claim in this article is that this trajectory towards failure can be brought to especially sharp focus by considering the subject of music in Coubertin’s thought and practice. Thus, scrutiny of Olympic music can give us insights into the politics of spectator sport in one of its most prominent modern arenas. Of course, in a sense, we have heard music sounding distantly behind many of Brown’s presentations of Coubertin’s work already: the very word “eurhythmy”, for example, and all the good vibrations it implies; or the Théâtre du Peuple (people’s theatre) with which Coubertin is shown to have been well acquainted.4 Yet somehow it never emerges in full at the foreground of Brown’s discussion. As I shall argue, however, there is plentiful evidence that it should: biographically speaking, for example, from Coubertin’s memories of his upbringing, education, and concert-going; theoretically, from the remarks on music made by Coubertin and his colleagues in the pages of the Revue Olympique; and practically, from the many musical performances that these early Olympians organised in order to promote and deliver their revival of the Games.
6 We might add that, if eurhythmy is to be understood as an all-embracing aesthetic experience – one that draws the stadium crowd into the diverse events unfolding before it – then the wide sonic net cast by performed music, and its immediate emotional impact as an art form, make it the eurhythmic medium par excellence. Through music, it could be claimed, Coubertin attempted to make his Olympic humanism not only an enthralling spectacle, but also a resounding reality. If so,
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however, the class problem arises once again, and here with particular acuity. A significant part of music’s impact, after all, is its powerful connotation of social class; the musical choices Coubertin made and dictated, and the hierarchy of taste they set out, again draw us back to the same failure that loomed over him when the Games took to the wider world stage.
7 To date, the literature on music at the Olympics has been somewhat chequered, and has rarely engaged these events’ musical provision critically. William K. Guegold’s compendium 100 Years of Olympic Music provides useful lists of the works played at opening and closing ceremonies from 1896 onwards and at supporting events during the Games; it is, however, strewn with errors and omissions and features little commentary on aesthetics and their place within Olympism.5 The special issue of the IOC-published Olympic Message (1996) is likewise selectively descriptive rather than critical. Elsewhere, focus has fallen on the history of the official Olympic Hymn and the Fine Arts competitions that took place (and in which medals could be won) from the Games in Stockholm in 1912 to those in London in 1948, but here, again, little has emerged beyond sketchy details of the largely forgotten composers and works entered in the music category, and of the panels that adjudicated them.6
8 Elizabeth Schlüssel’s doctoral thesis (Cologne, 2001) is a remarkable exception to this state of research affairs, in that it provides a comprehensive survey of Olympic Summer Games ceremonial music from Athens in 1896 to Munich in 1972, and grounds this in a preceding discussion of late nineteenth-century reception and recreation of the music of antiquity. Yet its historical ambit across the twentieth century is so broad that, even at the considerable length of over 700 pages, attention inevitably veers rapidly away from Coubertin’s formative ideas. Eurhythmy is, for example, only mentioned once.7 Similarly, Jeffrey O. Segrave’s reading of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a “medium of ideology” that helps to maintain the cultural authority of the Olympic movement is a convincing account of a position that certainly originates in Coubertin’s music- aesthetic thought, but hardly exhausts it in theory or as it was put into practice in the early years of the twentieth century.8
9 The present article, then, begins from the claims made for music by Coubertin and his colleagues, specifically in their Romantic belief in its eurhythmic ability to unite and elevate an attentive people to the higher plain of humanity so valued by Olympism. Tracing Douglas Brown’s 1996 approach, the article then traverses disciplinary boundaries, moving from an initial ground of the history of ideas towards that of modern cultural practice and production: it gives an analysis of musical experimentation amidst other artistic and sporting forms at Coubertin’s initial fêtes sportives and related events, and the difficulties attendant on translating these to the early Games.
10 Yet if this is a means of bringing out the trajectory of failure noted above, then it is also a path to its apparent resolution. The Berlin Summer Games of 1936 at last presented the overjoyed Coubertin with a working paradigm for music and aesthetics within the Olympic movement. By the same token, however, these Games steered towards a collision with twentieth-century national politics. Here, where the Olympic message of peace threatened to merge into the National Socialist mobilization for war, he likely realised that his festival aesthetics – in their visual, but also their sounding glory – had reached something of a final threshold, a place from which his Olympism, in the second half of the twentieth century, would ultimately have to retreat.
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The “Shock of the Beautiful”
11 It would be no difficult task to show Coubertin as the bearer of utterly conventional musical tastes of the late nineteenth-century French upper classes. His memoirs of earliest childhood, for example, reveal his love of grand and spectacular national pageantry, both real and imagined, and the music heard within it. One of his very first memories recalls the Paris Exhibition of 1867 and the orchestras that played at the festooned Champs-de-Mars, while another recalls similar events at St. Peter’s in Rome; recounting his school days, he writes of an invented capital city he named Agram and of sitting at the piano in order to compose ‘rousing symphonies’ that might lead its armies into battle.9
12 Many of his letters and essays, meanwhile, make clear his devotion to music of the established German canon, and indicate his share in the commonplace European nineteenth-century belief in German music as the utmost medium of humane universality. He cites, for example, pilgrimages made with his wife to hear Wagner’s music-dramas and emphasizes a love of Beethoven – in particular the choral finale of the Ninth Symphony and its setting of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”. His fascination with ancient culture, moreover, is reflected by his devotion to the operas of Gluck and that composer’s capacity to bring back “the melodious strains of the soul of antiquity.”10
13 Such musical tastes could, in a sense, be merged directly into Coubertin’s Olympic revival project without the need for any mediating theory. When he writes (to cite only a couple of instances) of music and sport as “the most fruitful aids to reflection and clearer vision” and of Wagner’s theatre at Bayreuth as a place where he could “examin[e] the Olympic horizons in peace”, it is hard not to think of the resulting Games as a kind of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) that sought to embed the sporting body within established cultural forms: the national, the ceremonial, the syncretic, the antique.11 Many have made precisely this connection. Indeed, Norbert Müller seems to stress it when, introducing Coubertin’s collected writings, he remarks on the “small step” between Coubertin’s “impressive creativity” and his passion for Wagner.12
14 Yet, the taking of such a direct step risks overlooking the subtlety of the theory that intervened: the constellation of ideas, in short, that linked such musical tastes to sport and the sporting body, to the ideology of Olympism as a mass movement, and to idiosyncratic notions like eurhythmy. To gain a better sense of this constellation, we might begin by turning to the copious literature generated by the early Olympic movement in its various attempts at self-definition. Central here are articles and reports published in the Revue Olympique, the official journal of the International Olympic Committee. This first appeared between 1901 and 1914, and, in its many attempts to engage Olympism’s sporting festivals with existing artistic and cultural discourses, has been called a “type of manifesto of aesthetic modernism”.13
15 In May 1906, ten years after the first modern Games in Athens, Coubertin arranged a conference at the Comédie Française for the express purpose of discussing the role of the arts within Olympism. The report on “resolutions made” at this conference appeared the next month in the Revue; very likely written by Coubertin himself, this advanced a section on music, in which musical practices, quite unlike those of literature, were identified as promising a “direct support” (appui immédiat) for sporting
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ones.14 Echoing a commonplace medical view of the time, it was here claimed that singing held benefits for respiratory development, and so the Committee had recommended that sports societies should join forces with local choral groups and introduce singing events, particularly en masse and en plein air.15 Moreover, numerous musically inclined members – amongst them the composers Max d’Ollone, Henri Rabaud, Arthur Coquard, and Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray – were tasked with identifying appropriate repertoire (both “ancient and modern”) to be sung by these societies, and to challenge composers to write new “odes and cantatas in honour of athleticism and sport.” With its alternation of choral sections and militaristic fanfares, Spyridon Samaras’s Olympic Hymn (written for the 1896 Games) is identified as a worthy model for such new composition.16 This, then, might stand as the first work of Olympic Music.
16 Yet, crucially, there was far more at stake here than a matter of respiratory gain through singing – that is, far more than the matter of an applied practice for athletes but something merely passive for those massed listeners who might attend an Olympic stadium. A paper subsequently published in the Revue makes this clear. Bourgault- Ducoudray’s La musique et le sport had been read originally at Coubertin’s 1906 conference: it speaks of the “shock of the Beautiful” (la commotion du Beau) that a crowd is apt to feel, particularly when an aesthetic scene is presented to it in a “clear, simple, and grand form”.17 Central to this shock is the role of large-scale choral music. For Bourgault-Ducoudray, this truly “popular art” is capable of expressing the aspirations and mentality of a people (people) long before they attain verbal definition and reward analytical enquiry. As such, he considers it a vital and immediate means of channelling the “new spirit” of the Olympic movement and fusing its accompanying socio-political message of unity with the “higher conception of the mission of art.”18 The performance of choral music at sporting events, Bourgault-Ducoudray suggests, is an important step towards the realization of the Olympic dream – towards the “development”, as he puts it, “of the idea that occupies us”.19
17 Coubertin himself extended this position a few years later, when, in a five-part Revue article of 1911, he coined the term ‘sporting Ruskinism (Ruskinianisme sportif)’ as a means of capturing and conceptualizing the Olympic approach to aesthetics.20 The term itself, of course, pays specific homage to the work of the English aesthetician and art critic John Ruskin (1811-1900), chiefly because a crucial realization had allegedly woven its way through many of his writings. According to Coubertin, Ruskin – whom he dubs the “great English apostle of popular art” – had grasped the following: The picture does not suffice: nor are the picture and the frame enough. It is also necessary that the spectator enters into the harmonic circle (le cercle harmonique) and its surrounding area, extending as far back as possible. Whether from the point of view of long experience or a developing artistic education, things (des choses) that are fairly beautiful or even beautiful in a mediocre sense – but are well associated with each other and with those who contemplate them – exert an influence far superior to that exercised by a very beautiful one that is poorly surrounded or poorly contemplated.21
18 Whether the spectator is aesthetically well-versed or in need of cultivation, then, he or she is written in to this artistic experience as the contemplator of many differently beautiful “things”, into which category he or she is simultaneously placed as both experiencing subject and experienced object. Coubertin advances the term l’eurythmie to describe this situation: in so doing he deliberately adopts an ancient term (eurythmia)
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used by, for example, Vitruvius to indicate an attractive, coherent, and well- proportioned architectural façade, and a contemporary term (Eurhythmie) employed by Rudolf Steiner and others to signify a “visual speech” that expresses, through movement, mankind’s innermost nature.22
19 Coubertin’s eurhythmy is thus a many-faceted concept: at times it defines a spontaneous “effect” or “gesture” that greatly intensifies individual beauties (we remember Bourgault-Ducoudray’s “shock of beauty”); at times, with something of a socialist resonance derived from Ruskin, it describes a specific aptitude of the modern masses, who are “much more sensitive to the perfection of collections of things than to the separate details” (in Coubertin’s words); at still other times, it is a “sense” or display of “taste” on the part of the artist that can be developed through attention to minute details.23 These latter are evidently highly important: addressing them directly and at great length, the remaining parts of Coubertin’s article establish the most promising “eurhythmic conditions” for sporting occasions. He writes, amongst many other things, of the optimum disposition, material, and colour of flags and lights; the arrangement of garlands and flowers, the placing of trees and torches; the shapes of spectator stands, porticos, triumphal arches, and canopies; and the dress and gestures of those in processions.24
20 Most significantly for our purposes here, Coubertin’s Ruskinism encompasses not only the visual but also the aural. He realizes that music and sound may cast a more far- reaching and profound spell than impressive sights alone, and thus incorporates these categories into his fantastic Olympic surroundings. Indeed, he goes so far as to state that no sporting event should take place without the assistance of music, and, as with other art forms, sets out detailed strictures on its use. Bearing in mind the open-air settings of many sports, he allows that military bands or wind orchestras will be likely choices of ensemble, but insists – compare Bourgault-Ducoudray – that large choirs of mixed voices singing in rich harmony will be more effective still.25 In a further moment of Romantic indulgence, he imagines a fencing contest that, illuminated by the moon and by numerous bonfires, takes place inside a forest clearing and calls upon the musical services of “a dozen choristers”; for a large arena, he proposes that the sounds of a “hunting band” (fanfare de chasse) alternating with choral singing makes for the most “exquisite and sporting effect”.26 Music should not, moreover, be deployed only as prelude and interlude for sporting contests, but should be heard simultaneously with them so as to aestheticize their gestures; it should not offer lively mimicry of the action, but should be grave, melancholy, and solemn so as to form a “harmonious contrast” with the athletic display. Something by Palestrina or Rameau, Coubertin proposes, could endow a gymnastics contest with a “character of grandeur” that even the “least refined” spectator could sense and appreciate.27
21 More intriguing still, Coubertin suggests that music is most effective when its source is distanced from its audience and when its performers are hidden: distance and invisibility can add enticing charm to even the most “barbarous” of sounds and ensure the crowd’s engagement with its surroundings.28 Imagining what he specifies as a “modern Olympia” in 1910, he had again written in the Revue of the “large choral masses alternating with distant fanfares” that would form the basis of future “Olympic symphonies.” He adds there that architects must be consulted in order to address the specific problems of stadium acoustics, and that one solution will be the erection of
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screens (écrans) – presumably to channel the music towards its audience, but also, he suggests, to hide its performers from view.29
22 At these mentions of hidden brass-heavy ensembles in perpetual accompaniment, we will immediately think – as, indeed, does Coubertin – of the orchestra at Wagner’s Bayreuth.30 Even so, we must take care of making too direct a connection here, and again of depicting Coubertin only as the devoted Wagnerian originator of a sporting Gesamtkunstwerk. As Brian Kane has recently shown, many examples of concealed- orchestra performance practices can be found across French and German musical culture from 1800 onwards; steeped in Romantic aesthetics, they hold in common the desire to shut out the mundane, thereby enhancing the listener’s experience and assisting music in its reputed revelation of a transcendent sphere.31 It is this goal, rather than a simple and direct Wagnerian homage, that Coubertin seems to seek. Through massed choral music and brass fanfares, emanating around his Olympic stadia as if from nowhere, he intends to cast his spell. Enclosed within the “harmonic circle” that he posits in the quotation above, his audience members – regardless of their level of cultural refinement – will be struck by a sudden revelation of beauty stemming from the things around them, and of which they form both a visual and, crucially, an aural part: the voices of those assembled, celebrating the exploits of the athletes, will mingle with the planned musical performances to create the overall transcendent eurhythmic effect.
23 To this point, what we have considered are lavish musical theories as presented to a modest readership in the pages of the Revue Olympique in the early years of the twentieth century.32 As Brown points out, however, Coubertin and his Olympic colleagues are rewarding objects of study because, hand in hand with their developing theoretical claims, they also aspired to be cultural practitioners and producers. Their careers are marked, in other words, by repeated experiments in the effects that they sought – experiments that stand outside both the manifesto-frame of the Revue and the bounds of the early Olympic Games themselves, and yet point towards them in telling ways.
24 As early as the summer of 1894, for example, Coubertin had worked to create an abundance of aesthetic entertainments that will remind us of the eurhythmic theory discussed in the above. The occasion was an inaugural congress in the “amphitheatre” of the Sorbonne, organised to discuss the possibility of reviving the ancient Olympics. As if figuring this project musically between the speeches and debates, Coubertin treated his delegates to a performance of the Hymn to Apollo – a melody and text recently unearthed at Delphi, transcribed by Théodore Reinach, and adapted for solo voice, choir, and small ensemble by Gabriel Fauré.33 Though he later described this performance as the grand coup in convincing his guests (“a subtle feeling of emotion spread through the auditorium as if the antique eurhythmy were coming to us from the distant past”), it is the subsequent evening entertainment that is of still greater interest in our terms.34 As part of a fête de nuit (night festival) in the grounds of the Paris Racing Club, Coubertin’s guests witnessed an impressive array of events, apparently occurring simultaneously or in quick succession: On a summer’s night as serene as we could hope for, the lawn of the Croix Catelan was illuminated with sparkling brilliance. There were foot races, and clashes of arms by torchlight. M. Lejeune’s fireworks brought proceedings to a close. Trumpet calls
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alternated with military bands concealed amidst the trees. The spectators were left in a state of great enthusiasm.35
25 We can certainly believe that they were: again, musical concealment married with artificial illumination and the thrill of the sporting body in order to captivate Coubertin’s guests. Moreover, in the summer of 1906, it is evident that his delegates were enthralled once again. Within the frame of another consultative congress – in this case the one convened to discuss the role of the arts at the Olympics – Coubertin assembled another variety programme that combined speeches with recitations on ancient themes and performances of chansons by Costeley and Janequin, as well as Camille Saint-Saëns’s two choral songs after Victor Hugo (Op. 53) and Bourgault- Ducoudray’s chorus “Nos Pères”. True to his favoured gestures of concealment, he also arranged for hunting horns to sound a rallying call from the nearby vestibule of the Sorbonne palace; this brought “echoes of the most charming effect”, as he puts it, and served as the signal for a highly aestheticized fencing contest to begin, in which one competitor attacked “in an academic manner marvellously suited to the majesty of the building.” Once again, Coubertin reports that all those present took with them a resounding “impression of eurhythmy.”36
26 It would not be difficult to find many additional instances of such festival experiments in aesthetic seduction. In 1914, for example, in celebration of twenty years of the Olympic movement, the Marquis de Polignac reimagined an ancient sporting festival at the Collège d’Athlètes at Reims, as part of which naked footraces took place to the accompaniment of Debussy’s choral music from Le Martyre de Saint-Sebastien.37 Most virtuosically of all, under the auspices of a Parisian international architecture competition in May 1911, Coubertin and Pottecher put together another variety programme that took place in the courtyard in front of the Sorbonne chapel. Its description in the Revue is worth citing at length, in order to capture the dense weave of its many attractions and music’s special role within: At nine o’clock three shots gave the signal: in the great silence of the assembly – suddenly attentive, almost without light, the scene deserted – we heard the wonderful prelude to Debussy’s L’enfant prodigue. A moment later, the orchestra played the procession from the same work, and the great door of the church, turning on its hinges, gave passage to a hundred gymnasts, alternately carrying lighted torches and large green palm fronds. When these young people had filled the scene and created an immense arc on each side of the great steps, sixteen semi-naked Ephebes, a circle of gold in their hair, appeared four by four and executed a series of Hellenic exercises together: every sport – wrestling, throwing, discus, running – was recalled in turn. … Then a little procession: wearing costumes of the time, players of hurdy-gurdies and bagpipes slowly circled the scene from which the gymnasts carrying torches and palms had just disappeared. And to complete this evocation of the athleticism of the Middle Ages, a soldier, holding the great sword upon his shoulder, appeared at the top of the steps. It was M. Viannene of the Comic Opera who sang, accompanied by the invisible orchestra, the “Pas d’armes du roi Jean” by Saint-Saëns. Again the stage was emptied, darkness spread throughout, and the orchestra played Berlioz’s Trio for two flutes and harp.38
27 Perhaps what is most striking here is not only that the musicians – mostly hidden behind “artificial foliage” – interject upon and accompany the sporting action, but that they mediate the flux of historical athleticism on display and channel it towards what,
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it later becomes clear, are the highpoints of the event: the concluding performance of Pottecher’s specially written drama The Philosopher and the Athletes and the awarding of the Olympic medal for architecture.39 Debussy’s cantata L’enfant prodigue (The prodigal son) begins by suggesting ancient otherness through gentle woodwind arabesques, while the instrumentation of Berlioz’s Trio, from his oratorio L’enfance du Christ (“The Childhood of Christ”), makes immediate aural gestures in a similar vein. Saint-Saëns’s orchestral song, meanwhile, is a rousing setting of Victor Hugo’s chivalric ballad, replete with musical faux-medievalisms.
28 Tracing the course of this path from ancient to modern and back again, those listening might be expected to hear the benediction of history for the present-day project of Olympism, just as, through the highly stylized transports of the concealed musicians, they could transcend the present and glimpse the Olympic ideal. Coubertin, for one, waxes lyrical on this account: “The audience moved away slowly,” he writes, “taking with them a lasting and beneficial memory from this unforgettable festival. Until now … and in spite of the almost inevitable imperfections of detail, something so perfectly eurhythmic has never been attempted and realized.”40
A “Festival of Vulgarity”
29 Yet, as eurhythmic as all these combined entertainments may have been, it is no less evident that there exists a hard point of contradiction between these fêtes and contemporary Olympic theory as it was being simultaneously expounded in the Revue. In the periodical, it had been made clear repeatedly that the presence of the people was the sine qua non of the true eurhythmic experience. Writing in 1906, for instance, Bourgault-Ducoudray had given the striking example of a Breton drama attended both by local inhabitants and by practiced aesthetes invited from Paris. Tellingly, it was the former body – the inexperienced and “less jaded” public – who had been at the heart of the vibrant artistic experience: Never have I seen such enthusiasm occur. The popular element and the literate element became united by a profound and sympathetic emotion. And in the evening, after the performance, [there was] the same close harmony between the Parisian luminaries and the people (peuple). Right next to the top table stood the table for the people’s banquet – lively, noisy, full of jubilant Bretons. [There is] nothing so eloquent as this spirit, nothing so contagious as this exuberant joy, nothing so moving as the participation of diverse social classes in the same sentiment of enthusiasm, the same exaltation of art.41
30 Not so much resolving as sublimating, this joyous “exaltation of art” had apparently been driven from beneath by the exuberance of the local Bretons. Their presence, the author implies, had helped to generate the higher transcendent artistic experience by which all classes could be enthralled, and in which all classes could share. Thus, they resemble the “crowd” that Coubertin’s writings had cited and that, as he had proposed, were particularly alive to the wonder of eurhythmic experiences.
31 Moreover, Brown furnishes the additional context of late nineteenth-century French cultural republicanism for grasping the intellectual foundations and popular aspirations of such ideas. Bringing together concerns for “strong ties between popular spectacles, public art, moral education, and social unity,” this brand of republicanism might be most readily linked to Coubertin’s close friend and collaborator Maurice
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Pottecher, and the largely amateur and community-based Théâtre du Peuple (people’s theatre) that he ran at Bussang in the Vosges region.42 But we can feel its resonance, too, in the grand setting, intricate level of aesthetic planning, and marked preference for a primarily French musical tradition evident within Coubertin’s fêtes. As only one example, another way of approaching the musical offerings of the grand Sorbonne palace fête of 1906 would be to note its drawing of a continuous line that extends from the French Renaissance chanson to Saint-Saëns’s orchestral songs after Hugo. The second of these, the Chanson d’ancêtre, imagines the proud ancestors who “broke free from their chains” and vanquished those who would oppress them. “Frappez, écoliers/ Avec les épées/Sur les boucliers” is its refrain and its moral.43
32 But despite such resonances, no such body of “people” was in evidence at Coubertin’s experimental fêtes at the Sorbonne and elsewhere, and in this sense his eurhythmy could hardly become the quintessential “popular art” that he had envisaged and ultimately claimed to have derived from ancient culture.44 Instead, the events described in the last section were delivered to relatively small and select gatherings of the wealthy, influential, and powerful – those who, perhaps flattered by the impressive aesthetic programme before them, would dip their hands into deep pockets in order to provide the necessary funding for the project.45 It is telling in this regard that the suspension of the predominantly French musical lineage on display in the Sorbonne event of 1906 comes as a result of the necessity of patronage. As part of the same conference programme, the royal hymn of Italy rang out as a means of honouring Count Tornielli, the Italian ambassador to Paris, and through him, securing the continuing support of the Duke of the Abruzzi and the Italian King.46
33 It might, of course, be argued that the absence of a people to engage this “popular art” was a contradiction foreseen by Coubertin and destined to be resolved once the Games were placed before the world audience. But in turn this very expectation lays bare a striking impasse at the heart of the Olympic aesthetic project. For, as soon as design and implementation were taken away from Coubertin and his native France – that is, handed over to National Organising Committees, scaled up, and made part of the Olympic Games themselves – it is evident that Coubertin’s enthusiasm for and belief in eurhythmy very rapidly waned. In 1910, for example, four years after the Sorbonne conference held specifically to address the role of Olympic arts (and its accompanying celebrations) we find him bemoaning various aesthetic aspects of the Games up to that point. Not the least among these is that, in London in 1908, music had been “utterly forgotten from beginning to end.” Indeed, what was heard had been confined to “bursts of brass music” and “the old favourites of the town bands.” Here his choice of words seems deliberately belittling, as if this “popular” music – the peals of lowly brass bands – had hardly conformed to the exalted musical offerings he had imagined and himself staged at the inaugural fêtes sportives.47
34 Part of the context here may well have the failure of the British Organising Committee to deliver on the planned Olympic Fine Arts medal competitions, a pet project of Coubertin’s since at least 1906.48 Indeed, responding to Stockholm in 1912 – the eventual initiator of the arts competitions – Coubertin cut a far more positive figure, noting specifically that the Swedes had responded directly to the appeals of the 1906 artistic congress, and had been “meticulous” in the aesthetic design of their Games (including the deployment of “immense choral masses”).49 He complains, however, that the “obligatory principle of simultaneity” founded at his congress had not been
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properly observed, and thus that the sporting body on display had not become appropriately aestheticized: The several thousand singers, for example, had been grouped and exercised with an indefatigable zeal by the engineer Hultqvist, a man so devoted to the progress of choral singing. But they only appeared when the athletes were not there. … What an effect would have been produced by these thousands of human voices, saluting, for example, the conclusion of a great athletic attempt, or crowning in the Stadium a day of muscular effort, or welcoming the entrance of the royal procession or the proclamation of the victors! In place of this, great “concerts” were organized. But what was Olympic about these concerts, and why give them in a stadium emptied of its actors? This was a serious error.50
35 Ultimately, he continues, the foundational question must be whether the will is present to “create eurhythmy, to organise ensembles of beauty” at the Olympic Games. His answer for Stockholm in 1912, as London in 1908, seems to be that this will was found sorely wanting. With what must be read as a cutting allusion to Theodor Pinet’s Olympiska Spelen – a “valse boston” composed especially for Stockholm – Coubertin concludes that “a waltz, a potpourri, variations on familiar themes” could never strike the appropriately solemn tone. Rather, “occasional orchestral music, frequent choral song, long silences, unexpected fanfares” are what is required; if “national and popular songs” are to be included, then they must be heard alongside, and thus elevated by, the presence of the “great classical works”. This would be the best means of communicating the identity of the Olympiad and linking to its socio-cultural mission: its projection of “a public and majestic cult, dedicated every four years to life, to humanity, and to the eternal renewal of youth.”51
36 As these responses suggest, Coubertin typically laid the blame for aesthetic failings at the door of the relevant National Organising Committee – the members of which, he suggests, had not yet grasped the solemn concept of eurhythmy, the importance of singular details, or the recommendations of the 1906 congress. “In this very new order of ideas,” he reflects, “experience is lacking,” and thus he seems optimistically to focus towards the renewed efforts of the future.52 Yet in his opening address for that congress, he had also taken aim in a different direction, railing at those who would attend his Games, and denying them the very ability that, elsewhere, he had made their steadfast possession: [W]e have lost all sense of eurhythmy. Today, the masses are incapable of linking the pleasures of various sorts of art together. They are used to scattering such pleasures into bits, lining them up in rows, and pigeonholing them. They do not find the ugliness and vulgarity of their surroundings offensive. Beautiful music stirs them, but it is a matter of indifference to them whether or not that music resonates within a noble architectural setting. Nothing in them seems to revolt at the miserably mundane decor, the ridiculous processions, the detestable cacophony, and the whole apparatus attendant upon what is called a “public festival” these days. One guest is always missing at these festivals: good taste.53
37 We might reflect that, in the final phrase, Coubertin’s overall position is most clearly revealed. He writes summarily of “good taste”: however meticulously an obedient organising committee might prepare, still this might be lacking, a far cry from the successes of his fêtes sportives. And far more seriously than that, good taste might not be native to the Olympic masses, who, whatever was placed before them, would remain
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unable to discern and unable to synthesize towards an all-embracing eurhythmy. Thus, the existence and value of that in which they took part would endure as a mystery to them; they would continue to revel in the base vulgarity – the peals of the brass bands and the sways of the popular waltzes – to which they had become accustomed amidst the fragments of modern culture.
38 This, then, is the flip side of Coubertin’s Olympic aesthetics. Constrained by the background of “good taste” from which his aesthetic ideas had emerged, and frustrated that his time had not yet come – and perhaps, in spite of all his efforts, never would – he is equally capable of radiating disappointment and disaffection as promises of universal humanity. For all the apparent success of his early Games in the first decades of the twentieth century, still he strikes the pose of the grumbling, alienated, superior modernist.
A Festival of “Olympic Youth”
39 It may come as a surprise, then, to read the following, part of Coubertin’s closing speech from the Summer Games of 1936. These took place the year before he died; the speech was delivered in his absence due to ill health: Soon the Games of 1936 will be no more than a memory, but what powerful and diverse Games they were! Those memories will be of beauty, first and foremost. Since the time I called the Conference on Arts, Literature, and Sports thirty years ago in Paris to establish a permanent connection between the restored Olympics and expressions of the mind, bold efforts from Stockholm to Los Angeles have helped make this ideal a reality. Now, Berlin has made this link a permanent feature of the Games, through such gallant and utterly successful initiatives as the Race of the Sacred Torch from Olympia, and the magnificent Festival held in the monumental Stadium on the opening night of the Games. Both events were instituted by my genial and enthusiastic friend, Carl Diem. 54
40 These words sound very much like an expression of culmination, the satisfied end of a life spent in the pursuit of beauty. In particular, the mention of the 1906 Paris conference, presumably obscure to many of Coubertin’s listeners, serves only to augment this personal resonance. After thirty years of striving, Coubertin seems to want to tell us, finally the moment had arrived for “expressions of the mind” to become permanently and properly integrated into the Olympic festival.
41 The 1936 Summer Games in question are notorious, and perhaps the most studied of all Olympic festivals. They were the first Games to take place in Germany; postponed from 1916 due to war, they were steered back towards Berlin under the careful stewardship of Theodor Lewald from the late 1920s until the IOC’s point of decision in May 1931. Though initially rejected by the National Socialists as antithetical to their völkisch ideology, they were soon seized upon by Hitler and the party’s high command as a large-scale propaganda opportunity. In our present discourse, they are therefore usually glossed as the “Nazi” Games, and typically seen as a grand feat of “theft” or deception, a cynical appropriation of Olympic trappings in order to project – both inwards and outwards – the image of a strong, thriving, and peaceful nation united behind its leader.55
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42 Certainly, we could read the Berlin Games’ aesthetic components in this way: as a careful pandering to Olympic strictures that simultaneously serves as an expression of their seamless interlock with German cultural heritage and national will. The famous and grandiose opening ceremony, for example, brought together ritual elements of Olympism already established – the lighting of the flame, the hoisting of flags, the procession of athletes, the mass release of doves – with performances of Handel’s “Hallelujah” Chorus and of Richard Strauss’s Olympische Hymne (‘Olympic Hymn’). 56 As Albrecht Dümling points out, this latter work combines allusions to both the Deutschlandlied and to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; we might well believe that, knowing of its creation especially for the Games, Coubertin was duped into trusting its apparent message of openness and brotherhood.57 Indeed, later in his Games closing speech Coubertin cited not only Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” but one of Hitler’s expansionist slogans: “Wir wollen bauen!” (“We wish to build!”), he proclaims, and thus momentarily twins the consolidation of Olympism with that of the Nazi state.58
43 But this view of the “duped” Coubertin is greatly complicated by his close involvement throughout the planning process for 1936. As we have seen, his closing speech singles out the General Secretary of the German Organising Committee, Carl Diem, for particular praise, and thus celebrates a personal connection that had been made more than twenty years before. Diem had originally been appointed to design the Berlin Games of 1916; thus from at least 1913 onwards, he and Coubertin had enjoyed a friendship based on a common love of opera, theatre, and archaeology, and the drive to create a working template for future Games, not least in their aesthetic aspects.59 Accordingly, it is hardly surprising to find that Diem’s memoirs stress Coubertin’s desire to keep an overview of the ‘harmonic consonance of word, deed, and music’ for 1936, and that it was Coubertin (“a musical man”) who had proposed individual musical items for their celebration: Handel’s ‘Hallelujah’ for the opening ceremony, for example.60
44 A more convincing interpretation of Coubertin’s position, accordingly, is that the Summer Games of 1936 represented his last hurrah, as mediated by Diem. It was then, as Elizabeth Schlüssel puts it, that he saw “his ideas and tastes realized in full for the first time.”61 A lifelong cultural Germanophile, Coubertin had waited over twenty years for a German Olympics; on the back of the eurhythmic failings of the Games up to that point, he took advantage of his friendship with Diem, we might say, in order to influence the aesthetic aspects of what would be presented to the crowds in Berlin. Diem described Coubertin at this time as a ‘dictator in velvet gloves’, someone who knew very clearly what he wanted and how to convince others of it gently and efficiently. So, it was that Diem was made to give specific assurances that the German Games would be as aesthetically rewarding as Coubertin’s early Parisian fêtes had been. 62
45 Even more so than in the case of the lavish opening ceremony, these claims are borne out by Olympische Jugend (‘Olympic Youth’) – the Festspiel (“festival play”, a term with strong Wagnerian connotations) performed in the Olympic stadium on the opening night and praised, as we have seen, by Coubertin in his concluding remarks. Written by Diem, this was a pageant comprising a series of loosely connected scenes, each showcasing the formation dancing of many thousands of children and young people and mostly scored for orchestra by Werner Egk and Carl Orff. The second part, for example, proceeded as follows, to the accompaniment of music by Orff:
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Second scene: The Maidens’ Grace. As the children exit by the Marathon Gate, the searchlights pick out 2300 girls, 14 to 18 years old, who stream in from the East Steps and dance a round on the grass. From their midst a single figure emerges and dances a waltz. Then exercises with balls, hoops, and clubs; the scene ends in a round dance for all.63
46 In the fourth scene, two warriors staged a fight to the death, whereupon young women danced a dirge for the fallen. The whole ended with the beams of massive searchlights fired into the sky, forming a “dome of light” above the arena and joining the waving flags and flaming beacons at its upper edge.
47 Olympische Jugend was, in short, a lambent display of German might. The official report leaves no doubt as to its meticulous organisation and the many thousands of people involved in its production.64 But by the same token, we might also understand this Festspiel as a realization of Coubertin’s long-held wishes: as a eurhythmic fête de nuit brought to the largest stage, eventually seen by as many as half a million people, and quite unlike anything seen at the Games to this point.65 This identity is evident from the surface elements, many of which will remind us of Coubertin’s French fêtes of earlier in the century – the stylized battle, the sporting exercises, the use of light and flame, Egk’s hymn to Olympia (in the third scene), and Orff’s deliberately “ancient” instrumentation and folksong motivic language.66
48 But it is also clear from the “eurhythmic” aesthetics that underlie and unite these elements. From his earliest sketches onwards, Diem conceived of “a great festival play in the stadium, in which all the magical powers of music, song, dance, and light work together.” This was not to be theatre in the conventional sense: not, in Diem’s words, a “self-contained intellectual event placed before the spectator, and with which he must reckon.” Rather, it was something of which the audience was itself a part, “the young people in the centre, surrounded and borne along by a festival community (Festgemeinde).” In Olympische Jugend, according to Diem’s slogan, ‘youth should present itself to itself’.67
49 Such integration was attempted, of course, through Coubertin’s established visual and choreographic means: the all-enclosing stadium, the ebb and flow of dancers from all areas of the visual field, the use of light and darkness. But it drew, too, from his earlier musical recommendations. As the official report shows, recording, relay, and loudspeaker technologies were employed throughout the piece in order to minimize the presence of the orchestral performers, and to maximize the resonant embrace of bells: a recording of the well-known Glockenspiel of the Potsdam Garnisonkirche was played during the dancers’ Olympic flag formation at the end of the third scene.68 Above all, as Egk confirms, the musical trajectory culminated in the grand finale under the dome of light and fire, in which all performers entered the arena for a performance of what is identified as the “Olympic Hymn” – in this case the ‘Ode to Joy’ from the end of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.69 Countless sources confirm that such an apotheosis had been Coubertin’s utmost wish for decades, and that he had specifically demanded it to crown a German Games.70 Small wonder, then, that Diem stresses Coubertin’s close interest in the development of the pageant, and, at its premiere, records the arrival of a telegram “brimming with thanks” from Lausanne, where the aged Coubertin had followed the whole performance on Genevan radio.71
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Conclusion: An ‘Unfinished Symphony’
50 We might conclude by stating, then, that Coubertin at last got his aesthetic wish. Through Carl Diem’s Olympische Jugend, the experimental and “eurhythmic” fêtes de nuit of the century’s early years were finally raised to the level of an Olympic Games, crowned by a performance of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” and experienced by hundreds of thousands of people. Yet, of course, this is a necessarily uneasy conclusion. As we have seen, Olympic and Fascist strands had become tightly intertwined here: in 1936, Coubertin’s ‘crowd’ was readily represented as the German Volksgemeinschaft (‘people’s community’), a body politic overawed and seduced by sublime aesthetic means and focused back towards the allegedly ancient roots of its contemporary strength. By the same token, Olympism’s sporting exercises for international peace were all too easily redirected towards another goal, namely the ever-intensifying mobilization – ‘Wir wollen bauen!’ – of the German national body for the waging of expansionist war. From this point of view, the Potsdam bells at the end of the pageant’s third scene were far more than a benign symbol of Prussian heritage: since these had also featured prominently as part of the soundscape of Hitler’s propagandistic ‘Day of Potsdam’ after his election in 1933, they also inevitably rang for the dawn of his ‘new order’, spearheaded by the thousands of young people now performing in the Berlin arena.72
51 As one commentator has put it, we might therefore see Coubertin at the end of his life as the ‘prisoner of his own utopia’ – enthralled by his own aesthetic idea of eurhythmy, and entrapped by the dogged belief that its marriage with sporting display must be for the betterment of humanity and its pursuit of international peace.73 Indeed, when some in the contemporary French press – well aware of the danger of national interests outweighing international ones – questioned the political astuteness of the Olympic movement, Coubertin’s response is telling in its lack of compromise and its insistence that sport must stand above and subsume political tensions: André Lang [interviewing Coubertin in Le Journal, August 1936]: Don’t you find the selection of Tokyo and the desire of the Japanese to astound the world in 1940 fraught with rather dangerous consequences? Coubertin: Not at all. I am glad of it. I wanted it. I consider the arrival of the Games in Asia a great victory. In terms of Olympism, the only thing international rivalries can be is fruitful. It is good for every country in the world to have the honor of hosting the Games and to celebrate them in their own way, according to the imagination and means of its people. In France, people are worried that the 1936 Games showcased Hitler’s strength and discipline. How could it have been otherwise? On the contrary, it is greatly to be desired that the Games should gladly wear the clothing that each country weaves during the four years of preparation for them. … The example of Germany is there to show us what can be achieved if you make it your business to focus on working.74
52 Yet, as obdurate as he may have been in the face of such press questioning, we should also finally accept that the elderly Coubertin displayed, in other venues more intimate, a more reflective side. On the eve of the 1936 Games, he had written a brief document apparently intended as the beginning of the last volume of his memoirs. In this – titled, in a final musical metaphor, ‘The Unfinished Symphony’ (‘La symphonie inachevée’) – he likens himself to a composer, one who had not only written a magnum opus but had enjoyed the privilege of hearing it performed and seeing it endure. Olympism, he
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suggests, had been this work, occupying a lifespan bookended on the one hand by ‘Napoleon III and the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris’ and on the other, the ‘strange’ – this his only adjective – phenomenon of Adolf Hitler. Even so, he continues, Olympism was one ‘loud and insistent’ movement only; it must now be followed by ‘slow, silent, gradual, and long thought-out study’ dedicated to ‘the principle of a completely new type of education’.75
53 Perhaps we should at last read this as valedictorian – as Coubertin’s late realization that his dream of grand, serious, and eurhythmic festivals, born of late nineteenth- century French pomp, its republican inheritance, and a personal taste for the exalted German musical canon, could make little room for their message alongside the spectacles of twentieth-century political styles. Perhaps it is an admission, too, that an aesthetic withdrawal or transformation had therefore become necessary. If so, it might be added that certain postwar Olympics followed just this path: as Elizabeth Schlüssel has shown in great detail, the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich – the first in Germany since 1936 – were reimagined as ‘heitere Spiele’ (‘carefree Games’), for which Kurt Edelhagen’s big band provided some of the opening soundtrack.76 This would hardly have met Coubertin’s expectations of solemnity, or gravity, or the nobility of the ancient world; nor, one strongly suspects, would it have been at all to his musical taste. But perhaps, at the very least, he would have accepted its necessity, his eurhythmic festival dream having reached its limits with so much else in the first half of the new century. Barker, Philip. “The Anthem: Olympism’s Oldest Symbol.” Journal of Olympic History 12/2 (2004): 46-53.
Brown, Douglas. “Modern Sport, Modernism and the Cultural Manifesto: De Coubertin’s Revue Olympique.” The International Journal of the History of Sport 18/2 (2001): 78-109.
Brown, Douglas A. “Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic Exploration of Modernism, 1894-1914: Aesthetics, Ideology and the Spectacle.” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 67/2 (1996): 121-35.
Brown, Douglas A. “Revisiting the Discourses of art, beauty and sport from the 1906 Consultative Conference for the Arts, Literature and Sport.” Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies 5 (1996): 1-24.
Coubertin, Pierre, de. Coubertin autographe. Edited by Jean Durry. Yens-sur-Morges : Cabédita, 2003.
Coubertin, Pierre de. Les batailles de l’éducation physique. Une campagne de vingt-et-un ans, 1887-1908. Paris : Librarie de l’Éducation Physique, 1908.
Coubertin, Pierre de. Mémoires de jeunesse. Edited by Patrick Clastres. Paris : Nouveau Monde, 2008.
Coubertin, Pierre de. Olympic Memoirs. No translator given. Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 1997.
Coubertin, Pierre de. Olympism: Selected Writings. Edited by Norbert Müller. Translated by William H. Skinner. Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2000.
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Diem, Carl. Ein Leben für den Sport. Erinnerungen aus dem Nachlass. Ratingen: Henn, 1974.
Diem, Carl. Gedanken zur Sportgeschichte. Schorndorf: Hofmann, 1965.
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Diem, Carl. Olympische Flamme. Das Buch vom Sport, 1. Berlin: Deutscher Archiv, 1942.
Diem, Carl. Olympische Jugend. Festspiel zur Aufführung im Olympia-Stadion am Eröffnungstage der XI. Olympischen Spiele in Berlin. Berlin: Reichssportverlag, 1936.
Dümling, Albrecht. “Von Weltoffenheit zur Idee der NS-Volksgemeinschaft. Werner Egk, Carl Orff und das Festspiel Olympische Jugend.” In Werner Egk: Eine Debatte zwischen Ästhetik und Politik, edited by Jürgen Schläder, 5-32. Munich: Herbert Utz, 2008.
Dümling, Albrecht. “Zwischen Autonomie und Fremdbestimmung. Die Olympische Hymne von Robert Lubahn und Richard Strauss.” Richard Strauss-Blätter 38 (1997): 68-102.
Fritzsche, Peter. Life and Death in the Third Reich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Guegold, William K. 100 Years of Olympic Music: Music and Musicians of the Modern Olympic Games, 1896-1996. Mantua, OH: Golden Clef, 1996.
Hon, Giora and Bernard R. Goldstein. From Summetria to Symmetry: The Making of a Revolutionary Scientific Concept. New York: Springer, 2008.
Hugo, Victor. Oeuvres complètes, vol. 13. Paris: Hetzel-Quantin, 1893.
Kane, Brian. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Kent, Graeme. Olympic Follies: The Madness and Mayhem of the 1908 London Games. London: JR Books, 2008.
Large, David Clay. Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
Lyberg, Wolf. “Sweden: Stockholm 1912-1956.” Olympic Message 2 [‘The Olympic Games and Music’]: 44-7.
MacAloon, John J. “Olympic Games and the Theory of Spectacle in Modern Societies.” In Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, edited by John J. MacAloon, 241-280. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984.
Mallon, Bill and Ture Widlund. The 1896 Olympic Games: Results for All Competitors in All Events, with Commentary. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998.
No editor given. XI Olympiade Berlin 1936. Amtlicher Bericht. Berlin: Organisationskomitee für die 11. Olympiade, 1937.
No editor given. Anweisungen für die Eröffnungsfeier der 11. Olympiade, Berlin 1936. Berlin: Organisationskomitee für die 11. Olympiade, 1936.
Schlüssel, Elizabeth. Zur Rolle der Musik bei den Eröffnungs- und Schlußfeiern der Olympischen Spiele von 1896 bis 1972. Doktorarbeit; Deutsche Sporthochschule Köln: Cologne, 2001.
Segrave, Jeffrey O. “‘All Men Will Become Brothers’ (‘Alle Menschen werden Brüder’): Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Olympic ideology.” In Sport, Music, Identities, edited by Anthony Bateman, 38-52. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015.
Sheppard, Jennifer R. “Sound of Body: Music, Sports and Health in Victorian Britain.” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 140/2 (2015): 343-369.
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Walters, Guy. Berlin Games: How Hitler Stole the Olympic Dream. London: John Murray, 2006.
ENDNOTES
1. See Douglas A. Brown, “Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic Exploration of Modernism, 1894-1914: Aesthetics, Ideology and the Spectacle,” in Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 67/2 (1996): 121-35. 2. Quoted from Coubertin’s essay “L’Art et le Sport” in Brown, “Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic Exploration of Modernism,” 127. Brown’s translation. 3. This summary and the one in the previous paragraph drawn from Brown, “Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic Exploration of Modernism,” 123-4. 4. Brown, “Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic Exploration of Modernism,” 129-31. 5. See William K. Guegold, 100 Years of Olympic Music: Music and Musicians of the Modern Olympic Games, 1896-1996 (Mantua, OH: Golden Clef, 1996). Also Olympic Message 2 [‘The Olympic Games and Music’] (April-May-June 1996; publ. International Olympic Committee, Château de Vidy, Lausanne). 6. See Philip Barker, ‘The Anthem: Olympism’s Oldest Symbol’, Journal of Olympic History 12/2 (2004): 46-53 and Richard Stanton, The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions: The Story of the Olympic Art Competitions of the 20th Century (Victoria: Trafford, 2000). 7. See Elizabeth Schlüssel, Zur Rolle der Musik bei den Eröffnungs- und Schlußfeiern der Olympischen Spiele von 1896 bis 1972 (Doktorarbeit; Deutsche Sporthochschule Köln: Cologne, 2001). ‘Eurhythmie’ is mentioned on p. 85. My thanks to the author for assisting me in obtaining a copy of her thesis. 8. Jeffrey O. Segrave, ‘“All Men Will Become Brothers’ (“Alle Menschen werden Brüder”): Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Olympic ideology,” in Sport, Music, Identities, ed. Anthony Bateman (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015), 38-52, quotation at 41. 9. See Pierre de Coubertin, Mémoires de jeunesse, ed. Patrick Clastres (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2008), 25, 46, and 63 (quote). ‘Agram’ was the contemporary Austro-German name for Zagreb; Coubertin explains (61) that he chose it for his imagined state since he liked its euphonious sound and actually knew very little of its associated history and geography. All translations from French and German are my own unless otherwise noted. 10. For an example of a Wagner trip, see the letter of October 1902 in Pierre de Coubertin, Coubertin autographe, ed. Jean Durry, 137, in which Coubertin mentions a recent trip to Bayreuth to hear the Ring, Parsifal, and Der fliegende Holländer. On his view of Beethoven’s Ninth (‘the harmony of the piece seemed to communicate with the Divine’), see the 1935 essay “The Philosophic Foundation of Modern Olympism” in Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings, ed. Norbert Müller, tr. William H. Skinner (Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 2000), 583; on Gluck, see the 1927 essay “The New Panathenean Games” in Olympism, 279-80. 11. Coubertin, Olympic Memoirs, no translator given (Lausanne: International Olympic Committee, 1997), 76. 12. Norbert Müller, “Coubertin’s Olympism’ in Coubertin,” Olympism: Selected Writings, 43. 13. See Douglas Brown, ‘Modern Sport, Modernism and the Cultural Manifesto: De Coubertin’s Revue Olympique’, in The International Journal of the History of Sport 18/2 (2001): 78-109, quote at 79.
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14. No author given, “Les décisions prises,” Revue Olympique 6 (June 1906), 87-93 at 91. Where no specific author is identified for an article in the Revue Olympique, Brown makes the reasonable assumption that Coubertin himself wrote it: see, for example, Brown, “Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic Exploration of Modernism,” 134n57, and for Coubertin’s editorial practices, “Modern Sport, Modernism and the Cultural Manifesto,” 86-90. I have made the same assumption about authorship throughout the present article. 15. On contemporary theories of the connection between singing and health, see Jennifer R. Sheppard, “Sound of Body: Music, Sports and Health in Victorian Britain,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 140/2 (2015): esp. 353-69. 16. “Les décisions prises,” 91. 17. Louis Bourgault-Ducoudray, “La musique et le sport,” Revue Olympique 7 (July 1906): 104-7 at 105. 18. Bourgault-Ducoudray, “La musique et le sport,” 106. 19. Bourgault-Ducoudray, “La musique et le sport,” 106. 20. Coubertin, “Décoration, Pyrotechnie, Harmonies, Cortèges. Essai de Ruskinianisme sportif,” Revue Olympique 64 (April 1911): 54-9; 65 (May 1911): 71-6; 67 (July 1911): 106-10; 68 (August 1911): 122-4; 70 (October 1911): 149-53. 21. Coubertin, “Essai de Ruskinianisme sportif,” Revue Olympique 64: 54. 22. On Vitruvius, see Giora Hon and Bernard R. Goldstein, From Summetria to Symmetry: The Making of a Revolutionary Scientific Concept (New York: Springer, 2008), 100-1; for an account of Steiner’s eurhythmy, see Svetoslava Toncheva, Out of the New Spirituality of the Twentieth Century: The Dawn of Anthroposophy, the White Brotherhood, and the Unified Teaching (Berlin: Frank & Timme), 154-63. 23. These descriptions can be found in Coubertin, “Essai de Ruskinianisme sportif,” Revue Olympique 70: 150 and 64: 54-5. 24. ‘Eurhythmic conditions’ is found in Coubertin, “Essai de Ruskinianisme sportif,” Revue Olympique 67: 109. 25. Coubertin, “Essai de Ruskinianisme sportif,” Revue Olympique 68: 122-3. 26. Coubertin, “Essai de Ruskinianisme sportif,” Revue Olympique 67: 108 and 68: 123. 27. Coubertin, “Essai de Ruskinianisme sportif,” Revue Olympique 68: 122-3. 28. Coubertin, “Essai de Ruskinianisme sportif,” Revue Olympique 68: 122-3. 29. Coubertin, “Une Olympie moderne,” Revue Olympique 51 (March 1910): 42-3. 30. “It should not be forgotten that the invisibility of the performers was part of the innovating dogma of the Wagnerian aesthetic – a dogma that commands an increasingly convinced community of the faithful”: Coubertin, “Une Olympie moderne,” 43. 31. Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), esp. 99-113. 32. On the Revue’s limited print run and readership, see Brown, ‘Modern Sport, Modernism and the Cultural Manifesto’, 86-90. 33. See the account given in Coubertin, Les batailles de l’éducation physique. Une campagne de vingt- et-un ans, 1887-1908 (Paris: Librarie de l’Éducation Physique, 1908), 96. 34. This quotation from Coubertin, Olympic Memoirs, 21-2. 35. Coubertin, Une campagne de vingt-et-un ans, 96. 36. See [Coubertin], “La festival de la Sorbonne,” Revue Olympique 6 (June 1906): 93-6. See also the account of the fencing contest in Coubertin, Une campagne de vingt-et-un ans, 200: “… a combat of classical allure, while hunting fanfares resounded from the vestibule of the palace. The eurhythmy of this festival – the first ever to combine sport, science, literature, and art – left those present with an unforgettable impression”. 37. On Polignac’s event at Reims, see the general account given under the title “Les fêtes olympiques de Reims,” Revue Olympique 103 (July 1914): 110-11, and the press report in Brown,
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“Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic Exploration of Modernism,” 129. Though the particular chorus by Debussy is not specified, one can imagine that Le Martyre’s Act III Paean to Apollo and its preceding fanfares might have fitted the bill. 38. [Coubertin], “La fête olympique de la Sorbonne,” Revue Olympique 66 (June 1911): 83-5 at 84. 39. This prize was given to the Swiss architect Eugène Monod; its awarding followed immediately on the performance of two Rameau choruses “while the old façade of the building was lit up by Bengal fire.” See [Coubertin], “La fête olympique de la Sorbonne,” 85. 40. [Coubertin], “La fête olympique de la Sorbonne,” 85. See also the similar account in Coubertin, Olympic Memoirs, 129. 41. Bourgault-Ducoudray, “La musique et le sport,” 105. 42. See Brown, “Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic Exploration of Modernism,” 129-131. As Brown shows, Pottecher added sporting events and regional choral music to the programme of his Théàtre du Peuple in August 1906: on this event, see the brief editorial account at the beginning of Pottecher, ‘L’art dramatique et le sport’, Revue Olympique 8 (1906): 117 and Coubertin, Une campagne de vingt-et-un ans, 200. 43. See Victor Hugo, Oeuvres complètes, 13 (Paris: Hetzel-Quantin, 1893), 261-4. To this point about French cultural republicanism, we might add the interjection of the anonymous editor – certainly Coubertin himself – to Bourgault-Ducoudray’s 1906 “La musique et le sport” article in the Revue Olympique. In an interval between the races at the Grand Prix of the Paris Racing Club in July 1906, Henri Radiguer had apparently led 160 singers and instrumentalists in a grand performance of five revolutionary-era French cantatas; this had been an “object lesson,” as the editor puts it, in the validity of Bourgault-Ducoudray’s claims about choral music and the expression of a people’s essence. See Bourgault-Ducoudray, “La musique et le sport,” 104. 44. For Coubertin’s view of eurhythmy as the ancients’ “popular art,” see Olympic Memoirs, 129. 45. The typical figure cited for attendance at the Sorbonne conferences is 2000 people, the capacity of the venue’s amphitheatre: see, for example, Brown, “Pierre de Coubertin’s Olympic Exploration of Modernism,” 127, and Bill Mallon and Ture Widlund, The 1896 Olympic Games: Results for All Competitors in All Events, with Commentary (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), 5. 46. Coubertin, “La festival de la Sorbonne,” 95. 47. Coubertin, “Une Olympie moderne,” 42. 48. On the ultimately unrealized plans for these competitions in London, see Graeme Kent, Olympic Follies: The Madness and Mayhem of the 1908 London Games (London: JR Books, 2008), 50-2. 49. Coubertin, “L’Art à l’Olympiade,” Revue Olympique 82 (October 1912): 154-5. 50. Coubertin, “L’Art à l’Olympiade,” 155. 51. Coubertin, “L’Art à l’Olympiade,” 155. The specific reference to a waltz is surely aimed at the Swedish organising committee: one of the musical centrepieces of the Games had been a “Valse Boston” composed by Theodor Pinet. See Wolf Lyberg, “Sweden: Stockholm 1912-1956,” in Olympic Message 2 [“The Olympic Games and Music”], 44-7. 52. Coubertin, “L’Art à l’Olympiade,” 155. 53. This speech reprinted in Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings, 611-12, quotation at 612. 54. This speech is reproduced in Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings, 519-20. 55. I use the word “theft” as an allusion to the subtitle of Guy Walters’s book Berlin Games: How Hitler Stole the Olympic Dream (London: John Murray, 2006), a recent example of the ongoing popular fascination with these particular Summer Games. In his Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), David Clay Large writes of the “Nazi appropriation of the ancient Olympic heritage in 1936” and draws attention to the Games as both a “coming-out party on the world stage” and as an attempt to “win the hearts and minds of the German people.” See 9-12; the information about the Games in my paragraph in the main text is drawn from 32-9, 49-52, and 63-65.
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56. For these details, I draw largely on the official report of the organizing committee: see XI Olympiade Berlin 1936. Amtlicher Bericht (Berlin: Organisationskomitee für die 11. Olympiade, 1937), esp. 544-7. See also Anweisungen für die Eröffnungsfeier der 11. Olympiade, Berlin 1936 (Berlin: Organisationskomitee für die 11. Olympiade, 1936), and for a musical summary of the ceremony, Schlüssel, 248-308. 57. See Albrecht Dümling, “Zwischen Autonomie und Fremdbestimmung. Die Olympische Hymne von Robert Lubahn und Richard Strauss,” Richard Strauss-Blätter 38 (1997): 68-102. 58. Coubertin, “Message at the Close of the Berlin Games,” in Olympism: Selected Writings, 520. 59. On this relationship, see Schlüssel, 250-9. 60. Carl Diem, Ein Leben für den Sport. Erinnerungen aus dem Nachlass (Ratingen: Henn, 1974), 161; also Diem, Gedanken zur Sportgeschichte (Schorndorf: Hofmann, 1965), 21. 61. Schlüssel, 250. 62. Diem, Ein Leben für den Sport, 88. 63. XI Olympiade Berlin 1936. Amtlicher Bericht, 577. The summary presented elsewhere in this paragraph is drawn from the same source, 577-84. 64. XI Olympiade Berlin 1936. Amtlicher Bericht, 584-7, 65. According to XI Olympiade Berlin 1936. Amtlicher Bericht, 587, the total number of spectators was 328093 – a figure made possible by repeat performances of the pageant over the next few weeks. The English version of the same report (The XIth Olympic Games, Berlin 1936. Official Report, 587) records “half a million persons altogether” as the total audience. 66. On Egk’s and Orff’s contributions, see their essays ‘Musik zum Olympischen Festspiel’ and ‘Jugend musiziert für die Jugend’ in the programme booklet Olympische Jugend. Festspiel zur Aufführung im Olympia-Stadion am Eröffnungstage der XI. Olympischen Spiele in Berlin (Berlin: Reichssportverlag, 1936), 33-8. Orff’s essay makes clear his use of viols and recorders, as well as the simple ‘folksong-like’ melodic airs he adopted. 67. Carl Diem, Olympische Flamme. Das Buch vom Sport, 1 (Berlin: Deutscher Archiv, 1942), 279-81. See also the similar account in XI Olympiade Berlin 1936. Amtlicher Bericht, 577, and the director Hanns Niedecken-Gebhard’s remarks in Olympische Jugend. Festspiel zur Aufführung im Olympia- Stadion am Eröffnungstage der XI. Olympischen Spiele in Berlin, 31: “From the ‘bird’s eye’ perspective, the spectators can see everything that happens … every observer, wherever he sits, is given the total impression.” 68. See XI Olympiade Berlin 1936. Amtlicher Bericht, 584-7 and Orff, “Jugend musiziert für die Jugend,” 38. 69. See “Schlussbild: Olympischer Hymnus” in Olympische Jugend. Festspiel zur Aufführung im Olympia-Stadion am Eröffnungstage der XI. Olympischen Spiele in Berlin, 12-13. 70. For example, Diem, Olympische Flamme, 279-80; see also the evidence cited by Schlüssel, 250-9 and 335-44. 71. Diem, Ein Leben für den Sport, 161-2. 72. On the ‘Day of Potsdam’, see Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 44-5. 73. The quotation is the description of Yves Pierre Boulongne, as cited in Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings, 519. 74. See Lang, “The Games in Tokyo in 1940?” in Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings, 520-2 at 521. 75. Coubertin, “The Unfinished Symphony,” in Coubertin, Olympism: Selected Writings, 751-3. 76. See the discussion in Schlüssel, 519-714, especially 634-47.
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ABSTRACTS
This article considers the role of music in Pierre de Coubertin’s aesthetic thought and practice, with particular focus on the concept of “eurhythmy”, as expounded by writings published in the Revue Olympique in the early years of the Olympic movement. It argues that music – on account of its far-reaching and immediate emotional impact – should be considered the fundamental eurhythmic medium, and that, as a consequence of this centrality, Coubertin’s sporting performances should be grasped not only as enthralling visual spectacles, but heard as resounding presentations of his modern Olympic humanism. Simultaneously, however, an acute problem of social class emerges, thus affording us insights into the politics of spectator sport in one of its most prominent early twentieth-century arenas. Since a significant part of music’s impact is its powerful connotation of class, the musical choices Coubertin repeatedly made and dictated, and the hierarchy of taste they set out, point towards the inevitable sense of failure he felt when the Games took to the wider world stage in the hands of the national organising committees. The Berlin Summer Games of 1936 provide a closing case study of this trajectory: in some ways a culmination of Coubertin’s eurhythmics, they can also be understood – in the year before his death – as the final realization of the limits of his aesthetic project.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Coubertin, music, Olympism, class, eurhythmy, modern spectacle, youth, Berlin 1936, fêtes sportives, Bourgault-Ducoudray, Ruskin, Carl Diem, Revue Olympique
AUTHOR
NICHOLAS ATTFIELD Nicholas Attfield is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Birmingham. His research interests in European music, culture, and politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are reflected in his DPhil on the reception of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies, and by publications on Bruckner, Orff, Pfitzner, Debussy, and music criticism during the First World War. He has also been the recipient of British Academy, DAAD, AHRC, and Procter research awards. In 2017 his monograph Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music, 1918–1933 was published by Oxford University Press/British Academy.
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Broke Ballers: The Mediated World of Football and Finance
Courtney Cox
Athletes can posture and preen – they can even beat each other up on the field – they just cannot ask for more money. – Ronald Bishop1 Some time ago, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times interviewed me concerning a new Home Box Office (HBO) scripted show revolving around the lives of current and former professional football players in the National Football League (NFL). He was primarily interested in whether or not shows like this one, titled Ballers (2015-), could build the viewership to sustain a lengthy run, while acknowledging in the eventual opening paragraph of his article that live sports (and increasingly, sports documentaries) remain one the most lucrative TV genres in terms of ratings. Their scripted counterparts, however, often operate on the other end of the spectrum, struggling to secure future seasons. The reporter asked me why scripted sport failed to grasp the attention of otherwise rabid fans of the game. I blamed it on the artificial aura of these programs – the fake logos, the counterfeit team names, and the overall inability to replicate the authenticity of the athletic organizations, players, and in- game action which draw in staggering numbers each season in “real” sports. My response aligns most closely with Sebastian Byrne when he writes that scripted sport “still often fails to be believable in the eyes of the skilled viewer, because of an inability to capture a sense of realism in its imitation of real-life sport.”2 This goes beyond mere action on the field; this speaks to Byrne’s dilemma of “actors who can’t play” as well as “players who can’t act.”3 What I may not have considered during the interview is what Kyle Kusz describes as American audiences’ desire to see “‘feel good’ morality tales that express ‘universal’ existential themes while simultaneously appearing to confirm the ‘truth’ of dominant American mythologies like individualism, meritocracy, hard work and personal perseverance.”4 Dubbed new jock cinema by Time magazine, 5 the films and television shows which bring the drama without the box score continue to find networks, draw
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big name actors, but more often than not, fail to sustain the Nielsen numbers to justify their primetime positioning.6 Ballers is a dynamic show with vibrant characters true to the brand of both its producers’ former work (Entourage) and network (HBO). The thirty-minute program provides a glimpse into the lives of professional football players in the offseason, highlighting the action occurs off of the field. The show mirrors many of the narratives circulating today about the economic, legal, and physical struggles of current and former professional athletes. Throughout each season, every aspect of these fictional characters’ lives includes various intersections of culture, finance, and media present in real life, whether on ESPN’s Sportscenter, an athlete’s Twitter account, or in financial publications. The lead character, Spencer Strasmore (played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), is a former player dealing with the potential cost of the game on his body and pocketbook after retirement. His life after football focuses on mentoring current athletes on their own business matters and convincing them that he and his firm will not fumble their financial futures. This article examines the first two seasons of Ballers in terms of the the sports-media complex, player identity, and the embedded nature of culture and finance. Shows like Ballers examine and reproduce certain social practices, turning them into easily digestible discourses which reinforce ideas—in this case—about race, gender, class and the world of finance. Scholars have written extensively about the sports-media complex as a framework for understanding how these mediated moments support recurring forms of knowledge about these industries and individuals. Ballers, in the same vein as other sports-themed television shows such as Coach (1989-1997), Arliss (1996-2002), or Friday Night Lights (2006-2011), provides a commentary and a particular perspective on the world of sport. In the case of this show, the financial aspects of the game are emphasized, and issues of culture, cost, and community are constantly at play.
Scripted Sport
Previous research has lamented the lack of critical examination of scripted sport texts, arguing that the intersection of sport and cinema are worthy of further inquiry due to their status as popular cultural forms.7 Diana Young places sports films squarely within the domain of other popular art forms and argues these texts “evoke not only modern concerns with health, physical fitness and physical attractiveness, but also a neoliberal believe that subjects have control over their own destiny.”8 While sport-themed films remain a growing area of inquiry—and even the subject of whether or not it can even be considered its own genre9—there is significantly less work invested in the ways in which sport is scripted on television. David Rowe argues that sports are ideal for the cinematic treatment due to the mythologies and values already in place which are then receptive to the types of storytelling often prevalent in mainstream Western cinema.10 These mythologies play off what he describes as binary distinctions between fantasy and reality.11 Scholars also argue sports films are allegorical and bring the social and sporting worlds together—either connecting or clashing12—use the dramatization of sport to reflect shifts in the protagonist’s character,13 and often, incorporate some semblance of difference while still privileging
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whiteness thematically.14 Finally, the most important aspect of scripted sport is resolution. As Garry Whannel writes, “ideological tensions around aspiration and achievement, success and failure, individual and team, cooperation and competition have to be managed, and magical resolutions found.”15 ESPN’s short-lived show, Playmakers (2003), remains the golden example of these unresolved tensions, clashing societal and sport values, and a failure to establish enough distance between Hollywood scripts and real-life headlines. Featuring a fictional professional football team riddled with domestic violence, drug addiction, the physical tolls the game takes on players’ bodies, and much more, the show focuses on the evils of professional sport rather than the tightly-bound resolution and character development arc typical of scripted sport. This is direct contrast to Rowe’s binary of fantasy and reality typically depicted in the genre, which ultimately led to the show’s demise.16 In an article memorializing Playmakers, Aaron Gordon writes, “Despite the show’s relative success—1.62 million households per week, a solid number for a cable show at the time—ESPN received more and more ire from the NFL and its sponsors.”17 The show was eventually cancelled following its first season, its 11 episodes deemed too detrimental to ESPN’s relationship with the NFL. Gordon writes, “By forcing the show’s cancellation, the NFL implicitly acknowledged that it had something to hide, and that Playmakers was revealing it. Maybe it was simply seen as bad P.R., but far more likely is that, by depicting the players to be real people, the writers touched on truths the NFL didn’t want us to know.”18 In analyzing Ballers, the relationship between media, sports, and society remains an integral part of the show’s formation and execution.
Where Media and Sport Converge
Several scholars have theorized about the myriad of ways in which media organizations, sports leagues, and audiences interact with one another. Lawrence Wenner’s transactional model of media, sports, and society relationships connects society to the mediated sports production complex, comprised of sports organizations, media organizations, sports journalists, mediated sport content, and the audience experience.19 He argues that a sociological analysis would approach his model from the “outside in”, whereas his transactional model works inside out, beginning with the audience experience and working its way out towards larger societal values and relations. Transactions between each group occur as sports journalists cover their local or national teams, a fan tweets to his favorite player, or media conglomerates and professional sports leagues reach media rights agreements.20 Wenner writes, “a transactional approach to mediated sport also entails assessments of content in conjunction with the forces that have led to the production of that content.”21 While Wenner and others provide a bird’s eye view of these relationships between fans, sports leagues, and media organizations, a closer examination of these partnerships reveals the chasms which can also exist.22 If we are to understand Wenner’s characterizations of sport organizations, media organizations, audience, mediated sports content, and sports journalists as exhaustive– how then should we consider a show like Ballers, which seemingly focuses on the discords within each of these spheres ? How should we theorize these tensions ? How can we understand the potential and problems of this program to illuminate these various power struggles ? “What sports on film offer”, Rowe writes, “is an opportunity
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to elaborate on the exploration of the relationship between sporting and other worlds that is deeply inscribed within the discourses of sports reportage.”23
The Embeddedness of Culture and Finance
Garry Whannel writes that the narratives inherent in sport link it to the ideology of capitalism – a minority of winners in a sea of losers. He writes, “sport as a topic then, is markedly well structured in terms of offering a metaphor for lived experience under capitalism, providing the terrain on which the ideological elements of competitive individualism can be worked through.”24 This operates in strange tandem with seemingly conflicting ideological themes of community, teamwork and collectivism which also remain prevalent in sport.25 In examining the themes of this show as they relate to the intermingling of culture and economic practices, this article follows in the footsteps of Viviana Zelizer’s body of work focusing on the concept of embeddedness–the ways in which “the economic action of individuals as well as larger economic patterns, like the determination of prices and economic institutions, are very importantly affected by networks of social relationships.”26 Within the world of sport, this embeddedness–dubbed sportsbiz– operates at the intersection of capital, culture, and commodified civil life.27 This is most visibly represented in professional leagues like the NFL, where a small number of athletes provide the physical capital to team owners who sell the game as a product to be consumed by masses of fans. Zelizer challenges those that study any forms of economic practice to include the “meaningful and dynamic interpersonal transactions” and emphasize the importance of including networks of relationships over studying the individual. 28 This relational approach emphasizes that “in all areas of economic life people are creating, maintaining, symbolizing, and transforming meaningful social relations.”29 This, in turn, is actually a form of cultural symbolic work, according to Zelizer. Her work focusing on the history and business of children’s life insurance30 shows the embedded nature of culture and finance as it pertains to the body. There remains a complicated relationship between one’s value in the market and one’s emotional value, whether in examining “the economically worthless but emotionally priceless child”31 or a 320-pound defensive tackle in one of the most profitable corporations in the world. It is reported that around 40 % of NFL players insure their bodies (or certain body parts relevant to their position), according to a CBS MoneyWatch report,32 which makes sense, given that unlike the insured babies in Zelizer’s article, NFL players are both valuable and expensive. Whether insuring their own bodies, being sold or traded between teams like stocks—or some in William C. Rhoden’s corner would argue, slaves33—the cost and value of NFL bodies are constantly in discussion, whether in NFL boardrooms, insurance companies, sports bars, or fantasy football leagues. In The Social Characterizations of Price Frederick Wherry writes, “People at the top of the social hierarchy are thought to have a ‘rational’ understanding of prices, while those at the bottom are thought to have an irrational and emotional reaction, driven by subgroup pressures and occasional value-rational attachments.”34 Wherry identifies four characters that interact with price–the fool, the faithful, the frugal and the frivolous.35 He defines the fool as noncalculating, ignorant of prices, budgets, or constraint.36 The faithful are “engage[d] in methodical calculations in order to abide by
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a covenant.”37 The frugal aim to save as much as possible and are sometimes from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.38 Finally, the frivolous are noncalculating individuals who spend excessive amounts of money without dire economic consequences.39 Mainstream depictions of professional athletes primarily mark them as either the fool or the frivolous ; Ballers is no exception. While the majority of professional football players are considered upper class, their individual identities (for example, race or ethnicity) factor into how their financial prudence is perceived. Their ability to scale the social status ladder is partially predicated on how they spend their money on luxury goods, homes and cars. Price becomes an instrument, according to Wherry, “used to assess the positive and negative qualities of individuals occupying different social positions in society.”40 Many of the common narratives surrounding the financial decisions of professional athletes consist of tales of luxury, expensive bar and restaurant tabs, bad investments, and eventually, bankruptcy. These financial struggles are often attributed to athletes’ ignorance in terms of investing, their youth, or the lifestyle expectations in tandem with the high salary and public recognition which accompanies the celebrity of professional sport. The nouveau riche athlete attempts to pivot away from their lower or middle-class upbringing in order to achieve (perceived) membership in the upper echelon of society. Fools, then, are identified as either calculating or noncalculating purchasers, either unable to manage money or lacking the knowledge to do so. Wherry writes that the fool “cannot be excused for lacking the relevant information to make an informed decision, nor can the fool be pitied for not being exposed to modeling behaviors from reasonable consumers in the marketplace.”41 The fool’s focus is immediate gratification and consumption, a stereotype often placed on professional athletes, especially those of color. The racial difference is important to note—especially given that almost all of the athletes portrayed on the show are Black. Wherry cites Lamont and Molnár’s in “How Blacks Use Consumption to Shape Their Collective Identity : Evidence from Marketing Specialists” to emphasize that for many within the African-American community, social membership within the U.S. is based on one’s “buying power.” This, he says, flips the script of the fool when the cultural nuances of these decisions are incorporated.42 This becomes especially important when one considers the ways in which sport is seen as “a way out” as well as a way up towards social mobility through physical labor power. However, this mostly occurs without disrupting sites of power, both within and outside of sport.43 The frivolous, like the fool, avoids calculation and loves extravagant purchases, but is situated closer to the mainstream in their societal standing, as opposed to the fool, commonly situated on the edges of society. Where many scripted sports texts may tell the “rags to riches” story of professional sports, Ballers simultaneously reproduces this narrative in tandem with the reverse : the “riches to rags” story of life after hanging up one’s cleats.
Method
Throughout this research, I am guided by Garry Whannel’s line of questioning in examining the characters of Ballers: “What is going on in the narrative journeys that the characters take; by what discursive means are their journeys explained, and what ideological meanings are implicated in the suturing of identity and respect?”44 To
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answer these questions, I utilize multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), which examines language in tandem with other audio and visual elements of texts, involving music, gestures, colors, framing, etc. David Machin defines a multimodal approach as “an emphasis on meaning being created through combinations.”45 In evaluating the first two seasons of Ballers (20 episodes total), I am specifically interested in the complex semiotics involved between characters which speak to larger ideologies surrounding sport, specifically professional football. Throughout this research, I connect two analytical approaches to this multimodal discourse analysis. First, in watching and organizing dialogues, gestures, and sound from the show, I draw upon both Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual modality – the ways in which an image is rendered more or less real based upon ways in which it is shot, edited and/or presented.46 As Ayodeji Olowu and Susan Akinkurolere write, “Modality is interpersonal rather than ideational in that it does not express absolute truth or falsehoods it produces shared truths aligning readers and viewers with what they old to be true for themselves, while distancing from others whose values they do not share.”47 Second, episodes were analyzed through Ruth Wodak’s social actor analysis, where characters on the show are considered to be “social actors [that] constitute knowledge, situations, social roles as well as identities and interpersonal relations between various interacting social groups.”48 She also writes that there are several ways that these discursive acts reflect society–in the creation, production and construction of certain social conditions and/or the restoration, justification, reproduction, transformation or destruction of a certain social status quo.49 This theoretical framework serves as a foundational methodological guide, centering the analysis on each action between characters on the show and connecting their dialogues and nonverbal actions to stylistic choices which speak to larger societal issues and ideologies. Each interpersonal interaction was analyzed and organized into themes. These themes were then grouped under the following clusters: sports-media complex, embeddedness, and the sporting body.
Results
The embeddedness of culture and finance. Wherry’s frugal and faithful, while less emphasized throughout the show, remain an integral part of Ballers character Charles Greane, an offensive lineman whose modesty in his material possessions casts him as a “good guy” at heart. Greane is neither morally nor financially bankrupt, although he both struggles throughout the show to maintain his identity as both faithful (in his marriage) and frugal (in his lifestyle) as his career ends and he finds himself looking for a job after football. It is also important to note that these characterizations are not mutually exclusive. Even throughout the show, characters make career and financial decisions that place them within the spectrum of frugal to frivolous and faithful to fool. Spencer, while seen as financially sound to those on the outside, is struggling to maintain his public persona as he also struggles with his own bank account. Ricky Jerret, a star player unsure of his football future given his reckless behavior with women and his own teammates, seems more financially secure than many of his counterparts, even with expensive taste. His character continues to shift throughout the series, eventually gaining the emotional maturity to match his physical and financial savvy.
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One of the central storylines of the first season of Ballers is the negotiation of defensive lineman Vernon Littelfield’s new contract, where his agent and his team are often seen arguing about his worth as a member of their team. These exchanges are of note, primarily because Vernon is never involved in these negotiations, he is always notified of where his contract stands after the fact. The cultural divide between professional athletes and the agents and advisors that represent them is documented in several successful TV programs and films such as Jerry Maguire (1996) and another HBO show, Arliss (1996-2002), and like its predecessors, Ballers shows the disconnect between the predominantly white agents and advisors and the black star athletes. Spencer becomes valuable to his firm as a former athlete of color capable of translating the cultural nuances of the players and the league to his older, white counterparts (and vice versa). As Spencer fights for the right to represent (real-life NFL player) Terrell Suggs, he tells Andre, Suggs’s financial manager, that his client no longer wants to work with him. Andre retorts, “He doesn't know what he thinks—he’s a football player.”50 In another scene, when Ricky comes to Spencer’s office to talk about his troubles, he asks that he leave Joe, his older, balding white partner, outside. Joe later begins to bond with potential clients at a firm-sponsored yacht party over a game of dice, only to lose the little cultural capital he just acquired with black athletes when he uses the “n-word” to address the crowd. He later apologizes and eventually rebounds from this experience, commenting in the second season at a tennis tournament, “I like that I feel uncomfortable around this many white people now.”51 Spencer as a translator of culture is valuable to the firm, but he often feels on the outside of two worlds – he’s no longer entrenched in the life of an NFL player on or off the field, and his coworkers view him as lesser (“some jock in a tailored suit”52) due to his career path and as only a tool to recruit football players to the firm. When he is fired from the firm and returns to negotiate a potential offer to buy the entire company, he looks around and says, “This place got really Caucasian really fast,”53 a snarky nod to the tokenism he feels as the lone advisor of color on the team. While race is undoubtedly a major divide between the players and their financial representatives, class remains an important schism as well. Jason, the agent who works with Spencer and Joe to secure players’ contracts, finds a greater divide with a white potential first round draft pick who lives in the Everglades than any of his black clients. The insults hurled between the player, Travis Mack, his family and his potential agent largely stem from perceived differences in class. Jason accompanies the draft hopeful on his boat in the middle of a swamp to prove his interest and willingness to take part in the cultural traditions of rural Florida life, only to find himself abandoned, waist- deep in the murkiness of the Everglades.54 This hazing ritual presents a power disruption and gives the draft pick some semblance of bargaining power, which he uses to his advantage leading up to draft day. As Rowe writes, sport serves as a means to both reproduce inequalities of power as well as a potential space of destabilization and reconfiguration.55 Jason later comments on draft day as he stands in the midst of banquet tables, “I’m looking at a billion dollars’ worth of talent and everyone’s waiting for their phone to ring,”56 a reference to the draft tradition of waiting by the phone for a team’s front office to offer them the opportunity to play the game they love professionally. His
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relationship to Travis becomes one complicated by risk, potential profit, and a market driven by the quality of workouts, game film, and front office interviews. Over the course of two seasons, an underlying but recurring ideology reinforced throughout Ballers is a popular one, articulated by Rowe as the way in which “sport is a prime illustration of the success that waits those racial and ethnic groups who commit themselves to excelling at it.”57 But what happens when they achieve it? For Vernon, his family and friends become part of his entourage, expecting him to pay for everything and draining a significant portion of his NFL salary. This reflects what James Carrier describes as a gift exchange, when “societies are dominated by kinship relations and groups, which define transactors and their relations and obligations to each other…objects are inalienably associated with the giver, the recipient, and the relationship that defines and binds them.”58 This is in opposition of the plan Spencer and Joe have in mind for Vernon, which is rooted in traditional commodity exchange – investments, savings, and implied safety from bankruptcy. In commodity exchanges, according to Carrier, it is the exchange of value that remains more important than the individuals involved.59 Vernon, caught between these two forms of exchange, faces the anger of either his financial advisors or his loved ones, who expect his support.60 Vernon’s assumed lack of financial savvy also extends to his entourage. In a candid conversation with Joe, Vernon’s best friend and hanger-on Reggie admits he has no financial knowledge even though his lifestyle may appear otherwise “I'm 24 years old, I drove here in a $ 400,000 Rolls Royce and I don't even have a checking account,” he says.61 He asks Joe for help in an effort to remove himself from Vernon’s gift economy and shift to a commodity exchange as a salaried member of Vernon’s team, which results in tension between Reggie and Vernon for some time.62 It is in the first season, when Spencer can’t withdraw $ 200 from an ATM due to insufficient funds, that viewers discover the former player’s own financial problems and experience in the gift economy—he later references “taking care of a lot of people” 63—even as he tries to convince others to trust him with their money. In one particularly poignant scene, Spencer is driving down the street and receives a call from his bank about his overdrawn funds as he chugs prescription painkillers.64 His financial woes continue in the second season, where he is eventually let go for his shortcomings and tries to scrape up enough money to buy the firm that fired him. When he asks Ricky for a loan, Ricky rightfully responds, “How you expect to handle my cash when you can’t even walk in the building? If y’all ain’t the most broke ass financial managers I’ve ever met !”65 He eventually invests millions of dollars into Spencer’s effort. In the final episode of the second season, Spencer goes to the NFL’s annual Rookie Symposium to confront Eddie George (an actual ex-NFL player). Apparently, George is the reason Spencer’s NFLPA certification was rejected; he filed a grievance against Spencer with the player’s union to keep him from advising current players. Initially framed as violating an unspoken “code” between players by reporting him, George is unrepentant when Spencer approaches him. “I should have filed a lawsuit,” he says. “Do you even have an MBA? You have no right managing anyone’s money.”66 He then tells Spencer how his life spiraled after following Spencer into a bad investment and losing everything–how he worked at coffee shops, lived out of his car, and even contemplated suicide. In order to drop the grievance, Spencer agrees to speak in front of the rookies and tells the story of how he bought into a bad real estate deal and convinced other players, including George, to do the same. “I lost every cent,” he tells
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the crowd of new NFL players, “and I lost a friend.”67 He then warns them of trusting their financial future to just anyone, even if it happens to be someone close to them. He cautions, “If you don’t smarten up, it’s not gonna be some guy in a $ 5,000 suit, it’s gonna be your brother, your sister, your parents.”68 The sporting body. Throughout the show, Ballers illustrates through both obvious plot points and subtleties the physical cost of a professional football career for the athlete, where many of the payments are due after they stop playing the game. The physical and mental toll football takes on the body has remained—and literally so—under the microscope as of late, with the discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head over time. Recent films like documentary League of Denial (2013) produced by PBS Frontline and feature film Concussion (2015) both focus on the discovery of this disease by Dr. Bennet Omalu and the denial of it by the NFL. In Concussion, Will Smith plays Dr. Omalu and says in front of league representatives, “You lose your mind, your family, your money and eventually, your life.”69 The film provides a statistic that 50 % of NFL linebackers suffer from concussive syndrome and a center will take over 70,000 hits impacting the brain over the course of an average professional career.70 With these staggering statistics now known, Spencer possesses a tremendous amount of anxiety over possibly having CTE, and when his girlfriend Tracy schedules him to meet with a neurologist, the viewer realizes just how much he is affected by the fear of being mentally unsound.71 When his doctor recommends an MRI just to confirm he is in good health, he sneaks out of the office, afraid of what the results may reveal. He eventually returns, and is relieved to discover he currently shows no signs of brain damage, although his doctor implies that his issues appear to be psychological rather than physical. Spencer is also haunted by his career in the NFL, with one play in particular that causes him nightmares regularly. He ended a fellow player’s career with one big hit during his time in the league, and relives the scene throughout the season. He eventually reunites with the player, who has found a second career repairing cars, and they not only reconcile the issues surrounding the hit, but find common ground as former players trying to figure out what life looks like after football. This is seemingly in line with Diana Young’s argument in “Fighting oneself: The embodied subject and films about sports” where she writes, The idea of the body as project also suggests a temporal dimension; characters have a relationship with their own histories. The past may be seen as an essential part of the subject’s formation that continues to play a role in shaping his/her development even as he/she is transformed by experience…The past may provide the narrative with a sense of inevitability, wherein the subject’s formation either propels him/her to victory or to self-destruction.72 After dodging his doctor’s warnings that his growing addiction to painkillers put him at risk for serious physical and mental illness (and refusing to write him another prescription), Spencer finds himself at a questionable health clinic where pills are seemingly doled out without question (or examination). His doctor urges him to find a long-term solution for his physical pain and upon examining him, tells him he has arthritis and urgently needs hip replacement surgery. Spencer is incredulous–how could a man of his stature–bulging muscles pressed against the seams of his expensive jackets–need a procedure often recommended for senior citizens? This coincides with
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Aaron Baker’s notion that scripted sport, which primarily focuses on male athletes, “provides a useful site for the analysis of dominant ideas of masculinity, [and] how it has been refigured over time in response to changes in American society.”73 Football stands as one of these last remaining bastions of masculinity, the remnants of what was assumed to be “in crisis” as far back as the late 1960s.74 According to Kusz, as far back as the mid to late 1990s, this remasculinization effort, often packaged as what “real men” do, was expressed through the images and narratives of sport primarily through men’s bodies in motion.75 Spencer and his body appear to represent what occurs when that body is no longer in motion ; he is seen at the end of the second season being prepped for surgery, finally caving to the pressure of his doctor and addressing his health problems. In several ways, Ballers directly responds to Sebastian Byrne’s call in “Actors Who Can’t Play in the Sports Film: Exploring the Cinematic Construction of Sports Performance” to shift scripted sport texts towards a “heightened sports performance…by teasing out the layers of conflict that exist in the bodily exchanges between the players, and by establishing obstacles through the cinematic magnification of their contrasting and competing physical skill-sets.”76 This can be seen in one of the final scenes of the second season, where Vernon goes one-on-one against his team’s first round draft pick who plays his position. It is his first day back on turf, and he remains determined to prove he still deserves the starting job and is ready to compete with the incoming rookie. He arrives early to camp, only to find his primary competition has as well. The team owner looks on as the two players battle one another, both looking to assert their strength over the other.77 The visual of an affluent white “owner” observing two black players engaged in physical combat vividly embodies inequity inherent in the NFL without a word of dialogue. The sports-media complex. From the show’s pilot, the sports-media complex is on full display, whether players use the video game Madden to think through their new position on the field, or another getting caught in a fist fight in a club, which circulates on TMZ immediately after, due to a patron recording the altercation on their phone.78 An entire episode is dedicated to a party where everyone’s eyes are glued to televised coverage of the NFL Draft. In the second season, ESPN NFL analyst Mark Schlereth continues to question to potential value of Travis Mack, the first-round draft pick of Spencer’s firm, in various television segments leading up to the draft.79 In order to quell his doubts, they set up a meeting between Schlereth and Mack, connecting them over their mutual love of fishing. While Travis struggles to convince the former offensive lineman-turned- broadcaster of his potential for success in the league, he eventually decides to perform the most popular aspect of the NFL Combine for Schlereth—the 40-yard dash.80 Far from the bright lights, snug Dri-Fit material, and dozens of cameras, Travis slips off his sandals and runs barefoot in the sand at an amazing speed. He impresses Schlereth, who begins speaking favorably of him on TV.81 Travis also appears on Jay Glazer’s TV show to prove he also possesses the mental prowess required to excel at the highest level. When Glazer stumps Travis with an X’s and O’s pop quiz, he steps outside of the studio with Spencer and admits he froze up due to the pressure of the cameras and his personal struggle with a learning disorder. He later returns and completes the segment successfully, playing to his strengths and once again utilizing the sports-media complex to his advantage.82
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Spencer appears afraid himself to appear on Fox Sports personality Jay Glazer’s show, even as he encourages his clients to do so in each season. He tries to avoid the appearance repeatedly, telling Glazer “I make Marshawn Lynch look like JFK” and “I want our business acumen to speak for itself.”83 When he finally accepts Glazer’s offer to appear on the show to publicize his work as a financial advisor, his nemesis Terrell Suggs appears on the show in an apparent setup for drama and ratings. Suggs tells Spencer, “I wouldn't even have a problem with you if you didn't post that shit on Twitter back in the day…you posted some asinine shit about me being more concerned with my stats than about winning.”84 Spencer tries to apologize and explain he meant to send his comments as a personal message. The confrontation soon escalates into a physical skirmish between the two on live television. The source of Spencer and Suggs’s dispute is one of many occasions where social media becomes an especially important component to the show. Vernon laments the comments made about him on Twitter as he recovers from surgery, and Ricky’s father’s tweets cause him to lose a potential contract offer from a new team.85 The use of new media throughout the show points to the tensions and disruptions within the sports- media complex due to the emergence and dominance of social media technology. Ballers also extends a storyline to Spencer’s girlfriend and sports reporter Tracy, who discovers her male counterpart makes $ 20,000 more than her. When she confronts her boss, who repeatedly calls her “Legs”—even as she asks him to stop—he makes light of her complaint and continues to belittle her and diminish her accomplishments.86 Tracy promptly quits at the table and walks away. She later tells Spencer, “For four years, I laughed at their terrible jokes and played the game perfectly, and they still paid Mitch more.”87 She later receives a job offer from ESPN and moves to Bristol, an upgrade professionally with potential consequences for her personal life, including her relationship with Spencer. Tracy’s storyline is only one of the ways in which Ballers illustrates Whannel’s argument that “the dominant construction of sport is that of a male oriented and dominated cultural practice in which masculinity is confirmed and conferred.”88
Discussion
Ballers is a show defined by the ideologies of professional football, often rooted in hegemonic masculinity — the stereotypical concept of “real manhood” built upon the domination of women, ruthless competition, and an unwillingness to display emotion or admit weakness.89 Many of the dominant ideologies which operate within the world of football also function within financial institutions, whether in assessing monetary worth, potential risk, or long-term sustainability through investment. The marriage of football and finance on display on Ballers reflects the similar values and ideologies present within both industries. David Rowe argues for another form of embeddedness specific to the scripted sports text—thematic plasticity, where mythology and values meet and are recognized and considered by the viewer.90 These myths and legends circulate throughout the sports- media complex, reinforcing a variety of ideals. Foucault writes that the body is submerged in a political field where it is worked over by power, as it is invested, marked, tortured, forced to perform, carry out tasks, or produce signs.91 Throughout the show, racial hierarchies remain unchallenged and often reinforced. Even with a
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diverse cast and crew, including former NFL player Rashard Mendenhall in the writing room, there remains ambivalence in the execution of each character’s development; issues of inequity are often referenced without consequence or confrontation. Previous research has found a connecting thread of “colonial systems of white dominance”92 even in films and TV shows rooted in themes of “overcoming” racism through sport. And while this paper primarily focused on issues of identity in terms of race and class, there is also a substantial argument to be made that the portrayal of women in sports- themed shows and films needs further exploration, as Ballers features more women without clothing than those with recurring speaking roles. Future research could further delve into the role of gender in scripted sport texts, both in the verbal and the visual. Ballers most successfully executes Byrne’s more balanced multidimensional approach to scripted sport, where obstacles and conflict are foregrounded through the body, bodily exchanges between players, and open up what he describes as “new directions for exploring the construction of character in spectacle sequences of goal-driven cinema.” 93 The use of the body–through injury, addiction, or peak conditioning, speak to the ways in which the corporal self can speak to larger conditions within and outside of the world of sport. Berr, Jonathan. “Most NFL players don’t buy disability insurance.” CBS MoneyWatch. Last modified May 16, 2014.
Bishop, Ronald. “The Wayward Child: An Ideological Analysis of Sports Contract Holdout
Coverage.” Journalism Studies 6, no. 4 (2005): 445–59. doi :10.1080/14616700500250347.
Byrne, Sebastian. “Actors Who Can’t Play in the Sports Film: Exploring the Cinematic Construction of Sports Performance.” Sport in Society, 2017, 1–15.
Carrier, James. “Gifts, commodities, and social relations: A Maussian view of exchange.” Sociological Forum, 6 no. 1 (1991): 119-136. Accessed October 12, 2015.
Connell, R.W. Gender and Power. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1987.
Cranmer, Gregory A., and Tina M. Harris. “‘White-Side, Strong-Side’: A Critical Examination of Race and Leadership in Remember the Titans.” Howard Journal of Communications, 26, no. 2 (2015): 153–71.
Farino, Julian, Peter Berg, Seith Mann, John Fortenberry, and Simon Cellan Jones. Ballers. Home Box Office, 2016 2015.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon, 1977.
Gordon, Aaron. “Playmakers, the Show the NFL Killed for Being Too Real.” Vice Sports. Sports, April 22, 2015.
Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Abingdon: Routledge, 1996.
Kuper, Terry A. “Toxic Masculinity as a Barrier to Mental Health Treatment in Prison.” Journal of Clinical Psychology 61, no. 6 (2005): 713–24.
Kusz, Kyle W. “Remasculinizing American White Guys In/Through New Millennium American Sport Films.” Sport in Society 11, no. 2–3 (n.d.): 209–26.
Landesman, Peter. Concussion. Drama/Sport. Columbia Pictures, 2015.
Machin, David. Introduction to Multimodal Analysis. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
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Olowu, Ayodeji, and Susan Olajoke Akinkurolere. “A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Selected Advertisement of Malaria Drugs.” Journal of English Education 3, no. 2 (June 3, 2015): 166–73.
Poulton, Emma, and Martin Roderick. “Introducing Sport in Films.” Sport in Society 11, no. 23 (2008): 107–16.
Rhoden, William. Forty Million Dollar Slaves. New York: Crown Publishers, 2006.
Rowe, David. “Play up: Rethinking Power and Resistance in Sport.” Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 22, no. 3 (August 1998): 241–51.
Rowe, David. “If You Film It, Will They Come? Sports on Film.” Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 22, no. 4 (November 1998): 350–59.
Schultz, Jaime. “Glory Road (2006) and the White Savior Historical Sport Film.” Journal of Popular Film and Television, 42, no. 4 (2014): 205–13.
Wenner, Lawrence A. “Media, Sports, and Society: The Research Agenda.” In Media, Sports, and Society, 13–48. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1989.
Whannel, Garry. “Winning and Losing Respect: Narratives of Identity in Sport Films.” Sport in Society, 11, no. 2–3 (2008): 195–208.
Wherry, Frederick F. “The social characterizations of price: The fool, the faithful, the frivolous, and the frugal.” Sociological Theory, 26, (2008): 363-379. Accessed October 12, 2015. DOI :10.1111/j. 1467-9558.2008.00334.x
Wodak, Ruth. “Fragmented identities: Redefining and recontextualizing.” In Politics as Text and Talk: Analytic approaches to political discourse, edited by Paul Chilton & Christina Schaffner, 143-170. Philadelphia: John Benjamins North America, 2002.
Young, Diana. “Fighting Oneself: The Embodied Subject and Films about Sports.” Sport in Society, 20, no. 7 (2017): 816–32.
Zelizer, Viviana A. “The price and value of children: The case of children’s insurance.” American Journal of Sociology, 86, no. 5 (1981): 1036-1056. Accessed October 25, 2015.
Zelizer, Viviana A. “Payment and social ties.” Sociological Forum, 11, no. 3 (1996): 481-495. Accessed November 1, 2015. DOI: 10.1007/BF02408389
Zelizer, Viviana A. “How I became a relational economic sociologist and what does that mean?” Politics & Society, 40, no. 2 (2012): 145-174. Accessed October 12, 2015. DOI : 10.1177/0032329212441591
ENDNOTES
1. Ronald Bishop, “The Wayward Child: An Ideological Analysis of Sports Contract Holdout Coverage,” Journalism Studies 6, no. 4 (2005): 448. 2. Sebastian Byrne, “Actors Who Can’t Play in the Sports Film: Exploring the Cinematic Construction of Sports Performance,” Sport in Society, 2017, 2. 3. Byrne, “Actors Who Can’t Play,” 3.
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4. Kyle W. Kusz, “Remasculinizing American White Guys In/Through New Millennium American Sport Films,” Sport in Society 11, no. 2–3 (n.d.): 210. 5. Kusz, “Remasculinizing American White Guys.” 6. For more on scripted sport television and failing ratings, see Greg Braxton, “‘Ballers’ on HBO Aims to Be Rare Sports-Themed Series with Winning Game Plan,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 2015. 7. Emma Poulton and Martin Roderick, “Introducing Sport in Films,” Sport in Society11, no. 2–3 (2008): 107–16. 8. Diana Young, “Fighting Oneself: The Embodied Subject and Films about Sports,” Sport in Society 20, no. 7 (2017): 816. 9. Garry Whannel, “Winning and Losing Respect: Narratives of Identity in Sport Films,” Sport in Society 11, no. 2–3 (2008): 196-197. 10. David Rowe, “If You Film It, Will They Come? Sports on Film,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 22, no. 4 (November 1998): 353. 11. Rowe, “If You Film It, Will They Come?” 354. 12. David Rowe, “If You Film It, Will They Come? Sports on Film,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 22, no. 4 (November 1998): 352. 13. Sebastian Byrne, “Actors Who Can’t Play in the Sports Film: Exploring the Cinematic Construction of Sports Performance,” Sport in Society, 2017, 5. 14. Baker quote via Jaime Schultz, “Glory Road (2006) and the White Savior Historical Sport Film,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 42, no. 4 (2014): 207. Schultz also cites Kusz argument that sports films are “a key cultural site offering images of white people that reproduce the idea of whiteness as the normative way of being in American society.” 15. Garry Whannel, “Winning and Losing Respect: Narratives of Identity in Sport Films,” Sport in Society 11, no. 2–3 (2008): 202. 16. David Rowe, “If You Film It, Will They Come? Sports on Film,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 22, no. 4 (November 1998): 354. 17. Aaron Gordon, “Playmakers, the Show the NFL Killed for Being Too Real,” Vice Sports, Sports, (April 22, 2015). 18. Gordon, “Playmakers, the Show the NFL Killed.” 19. Lawrence A. Wenner, “Media, Sports, and Society: The Research Agenda,” in Media, Sports, and Society (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1989), 27. 20. Wenner, “Media, Sports, and Society.” 21. Wenner, “Media, Sports, and Society.” 22. Ronald Bishop, “The Wayward Child: An Ideological Analysis of Sports Contract Holdout Coverage,” Journalism Studies 6, no. 4 (2005): 445–59, doi:10.1080/14616700500250347. 23. David Rowe, “If You Film It, Will They Come? Sports on Film,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 22, no. 4 (November 1998): 353. 24. Garry Whannel, “Winning and Losing Respect: Narratives of Identity in Sport Films,” Sport in Society 11, no. 2–3 (2008): 198. 25. Whannel, “Winning and Losing Respect,” 199. 26. Viviana A. Zelizer, “How I became a relational economic sociologist and what does that mean?” Politics & Society, 40, no. 2 (2012): 147, accessed October 12, 2015. DOI: 10.1177/0032329212441591. 27. David Rowe, “Play up: Rethinking Power and Resistance in Sport,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 22, no. 3 (August 1998): 243. 28. Rowe, “Play up: Rethinking Power and Resistance in Sport.” 29. Rowe, “Play up: Rethinking Power and Resistance in Sport,” 149. 30. Viviana A. Zelizer, “The price and value of children: The case of children’s insurance. American Journal of Sociology, 86, no. 5 (1981): 1036-1056, accessed October 25, 2015. 31. Zelizer, “The price and value of children,” 1052.
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32. Jonathan Berr, “Most NFL players don’t buy disability insurance.” CBS MoneyWatch, last modified May 16, 2014. 33. William C. Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slaves (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006). 34. Frederick F. Wherry, “The social characterizations of price: The fool, the faithful, the frivolous, and the frugal.” Sociological Theory, 26, (2008): 363, accessed October 12, 2015. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9558.2008. 00334.x 35. Wherry, “The social characterizations of price,” 364. 36. Wherry, “The social characterizations of price,” 368 37. Wherry, “The social characterizations of price.” 38. Wherry, “The social characterizations of price.” 39. Wherry, “The social characterizations of price.” 40. Wherry, “The social characterizations of price,” 363. 41. Wherry, “The social characterizations of price.” 42. Wherry, “The social characterizations of price,” 371. 43. David Rowe, “Play up: Rethinking Power and Resistance in Sport,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 22, no. 3 (August 1998): 248 and Garry Whannel, “Winning and Losing Respect: Narratives of Identity in Sport Films,” Sport in Society 11, no. 2–3 (2008): 201. 44. Garry Whannel, “Winning and Losing Respect: Narratives of Identity in Sport Films,” Sport in Society 11, no. 2–3 (2008): 196. 45. David Machin, Introduction to Multimodal Analysis (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), 5. 46. Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996, 256. 47. Ayodeji Olowu and Susan Olajoke Akinkurolere, “A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Selected Advertisement of Malaria Drugs,” Journal of English Education 3, no. 2 (June 3, 2015): 169; Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (Abingdon: Routledge, 1996), 160. 48. Ruth Wodak, “Fragmented identities: Redefining and recontextualizing,” in Politics as Text and Talk: Analytic approaches to political discourse, ed. by Paul Chilton & Christina Schaffner (Philadelphia: John Benjamins North America, 2002), 149. 49. Wodak, “Fragmented identities.” 50. Julian Farino, “Enter the Temple,” Ballers (Home Box Office, July 24, 2016). 51. Farino, “Enter the Temple.” 52. Julian Farino, “Raise Up,” Ballers (Home Box Office, June 28, 2015). 53. Julian Farino, “Million Bucks in a Bag,” Ballers (Home Box Office, September 18, 2016). 54. Julian Farino, “World of Hurt,” Ballers (Home Box Office, August 7, 2016). 55. David Rowe, “Play up: Rethinking Power and Resistance in Sport,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 22, no. 3 (August 1998): 249. 56. Julian Farino, “Laying in the Weeds,” Ballers (Home Box Office, September 11, 2016). 57. David Rowe, “Play up: Rethinking Power and Resistance in Sport,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 22, no. 3 (August 1998): 249. 58. James Carrier, “Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations: A Maussian View of Exchange,” Sociological Forum 6, no. 1 (1991): 121. 59. Carrier, “Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations.” 60. Carrier, “Gifts, Commodities, and Social Relations,” 124. 61. Julian Farino, “Enter the Temple,” Ballers (Home Box Office, July 24, 2016). 62. Farino, “Enter the Temple” 63. Simon Cellan Jones, “Most Guys,” Ballers (Home Box Office, August 14, 2016). 64. Peter Berg, “Pilot,” Ballers Home Box Office, June 21, 2015). Kuper, “Toxic Masculinity as 65. Simon Cellan Jones, “Laying in the Weeds,” Ballers (Home Box Office, September 11, 2016). 66. Julian Farino, “Game Day,” Ballers (Home Box Office, September 25, 2016).
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67. Farino, “Game Day.” 68. Farino, “Game Day.” 69. Peter Landesman, Concussion, Drama/Sport (Columbia Pictures, 2015). 70. Ibid. The statistics throughout this film are based in research primarily conducted by Dr. Bennet Omalu, Dr. Ann McKee, and other researchers at The CTE Center, located at Boston University School of Medicine. More information on their research is available at www.bu.edu/ cte 71. Julian Farino, “Heads Will Roll,” Ballers (Home Box Office, July 12, 2015). 72. Diana Young, “Fighting Oneself: The Embodied Subject and Films about Sports,” Sport in Society 20, no. 7 (2017): 820. 73. Baker reference via Kyle W. Kusz, “Remasculinizing American White Guys In/Through New Millennium American Sport Films,” Sport in Society 11, no. 2–3 (n.d.): 209. 74. Baker reference via Kusz, “Remasculinizing American White Guys,” 211. 75. Baker reference via Kusz, “Remasculinizing American White Guys, 212-213. 76. Sebastian Byrne, “Actors Who Can’t Play in the Sports Film: Exploring the Cinematic Construction of Sports Performance,” Sport in Society, 2017, 14. 77. Julian Farino, “Game Day,” Ballers (Home Box Office, September 25, 2016). 78. Peter Berg, “Pilot,” Ballers (Home Box Office, June 21, 2015). 79. Simon Cellan Jones, “Saturdaze,” Ballers (Home Box Office, August 21, 2016). 80. Jones, “Saturdaze.” 81. Jones, “Saturdaze.” 82. Simon Cellan Jones, “Everybody Knows,” Ballers (Home Box Office, August 28, 2016). 83. Julian Farino, “Face of the Franchise,” Ballers (Home Box Office, July 17, 2016). 84. Farino, “Face of the Franchise.” 85. Simon Cellan Jones, “Saturdaze,” Ballers (Home Box Office, August 21, 2016). 86. Julian Farino, “Enter the Temple,” Ballers (Home Box Office, July 24, 2016). 87. Farino, “Enter the Temple.” 88. Farino, “Enter the Temple,” 197. 89. R.W. Connell, Gender and Power (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1987); Terry A. Kuper, “Toxic Masculinity as a Barrier to Mental Health Treatment in Prison,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 61, no. 6 (2005): 713–24. 90. David Rowe, “If You Film It, Will They Come? Sports on Film,” Journal of Sport & Social Issues 22, no. 4 (November 1998): 357. 91. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977): 25. 92. Gregory A. Cranmer and Tina M. Harris, “‘White-Side, Strong-Side’: A Critical Examination of Race and Leadership in Remember the Titans,” Howard Journal of Communications 26, no. 2 (2015): 167. 93. Sebastian Byrne, “Actors Who Can’t Play in the Sports Film: Exploring the Cinematic Construction of Sports Performance,” Sport in Society, 2017, 10.
ABSTRACTS
This article explores the intersection of economy, sport and media through a thematic analysis of the first two seasons of HBO’s Ballers, a scripted TV show centered around the financial successes and struggles of professional athletes. Ballers, in the same vein as other sports-themed television shows such as Coach (1989-1997), Arliss (1996-2002), or Friday Night Lights (2006-2011), examine and reproduce certain social practices, turning them into easily digestible discourses which typically reinforce hegemonic norms. In the case of this show, the financial aspects of the game are emphasized, and issues of culture, cost, and community are constantly at
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play. Ballers is defined by the ideologies of professional football, often rooted in toxic masculinity and located at the tension between individual accomplishment and collective victory. Many of the dominant ideologies which operate within the world of football also function within financial institutions, whether in assessing monetary worth, potential risk, or long-term sustainability through investment. The marriage of football and finance on display on Ballers reflects the similar values and ideologies present within both industries.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Political economy, NFL, media studies, cultural studies, sport communication, scripted sport
AUTHOR
COURTNEY COX Courtney M. Cox is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. She is fascinated with the obstacles and opportunities located at the intersections of race, gender, class and sexuality in sport and sports media. She's also intrigued by online dialogues of these intersections across social media platforms and how storytelling is adapted to new media. She previously worked at ESPN, National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate KPCC, and with the Los Angeles Sparks.
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Sport in Films: Symbolism versus Verismo. A France-United States Comparative Analysis
Valérie Bonnet
1 This article is part of a larger study on film genre which started off during a symposium on sports in films organized by Yann Descamps and Daniel. Durbin. The issue tackled in this themed section – the political dimension of the mediated representation of sports – can also be examined though sports films for, as Jean-Michel Frodon underlined: “There is a natural kinship between cinema and the nation which rests on a common mechanism which they are made of – projection.” 1
2 While sport is omnipresent in the American audiovisual landscape – one only has to watch cable networks in the United States or even in France, where American audiovisual productions are also widely broadcast – it is far from being the case as far as the French production is concerned. Some would answer that I am forgetting about soccer’s omnipresence on French television, sports networks such as L’Équipe 21, and movies such as À Mort l’arbitre (Jean-Pierre Mocky, 1984) or Coup de tête (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1979, but that would be putting two different things on the same level, qualitatively and quantitatively. If we focus on the topic of this article, namely movie production, the ratio of fictions dedicated to sports is very superior in North America. Visiting websites which deal with cinema or list movies such as Imdb and others confirms this statement. Moreover, the corpus of scholarly work on the issue is far greater across the Atlantic. Since there is no precise figure to quote, and since it is complex to draw a quantitative comparison between industries which are structured differently, what these studies, rankings and analysis show is the strong dominance of American productions in both French and American rankings. These productions are different. Indeed, it is quite difficult to compare À Mort l’arbitre with Any Given Sunday (Oliver Stone, 1999), only to name a movie French audiences are familiar with. However, both were made by famous critically-acclaimed directors, and both tackle the dark side of these two countries’ most popular sports. While À Mort l’arbitre deals with society’s flaws by highlighting the mistreatment of athletes for the sake of profit, Any
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Given Sunday shows the violence of bewildered fans. The French production often presents some on-field action, and the American one only portrays sports through the penalty kick which sparked controversy and drama. Also, comparing The Run (Charles Olivier Michaud, 2014) – which features the struggle of an athlete facing both social and family issues – with La Ligne droite (Régis Wargnier, 2011) – which tells the story of an ex-convict turned guide for a disabled athlete, and how her new role helps her rebuild herself – brings us to the same conclusions. The part played by sports is not the same: while it is an entry point in American cinema, it is somewhat of an element of contextualization in French cinema.
3 However, there was a wave of films dedicated to sports in these two countries during the same period – the 1920s and 1930s. Those films focused on popular sports whose practice was on the rise in these two societies – namely baseball and football in the United States, and soccer and cycling in France, with both countries sharing a common interest in boxing. During this same period, both nations witnessed the advent of their first sports stars with baseball players such as Babe Ruth, Boxer Jack Dempsey, and football player Red Grange, boxer George Carpentier – who became even more famous after he lost to the much heavier and taller Dempsey due to a fractured hand in the second round –, or cyclist André Leducq and soccer player Marcel Domergue. We shall tackle these different approaches based on aesthetics, socio-economics or ideology. But first of all, we shall define the sports film genre.
Film genre theory
4 Considering the genre as the product of the interaction between a language (in this case, cinema) and an institution (sports), we will question the social existence of the sports film genre (external criterion), and then try to define its attributes and properties (internal criteria). Those criteria, as written previously, include esthetical, ideological and socioeconomic dimensions.
Sports film as a genre
5 Contrary to literature, where genres are associated to some hypertextuality or regulating conventions (to write a sonnet, one must follow specific rules), cinema uses what we shall call a programmed hypertextuality that literature does not elude either if we consider page turners and other serial productions. On another aspect, cinematic genres are usually defined in regard to the relation between the context and the plot.
6 The notion of genre does raise many debates on the different categories as well as criteria to be applied. Thus, American scholarly books offered the following list of famous, identifiable categories: Action, adventure, comedy, crime/gangster, drama, epics/historical, horror, musicals, science fiction, war, westerns.
7 Most of these genres were created at the end of the silent movie era: melodrama, western, horror movies, comedy, action and adventure, from swashbucklers to war movies. Musicals started with the era of talkies, and science fiction films appeared around the 1950s. The rise of the number of films and their diversity, linked to the different audiences, led analysts to come up with subcategories, thus stratifying the genres. These subcategories can also be identified through the narrative scheme – i.e. characters, plot, and context. One of the most referenced categorizations is the one
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formulated by Tim Dirk: biographical films (“biopics”), “chick” flicks (or gal films), detective/mystery films, disaster films, fantasy films, film noir, “guy” films, melodramas or women’s “weepers”, romance films, sports films, supernatural films, or thrillers/suspense films. This website even proposes to subdivide this subdivision: aviation films, buddy films, caper films, chase films, espionage films, “fallen” woman films, jungle films, legal films, martial arts films, medical films, military films, parody films, police films, political films, prison films, religious films, road films, slasher films, swashbucklers, etc.2
8 We notice that the more we get into specific subcategories, the more they are sorted by content. The sports film genre is granted an intermediary status, as the genre is not defined according to its plot or theme. If we take a look at the history of film production, we can see that the “sports film” genre exists in representations and categorizations formulated by popular sources (Wikipedia, Vodcaster, Top100, etc.), as well as institutional ones (an article from the e-Journal USA review edited by the State Department dedicated to film business discussed this topic), or academic ones (Crawford, Erickson, Pearson and al., and Miller).3 Demetrius Pearsons et al. released a quantitative study in which they identified 590 American movies over 65 years that they qualified as “sports films.”4 Several books show the presence of the genre in the field of sports studies, in sociology and history, as well as in film studies. Sports films are often brought up in sociological and historical analysis as representations and constructs of social identities (they are relevant in terms of gender studies and racial studies) or intergroup relations (in the context of the Civil Rights struggle to represent the relations between African-Americans and the white majority, or during the Cold War to tackle the USA-USSR divide), but also as representations of the history of sport itself. In any case, the genre is not studied as such. It is seized as a sui generis reality, while its characteristics virtually stand unquestioned.
Toward Defining Sports Films
9 In his own words, Glen Jones was very ambivalent while trying to define the “sports film” genre.5 Demetrius Pearsons and al. underlined the difficulty in framing this genre because of the variety of themes tackled. Stepghen D. Mosher showed the diversity in plots from comedy to tragedy, romance or satire,6 while Charles Summerlin divided them into mythical, celebratory and biographical “genres.”7 To conclude their studies, these authors wrote the following definition: Our definition of a sport film, or film centrally focused on a sporting theme, consisted of themes or subjects focusing on a team, a sport saga, or a specific sport participant (i.e. athlete, coach, or agent) in which sporting events engaging the participants in athletics were the primary activity of the film and cognitive abilities predefined in a setting of ranking or winning or losing.8
10 However, this definition does not reflect the state of research on this genre, which went beyond a certain kind of tautological definition (for instance, a western takes place in the Western part of America) for, as stated earlier, sport lies at the intermediary level of a definition which implies aspects of the plot and theme. To use a popular saying, one shall not mistake sports films with sports in films.
11 We have to go back to defining the numerous criteria of a film genre. Rick Altman summed up the notion of film genre as it was defined in the literature. He brings out
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the following seven characteristics: a genre has a social function, and it is characterized by a repeating strategy and a cumulative economy which mobilizes a dual structure, some kind of predictability, and privileges intertextual references. These characteristics could be found in sports films: • A dual structure based on a conflict of values leading the audience to focus on one character or the other alternately; the team (including or not the coach) could be considered as one single character. • A repeating strategy: The use of similar shots and stories (see Invictus, Clint Eastwood, 2010), the creation of a genre iconography (with slow-motion sequences in track and field, boxing clubs filled with smoke and dust at dusk, footing on the beach, and triumphing home runs in baseball), conflicts solved by the same outcomes and messages (knowing the other, winning through facing obstacles together, going through adversity), i.e. every ideological dimension of sports in films. • A cumulative economy: The movies follow an inter- and intra-textual serial strategy, i.e. they accumulate gags, scenes of panic; they accumulate goals, points and dunks through pulsing editing.9 • Predictability: The pleasure in the genre lies in the reaffirming of conventions which the audience knows and identifies in the film, i.e. the positive value of sports. • A tendency for intertextual references: Sports films feature multiple references to great people and episodes in sports history, through the names of characters, cameos and so on.10 Identifying them calls for a solid knowledge of sports history. • A symbolic dimension attached to sounds, situations and images: The strong reconciliatory dimension in Remember the Titans (Boaz Yakin, 2001) and Invictus are materialized through final handshakes or hugs, while surpassing oneself and one’s condition in boxing films is symbolized by the use of meat as hitting bags in Rocky 2. • A social function allowing to fictionally resolve cultural or situational conflicts which society cannot settle.11 We can name racial reconciliation (Glory Road, James Gartner, 2006), self- respect and teamwork (Coach Carter, Thomas Carter, 2005), victory over adversity (We Are Marshall, Christophe Beck, 2006), the possibility of making dreams come true (Invincible, Ericson Core, 2006), or the victory of (sports) values over (sports) commoditization (Any Given Sunday, 1999).
12 However, this set of characteristics does not provide formal features which could be heuristic for our purpose. Rick Altman proposes a definition which synthetizes the generic definitions founded on common traits (called semantic elements), and the generic definitions founded on relationships between placeholders (called syntax). Beyond the fact that this generic definition is unanimously accepted, the reason why we chose it is that it is not only based on the issue of theme, but also on construction, structural (syntactic) criteria which are linked to the part played by a genre within society.12 If semantic criteria belong to social codes and representation, syntactic criteria support/structure the genre, its grammar, and meaning.
13 For instance, western films are characterized by their characters, settings, filming modes, and how these elements epitomize certain ideas of the wilderness and civilization (through the relations between the characters, between characters and places, to name a few). Thanks to this definition, we consider the existence of an autonomous “sports film” genre.13 Beyond the film’s format (a narrative) and length (a full-length film), the semantic criteria defined by Altman also apply to the characters (coaches/athletes), the actors’ performances (realism, physical play, physical and psychological performances
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as the athlete showcases a competitive frame of mind), the soundtrack (in situ or media announcing as well as cheers and applauses from the crowd during sports scenes).14
14 The syntactic criteria are the following: • Narrative strategy: drama/comedy in relation to the athletic performance and life lesson taught through the movie. Thus, if we refer to popular categories on the “sports movies” Wikipedia page, these movies are mainly classified as metagenre – dramas and comedies, with biopics as the third, less important category.15 • Team/narrative relations: The unfolding story is linked to the team’s cohesiveness, i.e. the athlete(s)-coach(es) relation. The story follows the physical and psychological evolution of the characters and their close circles. • Sport/narrative relation: Sport is an active agent in the production of meaning around the team’s cohesiveness (failure, success and the reasons why they happened). • Narrative/sport cycle relation: Practices and competitions are shown alternately as narrative stages which highlight a climax in every sequence. • Image/sound relation: This follows the hierarchy between preparation and actualization. The truly narrative moments are not the sports scenes, which are often summed up through a short, fast-paced video clip with music following an energetic regimen.16
15 As explained in note #13, this list of criteria needs a few adjustments to be applied to sports films. The semantic criteria are more or less shared – sporting characters, emblematic locations such as stadiums, the sporting props, paradigmatic situations such as competitions – but the syntactic criteria seem to differ in both countries.
Is the “Sports Film” an American Genre?
16 As perceived as such, the “sports film” genre was only illustrated by American examples. It was also the case in the institutional and academic analyses quoted earlier and it would tend to prove the genre’s Americanness. Indeed, the genre does not seem to have been adopted by other cultures, even though other countries and geographical zones have produced their own genres such as the martial art film in South-East Asia, or the lucha pelicula in Mexico. However, another criterion comes into play in regard to the definition of sports practices: the institutional framework.17 Nolwenn Mingant’s work tends to validate this hypothesis: to globalize their productions, the majors would avoid promoting sports films as a strategy, or at least they would maintain them as low- budget productions targeting the local, national market.18 A series of socioeconomic and sociocultural explanations upholds this idea.19
The Studio Policy
17 Far from the artistic views of early French cinema or the curiosity aroused by the magic screen, the first broadcasting of sporting events took place in the 1890s, and they had commercial purposes. The expanding cinema industry used sport – which was itself on the rise. The “sports film” genre was a product of studio policy by definition. Andrew Miller showed that the 1926-1941 period witnessed the success of “American college sports movies.”20 He underlined that Hollywood’s interest in sports films, and especially football films, was based on this pastime’s popularity and made it an attractive subject. In the meantime, the newly institutionalized sports world found in cinema an opportunity to be broadcast to larger audiences.21 Because of smaller social barriers
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between genders than in boxing or baseball, football movies could attract female audiences: the relationships between girls (cheering for their boyfriends) and boys were mapping out the storylines. Moreover, college football – a WASP, upper-class sport – become democratic and open to other socio-economic groups. This phenomenon gave another opportunity to sell plots showing poor students dealing with the social gap separating them from their teams and classmates. Most of all, it was another opportunity to attract a broader audience.22
18 During this period, the birth of the first sports stars – Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Knute Rockne, Red Grange – became a source of inspiration for the athletic American Dream, and it caught the attention of the studios: numerous successful athletes and Olympic champions appeared in films as themselves or in different parts.23 As Seán Crosson (2014) underlines: Such recognizable sporting figures in some cases added considerably to the appeal of the films in which they appeared, particularly “assigning low-keyed films a magnetic box office attraction they would never otherwise have had” (Umphlett, 1984: 29).24
19 During the 1940s, these appearances turned into real parts, and several biopics dedicated to sporting figures were shot – Knut Rockne, All American (Lloyd Bacon, 1940), Gentleman Jim (Raoul Walsh, 1942), The Pride of the Yankees (Sam Wood, 1942). Steve Neale considers that these biopics are a linking cycle between sports considered as “an instance of popular culture to wartime populism and to martial values like fighting spirit, tactical awareness and the acceptance of loss and occasional defeat.”25 Then, the decline of sports films – which occurred in the 1960s according to Pearson et al. – coincided with the decline of the studios’ industrial strategy.
The Role of Sports in American Society
20 In American society, organized sport was actually an institution with a strong social dimension. Between the 1870s and the 1940s, sports became the most popular cultural activity in the United States. Basketball was invented, college football turned into a mass spectacle, and baseball reached the status of America’s pastime. Sports also became part of educational curricula, a phenomenon illustrated by Gary Dickerson’s emphasis on the importance of baseball as a tool for social integration teaching American values. 26 Both promoters and athletes linked countless virtues to it, defending the need for sports to assure the individual’s vitality and the nation’s grandeur through often- ideological speeches. Nowadays, the belief in sports’ social role is still lasting: it is thought to bolster the teaching of and respect for values which are essential to Americanness, such as competitiveness, equal opportunities, or social mobility. These are widely spread in society, and they solidify a close relation with “the imagined community who founded the nation.”27 The EJ (e-Journal USA) issue dedicated to the film industry underlines the role played by sports in institutional representations: Sports are part of the very fabric of American life, discourse, and lexicon [...]. The centrality of sports in American life is amply reflected in contemporary American cinema, (with) films featuring virtually every major sport, from football, basketball, baseball, and hockey, to boxing, horse racing, and even surfing.28
21 Cinema mirrors social issues. As Miller wrote, this is why college football films appeared in 1930s America, especially because of scholarships being more and more available to students from lower classes. The plots echoed the potential role of football
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as social equalizer (see above). As a college sport mostly played by middle-class young men who happened to go to the movies, football was perceived as a modern industrial sport. This trend increased, leading to football dethroning baseball during the 1950s, a sport that was considered older and more rural but whose success was attached to its Americanness.29 As western movies interpret the opposition and complementarity of the wilderness and civilization – one of the US’s founding myths – sport films work on the duality and complementarity of the individual and the group, whatever the extend of this one – from the athlete/coach couple to wider communities such as a team, a college, a village, or a nation.
Myth and Community-Building Sports
22 As a form of entertainment and social and cultural development, sport was also one of the great 20th-century myth-builders according to authors, as it gave birth to the then- famous athletic American Dream.30 While sports and cinema were perceived as two tools for social integration in a period of immigration, they mixed in a film genre which gained more popularity during the Great Depression. We can see that through the growing number of people practicing community-building sports such as football (the first team sport to be featured in a movie), baseball, and basketball. The sports most featured on the big screen were boxing (140), football (87), car racing (80), and baseball (72). They made up for about two thirds of sports films which were produced from 1930 to 1995. Basketball was featured in 27 movies – 20 of them being produced since 1970, while its number of players rose. Sports sociology finds in sports films a showcase of representations built by the American society for itself, as well as an entry point to examine and analyze its culture. Once more, institutional articles illustrate this, as the E Journal USA review clearly underlined: “Reflecting Americans’ love for sports of all kinds, U.S. filmmakers turn repeatedly to sports themes to convey messages much larger than the stories themselves.”31 Pearsons et al. 32 showed that, as prisms of the American culture, the scenarii and tones of sports films matched the social issues of their times: selflessness and character-building in the 1930s, hyperpatriotism and nationalism in the 1940s and 1950s, democratization and social awareness, as well as the rise of counter culture leading to the decline of traditional sports such as football and even boxing as a symbol of hope for social mobility33 during the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of antiheroes and non-ethical practices as well as the microcosmic representation of society in the 1980s and 1990s.34 Thus, Andrei Markovitz showed that the American identity was partly built upon “its” sports – meaning its three main sports allowing a distinction from England as they were local adaptations of English sports – baseball for cricket, football for rugby – or creation of their own practices in the case of basketball.35 In fact, the three most quoted subgenres within the sports film category are football films, baseball films, and boxing films.36 Altman defined the notion of generic community based on the common acceptance of a label attached to a group of films, this label implying that the audience shared a view on the world.37 It is unquestionably the case with American sports films, as their very existence is acknowledged by scholars and audiences who at least share a common view on the part played by sports in American society and culture.
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A French School or an Authorial Logic?
23 The French situation is for the more different. If we consider so-called sports films, there are way less productions, and among these, we find social critics such as À Mort l'arbitre, tall stories which vaguely tackle sports such as Les Fous du stade (Claude Zidi, 1972), aesthetic projects such as Zidane, un portrait du XXIe siècle (Philippe Parreno, Douglass Gordon, 2004), and biopics such as Édith et Marcel (Claude Lelouch, 1982). In regard to the diversity of these films, it is difficult to unite them within a single genre. Moreover, they are rarely described as “sports films”, for sport often serves as background, a reference to lower classes through soccer and cycling, or is used as a part of the characters’ construct – a Southerner will play rugby, while a tenacious character will practice a sport which requires stamina. Going back to Altman’s criteria, those elements do not hold any particular meaning in the inner structure of the text. However, sport is far from being totally missing in French society and films, as we noted earlier. As it was the case in the United States, the golden age of sports in France took place between the two World Wars: French sport was then celebrated in novels, poems, and statues, and it became an important part of French society.38 Similarly, popular sports such as cycling and soccer were praised in films as they allowed to build the myth of a French sports culture.39 The reasons for the non-creation of this genre in the French context lie elsewhere.
The Absence of Studio Policy and a Weak Production in the Genre
24 The first reason is the absence of a studio policy. France does not follow an industrial cultural strategy like the United States as explained by Raphaëlle Moine: “In this context, which is different from the studios’, the process of genre-building also goes through expansion, but it adds new traits and characteristics, sometimes derived from a mix of national elements and American ones, to existing, national genres.”40 The notion is not clearly framed in the context of the French market. Thus, so-called “boxing films” refer to both comic fictions and broadcastings of bouts in theaters in the two weeks following the events.41
25 Pierre Sorlin wrote that there is only one genre we could qualify as a French genre: police films, also called “gangster movies” or “French film noir” which were made over four decades with an insistence on inter-individual relations, a particular care for the description of the atmosphere, and a pessimistic tone, to name a few.42 The model for genre-creating in Hollywood – with a strategy of studio organization and competition between companies – or in the cultural spaces of an autonomous cinema production strong enough to digest outer influences is different from the one in non-autonomous cinema productions caring to maintain a cultural identity and resist the American cinema dominance since World War I and also during the 1950s.43 The concept of school or école was born during this period, establishing cinema as an art form, away from American industrial ways, even though French cinema pondered following the American industrial model when it tried to recapture its lost dominance. Critics were working on the rise of productions linking artistic success with national identity (réussite artistique et identité nationale), based on the heritage and reappropriation of French authors and masterpieces.44 This cinéma des nations lasted until the 1930s and was also followed by authorial logics mostly highlighted by the Nouvelle Vague. Movies
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were then rated on the basis of an individual view, the director’s, as he/she influenced the film’s characters, aesthetic, and atmosphere with his/her vision: “As they wanted to be seen as authors and not mere film makers, French directors remained aloof from genres which would hurt their reputation.”45 As a result, the authorial logic undoubtedly went before the genre logic, making Million Dollar Baby (2005) a Clint Eastwood movie more than a boxing film in the eyes of spectators, while this genre already existed in France (see below).
A Despicable Object
26 Refering to Rick Altman’s criteria, we shall consider the issue of reception. As Pierre Sorlin wrote, the French spectator is actually “less film-addict than film-amateur” (moins cinéphage que cinéphile46), while genre films are considered undignified by the French. Sport is also considered as undignified in the French collective imagination. Films tackling sports are often used as an opportunity to denigrate a stupefying, corrupted environment, as in À Mort l’arbitre, Coup de tête or Le Vélo de Guislain Lambert (Philippe Harel, 2001). This phenomenon dates back to a long time, since La Fausse maîtresse (André Cayatte, 1942) showed how rugby kept men away from their homes and made them neglect their wives, and Rue des prairies (Denys de La Patellière, 1959) denounced the corrupted world of professional cycling. Very far from myth-building, symbols, and an emphasis on the values of sports, French movies reveal distrust toward sports – which can be seen in books by Jean-Marie Brohm and Marc Perelman47 – as well as toward genre films. Thus, French commentators prefer categorizing boxing films – an American subgenre which experienced somewhat of a golden era in France – as films noirs over sports films.48 More generally, the French specialists in film genres do not take it into account, even as a subgenre.
27 In a context encouraging the denunciation of athletes’ misbehaviors – from soccer players wandering to doping scandals in cycling and corruption in any sports federation – sport is clearly not a topic the French film industry would capitalize on. Moreover, even though movies do often highlight its values, sport does not have a nation-building power, as the French situation calls for identifying to a national identity rather than an identity in the process of being constructed49. Furthermore, it is difficult to consider soccer as a national pastime, popular though it is, for it was imported for England. Often despised, sports became a pretext to burlesque in movies showing some amateur totally lacking mastery over a sport and winning by mistake, as is the case in Tati’s sports parodies (Oscar champion de tennis, 1932). Also, in early films, boxing is often part of a comic narrative (Soigne ton gauche, René Clément, 1936).
A Genre with no Structuring Language
28 These examples show the lack of compatibility with the genre’s syntax. If the serial logic as well as the David-against-Goliath duel narrative are to be found in these films, the symbolic dimension of sports – or at least its social function – is often tarnished, as we have seen. In the absence of any genre logic, there are also only a few intertextual references. But above all, as it is left aside by film enthusiasts, sports predictability is not compatible with films which – for writing purposes – are built on luck as the main source for comedy as well as the best way to reproduce the glorious uncertainty of sports on the big screen.50 More generally, if we focus on great movements following
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the cinéma des nations’ aesthetic realism, Truffaut’s Qualité française and the Nouvelle Vague, we note that both these two movements’ film grammars were not compatible with sports. The former was based on dialogues, while the latter was based on studio- making, settings, scriptwriting, adaptations, and costumes. They did not match sports’ modernity and need for outdoor action. The last movement was based on a light technical setting and it excluded realism. Once more, this did not allow the recreating and filming of the sports spectacle, which often calls for a heavier setting.51 These explanations mirror the American situation. As it does not follow a serial logic, and denounces sports and their political use, the French socio-economic and intellectual context does not favor the exploitation of sports films. The films mentioned above follow a formal approach more than a symbolic one. François Amy de la Bretèque underlined that the spectacle of sport – being it the Tour de France or a rugby match – came first, while the performance and its symbolic dimension only came second in terms of value in the first films featuring sports heroes.52
Beyond these Explanations
29 After comparing the roles played by sports in the media and cultures of two societies sharing strong and connected film cultures, we should also tackle the difference between emotions which are conveyed through sports and films.53 Indeed, as Moine underlined, “film genres bear with them and within them the mark of other literary or spectacular genres with which they sometimes share a degree of vagueness or preciseness.”54 In the case of our study, the notion of spectacular genre would refer to sports contests – mediatized or not. This explains the different importance granted to sports films in the French and American cultures: when in the American culture, sports films belong to a genre, in France, they form a more or less heterogeneous collection. The criteria for making these films are diverse. Critics (such as Les cahiers du cinema) and academic reviews as well as testimonies from actors and spectators bring up a systematic comparison between films and sports broadcasting which always ends up in favor of the latter, as the poetic dimension is not associated with cinema in that regard. This view was already shared in the 1920s and 1930s when the then-recurring use of game action in film editing was born.55 Representational movies gathered actors and professional athletes, and strong ties were built between the film and sports industries. 56 For instance, Descoins, scriptwriter of Le Roi de la pédale (Maurice Champreux, 1925), was a former sportswriter, and the chosen actors – Biscot, Préjean, and Gabin to a lesser extent – turned more or less professional. On the contrary, Carpentier shot his own biopic in as early as 1914 (Le roman de Carpentier) before starting his career as an actor once he hung up his gloves, to reenact his making as a boxer. Images of his fights were sometimes edited with images from the films. As a movie unanimously acclaimed by the rugby-loving community, La Grande passion (André Hugon, 1928) owed its success to the help of the Stade Toulousain club, players and international players who wrote and shot the movie. The French strategy of verismo does not match the genre system as it is linked with symbolism. Indeed, what makes the value of sports films and also allows to attract audiences other than aficionados – as it is the case with The Endless Summer (Bruce Brown, 1968) – is the status of sports as an omnibus subject, as Pierre Bourdieu wrote.57 The French audience is looking for a filmed sports contest, while the American audience is more attached to the symbolic and cultural dimension of sports. Therefore, so-called cheerleading films can be categorized within the sports film genre.58
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In a way, the sports film genre implies another discourse on sports which allow real or fictitious storytelling through the values attached to sport in realistic or humanistic movies from mainstream productions. While French spectators do not find this in films, they do find it in sports reporting, as reporters never miss an opportunity to teach life lessons.
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Crawford, Scott A. “The Sport Film—Its Cultural Significance.” Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, 59 (6), 1988: 45-49.
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Leger, Grindon. “Body and Soul: The Structure of Meaning in the Boxing Film Genre,” Cinema Journal, 35 (4), 1996: 54-69.
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Meyer, Jean-Christophe. “Ballon rond et grand écran : de l’indigence d’un palmarès.” In Football, Europe et régulations, édité par Guillaume Robin, Villeneuve d’Ascq : Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2011 : 213-223.
Nolwenn, Mingant. “Entre mondial et local : le jeu d’équilibriste des majors hollywoodiennes,” Revue de recherche en civilisation américaine, 1, 2009.
Moine, Raphaëlle. Les genres du cinéma. Paris : Armand Colin, 2002.
Mosher, Stephen D. “The white dreams of god: the mythology of sport films.” In Arena Review, 7 (2), 1983: 15-19.
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Perelman, Marc. Le Sport barbare: critique d'un fléau mondial. Paris: Editions Michalon, 2012.
Pope, Steven, W. “Negotiating the "Folk Highway" of the Nation: Sport, Public Culture and American Identity, 1870-1940.” In Journal of Social History, 27 (2), 1993: 327-340.
Rowe, David. “If you film it, will they come? Sports on Film.” In Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 22 (4), 1998: 350-359.
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Sorlin, Pierre. “Le cinéma français a-t-il échappé à la tentation des genres ?” In Le Cinéma français face aux genres, Raphäelle Moine (ed.), Paris: Association Française de Recherche sur l'Histoire du Cinéma, 2005: 15-24.
Summerlin, Charles. T. “The Athletic hero in film and fiction.” In Sports in American society, edited by William J. Baker and John M. Caroll, Saint Louis, River City, 1983: 77-87.
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Vernier, Jean-Marc. “Nouvelle forme scénique des jeux TV.” In Quaderni, 4, 1988 : 57-63.
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ENDNOTES
1. “Il existe une affinité de nature entre cinéma et nation, qui repose sur un mécanisme commun, qui les constitue l’un et l’autre : la projection.” Jean-Michel Frodon, “La projection nationale: cinéma et nation,” Cahiers de médiologie, 3, 1998: 135. 2. Tim Dirks, Film Genres.
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American baseball teams and stars, movies, magazines, and radio programs, brought Canada close to the USA in the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Concerning Australia, R. Fotheringham is very cautious about Australian sports films. He demonstrates that there are few movies dedicated to sport in the Australian film industry – these productions trying to erase the Australian roots from their plots for exportation purposes. The most part of the corpus brought up by this author is made of racing movies, which are borderline cases – races are considered as a game more than a sport; see # 16. Nowadays, there is a proper film industry in both these countries, partly producing sports films dedicated respectively to ice skating/hockey and surfing, but deeply rooted in the American seminal production. For the sake of the comparison, we shall focus on the USA. 20. Andrew C. Miller, “The American Dream Goes to College: The Cinematic Student Athletes of College Football,” The Journal of Popular Culture, 43 (6), 2010. 21. Andrew C. Miller, “The American Dream Goes to College: The Cinematic Student Athletes of College Football,” 1226. 22. Altman underlines: “As genres gain coherence and win audiences, their influence in all aspect of the cinema experience grows. For production teams, generic norms provide a welcome template facilitating rapid delivery of quality film products. Screen-writers increasingly conceive their efforts in relation to the plot formulas and character types associated with regular genres.” (Altman, “Cinema and genre.” The Oxford History of World Cinema, 1996, 276). 23. See James E. Bryant and Mary Mc Elroy, Sociological dynamics of sport and exercise (Englewood: Morton Publishing Company, 1997). 24. Seán Crosson, “All this must come to an end. Through talking: dialogue and troubles cinema,” in The Crossings of Art: Aesthetics and Culture in Ireland, Ruben Moi, Charles Armstrong, and Brynhildur Boyce (Eds.). Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014. 25. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood, London and New York, Routledge, 2000, 54. 26. Gary E Dickerson, The cinema of baseball: Images of America, 1929-1989 (Westport: Meckler, 1991). 27. Peter Marquis, “La balle et la plume,” Transatlantica, 2, 2011.
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nouveaux, ou eux-mêmes dérivés d’un mélange d’éléments nationaux et d’éléments américains.” Raphaëlle Moine, Les genres du cinéma (Paris : Armand Colin, 2002), 137. 41. These “film rights” were quite important in the cinema economy. 42. Pierre Sorlin, “Le cinéma français a-t-il échappé à la tentation des genres ?” in Le Cinéma français face aux genres, dir. Raphäelle Moine (Paris : Association Française de Recherche sur l’Histoire du Cinéma, 2005). 43. As soon as it was shot, Le roi de la pédale was promoted by both the cinema and sports press as an answer from the French to American cinema. 44. Christophe Gauthier, “Le cinéma des nations: invention des écoles nationales et patriotisme cinématographique (années 1910–années 1930),” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 4, 2004, 62. 45. “Les réalisateurs français, soucieux d’être considérés comme des auteurs et non comme de simples metteurs en images se sont tenus éloignés des genres qui nuiraient à leur réputation.” Pierre Sorlin, “Le cinéma français a-t-il échappé à la tentation des genres?” 21. Authors as well as actors were reluctant to be associated with a single genre for those same reasons. 46. Pierre Sorlin, “Le cinéma français a-t-il échappé à la tentation des genres ?” 22-23. 47. Jean-Marie Brohm, Les meutes sportives : critique de la domination (Paris : Editions L’Harmattan, 1993). Marc Perelman, Le sport barbare: critique d'un fléau mondial (Paris: Editions Michalon, 2012). 48. Even though boxing movies share some characteristics with films noirs such as those tackled earlier, and preferring urban settings, categorizing these movies as such means approaching them differently – just as much as considering Raging Bull a M. Scorcese movie and not a boxing movie would be. As social psychology showed, the way we categorize things reflects our view on the world. 49. Thus, Stanislas Frenkiel (“Larbi Ben Barek, Marcel Cerdan et Alfred Nakache : icônes de l'utopie impériale dans la presse métropolitaine (1936-1944) ?”, Staps, 80, 99-113) showed North African athletes were the objects of an indétermination catégorielle allowing to homogenize Alfred Nakache, Larbi Ben Barek and Marcel Cerdan in terms of identity, the press introducing them as French from 1936 to 1942, thus reflecting the imperial logic. On the other hand, sports only became part of the curricula to complete hygienist goals, even though Republican gym societies were also conveying Patriotic values. 50. François Amy de la Bretèque, “De Biscot à Gabin, les héros sportifs dans le cinéma français, évolution du système du vedettariat et trajectoire d’héroïsation (1925 - 1965),” in Montrer le sport, photographie, cinéma, télévision, dir. Laurent Véray et Pierre Simonet, (Paris : Les Cahiers de l’INSEP, 2000). 51. French directors actually often linked the limits to the representation of sports in films with a lack of technical and financial means. 52. François Amy de la Bretèque, “De Biscot à Gabin,” 93. 53. See Dominique Sipière, ed., Cinéma américain et théories françaises: images critiques croisées, Revue française d’études américaines, 2 (88), 2001. 54. “Les genres cinématographiques portent avec eux et en eux la marque d’autres genres, littéraires ou spectaculaires, dont ils partagent parfois le degré d’indétermination ou de précision.” Raphaëlle Moine, Les genres du cinéma, 24. 55. See the “Rugby et cinema” section in Midi Olympique Magazine, 143, May 2012, 50-51. 56. Another aspect in the comparison with sports is the idea of a competition between films and sports: A racer arguably told Biscot, the leading role in Le roi de la pédale: “I don’t like cinema, it does the real Tour de France wrong” (Je n’aime pas le cinéma, ça fait du tort au vrai tour de France). See François Amy de la Bretèque, “De Biscot à Gabin,” 92. 57. Pierre Bourdieu, Sur la télévision (Paris: Liber, 1996), 16. 58. The genre’s commercial exploitation is second to the audience’s expectations.
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ABSTRACTS
As sport does, cinema stands as a powerful tool for identifying and projecting oneself. After having defined the “sports film” genre, this study shows how it seems to be a product of American culture. Through a systematic comparison between French and American films, this paper highlights the different axiologies envisioned through these productions by audiences from both sides of the Atlantic – for ideological and aesthetic reasons.
INDEX
Mots-clés: Sports films, France, United States, film genre, sports values.
AUTHOR
VALÉRIE BONNET Valérie Bonnet is a linguist, and a discourse analyst. She is an associate professor in Information and Communication and a researcher at the LERASS (Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse 3) as a member of team Psycom (social psychology of communication). Her research focuses on sports broadcasting as well as the political, activist discourse within the African-American community and the media representation of minorities.
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Varia
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From Rocky (1976) to Creed (2015): “musculinity”1 and modesty
Clémentine Tholas
Forty years ago, in 1976, moviegoers discovered a 29-year old kind-hearted thug whose only way out of the Philadelphian rough districts was boxing. Rocky – film and character – was the brainchild of Sylvester Stallone, who managed to convince director John Avildsen and producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler to both shoot a script written by a penniless actor and hire him as the main lead. In 1977, Rocky was nominated for ten Academy Awards and ended up winning the award for “best picture”, making Stallone a star overnight. Six sequels to the original movie have come out since – Rocky II (1979), Rocky III–The Eye of the Tiger (1982), Rocky IV (1985), Rocky V (1990), Rocky Balboa (2006), and Creed (2015). Today the Rocky franchise has become such a global cultural phenomenon that almost everyone is familiar with the line “Yo, Adrian” or the Rocky steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the Benjamin Franklin parkway. The last film was directed by young Ryan Coogler. It shifts the focus from Rocky to Adonis Creed, the son of late boxing champion Apollo Creed as well as Rocky’s new protégé. A second Creed movie is expected to be made by the Coogler- Stallone duo and released in 2017, thus continuing the seemingly never-ending series, with Adonis appearing as the new torch-bearer when the light of Balboa dims after being diagnosed with cancer.2 This article discusses how Rocky Balboa should not be interpreted as a muscular super- fighter but as a humble character, a simple “bum from the neighborhood”. Both Stallone and Avildsen have underscored the humility and decency of Rocky as what made him such an endearing hero: “Rocky has a lot of issues, a lot of problems. He is like all of us” (Stallone); “On the second and the third page, the guy is talking to his turtle, and I was charmed” (Avildsen).3 My approach is related to new readings of Stallone introduced by Chris Holmlund, editor of The Ultimate Stallone Reader. She explains that Stallone studies appeared in the 1980s with the groundbreaking works of Yvonne Tasker and Susan Jeffords on the notions of “musculinity” and the “hard body”, but only gained full academic recognition in the 2010s after the 2008 SCMS conference in Philadelphia, during which scholars offered a vision of Stallone as a one-man-band
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(performer, screenwriter, director, producer), breaking free from the brawny action hero image he has been reduced to for many decades.4 In response to Valerie Walkerdine and Chris Holmlund’s views of Stallone as the image of working-class combative masculinity challenging oppression and longing for mastery,5 here I analyze how Rocky’s social, emotional and physical fragility is increased throughout the series of films. It is interesting to consider Rocky as a romanticized vision of the working class in which success and money corrupt the natural man, a perspective introduced by Peter Biskind and Barbara Ehrenreich; they interpret the working class as depoliticized in the 1970s productions but sexualized and connected with conflictual images of hard and impulsive but also soft and sentisized masculinities.6 The different films mingle violent manliness with emotive power and emphasize the gentleness of the character who needs to toughen up if he wants to survive in a world ruled by ferocity, exploitation and manipulation. Yet, Rocky, albeit presented as a rough action hero, stands out thanks to his gullibility and mildness. I argue that the articulation between the action genre and the development of Rocky in the films is paradoxical. The serial pattern gradually constructs a character whose delicate virility and brittleness make him a more likeable and thoughtful hero. If Rocky has sometimes been read as a white man who fights to regain his declining power, this paper examines how Rocky’s vulnerability shapes him as a better man and not as a super champion. It addresses the soft side of masculinity and the treatment of modesty and sensitivity in the Rocky saga which seems to restructure the American action man as an unthreatening demure hero.
Rituals and Rebirth
Each film presents Rocky, or his new alter-ego Adonis, fighting both for a professional distinction and a personal motivation. Two films have been directed by John Avildsen, four by Sylvester Stallone (who also penned six screenplays in the series), while Creed was directed and written by Ryan Coogler. Boxer Rocky Balboa is surrounded by a close circle of relatives and other boxers composed of Adrian, his wife (Talia Shire), Paulie Pennino, his brother-in-law (Burt Young), Mickey Goldmill, his old coach (Burgess Meredith), Robert, Rocky’s son, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) and Tony “Duke” Evers (Tony Burton). Other characters are periodically introduced as the nemesis whom the hero will have to defeat. Rocky’s life evolves in limited settings, for example his South Philly neighborhood in the Italian district; his apartment or house; his gym and training locations; and finally, the boxing rings, thus centering the plot on specific iconic places laden with meaning for a character who seems to be set in his ways. Eric Litchenfeld defines Rocky as “an extension (or manifestation) of his environment”, stressing the strong connections between his identity, his feelings and his personal geography.7 Even when displaced in other locales for new challenges, for instance California, Russia, or England, Rocky sticks to a temporal, geographical, or emotional routine that enables him to defy hardships Scholars found that the series uses similar plotlines, tropes and characters: Rocky is repeatedly faced with a challenge related to personal failings, economic problems, family issues, or the loss of a loved one (Adrian & Apollo). The only way he can overcome these trials is to fight an opponent who incarnates Balboa’s fears and frustrations (Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago, Tommy “The Machine Gunn”,
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Mason “the Line” Dixon). The character’s life is a perpetual battle in and out of the ring and Rocky always has “to go the distance” – as his coach Mickey says – through a hostile external world, different from his usual surroundings. According to Marianne Kac-Vergne, as in any action movie the hero seeks to regain his dignity through a struggle against those who have humiliated him.8 Creed recycles the same formula as young Adonis Creed can only make a name for himself by fighting British heavyweight champion Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew). Both Rocky and Adonis are confronted with internal and external threats, because they are enemies to their success as much as their opponents are. The two characters illustrate Chris Holmund’s idea that introspection and personal dilemmas are key ingredients to Stallone’s films because he tends to “foreground emotional interests” and “keep the action personal,”9 the muscles only serving a nobler cause. Most films of the series use a repetitive pattern and integrate images from the previous films in the introduction, and utilize numerous flashbacks as well. The original saga should be seen as “one big movie”,10 presenting the evolution of Rocky Balboa from the moment he leaves street life to prove his value as a professional boxer to his retirement and new career as a trainer of younger boxers. The first cycle, and each film within it, could thus appear as a simple story of rise, fall, and rise. The second cycle, heralded by Rocky V, is more complicated because Rocky has moved on to a new stage in life and acknowledges his position as an obsolete boxer turned into a restaurant owner whose come-back on the ring is quite strange. In Rocky Balboa, his restaurant appears as a time capsule in which memories of the past are accumulated and illustrate the discrepancy between the flamboyant fighter Rocky was and the aging man he is now. In 1993, Frank Ardolino presented the first cycle of the Rocky series as a “rebirth narrative” and a “narrative of sameness,”11 using the repetition of key scenes and motifs in order to intertwine the past, the present, and the future because the past serves as a driving force to change what is to happen while the efforts in the present allow Rocky to redeem past mistakes.12 These comments also apply to the new cycle because each film is about the constant resurrection of Rocky when he is on the verge of “throwing in the towel” for good. From the very first film, the saga deals with the end of Rocky’s career because the 29-year old underdog was never supposed to become the heavyweight champion. Nina Schnieder demonstrates that age is a major hindrance in the entire series because Rocky is repeatedly too old to make it and out of place in the major league. The seven films show that Rocky is never fit to fight and that, normally, his best option should be remaining in the corner or retiring. Yet, against all odds, he always wins, directly or indirectly.13 Interestingly, while aging is a challenge to many actresses in Hollywood who have difficulties embracing their aging, it seems that for Stallone and his fantasy alter ego, Rocky, advancing age is a way to keep the franchise profitable by creating a soft super hero. Each time, Rocky is offered an opportunity to start anew and change his fate, by fighting himself or having another character trigger his will power (Adrian or his son), or helping other boxers for the cause of outcasts (Tommy Gunn, Adonis Creed). In Rocky V, during a press conference, he tells his son “Having you is like being born again”. The idea of resurrection is crucial to the entire series because in each film Rocky comes back as a new man with new challenges and a new form of knowledge. The link between both cycles of films is also built on the recurrence of “ritualistic training sequences” orchestrated as a repetition with variations “to illustrate both difference from the past and continuity with it.”14 These sequences are probably the
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most awaited moments for the audience because they concentrate on the pain and efforts of Rocky to become someone better and to prepare to win. For example, in Rocky and Rocky II, the hero keeps the same training locations (the industrial wasteland, the Italian market, the slaughterhouse, the museum steps), an almost identical outfit, the grey track suit, the old converse shoes, the snow hat. However, in Rocky II, “the Italian Stallion” is now clumsily written on the back of his sweatshirt, and he doesn’t run alone but rather is waved at by people in the streets and followed by hordes of children who cheer him. This solitary training becomes a collective effort to support the champion who has won everyone’s heart. In the next installments, Bill Conti’s signature theme “Gonna Fly Now” is replaced by other tunes (ex: “The Eye of the Tiger” in Rocky III, “Burning Heart” in Rocky IV, both by the band Survivor), but reintroduced in Rocky Balboa as a reference to the spirit of the original film. The sixth installment also reactivates the same elements as the first two films, including the dog as a running companion, expect that this time Rocky is getting older and struggles much more. In Rocky III and IV, Rocky’s training is transferred to other locations such as the slums of Los Angeles, cradle of Apollo, or the Russian tundra, to take the character out of his comfort zone and make him tougher through destabilization. In Rocky V and Creed, Rocky becomes the trainer of Tommy and then Adonis. First, he tries in vain to be a new Mickey and to make Tommy a new Rocky, a tactic that doesn’t pay off because the young man is ridiculed by being called “Rocky’s Clone”, “Rocky’s Robot”. In Creed, Rocky is a weakened coach who has to train Adonis from the hospital where he receives his chemotherapy treatments. The last film combines ingredients from the other training sequences: the relocation in an unfamiliar and unfriendly place – the hospital and another gym–, the guidance of an old champion who knows all the tricks, the individual running sessions in the streets with the grey tracksuit and the black snow hat, but now Adonis is supported and escorted by the local youths on their motorbikes. Creed eventually conveys successful transmission from a focus on Rocky to a younger boxer that was absent in the previous films. In Rocky Balboa, Rocky has to fight again, he is unable to find a real heir for his legacy with Tommy in Rocky V. The training session in Creed, as well as Rocky’s age/sickness, make it clear that, this time, he is retiring for good, that no comeback to the ring is possible and the coming sequels will be different from the first six films. Rocky is thus over as a boxer, but not as a character. If the hero seems to be at his worst and unable to embody a boxing champion anymore, how can he continue carrying the saga on his shoulders? If a sequel is announced, producers are confident that Rocky can still attract crowds in the movie theaters; it thus seems worth studying the power of Rocky as an anti-action hero.
Meekness and Sensitiveness
While the Rocky series has been described as the paragon of “Reaganite entertainment” celebrating an idealized past and conservative values (cf. Andrew Britton)15 or the assertion of white supremacy over a racial or a cultural other,16 I prefer to center my article on the expression of humbleness and self-effacement embodied by the main character. As Susan Jeffords explained, Hollywood films produced in the 1990s promoted “the New Man” who represented a “more internalized masculine dimension,” a character exploring “ethical dilemmas, emotional traumas, and psychological goals,” The film industry offered “in a place of bold male muscularity
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and/as violence, […] a self-effacing man, one who now, instead of learning to fight, learns to love.”17 With the Rocky series, it seems that this combination of muscle and heart started as early as the 1970s, anticipating the latter trend. In most films, Balboa is described as a fighter characterized by his genuine heart. In Rocky IV, right before the match against Drago, Paulie’s comment “You’re all heart” encapsulates this peculiarity. When explaining his authorial choices in The Official Rocky Scrapbook, Sylvester Stallone stressed his desire to craft a compassionate everyman: That night I went home and I had the beginning of my character. I had him now. I was going to make a creation called Rocky Balboa, a man from the streets, a walking cliché of sorts, the all-American tragedy, a man who didn’t have much mentality but had incredible emotion and patriotism and spirituality and good nature even though nature had not been good to him. All he required from life was a warm bed and some food and maybe a laugh during the day. He was a man of simple tastes. […] But Rocky Balboa was different. He was America’s child. He was to the seventies what Chaplin’s Little Tramp was to the twenties.18 In light of these remarks, Rocky, often described as “a bum from the neighborhood,” appears as an alter ego of Chaplin’s popular character, belonging to the lower classes of American society and demonstrating the same sympathetic potential. As a result, being a bum proves to be his real power, more than his muscles. Even if Rocky is obviously not as astute as The Tramp, the film series demonstrates he can prove very resourceful and draws from his emotional power to accomplish great deeds in and out of the ring. Rocky puts on several costumes, corresponding either to the expression of his personality or to his desire to become stronger. Throughout the series, Rocky owns two major costumes: first a street costume composed of a black leather jacket, a hat, and some mitts, making him look like a shadow in the urban night; and then a boxer’s costume made of a pair of shorts, some gloves, and a gum-shield. Rocky’s boxing paraphernalia echoes the evocation by Yvonne Tasker of Zavitzianos’s concept of “homeovestim” – wearing clothes of the same sex – and Lacan’s “male parade” in which men put on the garments of masculine authority, as ways to raise self-esteem and regain authority.19 However, the boxing costume appears as an illusion of power and matches only very partially Rocky’s identity. In times of trouble, when he learns he is ruined in Rocky V, Rocky finds comfort not in the combat attire but his old clothes he finds in the attic of his mansion. He puts them back on and becomes again the man from South Philly. While the stars and stripes boxing shorts of Apollo can be passed on from Apollo to Rocky (Rocky III, IV), from Rocky to Tommy (Rocky V) and finally to Adonis (Creed), transferring some male power to the person who wears them, Rocky’s street costume is only made for Rocky and is more meaningful for him than the shorts which become a feebler signifier. The expression of Rocky’s meekness is related to his sense of humor: he mocks his failings with the help of his foil Paulie, an overweight drunk side-kick. Paulie is another loser but he lives with his shabbiness and flaws, with no interest in introspection and no intense desire to change contrary to Rocky. But he also admires his friend and comforts him when necessary: “If I could just unzip myself and step out and be someone else, I'd wanna be you” (Rocky IV). According to Frank Ardolino, Rocky may also resemble a small-town hero because of his “overall innocence, social naiveté, his love of plain talk and direct action, and his loyalty to family, friends and tradition.”20 The relationship with his wife Adrian adds a romantic and sentimental dimension to the series, even in the last episodes when he
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continues talking to her after she is dead. It is also worth noting that, apart from Creed, the series is devoid of sex scenes; Rocky and Adrian’s physical bond appears extremely chaste. Stallone explained in 1977 that they were soulmates: “The movie was really about two individuals – half people – coming together making a whole person.”21 Rocky is less interested in Adrian’s looks than in her intellectual potential, and he really picks a partner who can bring him what he considers he lacks. He looks for complementarity in their relationship, but not for a situation of domination as he asserts his male prowess mainly on the ring. The reserved and innocent representation of their love is remarkable, especially if we consider that it strikingly contrasts with the exhibition of half-naked male bodies, and participates in the rhetoric of modesty offered by the saga. For Chris Holmlund, the simplicity and sensitiveness of the hero appears to be a trait in Stallone’s films which stage “macho heroes who are not afraid to show their feelings,” men who “often cry and cry out.” For example, Rocky is crying for Adrian when she is in a coma (Rocky II) and in the following films he will deeply mourn her (Rocky Balboa and Creed).22 Other scholars suggest that Stallone tends to play with the human duality between power and weakness and on gender roles as well, making his action heroes multifaceted characters. For Yvonne Tasker, “the performance of muscular masculinity within the cinema draws attention to both the restraint and the excess involved in “being a man”23 and Stallone tries to sell the “male star as something other than a hunk/hulk.”24 She adds that the “drama of power and powerlessness […] intrinsic to the anxieties about male identity and authority”25 is a main characteristic of the action genre and of the star’s films. In Rocky Balboa, the character emphasizes the instability of human life and his own fears: “You or nobody ain’t never gonna hit as hard as life… But it ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward”. Audiences are meant to understand that exposing Rocky’s vulnerability through his sweet personality, but also through the sufferings of his body during the training and the matches, is a way to reveal his power.26 His “musculinity” makes sense because he is also sensitive, and his taunt body may appear as a shield to protect this candid character. The reason why Rocky wins is not the yearning for fame or the desire to show he is the strongest, it is love. His heart and his feelings for Adrian and old Mickey make him overcome obstacles. Mickey’s line “Get up you son of a bitch ’cause Mickey loves you” (Rocky V) illustrates the power of Rocky’s emotional trigger.27 Jérôme Momcilovic presents Stallone’s filmography as “the ideology of the immigrant’s humility, of the effort of life-saving labor […] the exaltation of the father figure, the laboring classes and family […] the myth of upward mobility and second chance.”28 This definition emphasizing the idea of class awareness can apply to Rocky, whose entire journey is synonymous with self-improvement both at the social and personal levels. If Rocky, like other characters played by Stallone (Rambo for instance), starts as a common man who is held back by inhibition and fear, he is gradually revealed as a superior being.29 Yet, it seems important not to lose sight of Rocky’s struggle to remain a decent man rather than becoming the ultimate superman. The stakes of the Rocky series are regaining dignity and repairing a broken-self through a physical and psychological transformation, showing how the hero surpasses himself.30 If we focus on Rocky’s modest personality, we see that his constant struggle for self-improvement goes beyond the sphere of boxing and social achievement. For example, even though his father told him he was not much of a brain and should better use his body to succeed, Rocky also tries to improve his intellectual skills with Adrian’s guidance. In Rocky II, after he is humiliated for not being able to read correctly the lines of an
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aftershave commercial, Rocky trains himself to read correctly while in bed with his wife. This new challenge will help him maintain a connection with his wife when she is in a coma as he reads for her and writes her poems, and later on, his ability to read will help Rocky behave like a role model for his son when he reads him children stories like Pinocchio or Goldilocks and the Three Bears in Rocky III. Real or surrogate fatherhood is an important aspect of the series because it participates in building the hero not as a muscular warrior but as a kind man. Rocky IV, Rocky V, Rocky Balboa and Creed insist on Rocky’s concern for younger generations (his son Robert, Tommy, Adonis) and his desire to help them. If Tommy endangers Rocky’s relation with his son and finally betrays him, Adonis is faithful to Rocky. He considers him as family, calls him “Uncle,” and supports him while struggling with cancer. Throughout the series, Rocky – who first appeared to be rather naïve – becomes a voice of experience, admittedly sometimes unsophisticated and awkward, but thanks to his kind-heartedness, modesty, and temperance he proves a reliable paternal figure, a secure refuge for Adonis in the last film.
Softness and Marginality
Rocky does not so much long to be a champion but to be a better man. This aspect of his personality is illustrated by his habit of standing in the background while his opponents incarnate ostentation. As a bum, Rocky holds the power to remain discreet and deferent while Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago, Tommy Gunn, and Mason Dixon all boast and brag. Apollo Creed is a showman who transforms boxing matches into gigantic shows with costumes, dancers, feathers, confetti, and famous singers (James Brown) in Rocky I, Rocky II and Rocky IV. On the contrary, Rocky’s only displays are his austere religious rituals, kneeling and praying in the bathroom and crossing himself while in the ring. Lang’s exuberance is mainly verbal, angrily expressing his rage against Rocky and society. Balboa is a man of few words, illustrating the saying that silence is golden – even if he becomes more and more voluble in the second cycle of films. Drago’s extensive use of machines and steroids to shape his dehumanized body contrasts with Rocky’s training in the harshness of the deserted Russian countryside. If Drago is almost turned into a robot, Rocky becomes a man of the woods, an American mother-nature’s son who only needs snow, frost, and will-power to prepare himself for the match. Both Tommy Gunn and Mason Dixon are lured by money and fame whereas Rocky, after spending a few years in a lavish mansion when a champion, is back in his old neighborhood where he tries to make a living by training young boxers at the gym and then by running a restaurant. He knows that celebrity and dollars are transient: the American dream of economic success might not necessarily mean progress. All in all, despite all the power and muscle, the series manages to produce a “soft” character spectators don’t have to be afraid of, an American hero who doesn’t stand as an aggressive assertion of US imperialism even if he is still a spokesman of American superiority. In the series, Rocky does not always avoid pretention and garishness – remember the ridiculous presence of the expensive robot in Rocky IV –, especially during his golden years as a champion, but Adrian and Paulie remind him about what matters most, namely respecting his relatives and being true to himself. What makes Rocky so likeable for spectators and scholars compared to other action heroes is that he
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preserves his original “bum” identity, a status he once despised and badly wanted to escape, but which finally proves more respectful than easy money and illusory glory. By belonging to the margin of society or going back to it, Rocky achieves an unexpected authority. According to Marianne Kac-Vergne, in action movies outcasts are considered superior to regular elites because they have not been corrupted and they stand as more authentic and more human. Outsiders have the power to regenerate traditional structures of power.31 The bum therefore becomes a virtuous man for whom winning is worth less than struggling and trying, this motto being given emphasis in the lyrics of the Bill Conti’s soundtrack: “Trying hard now, It’s so hard now, Trying hard now, Getting strong now.”32 In the tale of the humble Rocky – a working class hero, the value of effort and sacrifice becomes more important than the prize. The Rocky series has often been depicted as a modern-day fairy-tale, a rags-to-riches story appealing to American and international audiences for holding universal qualities. If the saga has been associated with the action or the sport film genres, celebrating masculine might and a certain form of justified violence, the longevity of the franchise is much more rooted in people’s attachment to Rocky Balboa. The character has almost entered the American national pantheon with his gloves, robe, and shorts being exhibited at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. and his statue standing aligned with George Washington’s statue in Philadelphia. Yet, I argue here, Rocky embodies modesty and decency rather than muscular strength and patriotic pride. Even after all those years, his authenticity and uncomplicatedness is still praised by Stallone in interviews: He is of the people, and he has no sense of entitlement or superiority. Actually he gets his power from being simplistic […] He’s completely without guile. He is “there” – he really hasn’t changed […] he didn’t think of himself as any better than the person who’s selling a fish or flowers. And I think I was trying to get that there is no egoism at all. Nothing! He is completely, like, back where he started.33 The character is a selfless man with whom people can easily identify. Back in the early years of the Rocky series, some people may have wanted to be like this brave man fighting to get what he wanted; today, younger spectators can see in Rocky something that may remind them of a nice protective relative while more mature spectators perhaps see a man who is aging and facing the same issues as them. Surprisingly, despite the boxing theme, we tend to forget that Rocky is a boxer because the series’ strength doesn’t lie in the repetition of the fighting motif but in the maturation and complexification of the character away from the ring. As some scholars argue, the Rocky series reworks the boxing genre towards the social realist tradition and could to a certain extent be compared with Frank Capra’s films for its celebration of the triumph of the common man.34
Ardolino, Frank. “Rocky Times four: Return, Resurrection, Repetition, Reaganism.” Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, 11 (1), Fall 1993:147-161.
Bacon, Kenneth. “Yo Adrian: The Rocky Saga.” Boxoffice, 151 (11), Nov 2015: 41-47.
Biskind, Peter and Barbara Ehrenreich. “Machismo and Hollywood’s Working Class.” In American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives, edited by Donald Lazere, 201-15. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987.
Conway, Brett. “To Roll back the Rock(y): white-male absence in the Rocky series.” Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, 22 (1), Fall 2014: 63-79.
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Cowie, Jefferson. Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York: New Press, 2010.
Holmlund, Chris. “Introduction: Presenting Stallone/ Stallone Presents.” In The Ultimate Stallone Reader edited by Chris Holmlund., 1-25. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Holmlund, Chris. “Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade: The ‘Mature’ Stallone and the Stallone Clone.” In Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 213-229. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Jeffords, Susan. “Can Masculinity be terminated.” In Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 245-261. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Kac-Vergne, Marianne. “Une Hypermasculinité vulnérable : le paradoxe du héros blanc face à la crise des autorités et la trahison des élites.” In Le Cinéma des années Reagan: Un modèle Hollywoodien? edited by Frederic Gimello-Mesplomb, 213-223. Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions, 2007.
Kasprowicz, Laurent and Francis Hippolyte. “Le Corps body-buildé au cinéma: magie et anthropologie d’un spectacle.” In Le Cinéma des années Reagan: Un modèle Hollywoodien? edited by Frederic Gimello-Mesplomb, 193-212. Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions, 2007.
Litchenfeld, Eric. “I, of the Tiger: self and self-obsession in the Rocky series,” In The Ultimate Stallone Reader edited by Chris Holmlund., 75-95. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Momcilovic, Jérôme. “L’homme extraordinaire au cinéma: Remarques sur l’oeuvre d’Arnold Schwarzenegger,” In Le Cinéma des années Reagan: Un modèle Hollywoodien? edited by Frederic Gimello-Mesplomb, 181-192. Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions, 2007.
Schnieder, Nina. “You ought to stop trying because you had too many birthdays? Heroic Male Aging in the Rocky films.” In Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS), 15 (1), 2014.
Setoodeh, Ramin and Kristopher Tapley. “Still Fighting.” Variety, 330 (13), Januray 2016: 44-49.
Stallone, Sylvester. The Official Rocky Scrapbook. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1977.
Tasker, Yvonne. “Dumb movies for dumb people: masculinity, the body and the voice in Contemporary action cinema,” In Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 230-244. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies, Genre and the Action Film. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Walkedine, Valerie. “Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy.” In Formations of Fantasy edited by Victor Burgin James Donald, and Cora Kaplan, 167-199. New York: Methuen,1986.
Webb, Lawrence. The Cinema of Urban Crisis: Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014.
ENDNOTES
1. See Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, Genre and the Action Film (New York: Routledge, 1993).
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2. Ramin Setoodeh, Kristopher Tapley, “Still Fighting,” Variety, January 2016, 48. 3. Setoodeh, Tapley, “Still Fighting,” 46-48. 4. Chris Holmlund, “Introduction: Presenting Stallone/ Stallone Presents,” in The Ultimate Stallone Reader, ed. Chris Holmlund, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 15-16. 5. Valerie Walkerdine “Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy,” in Formations of Fantasy, eds Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (New York: Methuen1986), 177. Chris Homlund, “Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade: The ‘Mature’ Stallone and the Stallone Clone,” in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, eds Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (NY: Routledge, 1993), 227. 6. Peter Biskind and Barbara Ehrenreich, “Machismo and Hollywood's Working Class,” in American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives, ed. Donald Lazere (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 211-213. 7. Eric Litchenfeld “I, of the Tiger: self and self-obsession in the Rocky series,” in The Ultimate Stallone Reader, ed. Holmlund, 76-77. 8. Marianne Kac-Vergne, “Une Hypermasculinité vulnérable : le paradoxe du héros blanc face à la crise des autorités et la trahison des élites,” in Le Cinéma des années Reagan: Un modèle Hollywoodien?, ed. Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb (Paris : Nouveau Monde éditions, 2007), 215. 9. Holmlund, “Introduction: Presenting Stallone/ Stallone Presents,” 4. 10. Anonymous, “Fifth film final round for Rocky,” Star Bulletin, 21 February 1990, B-5 11. Frank Ardolino, “Rocky Times four: Return, Resurrection, Repetition, Reaganism,” Aethlon, Fall 1993, 150. 12. Ardolino, “Rocky Times four,”151-152 13. Nina Schnieder, “You ought to stop trying because you had too many birthdays? Heroic Male Aging in the Rocky films,” Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS), 15 (1), 2014. 14. Ardolino, “Rocky Times four,” 151 15. Ardolino, “Rocky Times four,” 147 16. Brett Conway, “To Roll back the Rock(y): white-male absence in the Rocky series,” Aethlon, Fall 2014, 69. 17. Susan Jeffords, “Can Masculinity be terminated,” in Screening the Male, 245-246 18. Sylvester Stallone, The Official Rocky Scrapbook (NY: Grosset and Dunlap, 1977), 19. 19. Yvonne Tasker, “Dumb movies for dumb people: masculinity, the body and the voice in Contemporary action cinema,” in Screening the Male, 242. 20. Ardolino, “Rocky Times four,” 149. 21. Stallone, The Official Rocky Scrapbook, 19. 22. Holmlund, “Introduction: Presenting Stallone/ Stallone Presents,” 3. 23. Tasker, “Dumb movies for dumb people,” 233. 24. Tasker, “Dumb movies for dumb people,” 234. 25. Tasker, “Dumb movies for dumb people,” 243. 26. Laurent Kasprowicz and Francis Hippolyte, “Le Corps body-buildé au cinéma: magie et anthropologie d’un spectacle, » in Le Cinéma des années Reagan, 201. 27. The entire line refers to Rocky Marcianno’s cufflink used as a lucky charm: “If you ever get hurt and you feel that you’re goin’ down this little angel is gonna whisper in your ear. It’s gonna say, ‘Get up you son of a bitch ’cause Mickey loves you.” Rocky remembers the moment Mickey gave him the present. 28. Jérôme Momcilovic, “L’homme extraordinaire au cinéma: Remarques sur l’oeuvre d’Arnold Schwarzenegger, » in Le Cinéma des années Reagan, 183. 29. Momcilovic, “L’homme extraordinaire au cinéma,” 183. 30. Kasprowicz and Hippolyte, “Le Corps body-buildé au cinéma,” 197-199. 31. Kac-Vergne, “Une Hypermasculinité vulnerable,” 220-222. 32. Bill Conti, Gonna Fly Now, 1976.
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33. Kim Williamson, Boxoffice, December 2006, reprinted in reprinted in Kenneth Bacon, “Yo Adrian: The Rocky Saga,” Boxoffice, 151 (11), November 2015, 46. 34. Lawrence Webb, The Cinema of Urban Crisis: Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 60; Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010, 329.
ABSTRACTS
The profitable Rocky franchise celebrated its 40th anniversary with a new instalment, Creed. As Roger Ebert explained in 1976, Rocky is not so much about a story but about a hero. This paper examines the construction of Rocky’s character as a paradoxical action hero, a boxer made famous by his kind heart and mild manners instead of his muscles. The analysis of the seven films reveals how vulnerability and humbleness are used as the pillars of Rocky’s fictional personality and intensify the emotional dimension of the saga to bring the boxing film closer to the urban melodrama.
INDEX
Mots-clés: masculinity; action hero; working class; sensitiveness; vulnerability; empowerment
AUTHOR
CLÉMENTINE THOLAS Clémentine Tholas is Associate Professor of American studies in the English and applied foreign languages departments at the Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle University. Her research interests focus on early motion pictures in the US, namely WWI cinematic propaganda and the role of silent films. Clémentine Tholas-Disset published Le Cinéma américain et ses premiers récits filmiques (2014) and co-edited Humor, Entertainment, and Popular Culture during World War I (Palgrave, 2015).
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Conference and Seminar Reviews
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21st SERCIA Conference: Cinema and Seriality in the English- speaking World
Ann-Lys Bourgognon
EDITOR'S NOTE
Conference Organized by Ariane Hudelet and Anne Crémieux
AUTHOR'S NOTE
More information on the SERCIA and its activities can be found on their website and on Facebook (@Sercia).
1 The 22nd edition of the annual conference of SERCIA was organized by Ariane Hudelet (University of Paris Diderot) and Anne Crémieux (University of Paris X Nanterre) and welcomed a great variety of researchers who came together to reflect upon the notion of seriality within both cinema and television series.1 Among the international guests (who came from, for instance, the USA, England, Switzerland and Italy), the conference was highlighted by two keynote speakers: Scott Higgins from Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and Samuel Chambers, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD.
2 The program aimed to emphasize the different levels at which seriality can be analyzed: some panels focused on the production of films and their possible sequels, reboots and remakes, therefore drawing attention to the influence of seriality on the film market, viewership or transmedial practices. For instance, Célia Sauvage (University of Paris II Sorbonne Nouvelle) compared Hollywood's rather commercial sequels and more intentional and critically appreciated auteurist ones. Other workshops explored specific categories, such as the horror genre (Martial Martin from
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the University of Reims studied Scream in both its cinematographic and serial versions), TV series and serials, documentaries (a whole workshop was devoted to the genre and chaired by Nicole Cloarec from the University of Rennes I) or superhero films. Finally, some talks investigated the more theoretical aspects and issues raised by the notion of seriality in film and series, often exploring seriality within a narratological frame, or adapting concepts taken from film theory. While Elise Harris (University of Chapel Hill) focused on the aestheticization of time allowed by the form of the TV series, Claire Cornillon close-read Josh Whedon's Dollhouse to unveil its narrative complexity. As a result, conventions and genre codes, sequels and their variations, were explored, as well as viewer practices and such concepts as repetition, figurative seriality, discontinuity and the treatment of time in sequels which give an impression of circularity, or in long-running TV series faced with the inevitable aging of their actors.
3 Some of these questions were elucidated by the two in-depth keynote talks which were given during the conference. Scott Higgins first took the audience on a journey through the serial Captain America. He redefined what some critics dismissed as narrative inconsistencies in order to read the 1940's action-packed 15-minute stories as a goldmine for detail-savvy connoisseurs who look beyond systematic and unbelievable cliffhangers to focus on technological treasures, flamboyant fight scenes and the endless safe adventure provided by an ever-open show, something only such serial clockwork formatting could provide.
4 Samuel Chambers provided subtle insight on the CBS TV series The Good Wife (2009-2016), intricately weaving queer theory current debates about antinormativity and Foucault's underestimated notion of subject-position with the concept of seriality defined as a normative force in the context of a primetime network show highly reactive to real events and viewers' reactions. Focusing mostly on main character Alicia Florrick, a stay-at-home mother who went back to work at a law firm after her husband's scandalous resignation, Chambers proceeded to show how she diverged from the roles society tried to categorize her in (and referred to in the series' title), therefore challenging and critiquing the normative forces at work behind subject positions.
5 Over the three days of the conference, seriality appeared to be at the crossroads of many on-going reflections on both cinema and TV series as quickly evolving media. The changes they are currently undergoing are partially due to the Internet and the new forms of viewership it has generated, like streaming and binge watching, which in turn heavily modified the industries and markets. The notions entailed in seriality seem, therefore, to be caught between aspects highly valued by critics -- involving the treatment of time, character development, and complex narrative -- and more commonly disregarded effects of repetition, use of sequels for commercial reasons, sometimes at the expense of narrative coherence, quality or originality. However, many papers have outlined intersecting observations between these two poles, suggesting that even in the most popular forms of serial or cinematic entertainment, seriality constantly questions the origin(s) and closure(s) of a narrative while providing many layers of interpretation depending on the viewers' culture and knowledge. The idea that repetition generates new meanings thanks to the very action of showing an element over and over again also allowed many speakers to reflect on irony and the often-found distance and "meta" dimension that serial narratives can take – especially those belonging to the horror genre. The image of the ghost provides a vivid metaphor for many of the topics which were evoked: while only a few of the talks dealt with
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actual ghosts, the fact that some characters or elements of a show or film constantly reappeared definitely evoked spectrality, similarly to the more remote, haunting presence of literature or other artistic media which invites one to further reflect on seriality in intertexts.
6 Representative of serial complexity and interplay in TV and cinema was the parallel drawn by Francisco Ferreira (University of Poitiers) between the horror film Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984) featuring Freddy Krueger, a dead man coming back in the dreams of young teenagers to seek revenge, and Derrida's to-the-point summary of Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost".
ENDNOTES
1. Due to the very large number of panels, not all of them could be covered in this report.
AUTHOR
ANN-LYS BOURGOGNON Ann-Lys Bourgognon is doing a PhD in English at the Université du Havre Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France, September 8-10, 2016
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The Art of Walt Disney Animation Studios: Movement by Nature
Thibaut Clément
1 Created in collaboration with the Walt Disney Animation Research Library, the “The Art of Walt Disney Animation Studios: Movement by Nature” exhibition held at the Paris Musée Art Ludique holds special appeal for students of popular culture. Some of that interest will, of course, stem from the 350 pieces on display, and some from the process by which the Disney corporation further “artifies” 1 popular media, providing the studio’s products with an additional layer of cultural legitimacy and allowing the studio to present itself as a purveyor of fine arts in the process.2
2 The exhibition is composed of six major sections arranged in chronological order. Entitled “Nascent Art,” the first section devotes itself entirely to Disney’s early animated shorts, from 1918 to 1939, with exclusive emphasis on the studio’s roster of beloved characters – starting, unsurprisingly, with Mickey Mouse’s first appearances in Plane Crazy and Steamboat Willy, here presented by means of Ub Iwerk’s strikingly sparse and energetic animation drawings and storyboards. Conspicuously absent from the selected artworks are the Silly Symphonies – including Oscar winning efforts such as The Old Mill (1938) – here entirely left out in favor of such crowd-pleasing figures as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck or Goofy. Entitled “First Feature films”, the exhibition’s second part focuses on artworks produced for Snow White (1937), Pinocchio (1940), and Fantasia (1940). Bearing the title of “Life as Inspiration,” the exhibition’s third part devotes itself to wartime films such as Bambi (1942) and Saludos Amigos (1942) and might come closest to fulfilling the exhibition’s avowed purpose, namely exploring Disney’s quest for realism through the close, quasi-scientific observation of nature – as notably documented here by animator Rico Lebrun’s Animal Studies for Bambi. In its fourth part, the exhibition explores the so-called “Modern turn of the Fifties,” with artworks from Alice in Wonderland (1951), Lady and the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and 101 Dalmatians (1961). Rich in concept artworks departing – sometimes spectacularly – from the round, cuddly drawing style most readily associated with Disney animation, the section’s highlights include a spectacular story-sketch for 101 Dalmatians’ car chase scene – a vivid testimony to the iterative, collaborative and almost exclusively visual
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process of story development typical of the Disney studio. Sadly, though, this aspect is barely touched upon in the sketch’s presentation. In its fifth part, “The New Artistic Dimension of the 1980s,” the exhibition focuses on films closely associated with the so- called Disney Renaissance initiated with the company’s new management, with emphasis laid on The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), and Mulan (1998). Oddly enough, the critically acclaimed and third highest grossing traditionally animated film Aladdin is entirely omitted from this section. In its sixth and final section, “Exploring Modern Mythology”, the exhibition turns to more recent digitally animated features and, accordingly, presents digital art for Tangled (2010), Wreck it Ralph (2012), Big Hero 6 (2014), Frozen (2013), and Zootopia (2016). One notable exception, Moana (2017), while a digitally animated film, is here presented by means of hand-drawn concept art – most likely the influence of its directors John Musker and Ron Clements, themselves traditional animation veterans. More generally, while Disney’s digital turn has opened new esthetic avenues for the animation studio’s artists, some of the works in this final section showed inventive use of new technologies for exploring older styles, as evidenced by Dan Cooper’s pre- Raphaelite inspirations for Tangled’s concept art.
3 Chief among the exhibition’s highlights is the great diversity of drawings on display, with the author identifying at least five types of artworks, including animation drawings, story-sketches, concept art, background paintings as well as layout drawings. Also apparent from the art selection is the highly collaborative nature of the process of movie-making, as made clear in the concept artworks, whose visual styles are much more diverse than appear in the studio’s finished products. In that respect, artists involved in the development phase display surprisingly daring and innovative styles, testifying to both new developments in the art world and acute knowledge of art history. This is most apparent in Mary Blair’s naïve, folk-inspired art for Alice in Wonderland, Eyvind Earle’s exquisitely detailed take on medieval illumination for Sleeping Beauty, or Walt Peregoy’s delicate line drawings superimposed over bold color blocks – a style initially developed for 101 Dalmatians and the film’s rough outlines resulting from the Xerox process. Finally, the animation drawings are obviously the work of accomplished artists, if any confirmation was ever needed: especially striking in that respect are the expressive strokes of Keane’s drawings for Beast’s transformation, or in the raw energy and simplicity of Ub Iwerk’s original drawings for Mickey Mouse’s first shorts
4 Yet the exhibition is not without its flaws – some of them inherent to exhibitions on film-making, where, too often, individual artifacts are isolated from their original medium (i.e. film) and recategorized as artworks in their own right, whose function and value is transformed from primarily utilitarian or instrumental to purely esthetic. To this extent, the further “artification” of individual drawings from the Disney archives rests, in part, on their decontextualization. As a result, the very nature of the drawings and paintings on display, and how their intended uses accounts for their style or medium, remain largely unexplained, with the viewer left to figure out who the artists are and what their roles and contributions within the animation department might have been. Little is also said of how the economics of movie-making affects the films’ esthetics: the impact of Technicolor on the films’ color palette is not discussed, while the effect of the Xerox process on the animation and visual style of the studio’s 1960s production remains virtually unexplored.3 Likewise, few if any references are made to the studio as a business organization – much less to its history and economic and
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management vagaries. As a result, the motivations for the selection of the works on display remain unclear, with no reference to Disney’s pre-Mickey Mouse productions nor any explanation for the twenty-odd year gap between sections four and five – when much of the studio’s production in the late 1960s and 1970s suffered from lack of guidance, poor management and sometimes disappointing box office returns as a result of Walt and Roy Disney’s passing in 1966 and 1971. More disappointingly, and despite the exhibition title’s claims to the contrary, not much is really made of Disney’s unique animation style, aside from the studio’s claims to realism in section three. With the occasional exceptions of a few storyboards, most drawings are not shown as part of sequences but only presented as individual “stills.” While it certainly helps emphasize the artistry of the animators behind them, this slightly obscures their meaning and role within the context of the original films.
5 Some such limits likely result from the exhibition producers’ necessary cooperation with the Disney corporation, for whom the exhibition represents not only another avenue for the commercial exploitation of existing material, but also a prestigious publicity event – hence the heavy emphasis on all of the studio’s latest releases, from Tangled to Moana, whose commercial appeal remains widest. Still, the exhibition represents a welcome and all-too-rare opportunity to take a first-hand look at the striking art produced behind the scenes. And while the selection of artworks seems largely informed by imperatives of commercial appeal (with only the studio’s biggest hits and public favorites represented), the exhibitions does offer fascinating insight into the film development process as well as the variety of artists who called the studio their home and found surprisingly open avenues for individual expression and personal styles.
6 Paris Musée Art Ludique
7 October 14, 2016 – March 5, 2017
References:
Shapiro, Roberta and Nathalie Heinich. “When is Artification?” Contemporary Aesthetics Special Volume, 4 (2012).
ENDNOTES
1. Roberta Shapiro and Nathalie Heinich define artification as the process by which “things […] come to be seen as works of art.” Shapiro and Heinich, “When Is Artification?” 2. This strategy has been pursued for some decades now, with “Art of Disney” galleries in various theme parks offering Disney-themed paintings and sculptures – or, probably even more significantly, with the corporation’s helping hand in the organization of the 2006 Grand Palais exhibition Il était une fois Walt Disney - Aux sources de l’art des studios Disney.
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3. It is only briefly mentioned in one of the occasional museum labels referencing actual production processes, along with four other such signs on the multiplane camera, the so-called “Nine old men,” Cruella’s car model, and Maleficent’s transformation
AUTHOR
THIBAUT CLÉMENT Thibaut Clément is Associate Professor in American Studies at the Université Paris-Sorbonne.
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Barbie –Musée des Arts Décoratifs Paris
Anaïs Le Fèvre-Berthelot
1 At the top of the grand staircase of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the pink wall set the tone. Once the visitors had passed the doors they entered a dark room and faced the enlarged projections of the latest fashion shots from Barbie’s Instagram account (@barbiestyle). Indeed, “Barbie, ever up-to-date, uses new technologies to communicate with her fans and wins the hearts of new aficionados,” the museum explained.1 This could have been the beginning of an exhibition questioning Barbie’s socio-cultural meaning, her link with media franchises, the gender representations she has conveyed over the years, the marketing practices that are associated with the doll, but the museum apparently had other plans.
2 After a short historical display presenting the evolution of fashion dolls since the 18th century, the exhibition focuses exclusively on Barbie: the genesis of the doll, her evolution, her career, her family and her love-life, the manufacturing process, her relationship with pop culture and the fashion world. In the various sections the information seems directly written by Mattel, even though the curator swears to the contrary.2 If the staff of the Museum is willing to take the blame for “explanations” such as “Barbie left Ken in 2004 for Blaine, an Australian surfer. In 2011, after an assiduous courtship, the newly revamped and modernized Ken managed to win Barbie back,” one can only hope the price for their scientific integrity was high enough.
3 Barbie will turn sixty in 2019. The doll has been the target of many controversies as generations of girls played with this unrealistic model of femininity3 But neither this aspect, nor Mattel’s plummeting sales in recent years were mentioned in the exhibition.
4 The exhibition housed by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris was meant to coincide with the worldwide launch of a new doll collection named “Fashionista” that includes “3 new silhouettes, 18 skin colors, 23 hair colors and 14 different faces”. Barbie can now be “tall” (taller than she already was that is), “petite” (one head smaller than the classic Barbie), and —this is the real novelty— “curvy” (which means that if she was life-size,
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she would look like an average-size woman). In addition to the Paris exhibition, Barbie was also the star of an exhibition shown at the Mudec4 in Milan (October 28, 2015- March 13, 2016) and the Vittoriano museum in Rome (April 15-October 30, 2016). Despite the need for a scientific analysis of Barbie as a social and cultural phenomenon, the Paris exhibition was simply a sophisticated element in a global marketing strategy. And it worked: Mattel’s sales went up in 2016.
5 The exhibition reminded the visitors of the origins of Barbie. Created in 1959 by Ruth Handler, the doll was inspired—to say the least—by the Bild-Lilli doll. Lilli was originally a sassy cartoon character in the Bild-Zeitung and the 12-inch and 7.5-inch dolls were meant for men rather than for their children. When Barbie was first created, Mattel’s executives and the toy industry professionals “seemed uncomfortable with the doll’s breasts.” Even though the exhibition (following Mattel) praises Barbie for her freedom and her ability to pursue the careers of her dreams, the gender politics of the toy is not questioned here. The exhibition shows three “Barbie for President” dolls: one in an 80s pantsuit, another one with a blue suit and short blond bob, and one who looks like a Miss America Prom Queen. Anything is possible as Mattel says.
6 Barbie’s link with fashion and the association of the doll with a glamorous lifestyle was the main focus of the exhibition. Besides the Instagram shots adopting the visual codes of fashion blogging (selfies with friends, pictures of outfits and accessories, “throwback Thursday pictures” showing older models…), many rooms were devoted to Barbie’s special relationships with famous fashion designers. A series of videos made with shoe- designer Christian Louboutin was on display, several runway shows were staged, and an impressive but pointless wall of tiny clothes organized by color adorned the last room of the exhibition.
7 Some artistic works inspired by Barbie are also on display, including the 1986 portrait of the doll by Warhol. The more subversive works of Mariel Clayton are mentioned in the exhibition catalog, but not displayed in the museum.5 Warhol’s pop art portrait sums up the exhibition: it is smooth, pink, and the criticism can only be found in the eyes of the onlookers that do not succumb to the fascinating powers of the blond doll. A disturbing example of these powers is given in the documentary film Magical Universe (2014) about outsider artist Al Carbee who created dioramas and collages around Barbie dolls.
8 In addition to her recent status of social network it-girl, Barbie is the character of several animated TV series and of a number of films, and of course, she has been featured in a number of commercials. Even though the doll is at the center of a variety of media productions, the exhibition’s presentation of audiovisual documents was often disappointing. The extract from Magical Universe for example was presented on a tiny screen, as were most videos in the exhibition. The curators did not find a coherent or efficient way to deal with sound nor with the translation of documents that, for the most part, were in English even though French children represented a large proportion of the visitors.
9 Between the section devoted to Barbie’s family and friends and the one presenting her many careers, a small playroom for children was installed. Rather than presenting the Barbie Fan club paraphernalia as just another aspect of Barbie’s wonderful world, it might have been interesting to question the series of inventions used by Mattel to track its young consumers, including the latest ones: the camera doll and the talking doll.6 There is no doubt that a Barbie exhibition has its place in the program of a museum
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devoted to design, advertising and fashion. There is no doubt that Barbie is a major socio-cultural phenomenon that has had tremendous influence over generations of girls and that should be analyzed as such. If nothing else, the display at the Musée des Arts décoratifs had the advantage of pointing to the need for such work to be done with rigor and independence.
10 In the end, Barbie fans may have enjoyed going down memory lane, while visitors who actually hoped to learn something certainly went home disappointed. A detour by the museum gift store only corroborated what the cynics knew all along: everything can be bought. One can only regret that the lack of public funding leads major cultural institutions to house events that really should be organized in the reception hall of Mattel with complimentary drinks instead of an eleven-euro entrance ticket.
11 Musée des arts décoratifs, 107 rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris.
12 March 10, 2016 -September 18, 2016
13 Further information
ENDNOTES
1. Unless specified otherwise, the quotes are taken from the exhibition material.
2. Doreen Carvajal, “With Museum Shows in Europe, Barbie Gets Her Moment With the Masters”, The New York Times, March 11, 2016. Accessed 10/10/16.
3. Karlie Rice, Ivanka Prichard, Marika Tiggemann & Amy Slater, "Exposure to Barbie: Effects on thin-ideal internalisation, body esteem, and body dissatisfaction among young girls," Body Image, December 2016, vol. 19, pp. 142-149. 4. Museo delle Culture
5. Anne Monier (dir.), Barbie [exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée des Arts décoratifs, March 10 -September18 2016], Paris, France, Musée des Arts décoratifs, 2016. 6. “'FBI: New Barbie 'Video Girl' doll could be used for child porn'", CNN.com, December 4, 2010, accessed 03/06/2017.
AUTHOR
ANAÏS LE FÈVRE-BERTHELOT Anaïs Le Fèvre-Berthelot is associate professor of American Studies at University Rennes 2
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Dependence in / on TV series II (Séries et dépendance: Dépendance aux séries II)
Anne Sweet
1 Are TV series a sort of drug? Do series—which have become increasingly absorbing and immersive, and which are often greedily overconsumed in large episode batches of “binge-watching”—create “addicts”? Series are an intense source of pleasure for many —so can watching them really be harmful? If so, what are the repercussions on people’s personal and professional lives, and their physical and mental health? What are the signs and symptoms of media addiction? And how do media producers deploy strategies to seduce and manipulate media consumers? In what ways do new technologies like streaming services promote binge-watching and compulsive consumption? These are a few of the questions that the international interdisciplinary conference, “Séries et dépendance/Dépendance aux séries II: Prolongements diachroniques, psychologiques, psychiatriques et esthétiques” (“Series and Dependence/Dependence in/on TV series II: The diachronic, psychological, psychiatric and aesthetic extensions of TV series dependence”), tried to answer. It took place on December 9 and 10, 2016, at Paris Nanterre University in France, and featured talks in French and English by scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, as well as by health professionals.
2 “Dependence in/on TV series II” is part of a series, of which the first installment, “Dépendance aux séries I” (“Dependence in / on TV series I”), was held a few months earlier on February 5 and 6, 2016.1 Both were organized by the same group of professors: psychologists Nathalie Camart and Lucia Romo-Desprez (both from Paris Nanterre University), and media studies experts Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris and Sébastien Lefait (from Paris Nanterre University and the University of Paris 8 respectively).
3 While the question of TV addiction is not a new one,2 media have become more interactive and immersive, and the conference highlights the importance of ascertaining the possible consequences related to new ways in which viewers engage
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with series, for example through “binge-watching” and transmediality. The use of the term “binge-watching” conjures up other compulsive behaviors with addictive components like “binge-drinking” or “binge-eating.” “Once you pop, you just can’t stop”—as the old Pringles potato chip slogan goes, and both installments of “Dependence in/on TV Series” are predicated on the idea articulated by Carlton Cruise, executive producer of Lost (ABC, 2004-2010), that a TV series can be as addictive as potato chips and that TV producers do their utmost to make them so.3 His quote about this, which is reproduced on the brochures for both conferences, underlines his ideas thus: “It’s like the people who make potato chips. They know how to put the right chemicals in there to make you want to eat the next potato chip. Our goal is to make you want to watch that next episode.” 4 Thus, both conferences start with the hypothesis that—just like chips—series are created to be so desirable—even addictive— that viewers “can’t stop,” are insatiably ravenous for more, and can even be so overcome by their hunger to consume that they gorge themselves, with potentially dire consequences for their health and happiness.
4 The second conference expands upon ideas of the first, that the social and health issues pertaining to series’ overconsumption—and the production strategies that foster and encourage it—were the main axes along which experts from different fields, including media studies and psychology, examined the issue of series addiction. Using these ideas as a starting point, and featuring some of the same speakers, the second installment delves deeper into the roots of series addiction and emphasizes its possible cognitive effects. It also examines secondary addictions across other media, and the ways in which series consumers are further pulled into the immersive world of TV series through transmedia
5 In keeping with the conference’s objectives to study TV series addiction from a multi- dimensional angle, the keynote speakers analyzed the issue from both the perspective of the media consumer and the media producer. The first was Dr. Philippe Batel, a doctor who treats patients with addiction issues. His talk “Séries et dépendance? Le point de vue d'un psychiatre addictologue” (“Series and dependence? The Perspective of a Psychiatrist Specializing in Addiction?), set the tone for the importance of understanding series consumption as a medical and social issue. The second, Dodine Grimaldi, a screenwriter, gave a talk on “Manipulations scénaristiques pour addiction programmée” (“Narrative Manipulations for Scheduled Addiction,” which set the tone for study on how series creators purposefully attempt to trigger and maintain viewer engagement.
6 Shoring up the conference’s interdisciplinary perspective, researchers gave talks on various aspects related to the ways viewers engage with series. For example, Psychology Professors Nathalie Camart, Rafika Zebdi, and Cyrille Bouvet (Paris Nanterre University) gave a joint talk, “Psychologie des sériephiles: étude empirique menée auprès de 400 sujets” (“Psychology of Series’ Fans: an Empirical Study of 400 People”), which examined the behavior of series viewers. Also examining series addiction from a health perspective were Elizabeth Rossé, a psychologist at Marmottan Hospital, with her talk “Et si l'addiction aux séries n'existait pas?” (“What If TV Series Addiction Didn’t Exist?”), and Psychology professors Lucia Romo, Hélène Riazuelo, and Natalie Rigal (Paris Nanterre University), with their group presentation, “Regards croisés: le fil de la série télévisée” (“Converging Views: the Common Thread of TV series”). From the media studies perspective, Anne-Marie Paquet-Deyris discussed
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issues of addiction in relation to the recent British series Whitechapel (ITV, 2009-2013) in her speech entitled, “Whitechapel: how to become addicted to violence and crimes from the Past [sic].” Sébastien Lefait (University of Paris 8) analyzed the depiction of addiction in series, notably the drug-addict character Sherlock in the recent BBC1 series of the same name (2010-2017), and the interactivity of viewers with series through transmedia in his talk, “Hyperperception du personnage et hyperactivité spectatorielle: les paradoxes de la dépendance à l'écran” (“Character Hyperperception and Spectatorial Hyperactivity: the Paradoxes of Screen Dependency”). The speech by Alexis Pichard (Le Havre University), “Élaboration et expansion(s) d’un piège addictif télévisuel: Le cas de la série 24 heures chrono” (“Elaboration and Expansion of an Addictive Narrative Trap: The Case of 24”), analyzed how and why viewers had been motivated to watch an entire season of 24 (Fox 2001-2014) over a full day to mimic the episode structure of the series.
7 TV series addiction is a phenomenon that is still in the process of being scientifically defined and substantiated, and thus the talks presented at “Dependence in/on TV series II” were important in continuing the dialog and furthering research on this subject. In underlining the irrefutably addictive properties of TV programs, which are ever more present and distributed on various media platforms, researchers at the “Dependence in/on TV series II” also gave important evidence to advance the definition and understanding of media addiction in a larger sense. The increasing transmediality of immersive interactive media products that allow people to remain continuously connected to their preferred series or fictional world are sure to continue to profoundly engage media consumers cognitively and mentally as technology and production strategies become more sophisticated. The study of the potential impact of these phenomena is thus more imperative than ever, and a third installment of the conference is tentatively planned.
ENDNOTES
1. An official Youtube video created by PhD student Dalia Saleh (Paris Nanterre University), who assisted in the conference organization, and an interview in the French newspaper Libération with Nathalie Camart, one of its principal organizers, were published after this event. See, Clémentine Mercier, “Interview: Nathalie Camart: ‘Le concept de dépendance aux séries n’est pas scientifiquement validé’”, Libération, February 12, 2016. Accessed February 2, 2017. 2. See, for example, a review of TV addiction literature in Robin Smith, “Television Addiction,” in Perspectives on Media Effects, eds. Jennings Bryant and Dolf Zillmann (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 1986), 109-128. 3. See also, Hannah Osborne, “Once You Pop You Really Can’t Stop: Crisps are Addictive, Scientists Say”, International Business Times, April 12, 2013. Accessed February 2, 2017. 4. See official conference web site. Accessed February 2, 2017.
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The Color Line: African American Artists and Segregation – Musée du Quai Branly
Clémentine Tholas-Disset
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, 37 quai Branly, 75007 Paris. October 4, 2016 - January 15, 2017 Further information
1 When I was a student in the Latin Quarter, I often walked by the commemorative plaque in honor of African-American writer, Richard Wright, located Rue Monsieur Le Prince. Thanks to Wright and his works, I came across the experience of Black American artists in Paris after World War One, which they commonly described as a liberation and a rebirth compared to the sufferings of being second rank citizens in their mother country. Unfortunately, the French general public hardly recollects the presence of Negro musicians, writers or painters in France except for the song by Josephine Baker, J’ai deux amours performed at Le Casino de Paris in 1930 and 1931. For a long while, only a happy-few scholars and connoisseurs were acquainted with their cultural production. As if the African American community, who said they felt more accepted and empowered in our Gallic nation, had remained almost as invisible in France as they were in America.
2 In 2016, one hundred and twenty years after the Supreme Court ruling Plessy V. Ferguson establishing segregation in the United States, France is finally properly reminded of the existence of the black artists it took under its wing in the 1920s and of their creative heirs thanks to the exhibition “The Color Line: African American Artists and Segregation” curated by philosopher Daniel Soutif. Contrasting with the worn-out vision of segregation through the prism of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, the exhibition takes the visitors on a journey mainly through the 1910s to the
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1940s (some earlier and more recent works are also presented), to illustrate not so much the last moments of the struggle for equality but the birth and rise of an African American cultural awareness. The pieces collected for the exhibition stand as an artistic challenge to the representations of non-white people elaborated by white people, in order to overthrow traditional patterns of social and cultural submission and domination in the United States.
3 As French museumgoers stroll around a white circumvoluted maze, they are not introduced solely to the distress of segregation in the United States but to the lavishness and boldness of creations born out of racial oppression. The abundance of art works is spectacular and compensates for the inaccuracies in the chronological choices and the absence of some important references such as the official beginning of segregation in 1896, the doctrine “separate but equal” or the beginning of desegregation in schools in 1954. As a result, the exhibition should be envisioned as an extensive overview of African American artistry and sensitivity rather than a historical approach to systematized segregation. It is a graphic experience through “the souls of black folk” to quote W.E.B. Dubois’ famous phrasing. The exhibition discloses black activism through visual arts, which started after African Americans were faced with the limits of the Reconstruction Amendments which in theory granted them with US citizenship (1868) and the right to vote (1870).
4 “The Color Line” unveils what could be called pictorial resistance through a large variety of formats such as paintings, drawings, engravings, book and magazine covers, book illustrations, photographs, advertisements, short documentaries and motion pictures. It redirects the attention of the French public away from the creative forms usually associated with Africans Americans, in particular jazz music. The most striking example may be the decision to screen, in the second room of the exhibition, the two- reeler1 A Natural Born Gambler (1916) starring musical hall artist Bert Williams who became the first black motion picture performer. In 2014, the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, NY) had presented some Biograph reels dating from 1913 showing Williams and other black actors without blackface make-up and paved the way for reconsidering black agency in early twentieth century popular culture. The event at Le Musée du Quai Branly offers a similar (re)discovery of African Americans artists and intellectuals, particularly from the Harlem Renaissance movement – but not only that there are also audiovisual archives illustrating the way black Americans fostered their own representation and voice by mingling European and African heritages.
5 The French visitor can discover works that are probably unknown to him/her and yet considered classics in the United States, like the paintings and illustrations of Aaron Douglass (Aspects of Negro Life, 1934) or Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series–here presented through a video animation explaining the series and the historical aspects of the Great Migration to the North. Contemporary artists are also showcased in the exhibition, like Mickalene Thomas reinterpreting Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (Origin of the Universe, 2012) or Whitefield Lovell who praises the participation of black soldiers in World War One with the installation Autour du Monde (2008) combining wooden planks, charcoal drawings and globes. Daniel Soutif wishes to give access to the major landmarks in the evolution of the Black American community during the twentieth century and to discuss various themes such as violence and death, being a soldier, gender roles, urban life, iconic leaders, discrimination etc. The recognition of the works of female artists like Elizabeth Catlett, Lois Malou Jones or Faith Ringgold is also decisive because recent
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retrospectives devoted to African American artists gave preference to male painters: Aaron Douglass (Spencer Museum of Art & Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2007-2008), Jacob Lawrence (MoMA, 2015), Archibald Motley (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015) and Kerry James Marshall (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 2016). Interestingly, these female artists seemed to offer a forthright vision of violence and racial issues (Mob Victim, 1944; The Flag is Bleeding, 1967) while their male counterparts often directed their work towards the celebration of black people.
6 The attempt to present in such an exhaustive manner the works of African American artists raises a major problem of accessibility to genuine material. Indeed, too many pieces are not authentic material but reproductions on posters or stickers of documents from the Library of Congress. For example, it is disappointing not to have access to more film excerpts, especially from race films which are only illustrated thanks to posters unable to render the stakes of these all-black film productions. The screening of The Migration Series is an attempt to make up for the regrettable absence of the paintings but it is still a pity the French could not really discover this monument of African American culture from the Philips Collection. Furthermore, some books are introduced but their contents are often not accessible (very few are digitalized), offering only very limited information for the visitor. It may encourage the museumgoer to continue the journey beyond the walls of the museum and explore further these references on one’s own but it would have been interesting to enhance more clearly some key passages from African American political and literary production. Moreover, the accumulative effect can also put the visitor at a loss because from time to time he/she doesn’t know exactly where to go and what to look at or what the exact use of some items is. Indeed, I wondered why some album jackets by Michael Jackson were displayed in the final rooms. If the gradual whitening of the singer was visible, these pieces did not participate accurately in the debate on self-definition and self-representation offered by the exhibition.
7 What makes “The Color Line” quite distinctive is the way it exemplifies the cross-media productions of some artists and the sense of a global project to give African Americans a new voice of their own. For instance, Aaron Douglass created large historical paintings but also made illustrations for the covers, book covers and the poems of other Harlem Renaissance spokespeople like Alan Leroy Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay or Langston Hughes, or for the newspapers The Crisis or Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life. Jacob Lawrence also worked on different formats and more commercial materials, like posters for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich or the cover of Time magazine showcasing Reverend Jesse Jackson in 1970. These examples prove the versatility of black American artists and their interest in reconciling high and low culture to tell the story of their community through different mediums. We understand that pictorial creation partook in an all-encompassing experience to convey the vibrancy of African-Americanness and challenge ongoing racial discrimination. The most recent art pieces keep raising the issue of the color line even today as a new form of civil rights activism appeared in the US with the movement Black Lives Matter. The election of Donald Trump as the new president of the United States thanks to the support of a dominantly white electorate continues this debate of the place of non- whites in American society.
8 In conclusion, we should keep in mind that the Paris exhibition takes a political stance by showing how African American culture has gradually become mainstream and how
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it should be regarded as a vital force in the United States. The origin of the various pieces caught my attention because a large proportion of the art works presented in Paris came from the private collection of Walter O. Evans in Savannah. The individual initiative of Dr. Evans, a surgeon, started in the 1970s enabled the preservation of African American art at a time when neither American people nor American museums were attentive to such productions. Dr. Evans’ collection gathers paintings, sculptures, cartoons, rare books and manuscripts. He pioneered exhibitions devoted to black artists and intellectual life and truly helped to secure the African American legacy when there was a cultural void detrimental to the black culture in the United States. In recent years, Evans donated part of his collection to museums in order to transfer his mission of conservation to official institutions and make African American art a national concern. The French exhibition provides the next step as it raises international concern regarding the role of the black community in American culture at large, giving similar historical visibility to minorities as the National Museum of African American History & Culture which opened in Washington D.C. in September 2016. The Paris exhibition may definitely have been inspired by the NMAAHC and puts forth an aesthetic claim, complementing the Smithsonian’s interest for material culture, in order to reassess the contributions of African Americans to American society.
ENDNOTES
1. A short film from the silent era.
AUTHOR
CLÉMENTINE THOLAS-DISSET Clémentine Tholas-Disset is associate professor of American Studies at Paris 3— Sorbonne Nouvelle University
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Book Reviews
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Carlos Scolari, Paolo Bertetti and Matthew Freeman. Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 95 pages
Mehdi Achouche
REFERENCES
Carlos Scolari, Paolo Bertetti and Matthew Freeman. Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 95 pages.
1 According to the authors of Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines, transmedia storytelling is not quite new after all. They concur with Henry Jenkins, who coined the phrase and the concept in 2003, to deny technological determinism and the central importance of digital technologies behind the advent of transmedia storytelling. Yet they are also driven to the conclusion that, “if we consider transmedia storytelling as an experience characterized by the expansion of the narrative through different media and, in many cases, by the participation of the users in that expansion, then we could say that this is not a new phenomenon” (6). This is a very broad definition indeed, which allows them to highlight older narrative techniques which are clearly, as they successfully demonstrate, diachronically related to transmedia narration. However, it also leads them, as their stated goal, to “look[ing] for transmedia storytelling practices in the past” (ibid.), rather than looking for their ‘ancestors’, and to use the word transmedia repeatedly throughout the book when they should probably have been using the more
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accurate term ‘crossmedia’. The latter can also lead to the creation of a storyworld through many different media, delivery platforms and storytellers, but without having a unified story which moves forward or one common, consistent world expanding consistently, coherently and simultaneously (thanks to strong coordination) across various media, and from one storyteller to another. That is the essence of transmedia, relying as it does on what Jenkins calls additive comprehension or what Horace Newcombe called cumulative narration in the case of serialized TV shows, instead of the more traditional concurrent and contradictory versions of the same story or storyworld afforded by crossmedia franchising – the story, the characters and/or the storyworld move forward thanks to transmedia, rather than going in circles. This terminological problem has been a recurring one over the years, with many scholars taking liberties with the notion to the extent that they tend to obfuscate the qualitatively innovative nature of the present moment. This should not detract from the many strengths of this thoroughly researched book and the many insights it does provide on storytelling in 20th century popular culture, but it does highlight a certain limitation which goes beyond terminology.
2 The authors of Transmedia Archeology break up transmedia narratology into some of its constituent parts to offer an archeology of those parts. They identify in the introduction the older techniques underpinning transmedia narration as part of what they justifiably call the “aesthetics of the pulps”, their central tenet being that transmedia is directly related to that aesthetic. Borrowing the first two notions from Gregory Steirer, they identify these narrative building blocks as: narrative implication, which finds ways to imply “the existence of untold stories, hinting at a larger storyworld beyond the confines of the narrative taking place – a further series of spaces where concurrent adventures are unfolding”, 8); narrative expansion, with narrative growing, perhaps indefinitely, beyond the limits of any single text; seriality; and the “retroactive linkage” (a term borrowed from Mark J.P. Wolf), a cross-over technique where writers find a way to link two independent narratives and storyworlds by retroactively building narrative bridges between them – Superman and Batman are suddenly revealed to inhabit the same storyworld, for instance. These four techniques all participate to what Jenkins identified as the end result of transmedia storytelling: world-building, with texts incrementally elaborating a persistent and consistent world which can ultimately survive its originators, its early readers and even its original characters. However, the authors’ demonstrations show how early storyworlds failed to a large extent to coalesce, with characters and their redundant adventures being for a long time the center of attention. Finally, the authors never forget to include active audience participation, which, as they successfully demonstrate in the three case studies making up the book, was another central element of this early form of expansive storytelling, even though they tend to leave aside the other pole of transmedia storytelling – synergistic integration of resources and strategies by media conglomerates.
3 The first case study is in fact the only one to situate itself squarely in the world of pulp narratives. Paolo Bertetti minutely describes the evolution of Conan the Barbarian, adopting a “character-centred approach to the study of transmedia storytelling” (16): it is not so much the world in which Conan inhabits which will expand with time, but the character itself. By recounting the complex story of the slow popularization of the character, mainly after the death of its creator, Robert E. Howard, in 1936, Bertetti aims
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at showing that here the character is not subservient to the texts or the world which it inhabits, but is rather a “semio-pragmatic effect produced by texts” (16). This leads him to state that “older forms of transmedia franchises were constructed on character sharing rather than on the logics of a particular world” (17) and to focus on an “‘effet- personnage’ (‘character-effect’)” (16), rather than world-building. Conan is thus shown to be ultimately the result of a “bottom-up construction of the identity of a fictional character” (21-22), as early fans contributed to establishing the canon surrounding the character, making up a chronology of his events, a consensual biography for the character, and slowly filling out the numerous blanks left by Howard. The essay is thus very successful in showing how audience participation, a key feature of transmedia narration, did not require the Internet to appear and was already a force in the 1930s thanks to written correspondence, fanzines, cooperative publishing and fan conventions. Early in the history of the character, therefore, there was indeed co- creation rather than adaptation, which is true of transmedia narration.
4 However, when he moves on to later transmedia iterations of the character, Bertetti’s account tellingly reaches its limits, showing how these belonged in fact to more traditional crossmedia merchandising by Conan Properties in comics, cinema, television and video games. There has been so far no attempt to build a consistent and expanding “hyperdiegesis”,1 each medium and platform offering concurrent, incompatible reinterpretations of the character and his world; all are roughly based on the early Conan canon, but do not add to and expand on an overarching story and storyworld. Clearly aware of the problem, the author does state that “transmedial fictional coherency and consistency are less central. What is instead more important is the recognisability of the character and his identity […]” (36). Yet the recognisability of a character borrowed by other storytellers (be they producers or consumers of content) in other media is a very old phenomenon indeed, as he himself demonstrates, and does not offer any valuable insight into recent storytelling innovations, if only to highlight the type of storytelling that did not yet exist. The limit here might well be that storytellers have to a large extent failed so far to expand on Conan’s world; constantly focusing on the titular character inevitably reaches narrative limits which encourage constant revisions and reversions, rather than the continuous narrative accumulation which is the hallmark of transmedia storytelling.
5 The second chapter, by Matthew Freeman, focuses on Superman, and is more convincing in its attempt to demonstrate the presence of actual transmedia storytelling in older franchises. The essay is strong when it comes to demonstrate how “pulp aesthetics” informed narration in comic strips, comic books, radio dramas and movie serials to create expanding storyworlds like Superman’s – even though, as Umberto Eco has already noted, Superman’s early adventures are essentially redundant and repetitive, even when taking place across media. But it is particularly intriguing when it comes to the 1939/1940 New York World’s Fair. There, DC Comics published a one-off issue of their comic book, which included a new adventure of Superman and Lois Lane, set at the Fair. July 3, 1940 also happened to be “Superman Day” at the Fair: a marketing operation consisting in having an actor dressed as Superman greeting the fair-goers and organizing an athletic contest to choose “America’s Super-Boy and Super-Girl”, an event which was broadcast live on the Superman radio serial, while “the stage setting of the performance in turn served as the setting for the [comic’s] prologue” (47). As Freeman writes, “Superman Day represented an integrated media experience – the fictional adventure of the New York World’s Fair comic combined with
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the spectatorial spaces of the day in ways that created an integrated, cross-pollinated transmedia attraction”, one which does indeed “echo Jenkins’ characterization of contemporary transmedia audiences” migrating from one medium to another in search of new perspectives on a story and a storyworld rather than yet another adventure of the titular character (48). This offers the clearest and most convincing example in the book of one story being told simultaneously and cumulatively in different media thanks to strong cooperation and coordination among producers of content. The scale and sophistication of such marketing operations has immensely changed today, but there is not really any qualitative difference.
6 The third chapter is the most intriguing one, consisting in the study of an Argentine science fiction comic book, El Eternauta. Written by Carlos A. Scolari, the essay describes the story and its fascinating (re)incarnations through the decades, from the 1950s to the present day. It then essentially returns to observations similar to Bertetti’s: how the comic book was reappropriated and reimagined by successive storytellers and the wider public after the originator’s, Héctor Germán Oesterheld, death (at the hands of the Argentine dictatorship in the late 1970s) and became a striking example of user- participation in the act of storytelling. With time, El Eternauta became more and more explicitly politicized, first by its original author and then by new authors and by audiences, becoming “an icon of popular resistance against dictatorships and military power for 30 years now” (62). New generations of storytellers and readers adapted and reimagined the character and his time-traveling adventures to express this theme according to their own eras’ preoccupations. The essay includes the picture of a graffiti of the “Nestornauta”, a combination of the now traditional representation of the character with the face of President Nestor Kirchner, who died in 2010: “Before Kirchner’s death, the character was considered a cultural and political icon of the popular ‘resistance’ and ‘sacrifice’. After 2010, the myth was re-signified transforming Néstor Kirchner into a hero who gave his life for a political project” (67). This is an excellent example of the complex ways popular culture can work and the way it relates to political and societal issues, and it does a lot to help the book reach its major achievement: demonstrating how audiences have been for decades active in the co- creation, transformation and reappropriation of characters (Conan, Superman, El Eternauta). At the same time, the coordinated emergence of expanding and immersive storyworlds appears to be a more recent and more authentically transmedia-related phenomenon.
7 The authors do recognize in their conclusion that “these case studies are also atypical of our understanding of transmedia storytelling” (73). It is indeed telling that when they come closest to our current understanding, at the 1940 NYC Fair, corporate marketing (which after all is all about integration, synergies and consistency) is central to the phenomenon. This should argue for the necessity when working on transmedia to give proper consideration to corporate synergistic strategies designed to offer innovative experiences to consumers, be they at World’s Fairs or on social media. Transmedia is at its highest point of relevance when it situates itself at the intersection between media conglomerates and empowered audiences in the way they relate to, and sometimes the way they struggle over, expanding narratives.
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ENDNOTES
1. Matt Reeves’s proposed term in Fan Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002), Kindle edition.
AUTHORS
MEHDI ACHOUCHE Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3
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Stephen Rowley, Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs: Building Hollywood’s Ideal Communities New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 272 pages
Aurélie Blot
REFERENCES
Stephen Rowley, Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs: Building Hollywood’s Ideal Communities, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 272 pages
1 Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs, Building Hollywood’s Ideal Communities, by Stephen Rowley, a lecturer in the School of Global, Urban, and Social Studies at RMIT University, Australia, is a nice and complete analysis of the representation of small towns and suburbs featured in movies and sitcoms during and shortly after World War II. All along his study the author examines meticulously what he calls the notional places (7) (the representation we usually use to mentally visualize a certain category of place with its specificities) to consider how film and TV representations of spaces are featured to help define these notional places and then influence our feelings about these environments.
2 This work will especially please the researchers working on popular culture who want to understand the codes of the construction of a suburban landscape through the imaginary, as well as the close connection between fiction and reality. In fact, through a comparative analysis to explore the relationship between visual culture and urban theory, Stephen Rowley considers numerous detailed examples of movies and sitcoms in which the settings are parts of the American popular culture.
3 His aim is then to focus on some key threads of the cultural depictions of idealized towns and suburbs to find out how cultural depiction update to account for and deconstruct the shortfall of the postwar suburban experience.
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4 The first half of the book describes the different representations of these spaces in Films and TV sitcoms at specific historical moments while the second half analyzes the physical responses to this imagery through the study of places imagined by Disney in the 1950s and early 1960s and the implication of the urban planning movement well known as the New Urbanism.
5 In the first chapter of his study, Rowley considers the representation of small towns in movies and the development of notional places through different criteria. To illustrate his analysis, he uses examples of movies and more specifically Our Town (Sam Wood, 1940) and It’s a Wonderful Life (Franck Capra, 1946) in which the small town appears as a full character. In these two specific movies, the notional place of the small town is defined through different aspects: • development of Main Street • strong community institutions through the presence of a prominent civic precinct that recalls the importance of civic and religious institutions in the archetypal small town (police station, library, courthouse, Baptist church, Catholic church, Congregational church are meeting places that structure Main Street). • locally owned and socially integrated businesses such as drugstores. The storekeeper is well known by everybody and is an inhabitant of the town. It is synonymous with social interaction. • a classical architecture, mostly Victorian, to focus on stability and traditional values and a fluid interface between public and private spaces that is usually represented through porches which are private spaces that can be conducive to involvement in public life and interaction. • a highly walkable community: it allows the viewer to consider the town as an accessible place, synonymous with social interaction. This is why cars are present but essentially seen in motion, with only a few parked cars visible, while the railroad as a non-car transport is developed, permitting to determine the community as being out of time. • finally, there is an emphasis on the family unit as the structuring element of society. It is represented through an intergenerational reproduction of the social structure which underscores the notion of the town’s continuity over time (the tree that had been planted by the great great grand-father).
6 All these elements participate to the definition of the notional place of the small town depicted in movies in the 1940s-1950s and installed in the cultural imaginary.
7 The second chapter, titled “Sitcom Suburbs”, explains the development of the suburbs in the USA during the Postwar Suburban Boom before drawing a parallel with its representation in American TV Sitcoms in the early 1950s (26) . Working as some sort of a propaganda, TV Sitcoms from the 1950s gave a very specific representation of the suburb as an idealized place to live. Thus, sitcoms like Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet were featured especially to promote this new way of life. While suburbs were represented in a derogatory way in movies to underscore the positive image of the small town, in sitcoms, it is the contrary. The suburbs are the new place to live and are represented as the best place to start a family. Unlike the small town in films, most of the episodes of family sitcoms are shot indoors to remind the viewers that the dream house is in the suburbs. These fictional families embody some sort of a ‘too-good-to-be-true’ middle class that is promoted through the program.
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8 The type of Main Street that was developed in small-town movies is now either represented briefly or totally erased from the landscape, pointing out that social interactions are made in the residential district. At the end of this chapter, Rowley examines some examples of afterlife sitcom suburbs and speaks more specifically of the contemporary TV series Desperate Housewives (Marc Cherry, 2004). In this show, the suburb is represented as an idealistic place which is also terrifying because under the varnish of perfection looms the image of a bad suburb, a place of violence, crime and sadness. Desperate Housewives thus works as a satire of these sitcoms from the fifties. In fact, the TV series starts with Mary Alice Young, the voice-over of the TV series, who commits suicide in her house. It happens that the house is an updated replica of the Cleavers’ house from Leave it to Beaver. Here, the creator Marc Cherry denounces this pseudo perfection that had been sold in these sitcoms in the fifties. Thus, Rowley uses this example as a smooth transition to his third chapter in which he demonstrates the switch from the ideal suburb to the bad suburb in films and contemporary TV series.
9 Hollywood movies developed this notion of bad suburbs from the 1950s to the 1980s suggesting the rising disenchantment of people living in the suburbs. In fact, there is quite a difference between the image of a dream suburb broadcasted by sitcoms and the real life in the suburbs. Actually the image sold by the family sitcoms is nothing but a pipe dream. Rowley explains that the situation is particularly difficult for the real suburban families since they are far from everything and especially far from the city. Men have to drive for hours to go to work and women are totally isolated and neglected. Thus, suburbs became a real issue for women who felt desperate to live in this gilded cage. This geographic situation led to nervous breakdown, unhappiness and disenchantment. A reality that is depicted through horror movies in Hollywood showing a new vision of suburbs as uncanny. This is the case for instance of The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975) in which women, who appear to be useless, are replaced by robots. Since the suburbs are synonymous with rigor and conformity, everybody must behave to correspond to the norms and codes of the precinct. The rules to follow and the pressure on families to make more money and keep a certain standard of living lead to unhappy families and unhappy homes. Therefore, the vision of the real suburb is quite negative and the aspects that could appear as positive are actually borrowed from the small town ideal (institution buildings, Main Street, drugstores). There is then an ambivalence between the image depicted on TV and the real aspect of suburbs. To thwart this negative image and change the cultural imagery, urban planners had the idea to reshape the structure of the city mixing the notions of the small town ideal with the suburb ideal. In this perspective, Disney attempted to create a fantasy community first with its theme parks and then with its towns considered as fake towns by Rowley.
10 Chapter 4 is dedicated to the theme parks created by Walt Disney that led to the creation of EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). The theme parks function as some sort of movie towns that are built on “media imagery”, that is “a place that was also a TV show” (Karal Ann Marling, 117). These theme parks were supposed to correspond to “the American ideas of work, comfort, domesticity and urbanism” (118). Rowley analyses the different criticisms that have been made on these fake towns and especially the notion of control, fakery and commercialization. He defines Walt Disney as an urbanist who came up with an ideal town through his project of EPCOT defining civic spaces and a community balanced with the notions of fakery and fantasy. As Walt Disney states, “We think the need is for starting from scratch on a
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virgin island and building a special type of new community” (146). And this is what urban planners did through the cities of Seaside and Celebration.
11 The last two chapters discuss how urban planners made the “combination of a park, a town square and a mixed-use commercial Main Street” so exotic to Americans (150). Rowley studies the examples of Seaside that served as a setting for the movie The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998) and Celebration, the town inspired by Walt Disney. These new kinds of town are totally cinematic with a more compact community and a real interest in the experience of pedestrians on the street. This creation of new towns is called the New Urbanism that echoes the Hollywood small town depicted in movies. It relies on different elements such as: de-emphasis of cars, fluid interface between the public and private spheres, a population with a multigenerational link with the community and a close link between town and country. Contrary to the Hollywood small town in which families are the unit of construction, the New Urbanism underscores the family as part of the social experience creating physical environments more conducive to social interaction (160).
12 Seaside created in 1981 in Florida is the first New Urbanist town in which focus on the infrastructure of community is added to the design of the residential streets. Celebration was created in 1996 in Florida considering the idea of EPCOT by Walt Disney. This quiet little town offered a new way of life and for urban planners a new way to build cities. This town was made to create an improved version of everyday life, allowing wealthy people to live in a “suspension of reality” (166).
13 Using the last chapter as a way to consider media criticisms of these new types of towns and the New Urbanism, Rowley makes a lot of repetitions that could have been avoided on the notions of fakery, control and commercialization of these specific towns. However, the parallel drawn with movies like The Truman Show, The Matrix (Lana and Andy Wachowski, 1999) or Dark City (Alex proyas, 1998) is very compelling, considering the New Urbanism as a way to recall the notional places of movie towns and sitcom suburbs and reveal the uncanny and the artificial feel of these residential environments.
14 To conclude, we may say that Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs is well written and easy to read despite a few repetitions. One might consider it as a very informative read and a well-documented study with good references and complete analyses of movies and sitcoms. As Jim Collins states, this is a ‘benchmark work’ for anyone who wants to know more about the link between visual culture and urban theory and the influence of media and their cultural impact on people’s imaginary.
AUTHORS
AURÉLIE BLOT IUT Bordeaux Montaigne
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Bertrand Naivin, Selfie, Un nouveau regard photographique Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016, 161 pages
Karine Chambefort
REFERENCES
Bertrand Naivin, Selfie, Un nouveau regard photographique, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016, 161 pages
1 In the run-up to the presidential election in the United States, one photograph taken by Barbara Kinney during a Clinton meeting in Orlando went viral on social media. It showed a crowd of supporters all taking pictures of their grinning selves with their backs to the posing candidate. In the words of the photographer, it was a “massive selfie”. As the picture circulated, countless articles in the press commented that the picture evidenced the supposedly dramatic ways selfies have transformed relationships, with the young generation relinquishing eye contact and dialogue altogether, for the narcissistic pleasure of fake onscreen proximity. Information on the context of the picture soon helped clarify that the “massive selfie” had been staged by campaign organizers and Hillary herself and had taken place at the end of a rather traditional political meeting. However, the moment seemed to have upped the scales and achieved an industrialization of selfie-taking, allowing Hillary Clinton both to meet booming demands for selfies and to supply multiple posts supporting her candidacy.
2 The picture was taken after Bertrand Naivin’s book Selfie, un nouveau regard photographique went to print, but it seemed to confirm most of the author’s conclusions on this “phoneographic” practice. Indeed, Naivin considers the proliferation of selfies not as a simple trend but as a major shift in representation practices which heralds a new era for human relationships. Not only are selfies signs of more self-centered, self- obsessed times, but they are also ushering in a whole new way of “being”, of “inhabiting the world” (54).1 Naivin’s project, however, is not to study this recent practice from a psychoanalytical stance, as many have already done, reaching
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conclusions on the new narcissism involved in selfie-taking. Rather, his approach is a very personal mix of philosophy, art history, photographic theory, and history of photographic techniques. It posits that the deep transformations of photography at work in this selfie mania can be better measured by studying technological turns in the history of the medium, namely the invention of the portable camera by Kodak in the early 20th century and the invention of Polaroid. This view leads the author to take most of his examples from the field of American art and photography where the techniques first appeared and developed, which takes the reader through a wide- sweeping overview of visual culture in the United States. The argument is based on the overall assumption that taking photographs, including self-portraits, has always been a means for artists and amateurs alike to come to terms with transformations of all kinds, be it the social and cultural changes in early 20th century America or the more personal challenges of teenagerhood as far as selfies are concerned.
3 To begin with, Naivin examines what he calls the “first moment” of photography – roughly the first fifty years of photography– which climaxed with the invention of Kodak portable cameras in the 1890s, quite classically pinpointed here as the first technical turn in the history of photography. The author analyses the gradual transformations of the status of both the photograph and the photographer over the period. There was an epiphanic moment when photography shifted away from pictorial aestheticism towards more pragmatic concerns with the ordinary, and when practitioners –originally construed either as technicians harnessing the chemistry involved in daguerreotype processes or as artists intent on manipulating their pictures– were now acquiring the new autonomous status of photographers, with Joseph Strieglitz as a leading figure. In Bertrand Naivin’s historical overview, the first instances of street photographs by Paul Strand serve a demonstration of the Americanness in this coming-of-age of photography: the unplanned frontal views of common people and places encapsulate a typically American taste for the ordinary and for immediacy. This signalled a democratization of photography which was to bloom with the advent of portable Kodak cameras and rolls of film, as more and more amateurs could just “press the button” leaving Kodak to “do the rest” as promised in the adverts. It opened a “new era” for photography, and “the advent of what may be called ‘the American eye’ (…) which is characterized by a technical pragmatism, a taste for what is fast and convenient, and above all, establishing a culture of the ordinary.” (54).
4 The second technical turn was brought by Instant Photography in the 1960s, according to Bertrand Naivin. By abolishing the processing delay usually imposed on amateur photographers, Polaroid cameras even further reinforced the immediacy of photographic practices already described in the first part of the book as an American feature. They added a playful and consumerist dimension, as pictures could now be instantly produced, distributed or discarded. Visual narratives now amounted to a kind of “small talk” as opposed to the lyrical, dramatic narratives found in more classical culture. Naivin grounds his analysis of this second moment of photography on an overview of the uses of Polaroid by artists, the most famous of whom are David Hockney and Andy Warhol. A case-study of the latter’s Self-portraits in drag closes this section of the book and further clarifies what Naivin deems to be the “postmodern regime” of photographs, where they are deprived of any Benjaminian sacred “aura” or any sense of Barthesian punctum.
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5 Naivin sees some continuity between Instant photography thus defined and the more recent uses of “phoneography”. The third part of the book concentrates on the use of Smartphones as a hypermodern way of engaging with the world and with others. Deprived of any aesthetic intent or any truly introspective role, they are mainly meant to trigger online conversations. In fact, they may represent an entirely fictitious self, produced by the subject’s “slanted gaze” (136) on his/herself.
6 Recording and “imaging” every occasion of their lives, phoneographers are like “Hop- o'-My-Thumbs” (141). They produce pictures of their whereabouts that act as landmarks in an ever-changing and accelerating hypermodern world. Selfies are like “bottles in the sea” (152) in a very intimate quest for identity that has gone public. No wonder, argues Naivin, that teenagers are the main providers and consumers in this “mass production” of selfies (156), as they are particularly obsessed with themselves. The author finally suggests that the “industrialization” in this “third moment” of photography is another instance of “Americanness” in the development of photography.
7 This is where Bertrand Naivin leaves his narrative of the successive “regimes of the photograph”. On closing the book, it is quite obvious that one has read much more than just another discussion of the selfie mania. In fact, Naivin’s project is more ambitious than this, aiming to identify technological turns in the history of photography and to trace the ancestry of selfies in previous practices of self-portraiture over centuries of visual culture.
8 For that matter, it must be said the title of the book is rather misleading, as selfies, strictly speaking, are only discussed in the last third of Naivin’s essay. The title seems to suggest that the author extends the notion of “selfie” to periods and practices preceding the first use of the word in 2002, which he does not. Selfies as a visual practice only go back to the early 2000s when digital photography and social media combined to offer new access and visibility to a vernacular practice; consequently, any attempt to apply the name or the features of selfies to earlier practices would be misconceived. On the contrary, Bertrand Naivin carefully avoids this and clearly distinguishes between three notions: “a portrait of the artist by himself”, “a self- portrait” and “a selfie” (127). As a matter of fact, the word “selfie” is not used for a good portion of the essay (20-114), only to appear in the third part; but Naivin considers that the significance of the “third moment for photography” can be better embraced by digging up its roots in art history and theory. Thus, the first two parts of the book lay the ground for the author’s final contention: that selfies are “not a trend that is bound to disappear, but the expression of a new gaze on the self, combined with the advent of a new ‘self’”(159). They epitomize a deep shift in centuries-old representational modes, whose consequences are only starting to unfold.
9 Although they do not shed new light on the history of photography, the first two parts also offer useful reminders to readers already familiar with the history of American art and photography. There is a wealth of references throughout the book, from the world and theory of art, (ranging from Italian Renaissance theorist Alberti to Picasso and Man Ray to Warhol and contemporary artists like Anna Fox or Matthew Barney.) For that matter, the absence of index and bibliography at the end of the book is quite regrettable.
10 When the essay moves on to selfies per se, the point is easily driven in through comparisons with previous eras already examined –perhaps too easily, as the notion of
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technological turns or “moments” inevitably creates the sense of a teleological narrative. The essay, by focusing successively on Polaroid and selfies tends to narrow the scope of the study, while the first part had, quite commendably, adopted a broader view. This seems to imply that selfies are now the dominant form of picture-taking, which has not been established as a fact. It is true that there has been considerable media frenzy on the topic. Innumerable articles have reflected upon this new trend, often with undertones of moral panic, as noted by André Gunthert,2 construing selfies as expressions of the narcissism of millennials or heralds of a new self-centred, vacuous era. Naivin’s analysis is more nuanced, but the extreme close-up on the philosophical, psychological and aesthetic aspects of selfies tends to leave out a discussion of the real scope and impact of this new practice. Are selfies more prominent than the equally proliferating food pictures for example? By any means, it could it be said that the two partake in the same Hop-o'-My-Thumbs-like landmarking.
11 The argument of a transformation of representational modes through the selfie mania would require an inquiry into how other visual objects and communication practices may be connected to and affected by selfies. An exploration of the ways contemporary artists have engaged with selfies may provide clues to such connections,3 as suggested by Bertrand Naivin only at the end of his essay; but besides art, and to further assess the impact of selfies, the question could be raised on how the new “slanted gaze” involved in selfies might have spread to, or thrived in other walks of life. To a certain extent, the “slanted” mode of representation examined here epitomizes a new regime of truth so that we may wonder if and how this feeds into the current crisis of “post- truth”,4 “fake news” and “alternative facts”.
12 Indeed, the combination of selfies and social networks has turned selfie-takers into story-tellers of their own lives, spinning half-truths about their otherwise not-so- interesting lives. Filtered pictures on Instagram or Facebook walls build up fictitious selves. They are the media for alternative identities, making the alternative easily available and more enjoyable than truth. Not that this never happened in visual culture before, though – for instance, family albums have been shown to serve similar story- telling purposes.
13 There is indeed a degree of self-branding in selfies but the point for selfie-takers is also to entertain their online communities with stories which in turn idealize or dramatize ordinary situations. To a certain extent, selfies take the notion of spectacle to a further degree, or more exactly, to a broader scale, making everyone the actor and maker of their own reality show. Although Naivin never uses such terms, this is implicit in his analysis. From this viewpoint, the consequences are overwhelmingly negative, leading, on the one hand, to artificial and often contradictory versions of the self, and on the other hand, to a rather impoverished use of pictures, as desperate “wanted notices” (152).
14 This would perhaps require more qualified conclusions. It could also be argued that selfies often amount to people picking their day’s highlights and sharing a representation of them, as if writing about them in a visual diary. Could this be acknowledged as a form of creative agency, albeit sometimes (mis)directed to conform to unquestioned dominant models? This could even be regarded as a form of empowerment by offering selfie-takers a personal grasp on their image or by triggering participation in a new cultural practice. There are certainly grounds to lighten up about selfies, which may lie beyond the mere territories of the gaze and would have to
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do with creation, expression, circulation and community, and which still need to be explored. One step towards such a reappraisal of selfies has been recently made by the Saatchi Gallery with the exhibition “Selfie to Self-Expression” (April and May 2017) meant “to celebrate the truly creative potential of a form of expression often derided for its inanity”.
15 For this reason, readers might be under the impression that Selfie, un nouveau regard photographique tends to fall prey to the very sort of self-centredness that is often attributed to selfies. After reaching out to multiple references in the history of art, photography and theory in the first two parts of the book, it seems that the analysis of selfies remains a little self-contained, where one could have expected tentative forays into other fields and contemporary practices, beyond photography itself. Paradoxical though it may seem, selfies imply connections, somewhat intrinsically. Thus, they raise multiple questions related to art and popular culture, media and communication, or even politics –as exemplified by the debate over Hillary Clinton’s “massive selfie”– which could help to account for the selfie craze and to put into perspective its significance in the history of image-making.
NOTES
1. All translations by the author of this review. 2. André Gunthert, “La consécration du selfie”, Études photographiques, 32 | Printemps 2015, [On line] 16 juillet 2015, http://etudesphotographiques.revues.org/3529, last visited 23 March 2017. 3. Laurence Allard, Laurent Creton, Roger Odin (dir.), Téléphonie mobile et création, Paris, Armand Colin, 2014. 4. Jayson Harsin, “Regimes of Posttruth, Postpolitics, and Attention Economies”, Communication, Culture & Critique. 8 (2), 2015, pp. 327–33.
AUTHORS
KARINE CHAMBEFORT Université Paris Est Créteil
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Christopher Chávez, Reinventing the Latino Television Viewer: Language, Ideology, and Practice Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015, 180 pages
Emilie Cheyroux
REFERENCES
Christopher Chávez, Reinventing the Latino Television Viewer: Language, Ideology, and Practice, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015, 180 pages
1 Christopher Chávez offers a detailed and incisive look at the evolution of television marketing practices towards the U.S. Latino viewers who, he argues, have always been “framed” (25) by the networks that need them to fit into their own definitions. This process has always involved forming a pseudo conglomeration of Latinos that does away with the differences that exist between them and recently, it has also led to the creation of the “New Latino” designation in audience categories. Chávez shows that television executives have used the young generation’s bilingualism to justify the launch of new networks that offer English-language shows while still calling themselves Hispanic. Throughout the book, the author strives to highlight the stakes of such a shift, and sheds light on the fact that it’s a construct supposed to attract the acculturated Latinos and turn them into profitable viewers. According to him (who interestingly has worked as an account executive in the general market television industry), the “mainstream” is entering the Hispanic space and might erase it. The example he uses as an introduction illustrates this argument: Fusion, a channel set up by agreement with ABC News and Univision Communications Inc. offers a wide range of topics with a Hispanic perspective. Chávez remarks that this fusion leans more towards an “erasure” (8) since the Hispanic cultural ties are used as a secondary focus. At the heart of this issue is the use of language that he discusses thoroughly as a commodity used subsequently to exclude and redefine the Latino viewer. Thus, this meticulous
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study, illustrated by numerous interviews with industry professionals, draws attention to the economic and cultural power assigned to Latinos in the United States.
2 The first chapters are necessary background since Chávez gives socio-historical details that enable the reader to understand the recent trends. He explains that there has been a constant movement of negotiation between the Hispanic audience and the television networks. Nevertheless, if the Latinos have pushed the US television landscape towards more diversity, the traditional conglomerates of all American viewers still control the movement. The last three chapters are much more efficient in developing Chávez’ thoughts about the erasure of Hispanic cultural ties. He explains that there has always been a false opposition between English and Spanish that has led the networks to separate the mainstream and Hispanic spheres. But in spite of being marginalized, the Spanish-speaking viewers were still represented in the US television landscape. With the advent of the new English-language networks with the Hispanic sphere, Chávez dreads that these might be left behind. That’s why he discusses questions of representation and democracy and explains why the possible disappearance of Spanish would be detrimental to Latinos.
3 In the first chapter, Chávez uses historical information in order to explore the creation of the first Hispanic media, starting with the press and the radio and ending with the emergence of a national television network. It is useful to understand that the media has contributed to the emergence of the pan-ethnic construct “Hispanic” and thus, to a first kind of erasure. Indeed, Univision (Spanish International Network from 1961 to 1986) started because its manager, Emilio Azcárraga Vidaurreta, was refused Mexican content by Anglo managers. Only when he launched his own network was the Hispanic audience constructed around linguistic and cultural unity. Throughout this chapter, and with of the help of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of fields and cultural capital, Chávez seeks to determine where the Hispanic audience is situated. From his perspective, the existence of Spanish-speaking networks has mainly enabled Latinos to create their own Spanish-language alternative channels that he deems essential as a counterhegemonic force. That is the reason why he wants to warn the reader of the implications coming with the arrival of new English-language Hispanic networks and with the recent buyouts and fusions that might also erase Hispanic content.
4 The “New Latino” is at the source of the shift Chávez discusses: young, bicultural, bilingual and at ease with social media, it is a perfect target for marketers. The strength of the second chapter is to enlighten the reader to the fact that in the post- deregulation world, incredibly broad and precise methods are used to understand viewers. Chávez points out the absurdity of wanting to gather the smallest details about Latinos (statistics, study of the viewers’ brain activity) while not recognizing their differences. He also takes every belief held by marketers about Latinos one by one and efficiently deconstructs them: where marketers use “corporate logic” (60), he adds sociological content. As a Latino himself, he accurately argues that believing that Latinos are all the same, and thinking that their identity is contradictory with being American are two common stereotypes held by society. The reality he defends is that of “multiple, intersectional identities” (69). He puts forward ideas that seem obvious for any person with a bicultural background but that marketers refuse to take into account: Hispanics are not just bicultural but “ambicultural” (69) and able to “pivot” (70) between their different cultural identities. They thus feel at ease with code
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switching and that’s why Chávez makes language the core of his argument in the two subsequent chapters.
5 On television, Spanish has always been considered the language of “impurity” (89) and Chávez argues that mainstream networks have never managed to use it well (when it has been used) and it is usually replete with stereotypes. On television, Spanish is portrayed as a foreign accent the other characters and the audience can make fun of, as illustrated by the numerous mispronounced words and malapropisms used by Sofia Vergara’s character on Modern Family (ABC, 2009- present). Admittedly, English has always been a source of power and English-speaking viewers have always been at the top of the audience hierarchy, which, in terms of market transactions, translates into mainstream networks buying the Hispanic ones, not the opposite. But with these buyouts come new linguistic issues and in the fourth chapter, Chávez finally illustrates his concept of erasure, analyzing all the new network channels and highlighting the contradictions of their approaches. Fusion is scrutinized again, as well as El Rey, the network launched by Robert Rodriguez, who is in the opinion of this reviewer the embodiment of the New Latino. Erasing consists in segmenting even further what Hispanics are and considering that they all correspond to the New Latino profile. This thinking allows marketers to state that while English has become the dominant language among Latinos, it should be the sole language of their programs. While Chávez is right to point out that bilingualism is not a new phenomenon, it can’t be denied that the younger generations tend to prefer English, and it is thus almost inevitable to expect the television networks to exploit that. Nevertheless, the author rightfully explains that Hispanic culture runs the risk of becoming a flavor or an exotic artifact and that the generation who still prefers Spanish will not be served. The new networks are in fact more interested in attracting mainstream viewers. They thus only accept stories with a “crossover appeal”(122), in other words those accessible to the non-Hispanic audience, marginalizing even further the stories written by the Hispanic writers who do not fit into the new profile.
6 The issue of democracy comes naturally as an end of this book since Chávez reminds the reader that the advent of the new television networks does not entail better representation on screen and in society, as stereotypes continue to be widely used. He highlights a double perspective that explains why there is so much attention and economic interest directed towards Hispanics and why, at the same time, it does not guarantee further inclusion: the need to conquer markets and make profit from Latinos works hand in hand with the desire to suppress their forms of speech. The new networks are a consequence of both those endeavors and, according to Chávez, they advertise a false promise of inclusion that conceals a will to dominate the minority population even more. The problem Chávez raises is that the success of these new networks might lead the traditionally Spanish-language networks to pivot towards the mainstream and deliver content divested from its cultural heritage. Now, he postulates that only the Hispanic channels can act as a space of social advocacy. As Latinos continue to be considered foreigners within American society, however profitable, Chávez can only support the maintenance of the traditional Hispanic networks as they are. The assessment of the recent shift in television practices is thus rather pessimistic but Chávez ends on a positive note, expressing his hopes that the digital space will offer the alternative channels of expression that are essential to the civic participation of all Latinos.
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7 Chávez provides an insightful and enlightening analysis that is useful to anyone interested in Latino/a studies, media marketing strategies and their link to cultural and ideological issues. The last pages about the new digital perspectives are an original addition that could have been backed by a mention of the development of a network of Latino film festivals around the country. Indeed, these events program movies that deal with the issues of all Latinos, whether these are feature films from Latin American countries or documentaries about social issues affecting Latinos in the United States. At the periphery of Hollywood, these festivals fulfill the democratic role Chávez defends. Nevertheless, this book is an excellent read to understand the media’s construction of a population that is shaping the US cultural, social and political landscape.
AUTHORS
EMILIE CHEYROUX University Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle
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Ariane Hudelet, The Wire, Les règles du jeu Paris: PUF, 2016, 198 pages
Flore Coulouma
REFERENCES
Ariane Hudelet, The Wire, Les règles du jeu, Paris: PUF, 2016, 198 pages
1 David Simon’s cult television series The Wire has been the subject of a very rich academic and non-academic production since the end of its initial broadcast on HBO in 2008. It has also become a favorite among French academics in the past few years, yet apart from the collective works The Wire, Reconstitution collective (Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2011), and The Wire, l’Amérique sur écoute (La Découverte, 2014), no comprehensive monograph on the subject has been published in French until now, most of the bibliographical references being only accessible in English. Ariane Hudelet’s book, The Wire, les règles du jeu, aims to fill that gap. Since The Wire is now considered a cult phenomenon, as Ms Hudelet reminds us in her introduction, her study is doubly welcome; on the one hand, it provides a review of the French and English-language literature on the subject, which will be useful to students and researchers. On the other hand, Ms Hudelet’s book offers a unique and original interpretation of the series, and sheds light on its main issues and themes, using as its guiding thread the productive notion of “rules of the game.” At about 200 pages (four 50-page chapters) the book is substantial, but it is nonetheless explicitly designed to be accessible to both academic and non-academic readerships.
2 Ms Hudelet starts by defining the notion of rule. The Wire’s perhaps most iconic recurring line (“That’s the game, yo”) is universally shared among the series’ characters, across all social classes, on both sides of the law. Ariane Hudelet uses its complex polysemy as her gateway into the many aesthetic (especially visual), narrative, and political levels of the series. The “game” refers to the chess game that low and mi- level gangsters play to pass the time while waiting for customers; it also refers to the
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dangerous game of drug trafficking and gang life, and, more generally in the series, to the fixed game of an oppressive social order whose dehumanizing structure makes every actor a powerless pawn (chapter 1 “Un jeu de dupe?” [a fool’s game?]). The predetermined logic of the game is exposed at different levels, in the series’ relation to space: the many social hierarchies mapped out onto the Baltimore landscape make the town a chess board on which conflicts play out between and within socials groups (the police, the gangs, the school system, the local politicians, and the newspaper). Ariane Hudelet also uses this first chapter to address the many criticisms leveled at series creator David Simon for his allegedly excessive pessimism. According to his detractors, Simon’s vision of a struggling post-industrial Baltimore leaves his characters no way out; it is too bleak to inspire and uplift viewers. Ariane Hudelet argues against this, pointing out how Simon’s “formal strategies” (48), both narrative and visual, create a sense of involvement and excitement in the audience that averts the pitfalls of utter resignation.
3 The book’s second chapter turns to the notion of game as a pleasurable endeavor, and focuses on the series’ aesthetic and playful dimension. The series’ “narrative complexity” (52), its many echoes, and its sustained suspense engage the viewer in a decoding challenge that largely contributes to the series’ appeal: the deeper level of the narrative, including detective plots, social codes and interconnected networks, strongly emulate the “productive confusion” of a video game (61), and partially explains the audience’s enthusiasm for The Wire. Ariane Hudelet devotes part of her analysis to the repetition/variation structures that frame the dialogues and stage directions as well as the visual and sound effects throughout the series. David Simon paired these aesthetic choices with a deliberately slow tempo, thus reclaiming the “long term” as crucial to his narrative’s investigations and to the unfolding of the plot itself. For Ariane Hudelet, the series’ long-term strategy is also instrumental in generating and maintaining the viewers’ interest.
4 Chapter 3 focuses on the series as a game of representation based on the complex relationship between fiction, realism and reality: the stakes of fiction are an explicit sub-plot of season 5, the “meta-fictional” season of the series. The Wire uniquely combines realistic, documentary modes with a fully owned theatricality (107), thus highlighting the discrepancy between fiction and reality. This leads Ariane Hudelet to a broader reflection on the relationship between sign and meaning, an issue that allows David Simon to denounce the referential void at the heart of neo-liberal capitalism. At this juncture Ms Hudelet could have productively used the analytical tools provided by language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work on game, language and reference could further enlighten us on the series’ own relationship to meaning and reference. Ms Hudelet’s third chapter also examines the issue of violence as intrinsically linked to the question of language. Finally, Ariane Hudelet rounds up her study with an analysis of the meta-textual and self-referential dimension of the series (chapter 4). She meticulously reviews the series’ proliferating references to cinematic, televisual and literary genres, and shows how they anchor The Wire within a hybrid, seemingly fragmented generic tradition. The series retains a strong formal unity, however, thanks to David’s Simon’s coherent “vision d’auteur” [authorial viewpoint] (173).
5 Ariane Hudelet’s book is a very pleasant read. It is never pompous or overly technical yet provides scrupulously detailed and illuminating micro-analyses, thus giving the
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reader access to a subtle understanding of the aesthetic and narrative logic of the series. The Wire, les règles du jeu also enables the reader to apprehend the series within a broader context, and to understand the multiple traditions (literary, cinematic, televisual) at stake in the art of TV series.
AUTHORS
FLORE COULOUMA Université Paris Nanterre
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Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross- Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016, 256 pages
Anne Crémieux
REFERENCES
Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016, 256 pages
1 Marlene Dietrich’s top hat, Greta Garbo’s deep voice or Katharine Hepburn’s determined gait are all world-famous representations of women in the American cinema of the 20s and 30s. They were superstars who, both on and off the screen, seemed to live outside the world of patriarchy that ruled other women’s lives. There was a sense of sophisticated mystery about their sexuality that has since been lifted but which Laura Horak approaches for what they might have signified at the time, couching her argument in the study of dozens of examples of masculine women in celluloid films and other media.
2 A simple and compelling limitation of the range of Horak’s study to female characters wearing pants in fiction films from the beginning of cinema to 1934 enables her to draw convincing conclusions about how female masculinity on screen evolved both in terms of visibility and meaning.
3 In the introduction, Horak debunks a number of myths about women wearing masculine clothing in early cinema, namely that they are “transgressive,” that they “challenge patriarchy and the gender binary,” that they are “the only way movies could represent lesbianism” at the time and that they were very rare (1-2). In fact, cross-dressed women in films prior to 1940 and particularly prior to 1915 were not rare, as the 18-page appendix demonstrates. And they did not necessarily signify
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lesbianism, which was largely condemned, but on the contrary may have functioned to “help the medium become more respectable” (2), at least until the late 1920s. Horak positions herself against writers she otherwise lauds for their groundbreaking work, notably Andrea Weiss (Vampires and Violets) and Vito Russo (The Celluloid Closet), because she refuses to “read historical representations in the light of today’s codes and identities, instrumentalize gender nonconformity as a sign of homosexuality, and construct a progressive, continuous trajectory from the ‘bad old times’ to the enlightened present.” She feels they “miss the opportunity to be truly surprised by a past radically different from the present, a past that might prompt us to imagine a radically different future” (3). Whether these accusations are entirely founded may be subject to debate, but Horak’s standpoint certainly marks a new approach to gender studies that is liberated from past needs to prove that no matter how repressed, homosexuality has always been present and can still be detected in past cultural productions. Horak does not feel the need to assert something that is no more denied. She hardly needs to disclose and provide proof of the sexuality of the actresses, for instance, as the secrets have been lifted. Her introduction asserts that “The specter of sexual inversion did not haunt the cross-dressed women of cinema’s first decades” (6) and that it should therefore not be misconstrued. Frontier’s women, in particular, often wore pants because it simply seemed to fit the job description, as many who championed exercise and outdoors activities for women argued that “traditional women’s clothing was contributing to the nation’s sickliness” (9). The introduction establishes three waves of crossed-dressed women in cinema – 1908-1921, when cross- dressing by women generally signified sophistication within a media seeking recognition; 1922-1928, when the establishment of the star system assigned certain looks to certain actresses and limited cross-dressing to a few stars; and 1929-1934 when the Hays code was being drawn and the taboo of homosexuality was coming under target.
4 The book is divided in two parts of two chapters each, separated by a one-chapter Intermezzo.
5 Part I focuses on the first wave and the many tomboy parts, soon to be taken over by boy stars such as Jackie Coogan. Part II deals with the second and third wave, “when wholesome meanings vied with more transgressive ones” (12), with clear references to lesbianism in A Florida Enchantment (1914), moving on to a period when reviewers in particular “began to use cross-dressing as a euphemism for lesbianism” (16).
6 Part I is about films up to 1921. The first chapter is a study of the “Female Boy” of the early years, as actresses held quantities of boyish roles in the 1910s. According to Horak’s detailed research, this was first a ploy to “uplift” cinema as a respectable art form, that was later perceived as a remnant of theatre practices ill-suited to the immersive media that cinema was meant to be. At the same time, young soldiers were coming back from a victorious war and “femininity was no longer a valued characteristic of boyhood” (53).
7 The second chapter is entitled “Cowboy Girls, Girl Spies, and the Homoerotic Frontier.” The lifestyle of the frontier is presented as requiring practical dress for women that include pants, in territories were women are scarce and quickly gain the right to vote (most Western states included the woman’s vote in their constitution in the late 19th century). They “affirm a virile national ideal” (56), including against feminized racial others (Mexicans, Native Americans), showing “how important ostensibly deviant
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expressions of gender and sexuality were to the construction of normative, national ideals” (60). Horak looks at the specific gender dynamics of the West, where women of ill-repute dominated an unbalanced population and where most men were considered unfit for the company of respectable women. It is therefore logical that heterosexual romance, to seem realistic, should be complicated by cross-dressing that allows at first for a male friendship, the most common form of affective bond in the West, to turn into romance once the gender of the cross-dresser is revealed. The homoerotic implications, undeniable today as in the past, may therefore not be the only or primary grid of interpretation to apply to these films.
8 The third chapter, or Intermezzo, focuses on the various representations of the comedic play A Florida Enchantment, first staged on Broadway in 1896 and adapted 18 years later by Vitagraph for the moving pictures. Except for one New York critic, the film was received as a “good, wholesome comedy” that families will enjoy, while the play was largely criticized for showcasing sexual and gender perversion. Horak goes to great lengths to interpret this difference, from one media to another, from one generation to the next. Most importantly, the film seems to have been received in what was still an age of innocence as far as gender-bending was concerned, to be contrasted with the rising controversies to come and the fast-diminishing number of female cross- dressing in films as the industry was becoming more organized.
9 Part II focuses on “The Emergence of Lesbian Visibility” from 1921 to 1934, a period in which mainstream knowledge about lesbianism widens, both giving new meaning to female cross-dressing in film and making it more vulnerable to censorship.
10 Chapter 4 is entitled “Enter the Lesbian: Cosmopolitanism, Trousers, and Lesbians in the 1920s.” In the late 1920s, The Captive (1926) was followed by the publishing and strong censorship of Radclyffe Hall’s largely auto-biographical The Well of Loneliness (1928), in a decade marked by relative sexual freedom and gender-breaking fashion. Horak interprets lesbian cameos in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) or Manslaughter (1922) not so much as groundbreaking instances of lesbians on screen but rather as signs of the times, when narrative realism required including such characters in the background. It seemed like the time had come, and Radclyffe Hall’s book The Well of Loneliness became enough of a cultural icon for it to make a comedic cameo in The Secret Witness (1931) (167). The author draws several visual parallels between famous portraits of masculine lesbians such as Radclyffe Hall or Jane Heap and photograms from What’s the World Coming To (1926) or Wings (1927) (135, 156), in an effort to map how these images may have been perceived at the time. She quotes reviewers but also questions their motivations in using certain vocabulary or their opinion about what “sophisticated” audiences might understand as opposed to the rest of the population. The discourse on female masculinity evolved over the years and Horak is exemplary in discussing the slight changes and variations within the context of Mae West plays and the Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle scandal, when the only woman accepted in the director’s guild is the suit-wearing Dorothy Arzner.
11 The book’s last chapter, “The Lesbian Vogue and the Backlash Against Cross-Dressed Women in the 1930s,” concludes on both a high and low note, with the now cult 1930s films of Garbo, Dietrich and Hepburn, which were both impressively daring and contributed to the strict application of the 1934 code of self-censorship. Horak describes how Garbo, Dietrich and playwright Mercedes de Acosta recurrently made the news in ways that made their sexuality a thinly-kept secret. Some of the most
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famous moments and lines of their films, such as Dietrich’s outfit in Morocco or Garbo’s “bachelor” comment in Queen Christina, were reprised by the stars in interviews or at public events. The context of masculine outfits for women is discussed at length, in an attempt to truly decipher what the images might have meant to audiences at the time. Images of women in male garb but also of women kissing on the mouth, in both Morocco (1931) and Queen Christina (1933), and in the highly controversial German film Mädchen in Uniforms (1931). They must have been more ambiguous at the time than they seem today for the scenes to make it past the cutting-room floor. The chapter concludes on Sylvia Scarlett (1935, made in 1934) and its bouts with censorship, producing a gender- bending comedy carried by Hepburn’s mesmerizing performance of masculinity (222).
12 With this fascinatingly detailed and thorough study of cross-dressed women in pre- code cinema, Horak puts the light on a seldom studied practice that has few connections with its male counterpart, as crossed-dressed men spring from such a separate tradition and have been received widely differently. The fact that women wearing pants do not constitute a form of cross-dressing anymore is a sign of how ideologically complex the practice must have been in a not-so-distant past.
AUTHORS
ANNE CRÉMIEUX Université Paris Ouest – Nanterre
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Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2015, 400 pages
Pierre Cras
REFERENCES
Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2015, 400 pages
1 In 2007, the Christopher P. Lehman stated that American animation owes its existence to African Americans due to the prevalence of their negative depictions and caricatures in early cartoons. According to the author, these visual incarnations of a humor relying on ethnic jokes dominated without a doubt the emerging motion picture industry, including the animated films. Eight years later (2015), Nicholas Sammond goes into this topic in depth with his book Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. He argues that most of the famous early animation characters – Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, Bugs Bunny – carried distinguishing visual and acting features inherited from the American Blackface Minstrelsy practice.
2 Rather than being just organized into “regular” chapters, the Birth of an Industry’s content is divided according to the four major themes that have conditioned the existence of cartoon minstrels characters. The first theme “Performance” retells the story of the pioneer animators and their multidimensional work as vaudeville actors, magicians and cartoonists. The author especially emphasizes the roles of Winsor McCay and James Stuart Blackton, two of the most popular cartoonists-performers who “placed animation firmly in the tradition of the lightning-sketch” (45) during the preindustrial animation era (before the 1920s) and regularly crossed the mobile boundaries separating different medias such as comic strips, films, live performances and cartoons. One of the most apparent reflections of the animators’ diverse influences
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relies on formal and substantive conventions of the early cartoons – such as “self- reflexivity, the permeability of screen boundaries, the interplay between the animated character and its creator...” (57) – which were nothing less than adaptations of the vaudeville / blackface minstrelsy tropes to the animation medium.
3 The second part of the Nicholas Sammond’s study entitled “Labor” is the most innovative as the author focuses not only on the on-screen minstrel characters representations or the history of them, but also puts the light on the growing American cartoon industry production conditions.
4 According to the author, the transformation of American social spaces of entertainment from vaudeville theaters to movie palaces and the animation world entered in its industrialization phase through the application of the Fordist factory model, occurred at the same time. The evolution of material and human organization conditions deeply modified the animators working environment as well as the content of their creations “not just in terms of popular continuing characters but also in the formulation of animate space” (111). The introduction of sound during the 1920s coupled with the transformation of a craft modeled art form to an industry turned artists-performers to workers. Consequently, Nicholas Sammond maintains that this parallel development urged animators to use minstrel characters – which the author associated with the depictions of “rebellious slaves and their descendants” (89) who resisted to unfree labor through subversive and playful behaviors – as implicit witnesses of their own social condition. From the short-length Disney’s animated film Steamboat Willie (1928), new sound synchronization process to images was a marker of the increasing division of labor in animation as well as a quick standardization of the industry’s practices. This specific climate created the conditions for the use of ethnic and racial jokes / stereotypes on a regular basis. The latter “succeeded because they were legible to audiences of the day but also because they made efficient use of the limited narrative structure of the gag cartoon” (124). In other words, the tropes and conventions from Blackface Minstrelsy (white gloves, black plasmatic bodies, wide eyes and mobile mouths) were applied by animators to their creations in order to express a playful resistance to the working environment they had to regularly deal with.
5 The third section, “Space”, gets back to this notion of space as a “product” whose manifestations could be graphic and visible, or more subtle and internalized. Nicholas Sammond applies the latter case to the historical shift from silent movies spaces to talking ones during the late 1920s. By reorganizing the “economic, cultural and social spaces of moviemaking and moviegoing in the early sound era” (136), animated cartoons have entirely rebuild the existing links between the (real) spaces where the movies were created, the filmic ones made by representations and the theatrical ones where the audience received those films. The author argues that short films, including cartoons, should be considered as “transitional spaces” as they mark the gradual elimination of live performance in movie theaters. This is the reason why on the one hand, vaudeville starts to lose grounds to the movies but continued to largely inspire animators’ representations of race, class and gender issues until the 1940s on the other hand. Nicholas Sammond also discusses the vaudeville’s relationship to animation and their common use of ethnic stereotypes. The author bases his statement on the work of the animation historian Donald Crafton and asserts that all of the animation studios of the late 1920s-1930s period “depicted wily Chinamen, lazy Mexicans, simpering Jews, drunken Irishmen, and so on, either in human or thinly veiled animal form” (160). The
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transposition from vaudeville calibrated expressions of ethnicity and race – especially towards African Americans and their negative depictions – to the screen put the cartoons in the particular position of transitional objects which carried a shift in representational practices and their associated spaces. Many animated short films like Swing You Sinners! (1930) highlight perfectly the existing bridge between a “segregated imaginary of filmed entertainment and the Jim Crow world” (173) in which these movies were exhibited, watched and consumed. Such films created spaces that affirmed segregation in both physical and internalized way and set an harmony between real and internalized separations. As the 1930s progressed and the popularity of swing music increased among white audiences, the vaudevillian African American minstrel caricatures in cartoons became vestigial and handed over to a broader racist imagery made of jungle, plantation and ghetto spaces. According to Nicholas Sammond, cartoon minstrel characters such as Bimbo, Mickey Mouse, Felix or Bugs Bunny continued to “visually and gesturally act as minstrels but over time lose a direct association with blackface itself” (183). This evolution coupled with the creation of a fantasy world where “black” spaces – particularly Harlem, the Deep South and Africa – formed a contiguous world relying on African and African American caricatures.
6 The last part of the book is dedicated to the topic of race portrayal in 1930s animated films. Using more specifically the example of Mickey Mouse in Trader Mickey (1932), the author analyzes the mental and visual combination of African American cultural traits with some racist stereotypes (fear, violence, lust, stupidity of black characters). He asserts that because of their ambiguous use of mixed signals, the more vituperative clichés could be found in jazz cartoons like Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat (1937) or Tin Pan Alley Cats (1943). By their resort to typical African American musical and cultural elements during violent or spooky animated sequences, cartoonists linked jazz to death, decay and / or blatantly racist form of ethnic humor that combines fear and desire of black bodies. Nicholas Sammond considers the use of African American animated stereotype to be a “commodity fetish, a crystallization of social and material relations, a way to effectively and efficiently sell a gag”. (244) Indeed, the shortness of vaudeville routines and animated cartoons allowed actors and animators to transmit a thick package of social, ethnic and cultural representations to their respective audience in only a few minutes. This probably explains why the common tropes and practices of blackface minstrelsy in early American animation were so regularly used by cartoonists.
7 To conclude, the main concern of Nicholas Sammond is to examine the American cartoon production and figurative processes in the light of the blackface minstrelsy practice. The originality of this work verges on a comparative method and on the analysis of intermediality which took place between animated films and vaudeville. Despite its numerous strengths, Birth of an Industry suffers sometimes from minor limits. Due to the meticulous work and the large amount of material used to build a solid argumentation, it is sometimes a little bit confusing for non-specialists in aesthetics. Moreover, the author’s conclusion – mostly through a case study on the movie Tropic Thunder (2008) – opens the discussion about the current filmic legacy of blackface minstrelsy. Well-written and enriching, this part seems nevertheless in disharmony with the rest of the book and its very specific focus. Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation is however highly relevant,
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accurate and worth reading as it is a key work in the field of both American animation and ethnic studies.
AUTHORS
PIERRE CRAS Université Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle
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Jennifer Guiliano, Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015, 175 pages
Jennifer L. Gauthier
REFERENCES
Jennifer Guiliano, Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015, 175 pages
1 In the United States, the government has done all it can to obscure the actual historical facts surrounding the conquest of Native lands and the intentional genocide of Native peoples. History books used in schools make only passing mention of events like the Battle of Little Big Horn or the Trail of Tears. Unlike in Canada or Australia, state officials have not apologized for the forced assimilation policies and institutionalized racism of the Residential School system. However, the ugly details of this fraught history resurface each time public attention turns to Native American mascots in professional and collegiate sports. It is common knowledge that Americans love their sporting events, their sports teams and their sports rituals. Football and baseball are routinely linked with classic (conservative) aspects of American national identity. Although many teams have distanced themselves from their racially offensive mascots and invented new icons for themselves, the most insidious offenders persist. In the U.S., we were reminded of this fact during the 2016 World Series of Baseball. One of the most egregious perpetrators of Native American stereotypical images, the Cleveland Indians franchise, battled it out with the Chicago Cubs through extra innings in Game 7. Although they were ultimately bested and the Cubs took home the title for the first time since 1908, by the time it was over the leering, wide-eyed and red-faced Cleveland mascot had been seen by millions of viewers around the world. In fact, the 2016 World Series drew the largest television audience in 25 years.
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2 Who knows if anyone watching thought twice about the Cleveland mascot and its blatant denigration of a people and their culture. Defenders of these mascots claim that they are “honoring,” or “celebrating,” Native American peoples and traditions. This excuse has allowed the Washington Redskins to retain their mascot and its attendant products into the 21st century. Although plenty of other examples exist, Washington has borne the brunt of repeated demands to retire its mascot, the “Redskin,” by the Native American Indian Congress and other interested parties.
3 With these debates fresh in public discourse, Jennifer Guiliano’s monograph, Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America, provides a welcome historical context. Her text is short, but densely-packed, with 110 pages of prose and an extensive bibliography. Guiliano meticulously researched her topic using multiple archives and public documents. As the latest addition to the Critical Issues in Sport and Society Series at Rutgers University Press, her work adds a crucial perspective to this pressing and divisive issue in America. She argues that the origin of Native American mascotry is intimately linked to the development of the modern university in the first half of the 19th century. Moreover, she calls attention to all the various constituencies, both on and off the university campus, that stood to benefit from the commodification of racialized bodies. In addition, her work highlights attempts by these institutions to regulate the identity of the modern college man by invoking intertwined discourses of race and class. Universities and their sports boosters mobilized Native American mascots to alleviate post-war anxieties about masculinity and construct a specific white male identity.
4 To support her argument she examines five case studies, the University of Illinois, Stanford University, the University of North Dakota, Miami University (OH) and Florida State University, specifically focusing on the development of their football programs between 1926 and 1952. American football (to distinguish from soccer, or European football), has been closely linked to hegemonic masculinity since its invention. Guiliano traces this imbrication along with its growing commercialism and its role as a “moralizing force” for young men (18). The irony of this myth notwithstanding, football generated massive amounts of money and attention for colleges and universities, even as early as 1905. With its clear connections to capitalism and its cultivation of “hysterical interest,” it is no wonder that in 1927 sportswriter John Tunis described the sport as an “American religion” (25).
5 This distinct form of community identity and national expression relies on the tight regulation of bodies, revenue and fans. At the heart of this mix is the spectacle, and by the late 1920s it began to include the halftime show, including Native American mascots. The University of Illinois debuted Chief Illiniwek on a Saturday afternoon in October 1926. Played by local high school student and former Boy Scout, Lester Leutwiler, The Chief shared a traditional catlinite pipe with Benjamin Franklin, the mascot of visiting University of Pennsylvania during the halftime show. Most Illinois fans believed that the white character was William Penn reenacting a peace treaty with the Natives. Here the myths of Pennylvania’s founding erase the effects of colonialism and celebrate a fictional kinship relationship between Natives and white men.
6 Guiliano sets this mythical relationship in the context of Ernest Thompson Seton’s appropriation of Native culture to form the Woodcraft Indians, a precursor to the Boy Scouts. White folks’ romanticization of a people they had worked hard to eradicate served to mask the historical facts, replacing them with myths of peaceful negotiation
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and mutual respect, or as Guiliano suggests, “benign interplay” (42). Thus the Native American halftime spectacle served to reassure white, middle class men of their place in society, to affirm their presence and simultaneously the absence of actual Native Americans on the university campus, or in fact, anywhere in their daily lives.
7 In her chapter on the role of college bands in the institutionalization of Native American mascotry, Guiliano notes that they played an important role both on and off the field. By mobilizing the community through youth programs, public concerts and other service efforts, the band generated an audience of loyal, excited fans. This guaranteed participation was necessary for the successful enactment of the halftime spectacle, as the fans became the witnesses to the ascendancy of the white, middle class, modern American college man. In their music, bands appropriated what Philip Deloria calls the “sounds of ethnicity” to accompany the ersatz Native dances and rituals (50). As Guiliano vividly describes, these spectacles highlighted the silencing of the Indian voice, as the interplay between the white bandleader and the dancing Chief echoed the power relations in American history (52).
8 The University of Illinois pioneered and perfected the halftime spectacle, but many other schools did not have the financial means to mount such an elaborate show. Despite their limitations, Miami University (Ohio) and the University of North Dakota both sought to employ colonial tropes of racial dichotomies to mobilize school spirit and bring spectators to athletic events. In documenting the efforts of these two schools, Guiliano marshals extensive historical evidence including stories from the Miami student newspaper, fraternity archives, alumni bulletins and university brochures. She intertwines this material with a detailed history of the conquests of both Ohio and the Dakotas. With their vivid depictions of blatantly derogative stereotypes, the university publications are difficult to stomach, particularly for a contemporary reader aware of the persistent deployment of the same images almost one hundred years later. Despite some opposition at the University of North Dakota, both schools adopted Native American mascots as part of their strategy to attract students and assert a “modern” American identity.
9 The final case studies, Stanford University and Florida State University, chronicle efforts on the part of students to construct an identity that reflected their sense of themselves. At Stanford, the student body was reluctant to accept their Indian mascot between 1923 and 1930. This is an historic moment of contestation, as Guiliano herself notes, however, it could have been explored more fully. The debate at FSU centered on gender politics, as the university proposed the Seminole mascot to distance itself from its predecessor, a women’s seminary, whose symbol was the Tarpon. Efforts to agree on a mascot were further complicated here by the aspects of Southern identity thrown into the mix. In this chapter, the author also highlights the important role played by modern, state-of-the-art stadiums and the associated local infrastructure. Moreover, she includes a dense history of the settlement of Florida, but the timeline is diffuse and scattered.
10 While the previous five chapters emphasize the deployment of Native mascots to consolidate modern American masculinity, in the final chapter, Guiliano explores what happened when this identity was threatened by women and actual Native people. Here she examines the role of Indian athletes and female bodies in the halftime spectacle. As we might imagine, they were largely unwelcome. During the 1940s, as more women entered colleges and the men were away at war, the University of Illinois introduced
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“Princess Illiniwek,” played by Idell Stith, a white woman who had “honorary status with the Osage tribe” (90). However, Stith’s performance was limited to a single season. At the University of North Dakota in 1937, six Fort Yates Indians performed in the halftime show. Beginning in 1951, Yurok Indian H.D. “Timm” Williams performed as “Prince Lightfoot,” at Stanford University. Dressed in a Sioux headdress, Lightfoot performed on the sidelines at football games. Despite what Williams himself perceived as a kind of successful infiltration of white culture, Guiliano suggests that these highly regulated performances furthered the traditions of Native mascotry whose ultimate goal was to alleviate white anxiety and celebrate the modern American man.
11 Guiliano’s work lies at the intersection of sport studies, Indigenous studies and critical race studies, but it is firmly entrenched in the disciplinary methods of history. Thus, it could easily fit into a course within any of these disciplines. Her close attention to detail through readings of contemporary newspapers, institutional publications and personal correspondence lends strong evidence to her argument. Occasionally the reader may get bogged down in the minutiae of college yearbooks and fraternity magazines, but the effort and intention are recognized. Guiliano offers a convincing argument that Native American mascotry and its attendant activities played a significant role in the construction of the white modern American college man in the early 20th century. Although the book is purely historical in its focus, it invites the reader to see parallels with contemporary discourses, such as those I mentioned at the start of this review. Sport is a microcosm of life and thus this book reminds us of the roots of contemporary racism against Native Americans. Although Stanford (1972), Miami (1997), Illinois (2007) and North Dakota (2012) have all retired their Native mascots, Florida State retains Chief Osceola as their symbol, apparently authorized to do so by the local Seminole tribe.
AUTHORS
JENNIFER L. GAUTHIER Professor of Communication Studies, Randolph College, Lynchburg, Virginia, USA
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Charles J. Ogletree and Austin Sarat, eds. Punishment in Popular Culture New York: New York University Press, 2015, 318 pages
Sébastien Lefait
REFERENCES
Charles J. Ogletree and Austin Sarat, eds. Punishment in Popular Culture, New York: New York University Press, 2015, 318 pages
1 Reviewing a book that has been reviewed several times is a difficult task – especially if previous reviewers found the work remarkable and stimulating. Let it be known at the outset that such is the case for Charles J. Ogletree and Austin Sarat’s edited collection entitled Punishment in Popular Culture, and that I entirely share the book’s eulogies that others have provided before me. In my own assessment, therefore, I shall resist the natural temptation to focus on the volume’s minor blemishes that previous reviewers have supposedly overlooked – there are very few of those – and refrain from presenting my reading as more thorough – it is not. On the contrary, I will focus on what makes the book essential in my view, once again, but through a perspective that is slightly different from that offered by other reviewers. Indeed, as a scholar who has specialized in analyzing American history and society through the way they are present – and represented – in popular culture, and mostly on film and on television, my approach of the topic of punishment in popular culture may be different from, and hopefully a useful addition to, that of sociology or law academics.
2 To me, this is an outstanding volume for one main reason, which helps it transcend the collage aspect of any volume based on conference proceedings. In fact, the book draws its unity and coherence from the way its chapters all contribute, in one way or another, to the demonstration that it has become awkward, not to say irrelevant, to study important social issues (in this case punishment) without looking at their representations and traces in popular culture. If, as the authors state in the introduction, “how a society punishes reveals its true character,” it is even more true
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that how a society depicts itself wielding punishment as a protectionary or retributive weapon is an even more relevant marker of its essence.
3 A key asset of the book is the way it takes account of the two-way relationship between culture as a system of practices on the one hand, and cultural productions on the other. The many forms this relationship may take are examined in the collection. One of them can be described as a legitimation process, thanks to which cultural representations validate and substantiate forms of punishment. Another one is an illustration process: this approach accounts for the presence of depictions of – sometimes harsh – punishment on-screen by looking at their real-life causes. This is not, however, a binary system, as there are many midway points between those two extremes, and many circular effects that combine the illustration of social change in popular culture with the prompting of change by popular culture. In this respect, the examples making up the list of works in the book’s corpus are all the more appropriate since they allow the authors to collectively address the multiple layers of influence of popular culture on society, and vice versa. The complex connection between entertainment as culture and the way some of its key aspects trickle down into practices that are culturally shared by American citizens is thus delved into quite extensively.
4 To justify this approach, the editors make an important observation in the introduction: more and more, reality reaches us in the form of images. As a result, depictions of punishment that are semi or fully functional merge with extant usages. The result is a view of punishment that combines real techniques and strategies with imaginary ones, the impact of which is sometimes actual, sometimes purely fictional. As a result, it may have become almost useless to assess how a society punishes without gauging the role of represented punishment in that same society’s evaluation of the efficiency of those strategies, as well as of the origins thereof.
5 An equally crucial observation that is made in the book’s introduction and repeated at regular intervals throughout the chapters is that punishment is, in itself, a spectacle. Even though this has been a well-known fact since Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975), at least, the repercussions of this situation, especially concerning contemporary times, have received little attention. Considering that the spectacularity of punishment has varied quantitatively as well as qualitatively throughout history, to finally include popular-culture portrayals, it has become more important than ever to apply the techniques of visual culture analysis to punishment per se, but also, as a complement, to apply the conceptual frameworks of political science, sociology, or ethics, to fictional representations of punishment.
6 In this respect, my only regret while reading the book was the near total absence in the corpus of works under study of one of the most striking examples of the entanglement between represented punishment and actual punishment: the TV show 24 (Fox, 2001-2010). In fact, while the show spurred controversy for its treatment of torture at a time when some Americans were likely to crave revenge after 9/11, while others may have needed revenge in its cathartic form, it also became clear that the show contributed to legitimizing the use of torture in actual warfare. This entanglement later took an even more surprising form, as, in a now well-documented turn of events, the torture strategies depicted in 24 eventually inspired American soldiers with new horrible procedures. Finally, in what is perhaps the most striking illustration of how culture currently impacts real-life policies, the ticking time bomb effect directly drawn from 24 was used as a sensationalist strategy within political debates in the 2007
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Democratic primary campaign, when candidates were candidly asked how they would react if, as had been the case on the show, a prisoner had been captured who probably held information about an upcoming terrorist attack on American soil. The question was, would they allow torture to be used on the prisoner, or not. In this example, the capacity for cultural representations of punishment to prompt political decisions was taken for granted as an element that populated popular imagination to such an extent as to encourage or deter voters to favour Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, based on the acknowledgement that what voters think they know about punishment includes – and may sometimes be limited to – the type of punishment used in popular culture productions of the 24 ilk. Strikingly, this question that was generated by popular culture appeared during an MSNBC debate, not one on Fox, and it was addressed by Democratic candidates to their likes, rather than occurring in a Republican context.
7 Yet to be fair to the volume, the book’s seventh chapter applies roughly the same reading to the humilitainment trend on reality TV, to its pollution of our perception of the Abu Ghraib photographs featuring torturing and tortured parties, while taking into account that those photos also impacted the framework of our perception of television programmes. In that case as in that of 24, the combination of on-screen and off-screen punishment has indeed turned into a vicious circle. In what follows, I propose to select elements from the chapters that help further investigate the relationship between visual representations and real-life practices, as illustrated in the example above. Hopefully, this review will provide a reading grid aimed at advancing our knowledge of the current equilibrium between the real and the fictional in our perception of the mechanisms of justice.
8 With this in mind, the first chapter, “Redeeming the Lost War: Backlash Films and the Rise of the Punitive State,” by Lary May, may be the least clear of all in its approach of the bilateral influence between actual punishment and its depiction in cultural productions. The chapter, albeit quite substantial, starts by setting out to explain policy changes by looking at their cultural causes, then contents itself with the assumption that backlash films operate “in tandem with contemporary policies.” How culture influences social policies, therefore, is often left behind to foreground long descriptions of historical context, and of the matching punishment strategies.
9 The next chapter, “Better Here than There: Prison Narratives in Reality Television,” by Aurora Wallace, offers a more convincing take on the same issue, by demonstrating why and how prison-based reality TV formats provide viewers with the comforting feeling that, by comparison with the situation abroad, the US prison system is a decent one. The effect of cultural productions, in that case, is clearly to replace documentary- type perception of the actual state of American penitentiaries with a scary depiction that invites viewers to look away from the state of affairs at home. Popular culture thus screens reality away, allowing policies that further deteriorate living conditions in US prison-houses to endure or even thrive.
10 Kristen Whissel’s “The Spectacle of Punishment and the ‘Melodramatic Imagination’ in the Classical-Era Prison Film: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Brute Force (1947)” is indeed quite classical in its approach itself, as it treats the films under study as documents illustrating and exposing the barbarity of punishment. The chapter, however, stands out for the way it tackles the key issue of how surveillance, an essential part of disciplinary processes, acts as the main transfer area between
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represented punishment and its actual form. As the film apparatus is one that recycles panoptic surveillance, it endows viewers with a surveillant gaze that is in turn likely to change citizens’ scopic regime into one that values discipline and promotes punishment, on a daily basis.
11 The next chapter, “‘Deserve Ain’t Got Nothing to Do with It’: The Deconstruction of Moral Justifications for Punishment through The Wire,” by Kristin Henning, looks into David Simon’s acclaimed series. As The Wire spans overs five seasons, its duration and long-term character identification allow Simon to depict the nuances and the evolution of punishment practices in the Baltimore drug-trade milieu. The author convincingly shows that The Wire reads as an extensive study of punishment, from origins to effects, that differentiates between retributivism and consequentialism.
12 In the next chapter, “Rehabilitating Violence: White Masculinity and Harsh Punishment in 1990s Popular Culture,” Daniel LaChance further demonstrates the agency of culture. Indeed, the relationship between collective constructions and on-film depictions is nowhere clearer than in the case of white supremacist views of punishment. The chapter offers a thought-provoking argument: that submission to punishment may have become an essential element in the construction of the self, especially the masculine self. Thanks to narrative experiments in fictional chastisement, new uses for punishment are considered as real-life possibilities. In particular, the depiction of whiteness in the films and TV shows under study rehabilitates acceptance of violence as a coping mechanism. Nevertheless, the chapter does not always evince sufficient awareness that the cases it presents are very specific, not to say quite extraordinary, which consequently undermines their applicability under real-life circumstances.
13 The next chapter, “Scenes of Execution: Spectatorship, Political Responsibility, and State Killing in American Film,” distinguishes itself for its collective quality. It was written by Austin Sarat, Madeline Chan, Maia Cole, Melissa Lang, Nicholas Schcolnik, Jasjaap Sidhu, and Nica Siegel. The chapter offers a typology of execution scenes on- screen, based on the position of the convict being executed, the executioner, and the witnesses. For each character in this drama of punishment, a mode of identification with the viewer is defined, by appealing to the theory of the gaze. As the chapter was written hand-in-hand with the author’s students, it mostly reads as a catalogue of recurring patterns. It also has a somewhat repetitive quality. This is a minor flaw, however, which is additionally easily forgiven, given that the chapter offers students the chance to publish in a high-quality volume, but also given that it rounds up its arguments by examining a crucial fact: that film may, by eliding degree and turning a round character into a flat one, help legitimize cruel and unusual forms of punishment, such as the death penalty. Conversely, although TV series are not tackled in the article, it becomes obvious that their longer duration and often character-driven plots may enable viewers to fully identify with characters, understand their motivations, and maybe even cathartically suffer punishment with them.
14 The next chapter, “The Pleasures of Punishment: Complicity, Spectatorship, and Abu Ghraib,” by Amy Adler, also uses a reading grid, applying it to visual culture. The pattern, in that case, is Freud’s psychology. It is exploited to understand cases in which someone watches someone else being punished, alternatively putting themselves in the position of hating the convict, identifying with the person being punished, and being a neutral observer. Interestingly, the pattern applies to a visual culture that includes real photographs alongside reality TV programs: the Abu Ghraib pictures of humiliation on
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the one hand and the humiliation found in reality TV entertainment on the other hand. While others than myself have found this chapter less convincing than the others, I find it unique and extremely useful because of the way it takes as its starting point that popular culture blurs the boundary between real photographs, the seriousness of which tends to be diminished in the face of their reality-TV equivalent, and semi fictional programs, the harmlessness of which tends to be toned down by the effect they have in legitimizing forms of cruelty, leaving them to transpire into real-life politics and warfare – in a case quite similar to that I have described above about the influence of 24 on American politics.
15 The final chapter was written by Brandon L. Garrett, and it is entitled “Images of Injustice.” It shares that very same quality, which I deem essential in volumes dealing with popular culture. In fact, it thoroughly examines the meandering ways in which CSI, as depicted on screen, has generated new behavioural patterns in juries all around the United States. Once again, the two-way influence between popular culture and legal culture is demonstrated through the investigation of several specific cases, in an article that gradually develops as a trial of forensics. The latter is debunked as a “science” that has become so influenced by fiction that it sometimes neglects its duty by rushing to the conclusions that jury members seem to crave, influenced as they are themselves by the necessary closure of fictional narratives. Very convincingly, the chapter concludes by examining the new patterns of viewership and forensic modes of participation also exemplified in The Jinx, Making a Murderer, or the audio podcast Serial, where democratic justice is achieved when watchers start looking for new clues, to aid the judicial system with their own eyes and documents put in the service of freeing the wrongly-accused innocent.
16 To conclude, I wish to identify the concept that lurks in the background of most chapters, without being tackled as an essential aspect of contemporary strategies: fear. Had this notion been addressed in one section of the volume, the result would have been even more thought-provoking. Indeed, even if fear has always been an essential cog in making the spectacle of punishment a useful deterrent, this mechanism has taken new shape and strength with the advent of terrorist warfare, and has been amplified with terrorists’ use of new media. This is one of the key areas in which the two-way pattern of influence between represented and actual punishment has suffered a sea-change, to the extent of exposing older patterns of analysing punishment as instantly obsolete. With terrorist executions, for instance, represented punishment has the sole purpose of threatening viewers into adapting their ways to fundamentalist ideology. In turn, the depiction of terrorism in films or TV shows may either promote similar fears or expose – and thereby demolish – the visual strategies deployed by terrorists. As punishment is visually weaponized in a new way, popular culture is endowed with the crucial task of demonstrating its ability to fight back by tackling terrorism as a cultural phenomenon.
17 Altogether, this is a very minor blemish. As a whole, the volume is of outstanding quality, due to the innovative way in which it shows the relevance of studying popular culture alongside actual social development, as the former does not merely represent the latter, but is also more and more likely to prompt social change, block it, or reshape it completely by coming up with new ideas. In 2017 United States, when both presidential finalists supported capital punishment, and the winner is a former reality- TV host who distinguished himself by overusing the punishingly humiliating phrase
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“You’re fired,” which is a TV show cliché in itself, taking account of this connection is more essential than ever.
AUTHORS
SÉBASTIEN LEFAIT Paris 8 University, TransCrit Research Group
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Delphine Letort, The Spike Lee Brand: A Study of Documentary Filmmaking Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015
David Lipson
REFERENCES
Delphine Letort, The Spike Lee Brand: A Study of Documentary Filmmaking, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015
1 Spike Lee is known the world over for films like She’s Gotta Have It (1986), School Daze (1988), Do the Right Thing (1989), etc. This association with fiction films is so strong that one could mistakenly think that Delphine Letort’s book The Spike Lee Brand: A Study of Documentary Filmmaking would explore the connection between these fiction films and the documentary genre. However, the first pages of the book clearly indicate that it will focus on Spike Lee the documentary filmmaker. Making people aware of this fact, therefore, comes across as one of the main goals of this book, as the author states clearly, “The filmmaker’s commitment to documentary is rarely discussed in the abundant critical literature devoted to his filmic output which prioritizes his fiction drama” (2). Indeed, she explores the two-part series based on Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Parts (2005) and sequel If God is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise (2010), as well as Lee’s other documentaries, 4 Little Girls (1997), A Huey P. Newton Story (2001), Jim Brown: All-American (2002), Kobe Doin’ Work (2009), Bad 25 (2012). A quick glance at the literature on Spike Lee confirms Letort’s affirmation. For example, in the book The Spike Lee Reader (Paula Massood (ed.), Temple University, 2008), among the 16 articles that comprise the 250-page book, just one is devoted to the documentary film 4 Little Girls. And sometimes Lee’s work as a documentarian is totally absent. David Sterritt, author of Spike Lee’s America (Polity Press, 2013), bluntly defends this choice saying, “I find his documentaries and filmed theater works a generally unimaginative lot, however fascinating their subjects may be in themselves” (Sterritt, 6). Letort’s scholarly contribution is therefore considerable because it not
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only deals with Lee’s neglected documentary output, but also, considering that books about Lee tend to be edited compilations of different contributors, it is perhaps the first in-depth study carried out exclusively by one author. The book discusses certain distinguishing features of Lee’s fiction films as well, not in a comparative approach, but merely as a way of foregrounding his nonfiction work and explaining how issues like black agency, institutional racism, and black pride can be found in both film genres.
2 After a brief introduction, The Spike Lee Brand sets out to explore this new virgin territory in four main chapters, each divided into three or more sub-sections. Chapter 1 deals with the fabrication of the Spike Lee documentary. The focus is on the modes of representation, defined by theorist Bill Nichols, that Lee uses in his films and how to discern his authorial voice. Letort explores the artistic and creative use of the camera, the fictional aspects that Lee incorporates into his documentary film, and the overall aesthetic gaze that is used. She then connects these techniques with the activist message they are meant to serve. Lee’s creative appropriation of documentary technique is then followed by an exploration of the history and memory of African Americans in chapter 2. Here, the book compares and contrasts different elements of history and memory, ranging from the intimate family recollection and traditional oral history to plain and simple photographs. In chapter 3, the author delves into the representation of race in the media and, notably, black stereotypes. This chapter is divided into three parts, first dealing with stereotypes of black crime, then the myth of the black athlete, and finally how the media portrays the Black Panthers. The fourth and final chapter comprises six diverse sections, all of them arranged under the umbrella heading of Black Nationalism. The author covers musical resilience and creativity, black pride, sports as the path to success for African Americans, the racial politics of New Orleans and its fight for civil rights, before ending the chapter on the documentary’s ethical and political stance. The Spike Lee Brand concludes by focusing on the economic and artistic aspect of making “nonfiction joints”1 and how Lee had to strike the right balance between the two. The author briefly weaves into her concluding remarks each documentary film and its relation to The Spike Lee Brand. The last paragraphs then return the focus on Spike Lee, the person, by evoking Lee’s own possible bi-racial ancestry and how he encapsulates the history of the United States and its complex interplay of racial identity as witnessed in his documentaries.
3 “The Spike Lee Brand makes a very important contribution to scholarly studies of the film-work of Spike Lee.” I could not agree more with what Mark A. Reid, the author of numerous films on black cinema,2 wrote in the foreword to this book. Letort’s contribution is extensive and rich. She breaks new ground and brings new knowledge to the public arena. Letort has achieved this through a very articulate, in-depth, and thorough analysis that sheds new light on a worthy subject in the field of documentary film. She demonstrates her expertise in this area, yet at the same time her writing is clear, concise, and easy to understand, avoiding the academic traps of jargon and technicality. She makes pertinent observations not only about what is seen on film but also what is not seen, what is ignored by Spike Lee. For instance, she notes that in Jim Brown: All-American, the filmmaker could have done more to challenge the stereotypical narrative surrounding the black athlete by mentioning that the former football player obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Syracuse University. This information would have stressed the fact that Brown used his intellect as well as his physical body (90). She cites other scholars who have noted similar problematic omissions. Film scholar Valerie
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Smith pointed out that Chris McNair, one of the central social actors in the documentary 4 Little Girls, was convicted of bribery and that this information would have weakened the film’s argument (48). In fact, Letort calls upon a whole host of qualified scholars in specialized academic fields (history, philosophy, geography, cultural studies, sociology, etc.) to complement her observations. She treats the subject with enough critical distance to allow her to point out Spike Lee’s own contradictions and conflicts. For example, Lee denounces, on the one hand, stereotyped media images of African Americans (the black athlete) and on the other, he takes part in perpetuating these very same images. The research is methodical and extensive, as evidenced by the 34 pages of end notes3 and 15-page bibliography.
4 Despite the book’s numerous merits, there are a few aspects that could be improved. First of all the title relegates the word “documentary” to the subtitle and stresses the word “brand” which can be misleading. Moreover, this undermines the author’s stated purpose of raising awareness of Lee as a documentary filmmaker. Perhaps The Spike Lee Brand was chosen to make the book more marketable by appealing to the reader who knows about Spike Lee the fiction filmmaker. It is true that he started making documentaries years after he was established as a feature filmmaker.4 Second, Letort analyzed A Huey P. Newton Story, which is not a pure documentary, but makes no mention of the documentary The Original Kings of Comedy (2000), not even a word to say why she would not be analyzing it. Finally, Bad 25 and Kobe Doin’ Work were not fully exploited. Letort does provide analysis but it’s very little compared to what the other films received and it could be pursued even further. Of course, since the book is only 150 pages long, choices have to be made. Perhaps this could be the subject of a second volume. She could then include not only the aforementioned The Original Kings of Comedy but also Lee’s latest documentary, Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the Wall, which came out in 2016.
5 To conclude, the few minor quibbles should not take away from the fact that this is a beautifully written piece of work, which is intellectually stimulating and enriching not only from the standpoint of documentary films but also in terms of American Studies.
ENDNOTES
1. “Nonfiction joint” is a term used by the author to describe a Spike Lee documentary film. Chapter 1 of the book is called “The Making of Spike Lee’s Nonfiction Joints”. “A Spike Lee Joint” is what appears on the screen during the end credits of Spike Lee’s films. 2. Redefining Black Film (U of California Press, 1993), Post Negritude, Visual and Literary Culture (SUNY Press, 1997) and Black Lenses, Black Voices: African American Film Now (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). 3. In total 354 notes. 4. 4 Little Girls was made in 1997, 14 years after Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads.
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AUTHORS
DAVID LIPSON Université de Strasbourg
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Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (eds.), The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, 272 pages
Elizabeth Mullen
REFERENCES
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (eds.), The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, 272 pages
1 The Laughing Dead is as hybrid as its subject, covering American and British film and television in a broad manner. Most of the essays here do not delve deeply into film aesthetics or theory, but they do provide a different perspective on both commonly analyzed and lesser-known films. The essays dealing with suburbia and gender are the strongest of the book.
2 This collection of sixteen articles explores ways in which comedy and horror subvert generic norms, shattering expectations and forcing audiences to reevaluate established structures. In their introduction, Miller and Van Riper point out that while comedy and horror seem to be at “opposite ends of the dramatic spectrum” (xiv), the former relying on Bergsonian detachment and the latter on visceral engagement, both achieve their desired effects by upending expectations and systematically going against what audiences assume is “supposed to” happen. In the process, comedy-horror films create new spaces where not only generic but also societal norms are called into question.
3 The Laughing Dead is divided into three main areas of focus: comic subversion of “traditional horror narratives,” (Playing With Genre), theoretical perspectives on how
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the blending of comedy and horror critiques generic conventions (Horror, in Theory) and finally, the effects of “introducing the undead into unexpected settings” (There Goes the Neighborhood). The introduction provides a historical overview of how comedy-horror has evolved, from the beginnings of horror cinema into the 21st century and summarizes each section clearly and coherently.
4 The first section, Playing With Genre, focuses on ways in which the articulation of comedy and horror can call into question underlying cultural tensions. Thomas Prasch (3-24) analyses how Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) addresses Central European oppression through comic distancing within the vampire canon. Christina M. Knopf looks at the comic treatment of liminal spaces in horror movies of the 1940s (25-38) in the historical context of a world on the brink of war, specifically through the use of doors as “tropes of undead horror” (xix), while Steven Webley traces the heritage of George A. Romero’s zombie films in British “ZomComs” Shaun of the Dead and the series Dead Set (39-58), reading both as “a redoubling of post-ideological cynicism” (51). Gary Rhodes posits New York City as an oneiric, vampiric force in the Reagan-era horror-comedy The Vampire’s Kiss (1988) starring Nicholas Cage (59-70). In a distinct departure from the other chapters of the first section, Eric César Moralès (71-83) looks at how the animated children’s movie The Book of Life (2014) combines a storyline focused on death with traditional animated film techniques (bright colors, goofy sidekicks, a catchy soundtrack) to neutralize anxieties stemming from the fear of death.
5 In the book’s second section, Horror, in Theory, each essay explores the effects of consciously injecting humor into horror narratives. Murray Leeder (87-101) bases his observations on the œuvre of the “Abominable Showman,” gimmick film king William Castle. Leeder’s main point is that there is no intrinsic opposition between comedy and horror, and that Castle’s “Cinema of Attractions” approach allowed contemporary audiences to revel in the extreme and the abject, eliminating the barrier between on- and offscreen sensation through gimmickry (skeletons flying over theater audiences, select vibrating seats, etc.) and direct address. Martin Norden (102- 120) does not break new ground in his essay on humor in The Bride of Frankenstein (Whale, 1935), but he coherently outlines how Whale laces his sequel with over-the-top performances, Hollywood in-jokes and thinly-veiled winks at “non-mainstream sexuality and aberrant procreation” (117). In her essay on Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (121-137), Deborah Carmichael refreshingly analyzes the way the comic duo’s antics blend with the horror genre to question contemporary gender roles and reflect unresolved postwar anxieties. Mary Hallah’s article on humor in vampire films (138-153) firmly roots the modern vampire comedy in the gothic horror tradition, underscoring how comic elements mediate the tension arising from vampiric liminality and blur the boundaries between good and evil, familiar and other. Lisa Cunningham draws on Barbara Creed and Mary Ann Doane in her analysis of queerness and the undead female monster (154-168). She convincingly argues that the “othering” of the queer female protagonists through (un)death specifically in a comedy horror film creates a space in which to reconsider the ways mainstream culture condemns queer women as monstrous. By focusing on comic yet disturbing portrayals of monstrous female violence, Cunningham demonstrates how “disturbing the mask of femininity” (159) subverts traditional social structures and gender norms. In the final essay of this section, Chris Yogerst examines the importance of the genre-savvy audience to the success of Zombieland (2009) in his “Rules for Surviving a Horror Comedy” (169-184),
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placing it within the self-reflexive comedy-horror canon alongside Young Frankenstein and Scream.
6 The five essays of the book’s last section, There Goes The Neighborhood, analyze how horror comedies critique contemporary issues of consumer culture, class, and gender. In his analysis of Andrew Currie’s 2006 “zomcom” Fido (187-200), Michael C. Reiff examines how the film exposes the implications of incorporating zombies into society as consumable products and symbols of middle-class upward mobility. As can be expected, Reiff references George Romero’s Dead films, particularly Dawn of the Dead (1978) and, from a gender perspective, Savini’s 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead. Reiff sees the zombie as a conceit for macho masculinities; more problematically, he reads Fido’s female protagonist’s purchase of a zombie as a subversion of patriarchy from within consumer culture; he also draws parallels between zombie commodification and propagandistic treatment of the Japanese during World War II. In his article on Ghostbusters (1984, 1989) (201-214), A. Bowdoin Van Riper leaves the suburbs for the Big Apple, detailing how the eponymous Ghostbusters of the 1980s are comically portrayed as cogs in the service economy of a city whose inhabitants view the ghost outbreak as just another inconvenience of city life — up until the final battle, where they pull together to defeat the (ridiculous) enemy. Van Riper points out how this “Nobody messes with my city” attitude plays differently to a post-9/11, post-Paris, London, and Boston terrorist attacks audience. Across the pond, Shelley Rees focuses her analysis (215-226) of British cult favorite “ZomRomCom” Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004) on both the portrayal of low-paid workers in Western cities as “practically zombies anyway” and on the queering of heteronormative masculinity. The last two articles of the section deal respectively with teaching tolerance through undead characters in children’s films (227-242) and with the democratization of the Frankenstein myth (243-257). In the latter, the author draws attention to the creators’ “everyman” status in films like Frankenweenie (1984), Weird Science (1985), Frankenhooker (1990) and Rock ‘n’ Roll Frankenstein (1999) but there is no specific analysis of the role comedy plays. In the former, suburban conformity is both criticized and ridiculed: outcasts (living and undead) expose the zombie-like lifelessness of conformist society and the zest of living outside the norm.
7 Continuing the work they began in Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier (2012) and Undead in the West II: They Just Keep Coming (2013), Miller and Van Riper provide an uneven but compelling overview of the comedy-horror film in The Laughing Dead.
AUTHOR
ELIZABETH MULLEN Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest
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Dolores Inés Casillas, Sounds of Belonging. U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy New York: New York University Press, 2014, 220 pages
Isabelle Vagnoux
REFERENCES
Dolores Inés Casillas, Sounds of Belonging. U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and Public Advocacy, New York: New York University Press, 2014, 220 pages
1 This keenly researched and well organized book provides a vivid and original contribution to the fields of Latino – more specifically Mexican-American – and media studies. It offers the first study of Spanish-language radio since Félix F. Gutiérrez and Jorge Reina Schement published Spanish-Language Radio in the Southwestern United States (Austin: University of Texas Press) in 1979 and fully rehabilitates the radio set as “a modern tool of globalization” (8).
2 With the formidable growth of Spanish-language radio stations, which have proliferated over the past thirty years, jumping from 67 in 1980 to some 1,300 in 2010, and unseating their English-language counterparts as number one in major radio markets (7), Sounds of Belonging focuses on the social and advocacy role played by these radio stations, which are part and parcel of Latino identity. It also emphasizes the growing significance of the Latino minority in the United States, presented as the third largest Spanish-speaking country in the world. This assertion might be nuanced, however, depending on whether one counts the number of Latinos or the number of Spanish-speaking Latinos. Depending on figures used, the U.S. would actually rank between third and fifth in the world as not all Latinos can speak Spanish.
3 Although the author recognizes that she focuses on Mexican/Mexican-American radio along the West Coast and particularly California, the title of the book is somewhat
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misleading as one would rather expect a nation-wide study, encompassing all Latino groups. To what extent her analysis would apply, for example, to the East coast or to Cuban American radio stations remains to be further investigated. In other words, a more specific title would have been a better match given the very specific research conducted in Sounds of Belonging.
4 The study combines a chronological, historical approach to the development of Spanish-language radio, based on secondary sources and newspapers —to make up for the lack of audio archives in the early years—as well as programs, recordings and radio personnel interviews for the more recent periods, using such paradigms as racialization, transnational identity or gender. It goes back to the very early days of radio programs with the twin development of Pan-American-sponsored English- language programs and Spanish-language programs catering to an immigrant listenership. The author contrasts English-language programs celebrating Latin America, its folklore and exotic music in the late 1920s and 1930s, when good (or “patronizing”) diplomatic and economic relations prevailed between the United States and its southern neighbors, and the early Spanish-language programs that were relegated to the early-morning slots of English-language radio stations. They accompanied Mexican workers to their early work shifts, reflecting their “marginalization within U.S. society,” in the author’s words (15). Spanish-language programs soon became “acoustic allies,” playing on nostalgia, making immigrants feel at home away from home, but also serving the community with job listings, local affairs and advocacy-oriented announcements in the strongly anti-immigrant atmosphere of the Great Depression years. At the same time, Mexican-led Spanish-language radio entered the fray, offering a romanticized vision of Mexico. At the end of World War II, the first Mexican-American radio was launched. Casillas highlights the tight links between the development of U.S. Spanish-language radio and issues of national identity and anxiety over the “place of immigrants,” (50) an issue that continued in the next decades when bilingual community radio stations were introduced, powered by the Chicano and farmworker movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Casillas emphasizes the “under-the-radar existence” of rural bilingual radio stations, much less studied than their urban counterparts and other aspects of the Chicano movement, in spite of their political activism and the growth of bilingual public radio.
5 The chapter “Sounds of Surveillance,” enriched with conversation extracts, brings up immigration policy and control, the main issue for Latinos over the past thirty years. Spanish-language radio’s interactive format and its active advisory role in immigration issues started in the 1980s and, to a large extent, control most of the broadcasting schedules. Their talk-based programming allows listeners/callers to share their experiences as immigrants all the more candidly as they are not visually apparent. They also make guest immigration attorneys, professionals or doctors accessible to often poor and undocumented listeners and give them free legal advice to help them navigate the intricacies of the legalization or naturalization processes. In so doing, Spanish-language radio can be seen as offering free of charge services to the community while it “capitalizes” upon and draws profit from the conversation around immigration as programs are sponsored by companies closely related to migration, such as Western Union, AT&T or local attorneys’ offices.
6 Gender in male-led radio programs is at the heart of the chapter “Pun Intended. Listening to Gendered Politics on Morning Radio Shows,” which is also illustrated with
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extracts. It relies heavily on the analysis of one of the most famous radio hosts, El Cucuy, the Latino counterpart of Rush Limbaugh in terms of linguistic violence and celebrity, an immigrant sending money home, a symbol of “transnational masculine image,” and an activist who played a prominent role in the 2006 immigrant demonstrations. Because radio has always tended to privilege male voices, Casillas “deliberately makes space for the voices of female listeners.” One might, however, regret the time-gap between the years when most interviews and recordings of radio shows were conducted (2002-2005) and the publication date of her study, 2014. To what extent, for example, is the gender issue similar over a decade later? Have women managed to develop their own shows in the meantime ?
7 In keeping with her strong emphasis on racialization and the larger dynamic of race and class, the author ends her study with an analysis of audience ratings, Arbitron, the dominant radio ratings company, and the disparity in revenue between English and Spanish-language radio (“Desperately Seeking Dinero”) In spite of excellent ratings, exceeding those of their English-language counterparts, due to an expanding Latino audience and a close link between Latinos and their radio programs, Spanish-language radio collected on average 40 percent less in revenue in 2006. Casillas argues that the methodologies used by the audience industry “work to preserve dominant hierarchies of race, citizenship, and language” (20).
8 Sounds of Belonging can be viewed as somewhat ideology-driven with its choice of the word Latino, seen as “pan-friendly” (xiii) over the more official “Hispanic,” and with the lens of racialization continuously used throughout the book. Most of the time, the analysis is convincing, but it is occasionally far-fetched, as when Casillas considers the fact that many Latino workers take their radios to work with them as “a symbolic form of defiance” to racialization and efforts to suppress Spanish (151). She overlooks the fact that, throughout Latin America, radio sets are traditional companions on worksites, and that immigrants simply imported these habits into the United States, most of the time without thinking in terms of defiance or resistance.
9 More than a media study, Sounds of Belonging deftly weaves together the many threads of Spanish-language radio, cultural history, business, immigration policy, gender, racialization, and globalization to paint a rich and vivid portrait of these transnational citizens living in the United States.
AUTHORS
ISABELLE VAGNOUX Aix Marseille Univ, LERMA, Aix-en-Provence, France
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