InMediaThe French Journal of Media Studies 

6 | 2017Fields of Dreams and MessagesThe Politics of the Mediated Representation of Sports

Édition électroniqueURL : http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/831DOI : 10.4000/inmedia.831ISSN : 2259-4728

ÉditeurCenter for Research on the English-Speaking World (CREW)

Référence électroniqueInMedia, 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 DreamsPolitical Messaging and the Mediated Representation of Sports

The Politics of Discourse on the Fields of Dreams: Political Messaging and the MediatedRepresentation of SportsDaniel Durbin et Yann Descamps

Long Shot: The Prospects and Limitations of Sports and Celebrity Athlete DiplomacyMichael K. Park

Coubertin’s Music: Culture, Class, and the Failure of the Olympic ProjectNicholas Attfield

Broke Ballers: The Mediated World of Football and FinanceCourtney Cox

Sport in Films: Symbolism versus Verismo. A France-United States Comparative AnalysisValérie 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 WorldAnn-Lys Bourgognon

The Art of Walt Disney Animation Studios: Movement by NatureThibaut 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 BranlyClémentine 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 pagesMehdi Achouche

Stephen Rowley, Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs: Building Hollywood’s IdealCommunitiesNew York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 272 pages Aurélie Blot

Bertrand Naivin, Selfie, Un nouveau regard photographiqueParis: L’Harmattan, 2016, 161 pagesKarine Chambefort

Christopher Chávez, Reinventing the Latino Television Viewer: Language, Ideology,and PracticeLanham: Lexington Books, 2015, 180 pagesEmilie Cheyroux

Ariane Hudelet, The Wire, Les règles du jeuParis: PUF, 2016, 198 pagesFlore Coulouma

Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and AmericanCinemaNew Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016, 256 pagesAnne Crémieux

Nicholas Sammond, Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise ofAmerican AnimationDurham: Duke University Press Books, 2015, 400 pagesPierre Cras

Jennifer Guiliano, Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of ModernAmericaNew Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015, 175 pagesJennifer L. Gauthier

Charles J. Ogletree and Austin Sarat, eds. Punishment in Popular Culture New York: New York University Press, 2015, 318 pagesSébastien Lefait

Delphine Letort, The Spike Lee Brand: A Study of Documentary FilmmakingAlbany: State University of New York Press, 2015David Lipson

Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper (eds.), The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to ZombielandNew York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, 272 pagesElizabeth Mullen

Dolores Inés Casillas, Sounds of Belonging. U.S. Spanish-Language Radio and PublicAdvocacyNew York: New York University Press, 2014, 220 pagesIsabelle Vagnoux

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Daniel Durbin and Yann Descamps (dir.)

The Politics of Discourse on theFields of DreamsPolitical Messaging and the Mediated Representation of Sports

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The Politics of Discourse on theFields of Dreams: PoliticalMessaging and the MediatedRepresentation of SportsDaniel 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 andAthletes

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 andPopular 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.

14

This media file cannot be displayed. Please refer to the online document http://

journals.openedition.org/inmedia/833

Baker, Aaron. Contesting Identities: Sport in American Film. Chicago: University of Illinois Press,

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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.

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Farrell, Thomas B. “Media Rhetoric as Social Drama: The Winter Olympics of 1984.” Critical Studies

in Mass Communication. 6 (1989), 158-182.

Farrington, Neil, et. al. Sport, Racism and Social Media. London: Routledge, 2014.

Fernandez Peña, Emilio, et al. eds. An Olympic Mosaic: Multidisciplinary Research and Dissemination of

Olympic Studies. Barcelona: Centre d’Estudis Olimpics, 2011.

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.

Fiske, John. Television Culture. New York: Routledge, 2011 (1987).

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.

Plato. The Laws. London: Penguin Classics, 2005.

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

Wenner, Lawrence A. ed. Media, Sports, and Society. Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1989.

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. <accessed on February 5, 2017>

4. Pierre Milza, et al. dir., Le pouvoir des anneaux. Les Jeuxolympiques à la lumière de la politique,

1896-2004 (Paris : Vuibert, 2004).

5. John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Routledge, 2011 (1987)), 14.

6. See Henry Jenkins’ use of the concept to tackle the Matrix and its story unfolding through

different media.

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York

University Press, 2006), 98.

7. Jacques Blociszewski, Le match de football télévisé (Rennes : Éditions Apogée, 2007) ; Bernard

Leconte, “Retransmission sportives et énonciationtélévisuelle : quand la télévision, sous couvert

de reportage sportif, parle de tout autre chose,” In Montrer le sport. Photographie, cinéma, télévision,

directed by Laurent Veray, Pierre Simonet (Paris : INSEP, 2000), 203-210; Georges Vigarello, “Le

InMedia, 6 | 2017

10

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 media.descampsyann@yahoo.fr

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Long Shot: The Prospects andLimitations of Sports and CelebrityAthlete DiplomacyMichael 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: ACase 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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23

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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24

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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25

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

InMedia, 6 | 2017

26

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.

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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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31

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.

InMedia, 6 | 2017

32

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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35

Coubertin’s Music: Culture, Class,and the Failure of the OlympicProjectNicholas 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.

Coubertin, Pierre de, ed. Revue Olympique, articles in various issues (1901-1914).

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.

Stanton, Richard. The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions: The Story of the Olympic Art Competitions of

the 20th Century. Victoria: Trafford, 2000.

Toncheva, Svetoslava. Out of the New Spirituality of the Twentieth Century: The Dawn of Anthroposophy,

the White Brotherhood, and the Unified Teaching. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2015.

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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 Worldof Football and FinanceCourtney 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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58

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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59

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.

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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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69

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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70

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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71

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).

InMedia, 6 | 2017

72

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 versusVerismo. A France-United StatesComparative AnalysisValérie 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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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. <accessed on May 12, 2012>.

3. David J. Firestein, “Fields of Dreams: American Sports Movies,” E journal USA, 12 (6), 2007.

4. Demetrius W. Pearson, Russell L., Curtis, Allen C. Haney and James J. Zhang, “Sport Films:

Social Dimensions Over Time, 1930-1995,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 27 (2), 2003.

5. Glen Jones, “In praise of an ‘invisible genre’? An ambivalent look at the fictional sports feature

film,” Sport in Society, 11 (2-3), 2008.

6. Stephen D. Mosher, “The white dreams of god”: the mythology of sport films,” Arena Review, 7

(2), 1983.

7. Charles T. Summerlin, “The athletic hero in film and fiction,” in Sports in American society, ed.

William J. Baker and John M. Caroll (Saint Louis: River City, 1983).

8. Demetrius W. Pearson, et al., “Sport Films: Social Dimensions Over Time, 1930-1995,” 149.

9. Jean-Marc Vernier, “Nouvelle forme scénique des jeux TV.”

10. For instance, Tom McLaren, one of the characters in Vertical Limit, was named by the director

after fellow New Zealander Bob McLaren – a pilot and founder of the mythical McLaren racing

team. In Any Given Sunday, five members of the Pro Football Hall of Fame do cameos as coaches of

the five teams faced by the Miami Sharks – Bob St. Clair plays the part of the Minnesota Americans

coach, Y.A. Tittle coaches of the Chicago Rhinos, Dick Butkus is the coach of the California Crusaders,

Warren Moon coaches the New York Emperors and Johnny Unitas is the coach of the Dallas Knights.

11. Actually, sports films are allegorical by definition (cf. David Rowe, “If you film it, will they

come? Sports on Film,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 22 (4), 1998), and sports films promote the

Athletic American Dream.

12. Rick Altman, “Cinema and genre.” The Oxford History of World Cinema, 1996, 283.

13. R. Altman does not cite sports film as a genre, but he mentions boxing films as the product of

a genrification process, and baseball and surfing films as minor genres.

14. If we compare this with R. Altman’s work on musicals, sports scenes –which are metaphors

for a psychological evolution which belong to diegesis with their images from diegetic media (see

Any Given Sunday) – would stand more as the equivalent of music scenes than the soundtrack

itself.

15. However, we can question the status of biopics, which would stand as a metagenre more than

a subgenre to me.

16. Jean-Marc Vernier, “Nouvelle forme scénique des jeux TV, » Quaderni, 4, 1988, 57-63.

17. Depending on definitions, a physical practice is called sport on the basis of the following

criteria: A set of motor situations; a set of rules, Stakes related to competitiveness; an

institutional framework. Thus, this definition implies to be affiliated to a federation – which does

not appear in the lucha pelicula – and to be set in the framework of official competitions – which

is not to be found in martial art movies.

18. Nolwenn Mingant, “Entre mondial et local : le jeu d’équilibriste des majors hollywoodiennes,”

Revue de recherche en civilisation américaine, 1, 2009. <accessed on September 19, 2016>.

19. It may be argued that there are numerous sports films in Australia or Canada. But, as Lorenz

underlines: “Likewise, the United States gained a stranglehold on the Canadian movie market in the 1920s.

Canada was regarded as Hollywood’s ‘domestic’ box office, and almost all of the movies Canadians watched

were made in the United States.” Stacy Lorenz, “A Lively Interest on the Prairies: Western Canada,

the Mass Media, and a ‘World of Sport’ 1870–1939,” Journal of sport history, 2000, 19.

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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. <accessed on October 3, 2012>.

28. David J. Firestein, “Fields of Dreams: American Sports Movies.” E journal USA, 12 (6), 2007, 9.

29. Thus, as for Miller, the making of college football films was motivated by the concerns in

1930s America, especially over the growth of the scholarship system.

30. James E. Bryant and Mary Mc Elroy, Sociological dynamics of sport and exercise (Englewood:

Morton Publishing Company, 1997), among others.

31. David J. Firestein, “Fields of Dreams: American Sports Movies,” 9.

32. Demetrius W. Pearson, et al., “Sport Films: Social Dimensions Over Time, 1930-1995.”

33. Baseball movies are still being produced due to the memorial dimension which is specific to

this sport.

34. We shall underline the decline of sports films in the 1960s due to these same reasons.

35. Andrei S. Markovits, “Pourquoi n'y a-t-il pas de football aux États-Unis? L'autre

‘exceptionnalisme’ américain,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'histoire 26, 1990, 23.

36. We shall note the rise of surfing films in the 1980s. The rise of a new genre is the result of a

kind of subdivision of existing genres by producers as an answer to the viewers’ estimated

expectations and observed behaviors.

37. Altman, Film/genre.

38. Laurent Veray, “Aux origines du spectacle sportif télévisé : le cas des vues Lumière,” in

Montrer le sport, photographie, cinéma, télévision, dir. Laurent Véray et Pierre Simonet, (Paris :

INSEP, 2000).

39. These practices were popular in two ways, as they were broadcast first, and to mass

audiences.

40. “Dans ce contexte, qui n’est pas celui des studios, le processus de genrification opère aussi par

expansion, mais il greffe à des genres existants, et souvent nationaux, des déterminations et des traits

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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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99

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: Cinemaand Seriality in the English-speaking WorldAnn-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 AnimationStudios: Movement by NatureThibaut 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 DécoratifsParis 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: Dépendanceaux 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 sce naristiques pour addiction

programmee” (“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 seriephiles: e tude empirique

mene e aupres 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 AmericanArtists and Segregation – Musée duQuai BranlyClémentine 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 andMatthew Freeman. TransmediaArchaeology: Storytelling in theBorderlines of Science Fiction, Comicsand 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 andSitcom Suburbs: Building Hollywood’sIdeal CommunitiesNew 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 nouveauregard photographiqueParis: 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 theLatino Television Viewer: Language,Ideology, and PracticeLanham: 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 règlesdu jeuParis: 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, andAmerican CinemaNew 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 anIndustry: Blackface Minstrelsy and theRise of American AnimationDurham: 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 ofModern AmericaNew 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 FilmmakingAlbany: 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. BowdoinVan Riper (eds.), The Laughing Dead:The Horror-Comedy Film from Bride ofFrankenstein to ZombielandNew 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 ofBelonging. U.S. Spanish-Language Radioand Public AdvocacyNew 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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