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
InMedia, 6 | 2017
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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
InMedia, 6 | 2017
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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
InMedia, 6 | 2017
8
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
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Farrell, Thomas B. “Media Rhetoric as Social Drama: The Winter Olympics of 1984.” Critical Studies
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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.
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Riefenstahl, Leni. Olympia. The Complete Original Version [DVD]. Pathfinder, 2006 (1938).
Spivey, Nigel. The Ancient Olympics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Vigarello, Georges. “Le marathon entre bitume et écran.” Communications, 67 (1998): 211-215. DOI:
10.3406/comm.1998.2026
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.”
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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 [email protected]
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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
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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
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62. Murray and Pigman, “Mapping the Relationship.”
63. Murray and Pigman, “Mapping the Relationship.”
64. Murray and Pigman, “Mapping the Relationship.”
65. Murray and Pigman, “Mapping the Relationship.”
66. Guilianotti and Robertson. “Sport and Globalization,” 51.
67. Miskimmon Roselle and Ben O’Loughlin, “Strategic Narrative,” 74.
68. “German-born Soccer Stars Choose to Play for U.S. National Team.” CNN. Accessed December
14, 2015.
69. “German-born Soccer Stars Choose to Play for U.S. National Team.” CNN.
70. Jackson, “The Contested Terrain of Sport,” 1.
71. Manzenreiter, “The Beijing Games,” 31.
72. Fitts, “Murder, Espionage, and Baseball,” 8-9.
73. Fitts, “Murder, Espionage, and Baseball,” 9.
74. Fitts, “Murder, Espionage, and Baseball,” 9.
75. “Prince William Scores with Football Diplomacy in China. The Daily Mail Online. Accessed
November 20, 2015.
76. See Dyer, Stars.
77. Daniel J. Boorstin. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage Books,
2012.
78. Boorstin, The Image, 57.
79. Murray, “The Two Halves of Sports-Diplomacy,” 579.
80. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 7.
81. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 3.
82. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 7.
83. Fen. O.Hampson and Dean F. Oliver. “Pulpit Diplomacy: A Critical Assessment of the Axworthy
Doctrine.” International Journal, 53(3) (1998): 379-406; Potter, Evan. H. Branding Canada: Projecting
Canada's Soft Power through Public Diplomacy. McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP, 2008.
84. Murray, “The Two Halves of Sports-Diplomacy,” 579.
85. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 2.
86. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 7.
87. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 2.
88. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 4.
89. See Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy and Tsaliki, Frangonikolopoulos, and Huliaras, Transnational
Celebrity Activism.
90. Pigman, “Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage!,” 86.
91. Andrews, and Jackson, “Introduction: Sport Celebrities, Public Culture,” 8.
92. Vanc, “The Counter-intuitive Value,” 1191.
93. Boorstin, The Image.
94. Redeker, “Sport as an Opiate,” 499.
95. Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy, 53-54.
96. See Cooper, Celebrity Diplomacy.
97. Vanc, “The Counter-intuitive Value,” 1201.
98. Vanc, “The Counter-intuitive Value.”
99. Vanc, “The Counter-intuitive Value.”
100. Maeve Shearlaw. “Dennis Rodman to Go Back to North Korea-Again.” The Guardian. Accessed
October 17, 2016.
101. Sang-Hun Choe. “Rodman Gives Details on Trip to North Korea.” New York Times. Accessed
March 17, 2016.
102. “Dennis Rodman Makes 4th Trip to North Korea.” VOA News. Accessed July 14, 2016.
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103. Demick, Barbara. “Dennis Rodman Talks North Korean Diplomacy Before an Audience of
Cadets at West Point.” Los Angeles Times. Accessed July 14, 2017.
104. Jackson, “The Contested Terrain,” 277.
105. Scott Neuman. “Add ‘North Korea Expert’ to Dennis Rodman’s Resume.” NPR. Accessed
October 15, 2016.
106. Scott. “Add ‘North Korea Expert’
107. Fischer, A Kim Jong-Il Production, 38.
108. See Fischer, A Kim Jong-Il Production.
109. See Fischer, A Kim Jong-Il Production.
110. Mark Zeigler. “The Oddest Fan.” The San Diego Union Tribune. Accessed October 12, 2016.
111. Zeigler, “The Oddest Fan.”
112. See Higgins, “Who Will Succeed Kim Jong-Il?”
113. Daniel Wakin. “North Koreans Welcome Symphonic Diplomacy.” New York Times. Accessed
October 12, 2016.
114. Brendan Byrne. “Kim Jong-un Wants North Korea in More Sports Events.” ValueWalk.
Accessed September 19, 2016.
115. Susan Choeng. “North Korea’s Hearing-Impaired Football Team Given Rare Honour of Trip
to Play Australia.” ABC News. Accessed October 14, 2016.
116. See Kellner, “The Sports Spectacle.”
117. Eric Gibson. “Why Dictators Love Kitsch.” Wall Street Journal. Accessed November 13, 2016.
118. Glenn Kessler. “During Visit by Bill Clinton, North Korea Releases American Journalists.”
Washington Post. Accessed September 12, 2016.
119. “Ex-player of U.S. NBA Pay Respects to Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il.” Korean Central News Agency.
Accessed December 4, 2016.
120. “Kim Jong Un Meets Ex-NBA Star and His Party.” Korean Central News Agency. Accessed
December 2, 2015.
121. Mark Bowden. “Understanding Kim Jong Un, the world’s most enigmatic and unpredictable
dictator.” Vanity Fair. Accessed December 7, 2016.
122. Song Min Choi. “Globetrotter Chic Shocks a Nation!” Daily NK. Accessed March 21, 2016.
ABSTRACTS
This paper seeks to explore some of the unique features of sport as an instrument of American
soft power. Informed by Cooper’s theoretical perspective on celebrity diplomacy, this work
extends the celebrity diplomacy discourse into the area of sports celebrities and explores the
unique features of celebrity athletes as an instrument of diplomacy. This work also expands the
discourse on celebrity athletes as non-state sanctioned antidiplomats, and examines Dennis
Rodman’s “basketball diplomacy” efforts in North Korea as a case study to examine the power
celebrity athletes can have—contrary to what one would expect—toward fostering engagement
with even the most reclusive and hostile governments. Moreover, this works examines North
Korean media accounts of Rodman’s basketball diplomacy, in order to evaluate the potential
limitations of celebrity athlete diplomacy and to offer cautious conclusions when celebrity
athletes are used as instruments of engagement.
INDEX
Keywords: Sports communication, celebrity diplomacy, sports diplomacy, soft power, sports
celebrity diplomacy
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AUTHOR
MICHAEL K. PARK
Michael K. Park specializes in media law, communications policy and sports communication.
Moreover, his research interests include critical media studies, race and masculinity and public
diplomacy. Park's writing has appeared in communication and law journals. His professional
experience includes stints at William Morris Endeavor, in Beverly Hills, California, where he
worked in the Motion Picture department and the Federal Communications Commission, in the
office of FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps. Park recently completed his doctorate at the
Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California
and is also a graduate of the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
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Coubertin’s Music: Culture, Class,and the Failure of the 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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big name actors, but more often than not, fail to sustain the Nielsen numbers to justify
their primetime positioning.6
Ballers is a dynamic show with vibrant characters true to the brand of both its
producers’ former work (Entourage) and network (HBO). The thirty-minute program
provides a glimpse into the lives of professional football players in the offseason,
highlighting the action occurs off of the field. The show mirrors many of the narratives
circulating today about the economic, legal, and physical struggles of current and
former professional athletes. Throughout each season, every aspect of these fictional
characters’ lives includes various intersections of culture, finance, and media present
in real life, whether on ESPN’s Sportscenter, an athlete’s Twitter account, or in financial
publications.
The lead character, Spencer Strasmore (played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), is a
former player dealing with the potential cost of the game on his body and pocketbook
after retirement. His life after football focuses on mentoring current athletes on their
own business matters and convincing them that he and his firm will not fumble their
financial futures.
This article examines the first two seasons of Ballers in terms of the the sports-media
complex, player identity, and the embedded nature of culture and finance. Shows like
Ballers examine and reproduce certain social practices, turning them into easily
digestible discourses which reinforce ideas—in this case—about race, gender, class and
the world of finance. Scholars have written extensively about the sports-media
complex as a framework for understanding how these mediated moments support
recurring forms of knowledge about these industries and individuals. Ballers, in the
same vein as other sports-themed television shows such as Coach (1989-1997), Arliss
(1996-2002), or Friday Night Lights (2006-2011), provides a commentary and a particular
perspective on the world of sport. In the case of this show, the financial aspects of the
game are emphasized, and issues of culture, cost, and community are constantly at
play.
Scripted Sport
Previous research has lamented the lack of critical examination of scripted sport texts,
arguing that the intersection of sport and cinema are worthy of further inquiry due to
their status as popular cultural forms.7 Diana Young places sports films squarely within
the domain of other popular art forms and argues these texts “evoke not only modern
concerns with health, physical fitness and physical attractiveness, but also a neoliberal
believe that subjects have control over their own destiny.”8
While sport-themed films remain a growing area of inquiry—and even the subject of
whether or not it can even be considered its own genre9—there is significantly less
work invested in the ways in which sport is scripted on television. David Rowe argues
that sports are ideal for the cinematic treatment due to the mythologies and values
already in place which are then receptive to the types of storytelling often prevalent in
mainstream Western cinema.10 These mythologies play off what he describes as binary
distinctions between fantasy and reality.11 Scholars also argue sports films are
allegorical and bring the social and sporting worlds together—either connecting or
clashing12—use the dramatization of sport to reflect shifts in the protagonist’s
character,13 and often, incorporate some semblance of difference while still privileging
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whiteness thematically.14 Finally, the most important aspect of scripted sport is
resolution. As Garry Whannel writes, “ideological tensions around aspiration and
achievement, success and failure, individual and team, cooperation and competition
have to be managed, and magical resolutions found.”15
ESPN’s short-lived show, Playmakers (2003), remains the golden example of these
unresolved tensions, clashing societal and sport values, and a failure to establish
enough distance between Hollywood scripts and real-life headlines. Featuring a
fictional professional football team riddled with domestic violence, drug addiction, the
physical tolls the game takes on players’ bodies, and much more, the show focuses on
the evils of professional sport rather than the tightly-bound resolution and character
development arc typical of scripted sport. This is direct contrast to Rowe’s binary of
fantasy and reality typically depicted in the genre, which ultimately led to the show’s
demise.16 In an article memorializing Playmakers, Aaron Gordon writes, “Despite the
show’s relative success—1.62 million households per week, a solid number for a cable
show at the time—ESPN received more and more ire from the NFL and its sponsors.”17
The show was eventually cancelled following its first season, its 11 episodes deemed too
detrimental to ESPN’s relationship with the NFL. Gordon writes, “By forcing the show’s
cancellation, the NFL implicitly acknowledged that it had something to hide, and that
Playmakers was revealing it. Maybe it was simply seen as bad P.R., but far more likely is
that, by depicting the players to be real people, the writers touched on truths the NFL
didn’t want us to know.”18 In analyzing Ballers, the relationship between media, sports,
and society remains an integral part of the show’s formation and execution.
Where Media and Sport Converge
Several scholars have theorized about the myriad of ways in which media
organizations, sports leagues, and audiences interact with one another. Lawrence
Wenner’s transactional model of media, sports, and society relationships connects
society to the mediated sports production complex, comprised of sports organizations,
media organizations, sports journalists, mediated sport content, and the audience
experience.19 He argues that a sociological analysis would approach his model from the
“outside in”, whereas his transactional model works inside out, beginning with the
audience experience and working its way out towards larger societal values and
relations. Transactions between each group occur as sports journalists cover their local
or national teams, a fan tweets to his favorite player, or media conglomerates and
professional sports leagues reach media rights agreements.20 Wenner writes, “a
transactional approach to mediated sport also entails assessments of content in
conjunction with the forces that have led to the production of that content.”21 While
Wenner and others provide a bird’s eye view of these relationships between fans, sports
leagues, and media organizations, a closer examination of these partnerships reveals
the chasms which can also exist.22
If we are to understand Wenner’s characterizations of sport organizations, media
organizations, audience, mediated sports content, and sports journalists as exhaustive–
how then should we consider a show like Ballers, which seemingly focuses on the
discords within each of these spheres ? How should we theorize these tensions ? How
can we understand the potential and problems of this program to illuminate these
various power struggles ? “What sports on film offer”, Rowe writes, “is an opportunity
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to elaborate on the exploration of the relationship between sporting and other worlds
that is deeply inscribed within the discourses of sports reportage.”23
The Embeddedness of Culture and Finance
Garry Whannel writes that the narratives inherent in sport link it to the ideology of
capitalism – a minority of winners in a sea of losers. He writes, “sport as a topic then, is
markedly well structured in terms of offering a metaphor for lived experience under
capitalism, providing the terrain on which the ideological elements of competitive
individualism can be worked through.”24 This operates in strange tandem with
seemingly conflicting ideological themes of community, teamwork and collectivism
which also remain prevalent in sport.25
In examining the themes of this show as they relate to the intermingling of culture and
economic practices, this article follows in the footsteps of Viviana Zelizer’s body of
work focusing on the concept of embeddedness–the ways in which “the economic action
of individuals as well as larger economic patterns, like the determination of prices and
economic institutions, are very importantly affected by networks of social
relationships.”26 Within the world of sport, this embeddedness–dubbed sportsbiz–
operates at the intersection of capital, culture, and commodified civil life.27 This is most
visibly represented in professional leagues like the NFL, where a small number of
athletes provide the physical capital to team owners who sell the game as a product to
be consumed by masses of fans. Zelizer challenges those that study any forms of
economic practice to include the “meaningful and dynamic interpersonal transactions”
and emphasize the importance of including networks of relationships over studying the
individual. 28 This relational approach emphasizes that “in all areas of economic life
people are creating, maintaining, symbolizing, and transforming meaningful social
relations.”29 This, in turn, is actually a form of cultural symbolic work, according to
Zelizer.
Her work focusing on the history and business of children’s life insurance30 shows the
embedded nature of culture and finance as it pertains to the body. There remains a
complicated relationship between one’s value in the market and one’s emotional value,
whether in examining “the economically worthless but emotionally priceless child”31 or
a 320-pound defensive tackle in one of the most profitable corporations in the world. It
is reported that around 40 % of NFL players insure their bodies (or certain body parts
relevant to their position), according to a CBS MoneyWatch report,32 which makes sense,
given that unlike the insured babies in Zelizer’s article, NFL players are both valuable
and expensive. Whether insuring their own bodies, being sold or traded between teams
like stocks—or some in William C. Rhoden’s corner would argue, slaves33—the cost and
value of NFL bodies are constantly in discussion, whether in NFL boardrooms,
insurance companies, sports bars, or fantasy football leagues.
In The Social Characterizations of Price Frederick Wherry writes, “People at the top of the
social hierarchy are thought to have a ‘rational’ understanding of prices, while those at
the bottom are thought to have an irrational and emotional reaction, driven by
subgroup pressures and occasional value-rational attachments.”34 Wherry identifies
four characters that interact with price–the fool, the faithful, the frugal and the
frivolous.35 He defines the fool as noncalculating, ignorant of prices, budgets, or
constraint.36 The faithful are “engage[d] in methodical calculations in order to abide by
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a covenant.”37 The frugal aim to save as much as possible and are sometimes from lower
socioeconomic backgrounds.38 Finally, the frivolous are noncalculating individuals who
spend excessive amounts of money without dire economic consequences.39 Mainstream
depictions of professional athletes primarily mark them as either the fool or the
frivolous ; Ballers is no exception.
While the majority of professional football players are considered upper class, their
individual identities (for example, race or ethnicity) factor into how their financial
prudence is perceived. Their ability to scale the social status ladder is partially
predicated on how they spend their money on luxury goods, homes and cars. Price
becomes an instrument, according to Wherry, “used to assess the positive and negative
qualities of individuals occupying different social positions in society.”40 Many of the
common narratives surrounding the financial decisions of professional athletes consist
of tales of luxury, expensive bar and restaurant tabs, bad investments, and eventually,
bankruptcy. These financial struggles are often attributed to athletes’ ignorance in
terms of investing, their youth, or the lifestyle expectations in tandem with the high
salary and public recognition which accompanies the celebrity of professional sport.
The nouveau riche athlete attempts to pivot away from their lower or middle-class
upbringing in order to achieve (perceived) membership in the upper echelon of society.
Fools, then, are identified as either calculating or noncalculating purchasers, either
unable to manage money or lacking the knowledge to do so. Wherry writes that the fool
“cannot be excused for lacking the relevant information to make an informed decision,
nor can the fool be pitied for not being exposed to modeling behaviors from reasonable
consumers in the marketplace.”41 The fool’s focus is immediate gratification and
consumption, a stereotype often placed on professional athletes, especially those of
color. The racial difference is important to note—especially given that almost all of the
athletes portrayed on the show are Black. Wherry cites Lamont and Molnár’s in “How
Blacks Use Consumption to Shape Their Collective Identity : Evidence from Marketing
Specialists” to emphasize that for many within the African-American community,
social membership within the U.S. is based on one’s “buying power.” This, he says, flips
the script of the fool when the cultural nuances of these decisions are incorporated.42
This becomes especially important when one considers the ways in which sport is seen
as “a way out” as well as a way up towards social mobility through physical labor
power. However, this mostly occurs without disrupting sites of power, both within and
outside of sport.43
The frivolous, like the fool, avoids calculation and loves extravagant purchases, but is
situated closer to the mainstream in their societal standing, as opposed to the fool,
commonly situated on the edges of society. Where many scripted sports texts may tell
the “rags to riches” story of professional sports, Ballers simultaneously reproduces this
narrative in tandem with the reverse : the “riches to rags” story of life after hanging up
one’s cleats.
Method
Throughout this research, I am guided by Garry Whannel’s line of questioning in
examining the characters of Ballers: “What is going on in the narrative journeys that
the characters take; by what discursive means are their journeys explained, and what
ideological meanings are implicated in the suturing of identity and respect?”44 To
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answer these questions, I utilize multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), which examines
language in tandem with other audio and visual elements of texts, involving music,
gestures, colors, framing, etc. David Machin defines a multimodal approach as “an
emphasis on meaning being created through combinations.”45 In evaluating the first
two seasons of Ballers (20 episodes total), I am specifically interested in the complex
semiotics involved between characters which speak to larger ideologies surrounding
sport, specifically professional football.
Throughout this research, I connect two analytical approaches to this multimodal
discourse analysis. First, in watching and organizing dialogues, gestures, and sound
from the show, I draw upon both Kress and Van Leeuwen’s visual modality – the ways in
which an image is rendered more or less real based upon ways in which it is shot,
edited and/or presented.46 As Ayodeji Olowu and Susan Akinkurolere write, “Modality
is interpersonal rather than ideational in that it does not express absolute truth or
falsehoods it produces shared truths aligning readers and viewers with what they old to
be true for themselves, while distancing from others whose values they do not share.”47
Second, episodes were analyzed through Ruth Wodak’s social actor analysis, where
characters on the show are considered to be “social actors [that] constitute knowledge,
situations, social roles as well as identities and interpersonal relations between various
interacting social groups.”48 She also writes that there are several ways that these
discursive acts reflect society–in the creation, production and construction of certain
social conditions and/or the restoration, justification, reproduction, transformation or
destruction of a certain social status quo.49 This theoretical framework serves as a
foundational methodological guide, centering the analysis on each action between
characters on the show and connecting their dialogues and nonverbal actions to
stylistic choices which speak to larger societal issues and ideologies. Each interpersonal
interaction was analyzed and organized into themes. These themes were then grouped
under the following clusters: sports-media complex, embeddedness, and the sporting body.
Results
The embeddedness of culture and finance. Wherry’s frugal and faithful, while less
emphasized throughout the show, remain an integral part of Ballers character Charles
Greane, an offensive lineman whose modesty in his material possessions casts him as a
“good guy” at heart. Greane is neither morally nor financially bankrupt, although he
both struggles throughout the show to maintain his identity as both faithful (in his
marriage) and frugal (in his lifestyle) as his career ends and he finds himself looking for
a job after football. It is also important to note that these characterizations are not
mutually exclusive. Even throughout the show, characters make career and financial
decisions that place them within the spectrum of frugal to frivolous and faithful to fool.
Spencer, while seen as financially sound to those on the outside, is struggling to
maintain his public persona as he also struggles with his own bank account. Ricky
Jerret, a star player unsure of his football future given his reckless behavior with
women and his own teammates, seems more financially secure than many of his
counterparts, even with expensive taste. His character continues to shift throughout
the series, eventually gaining the emotional maturity to match his physical and
financial savvy.
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One of the central storylines of the first season of Ballers is the negotiation of defensive
lineman Vernon Littelfield’s new contract, where his agent and his team are often seen
arguing about his worth as a member of their team. These exchanges are of note,
primarily because Vernon is never involved in these negotiations, he is always notified
of where his contract stands after the fact.
The cultural divide between professional athletes and the agents and advisors that
represent them is documented in several successful TV programs and films such as
Jerry Maguire (1996) and another HBO show, Arliss (1996-2002), and like its predecessors,
Ballers shows the disconnect between the predominantly white agents and advisors and
the black star athletes. Spencer becomes valuable to his firm as a former athlete of
color capable of translating the cultural nuances of the players and the league to his
older, white counterparts (and vice versa). As Spencer fights for the right to represent
(real-life NFL player) Terrell Suggs, he tells Andre, Suggs’s financial manager, that his
client no longer wants to work with him. Andre retorts, “He doesn't know what he
thinks—he’s a football player.”50 In another scene, when Ricky comes to Spencer’s office
to talk about his troubles, he asks that he leave Joe, his older, balding white partner,
outside.
Joe later begins to bond with potential clients at a firm-sponsored yacht party over a
game of dice, only to lose the little cultural capital he just acquired with black athletes
when he uses the “n-word” to address the crowd. He later apologizes and eventually
rebounds from this experience, commenting in the second season at a tennis
tournament, “I like that I feel uncomfortable around this many white people now.”51
Spencer as a translator of culture is valuable to the firm, but he often feels on the
outside of two worlds – he’s no longer entrenched in the life of an NFL player on or off
the field, and his coworkers view him as lesser (“some jock in a tailored suit”52) due to
his career path and as only a tool to recruit football players to the firm. When he is
fired from the firm and returns to negotiate a potential offer to buy the entire
company, he looks around and says, “This place got really Caucasian really fast,”53 a
snarky nod to the tokenism he feels as the lone advisor of color on the team.
While race is undoubtedly a major divide between the players and their financial
representatives, class remains an important schism as well. Jason, the agent who works
with Spencer and Joe to secure players’ contracts, finds a greater divide with a white
potential first round draft pick who lives in the Everglades than any of his black clients.
The insults hurled between the player, Travis Mack, his family and his potential agent
largely stem from perceived differences in class. Jason accompanies the draft hopeful
on his boat in the middle of a swamp to prove his interest and willingness to take part
in the cultural traditions of rural Florida life, only to find himself abandoned, waist-
deep in the murkiness of the Everglades.54 This hazing ritual presents a power
disruption and gives the draft pick some semblance of bargaining power, which he uses
to his advantage leading up to draft day. As Rowe writes, sport serves as a means to
both reproduce inequalities of power as well as a potential space of destabilization and
reconfiguration.55
Jason later comments on draft day as he stands in the midst of banquet tables, “I’m
looking at a billion dollars’ worth of talent and everyone’s waiting for their phone to
ring,”56 a reference to the draft tradition of waiting by the phone for a team’s front
office to offer them the opportunity to play the game they love professionally. His
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relationship to Travis becomes one complicated by risk, potential profit, and a market
driven by the quality of workouts, game film, and front office interviews.
Over the course of two seasons, an underlying but recurring ideology reinforced
throughout Ballers is a popular one, articulated by Rowe as the way in which “sport is a
prime illustration of the success that waits those racial and ethnic groups who commit
themselves to excelling at it.”57 But what happens when they achieve it? For Vernon,
his family and friends become part of his entourage, expecting him to pay for
everything and draining a significant portion of his NFL salary. This reflects what James
Carrier describes as a gift exchange, when “societies are dominated by kinship relations
and groups, which define transactors and their relations and obligations to each
other…objects are inalienably associated with the giver, the recipient, and the
relationship that defines and binds them.”58 This is in opposition of the plan Spencer
and Joe have in mind for Vernon, which is rooted in traditional commodity exchange –
investments, savings, and implied safety from bankruptcy. In commodity exchanges,
according to Carrier, it is the exchange of value that remains more important than the
individuals involved.59 Vernon, caught between these two forms of exchange, faces the
anger of either his financial advisors or his loved ones, who expect his support.60
Vernon’s assumed lack of financial savvy also extends to his entourage. In a candid
conversation with Joe, Vernon’s best friend and hanger-on Reggie admits he has no
financial knowledge even though his lifestyle may appear otherwise “I'm 24 years old, I
drove here in a $ 400,000 Rolls Royce and I don't even have a checking account,” he
says.61 He asks Joe for help in an effort to remove himself from Vernon’s gift economy
and shift to a commodity exchange as a salaried member of Vernon’s team, which
results in tension between Reggie and Vernon for some time.62
It is in the first season, when Spencer can’t withdraw $ 200 from an ATM due to
insufficient funds, that viewers discover the former player’s own financial problems
and experience in the gift economy—he later references “taking care of a lot of people”63—even as he tries to convince others to trust him with their money. In one
particularly poignant scene, Spencer is driving down the street and receives a call from
his bank about his overdrawn funds as he chugs prescription painkillers.64 His financial
woes continue in the second season, where he is eventually let go for his shortcomings
and tries to scrape up enough money to buy the firm that fired him. When he asks
Ricky for a loan, Ricky rightfully responds, “How you expect to handle my cash when
you can’t even walk in the building? If y’all ain’t the most broke ass financial managers
I’ve ever met !”65 He eventually invests millions of dollars into Spencer’s effort.
In the final episode of the second season, Spencer goes to the NFL’s annual Rookie
Symposium to confront Eddie George (an actual ex-NFL player). Apparently, George is
the reason Spencer’s NFLPA certification was rejected; he filed a grievance against
Spencer with the player’s union to keep him from advising current players. Initially
framed as violating an unspoken “code” between players by reporting him, George is
unrepentant when Spencer approaches him. “I should have filed a lawsuit,” he says.
“Do you even have an MBA? You have no right managing anyone’s money.”66 He then
tells Spencer how his life spiraled after following Spencer into a bad investment and
losing everything–how he worked at coffee shops, lived out of his car, and even
contemplated suicide. In order to drop the grievance, Spencer agrees to speak in front
of the rookies and tells the story of how he bought into a bad real estate deal and
convinced other players, including George, to do the same. “I lost every cent,” he tells
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the crowd of new NFL players, “and I lost a friend.”67 He then warns them of trusting
their financial future to just anyone, even if it happens to be someone close to them. He
cautions, “If you don’t smarten up, it’s not gonna be some guy in a $ 5,000 suit, it’s
gonna be your brother, your sister, your parents.”68
The sporting body. Throughout the show, Ballers illustrates through both obvious plot
points and subtleties the physical cost of a professional football career for the athlete,
where many of the payments are due after they stop playing the game. The physical
and mental toll football takes on the body has remained—and literally so—under the
microscope as of late, with the discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a
degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head over time. Recent
films like documentary League of Denial (2013) produced by PBS Frontline and feature
film Concussion (2015) both focus on the discovery of this disease by Dr. Bennet Omalu
and the denial of it by the NFL. In Concussion, Will Smith plays Dr. Omalu and says in
front of league representatives, “You lose your mind, your family, your money and
eventually, your life.”69 The film provides a statistic that 50 % of NFL linebackers suffer
from concussive syndrome and a center will take over 70,000 hits impacting the brain
over the course of an average professional career.70
With these staggering statistics now known, Spencer possesses a tremendous amount of
anxiety over possibly having CTE, and when his girlfriend Tracy schedules him to meet
with a neurologist, the viewer realizes just how much he is affected by the fear of being
mentally unsound.71 When his doctor recommends an MRI just to confirm he is in good
health, he sneaks out of the office, afraid of what the results may reveal. He eventually
returns, and is relieved to discover he currently shows no signs of brain damage,
although his doctor implies that his issues appear to be psychological rather than
physical.
Spencer is also haunted by his career in the NFL, with one play in particular that causes
him nightmares regularly. He ended a fellow player’s career with one big hit during his
time in the league, and relives the scene throughout the season. He eventually reunites
with the player, who has found a second career repairing cars, and they not only
reconcile the issues surrounding the hit, but find common ground as former players
trying to figure out what life looks like after football. This is seemingly in line with
Diana Young’s argument in “Fighting oneself: The embodied subject and films about
sports” where she writes,
The idea of the body as project also suggests a temporal dimension; characters have a
relationship with their own histories. The past may be seen as an essential part of the
subject’s formation that continues to play a role in shaping his/her development even
as he/she is transformed by experience…The past may provide the narrative with a
sense of inevitability, wherein the subject’s formation either propels him/her to victory
or to self-destruction.72
After dodging his doctor’s warnings that his growing addiction to painkillers put him at
risk for serious physical and mental illness (and refusing to write him another
prescription), Spencer finds himself at a questionable health clinic where pills are
seemingly doled out without question (or examination). His doctor urges him to find a
long-term solution for his physical pain and upon examining him, tells him he has
arthritis and urgently needs hip replacement surgery. Spencer is incredulous–how
could a man of his stature–bulging muscles pressed against the seams of his expensive
jackets–need a procedure often recommended for senior citizens? This coincides with
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Aaron Baker’s notion that scripted sport, which primarily focuses on male athletes,
“provides a useful site for the analysis of dominant ideas of masculinity, [and] how it
has been refigured over time in response to changes in American society.”73 Football
stands as one of these last remaining bastions of masculinity, the remnants of what was
assumed to be “in crisis” as far back as the late 1960s.74 According to Kusz, as far back as
the mid to late 1990s, this remasculinization effort, often packaged as what “real men”
do, was expressed through the images and narratives of sport primarily through men’s
bodies in motion.75 Spencer and his body appear to represent what occurs when that
body is no longer in motion ; he is seen at the end of the second season being prepped
for surgery, finally caving to the pressure of his doctor and addressing his health
problems.
In several ways, Ballers directly responds to Sebastian Byrne’s call in “Actors Who Can’t
Play in the Sports Film: Exploring the Cinematic Construction of Sports Performance”
to shift scripted sport texts towards a “heightened sports performance…by teasing out
the layers of conflict that exist in the bodily exchanges between the players, and by
establishing obstacles through the cinematic magnification of their contrasting and
competing physical skill-sets.”76 This can be seen in one of the final scenes of the
second season, where Vernon goes one-on-one against his team’s first round draft pick
who plays his position. It is his first day back on turf, and he remains determined to
prove he still deserves the starting job and is ready to compete with the incoming
rookie. He arrives early to camp, only to find his primary competition has as well. The
team owner looks on as the two players battle one another, both looking to assert their
strength over the other.77 The visual of an affluent white “owner” observing two black
players engaged in physical combat vividly embodies inequity inherent in the NFL
without a word of dialogue.
The sports-media complex. From the show’s pilot, the sports-media complex is on full
display, whether players use the video game Madden to think through their new
position on the field, or another getting caught in a fist fight in a club, which circulates
on TMZ immediately after, due to a patron recording the altercation on their phone.78
An entire episode is dedicated to a party where everyone’s eyes are glued to televised
coverage of the NFL Draft.
In the second season, ESPN NFL analyst Mark Schlereth continues to question to
potential value of Travis Mack, the first-round draft pick of Spencer’s firm, in various
television segments leading up to the draft.79 In order to quell his doubts, they set up a
meeting between Schlereth and Mack, connecting them over their mutual love of
fishing. While Travis struggles to convince the former offensive lineman-turned-
broadcaster of his potential for success in the league, he eventually decides to perform
the most popular aspect of the NFL Combine for Schlereth—the 40-yard dash.80 Far from
the bright lights, snug Dri-Fit material, and dozens of cameras, Travis slips off his
sandals and runs barefoot in the sand at an amazing speed. He impresses Schlereth,
who begins speaking favorably of him on TV.81 Travis also appears on Jay Glazer’s TV
show to prove he also possesses the mental prowess required to excel at the highest
level. When Glazer stumps Travis with an X’s and O’s pop quiz, he steps outside of the
studio with Spencer and admits he froze up due to the pressure of the cameras and his
personal struggle with a learning disorder. He later returns and completes the segment
successfully, playing to his strengths and once again utilizing the sports-media complex
to his advantage.82
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Spencer appears afraid himself to appear on Fox Sports personality Jay Glazer’s show,
even as he encourages his clients to do so in each season. He tries to avoid the
appearance repeatedly, telling Glazer “I make Marshawn Lynch look like JFK” and “I
want our business acumen to speak for itself.”83 When he finally accepts Glazer’s offer
to appear on the show to publicize his work as a financial advisor, his nemesis Terrell
Suggs appears on the show in an apparent setup for drama and ratings. Suggs tells
Spencer, “I wouldn't even have a problem with you if you didn't post that shit on
Twitter back in the day…you posted some asinine shit about me being more concerned
with my stats than about winning.”84 Spencer tries to apologize and explain he meant
to send his comments as a personal message. The confrontation soon escalates into a
physical skirmish between the two on live television.
The source of Spencer and Suggs’s dispute is one of many occasions where social media
becomes an especially important component to the show. Vernon laments the
comments made about him on Twitter as he recovers from surgery, and Ricky’s father’s
tweets cause him to lose a potential contract offer from a new team.85 The use of new
media throughout the show points to the tensions and disruptions within the sports-
media complex due to the emergence and dominance of social media technology.
Ballers also extends a storyline to Spencer’s girlfriend and sports reporter Tracy, who
discovers her male counterpart makes $ 20,000 more than her. When she confronts her
boss, who repeatedly calls her “Legs”—even as she asks him to stop—he makes light of
her complaint and continues to belittle her and diminish her accomplishments.86 Tracy
promptly quits at the table and walks away. She later tells Spencer, “For four years, I
laughed at their terrible jokes and played the game perfectly, and they still paid Mitch
more.”87 She later receives a job offer from ESPN and moves to Bristol, an upgrade
professionally with potential consequences for her personal life, including her
relationship with Spencer. Tracy’s storyline is only one of the ways in which Ballers
illustrates Whannel’s argument that “the dominant construction of sport is that of a
male oriented and dominated cultural practice in which masculinity is confirmed and
conferred.”88
Discussion
Ballers is a show defined by the ideologies of professional football, often rooted in
hegemonic masculinity — the stereotypical concept of “real manhood” built upon the
domination of women, ruthless competition, and an unwillingness to display emotion
or admit weakness.89 Many of the dominant ideologies which operate within the world
of football also function within financial institutions, whether in assessing monetary
worth, potential risk, or long-term sustainability through investment. The marriage of
football and finance on display on Ballers reflects the similar values and ideologies
present within both industries.
David Rowe argues for another form of embeddedness specific to the scripted sports
text—thematic plasticity, where mythology and values meet and are recognized and
considered by the viewer.90 These myths and legends circulate throughout the sports-
media complex, reinforcing a variety of ideals. Foucault writes that the body is
submerged in a political field where it is worked over by power, as it is invested,
marked, tortured, forced to perform, carry out tasks, or produce signs.91 Throughout
the show, racial hierarchies remain unchallenged and often reinforced. Even with a
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diverse cast and crew, including former NFL player Rashard Mendenhall in the writing
room, there remains ambivalence in the execution of each character’s development;
issues of inequity are often referenced without consequence or confrontation. Previous
research has found a connecting thread of “colonial systems of white dominance”92
even in films and TV shows rooted in themes of “overcoming” racism through sport.
And while this paper primarily focused on issues of identity in terms of race and class,
there is also a substantial argument to be made that the portrayal of women in sports-
themed shows and films needs further exploration, as Ballers features more women
without clothing than those with recurring speaking roles. Future research could
further delve into the role of gender in scripted sport texts, both in the verbal and the
visual.
Ballers most successfully executes Byrne’s more balanced multidimensional approach to
scripted sport, where obstacles and conflict are foregrounded through the body, bodily
exchanges between players, and open up what he describes as “new directions for
exploring the construction of character in spectacle sequences of goal-driven cinema.”93 The use of the body–through injury, addiction, or peak conditioning, speak to the
ways in which the corporal self can speak to larger conditions within and outside of the
world of sport.
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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.
InMedia, 6 | 2017
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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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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From Rocky (1976) to Creed (2015):“musculinity”1 and modesty Clémentine Tholas
Forty years ago, in 1976, moviegoers discovered a 29-year old kind-hearted thug whose
only way out of the Philadelphian rough districts was boxing. Rocky – film and
character – was the brainchild of Sylvester Stallone, who managed to convince director
John Avildsen and producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler to both shoot a script
written by a penniless actor and hire him as the main lead. In 1977, Rocky was
nominated for ten Academy Awards and ended up winning the award for “best
picture”, making Stallone a star overnight. Six sequels to the original movie have come
out since – Rocky II (1979), Rocky III–The Eye of the Tiger (1982), Rocky IV (1985), Rocky V
(1990), Rocky Balboa (2006), and Creed (2015). Today the Rocky franchise has become such
a global cultural phenomenon that almost everyone is familiar with the line “Yo,
Adrian” or the Rocky steps in front of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on the Benjamin
Franklin parkway. The last film was directed by young Ryan Coogler. It shifts the focus
from Rocky to Adonis Creed, the son of late boxing champion Apollo Creed as well as
Rocky’s new protégé. A second Creed movie is expected to be made by the Coogler-
Stallone duo and released in 2017, thus continuing the seemingly never-ending series,
with Adonis appearing as the new torch-bearer when the light of Balboa dims after
being diagnosed with cancer.2
This article discusses how Rocky Balboa should not be interpreted as a muscular super-
fighter but as a humble character, a simple “bum from the neighborhood”. Both
Stallone and Avildsen have underscored the humility and decency of Rocky as what
made him such an endearing hero: “Rocky has a lot of issues, a lot of problems. He is
like all of us” (Stallone); “On the second and the third page, the guy is talking to his
turtle, and I was charmed” (Avildsen).3 My approach is related to new readings of
Stallone introduced by Chris Holmlund, editor of The Ultimate Stallone Reader. She
explains that Stallone studies appeared in the 1980s with the groundbreaking works of
Yvonne Tasker and Susan Jeffords on the notions of “musculinity” and the “hard body”,
but only gained full academic recognition in the 2010s after the 2008 SCMS conference
in Philadelphia, during which scholars offered a vision of Stallone as a one-man-band
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(performer, screenwriter, director, producer), breaking free from the brawny action
hero image he has been reduced to for many decades.4 In response to Valerie
Walkerdine and Chris Holmlund’s views of Stallone as the image of working-class
combative masculinity challenging oppression and longing for mastery,5 here I analyze
how Rocky’s social, emotional and physical fragility is increased throughout the series
of films. It is interesting to consider Rocky as a romanticized vision of the working class
in which success and money corrupt the natural man, a perspective introduced by
Peter Biskind and Barbara Ehrenreich; they interpret the working class as depoliticized
in the 1970s productions but sexualized and connected with conflictual images of hard
and impulsive but also soft and sentisized masculinities.6 The different films mingle
violent manliness with emotive power and emphasize the gentleness of the character
who needs to toughen up if he wants to survive in a world ruled by ferocity,
exploitation and manipulation. Yet, Rocky, albeit presented as a rough action hero,
stands out thanks to his gullibility and mildness. I argue that the articulation between
the action genre and the development of Rocky in the films is paradoxical. The serial
pattern gradually constructs a character whose delicate virility and brittleness make
him a more likeable and thoughtful hero. If Rocky has sometimes been read as a white
man who fights to regain his declining power, this paper examines how Rocky’s
vulnerability shapes him as a better man and not as a super champion. It addresses the
soft side of masculinity and the treatment of modesty and sensitivity in the Rocky saga
which seems to restructure the American action man as an unthreatening demure
hero.
Rituals and Rebirth
Each film presents Rocky, or his new alter-ego Adonis, fighting both for a professional
distinction and a personal motivation. Two films have been directed by John Avildsen,
four by Sylvester Stallone (who also penned six screenplays in the series), while Creed
was directed and written by Ryan Coogler. Boxer Rocky Balboa is surrounded by a close
circle of relatives and other boxers composed of Adrian, his wife (Talia Shire), Paulie
Pennino, his brother-in-law (Burt Young), Mickey Goldmill, his old coach (Burgess
Meredith), Robert, Rocky’s son, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) and Tony “Duke” Evers
(Tony Burton). Other characters are periodically introduced as the nemesis whom the
hero will have to defeat. Rocky’s life evolves in limited settings, for example his South
Philly neighborhood in the Italian district; his apartment or house; his gym and
training locations; and finally, the boxing rings, thus centering the plot on specific
iconic places laden with meaning for a character who seems to be set in his ways. Eric
Litchenfeld defines Rocky as “an extension (or manifestation) of his environment”,
stressing the strong connections between his identity, his feelings and his personal
geography.7 Even when displaced in other locales for new challenges, for instance
California, Russia, or England, Rocky sticks to a temporal, geographical, or emotional
routine that enables him to defy hardships
Scholars found that the series uses similar plotlines, tropes and characters: Rocky is
repeatedly faced with a challenge related to personal failings, economic problems,
family issues, or the loss of a loved one (Adrian & Apollo). The only way he can
overcome these trials is to fight an opponent who incarnates Balboa’s fears and
frustrations (Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago, Tommy “The Machine Gunn”,
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Mason “the Line” Dixon). The character’s life is a perpetual battle in and out of the ring
and Rocky always has “to go the distance” – as his coach Mickey says – through a
hostile external world, different from his usual surroundings. According to Marianne
Kac-Vergne, as in any action movie the hero seeks to regain his dignity through a
struggle against those who have humiliated him.8 Creed recycles the same formula as
young Adonis Creed can only make a name for himself by fighting British heavyweight
champion Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew). Both Rocky and Adonis are confronted with
internal and external threats, because they are enemies to their success as much as
their opponents are. The two characters illustrate Chris Holmund’s idea that
introspection and personal dilemmas are key ingredients to Stallone’s films because he
tends to “foreground emotional interests” and “keep the action personal,”9 the muscles
only serving a nobler cause.
Most films of the series use a repetitive pattern and integrate images from the previous
films in the introduction, and utilize numerous flashbacks as well. The original saga
should be seen as “one big movie”,10 presenting the evolution of Rocky Balboa from the
moment he leaves street life to prove his value as a professional boxer to his retirement
and new career as a trainer of younger boxers. The first cycle, and each film within it,
could thus appear as a simple story of rise, fall, and rise. The second cycle, heralded by
Rocky V, is more complicated because Rocky has moved on to a new stage in life and
acknowledges his position as an obsolete boxer turned into a restaurant owner whose
come-back on the ring is quite strange. In Rocky Balboa, his restaurant appears as a time
capsule in which memories of the past are accumulated and illustrate the discrepancy
between the flamboyant fighter Rocky was and the aging man he is now. In 1993, Frank
Ardolino presented the first cycle of the Rocky series as a “rebirth narrative” and a
“narrative of sameness,”11 using the repetition of key scenes and motifs in order to
intertwine the past, the present, and the future because the past serves as a driving
force to change what is to happen while the efforts in the present allow Rocky to
redeem past mistakes.12 These comments also apply to the new cycle because each film
is about the constant resurrection of Rocky when he is on the verge of “throwing in the
towel” for good. From the very first film, the saga deals with the end of Rocky’s career
because the 29-year old underdog was never supposed to become the heavyweight
champion. Nina Schnieder demonstrates that age is a major hindrance in the entire
series because Rocky is repeatedly too old to make it and out of place in the major
league. The seven films show that Rocky is never fit to fight and that, normally, his best
option should be remaining in the corner or retiring. Yet, against all odds, he always
wins, directly or indirectly.13 Interestingly, while aging is a challenge to many actresses
in Hollywood who have difficulties embracing their aging, it seems that for Stallone
and his fantasy alter ego, Rocky, advancing age is a way to keep the franchise profitable
by creating a soft super hero. Each time, Rocky is offered an opportunity to start anew
and change his fate, by fighting himself or having another character trigger his will
power (Adrian or his son), or helping other boxers for the cause of outcasts (Tommy
Gunn, Adonis Creed). In Rocky V, during a press conference, he tells his son “Having you
is like being born again”. The idea of resurrection is crucial to the entire series because
in each film Rocky comes back as a new man with new challenges and a new form of
knowledge.
The link between both cycles of films is also built on the recurrence of “ritualistic
training sequences” orchestrated as a repetition with variations “to illustrate both
difference from the past and continuity with it.”14 These sequences are probably the
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most awaited moments for the audience because they concentrate on the pain and
efforts of Rocky to become someone better and to prepare to win. For example, in Rocky
and Rocky II, the hero keeps the same training locations (the industrial wasteland, the
Italian market, the slaughterhouse, the museum steps), an almost identical outfit, the
grey track suit, the old converse shoes, the snow hat. However, in Rocky II, “the Italian
Stallion” is now clumsily written on the back of his sweatshirt, and he doesn’t run
alone but rather is waved at by people in the streets and followed by hordes of children
who cheer him. This solitary training becomes a collective effort to support the
champion who has won everyone’s heart. In the next installments, Bill Conti’s
signature theme “Gonna Fly Now” is replaced by other tunes (ex: “The Eye of the Tiger”
in Rocky III, “Burning Heart” in Rocky IV, both by the band Survivor), but reintroduced
in Rocky Balboa as a reference to the spirit of the original film. The sixth installment
also reactivates the same elements as the first two films, including the dog as a running
companion, expect that this time Rocky is getting older and struggles much more. In
Rocky III and IV, Rocky’s training is transferred to other locations such as the slums of
Los Angeles, cradle of Apollo, or the Russian tundra, to take the character out of his
comfort zone and make him tougher through destabilization. In Rocky V and Creed,
Rocky becomes the trainer of Tommy and then Adonis. First, he tries in vain to be a
new Mickey and to make Tommy a new Rocky, a tactic that doesn’t pay off because the
young man is ridiculed by being called “Rocky’s Clone”, “Rocky’s Robot”.
In Creed, Rocky is a weakened coach who has to train Adonis from the hospital where he
receives his chemotherapy treatments. The last film combines ingredients from the
other training sequences: the relocation in an unfamiliar and unfriendly place – the
hospital and another gym–, the guidance of an old champion who knows all the tricks,
the individual running sessions in the streets with the grey tracksuit and the black
snow hat, but now Adonis is supported and escorted by the local youths on their
motorbikes. Creed eventually conveys successful transmission from a focus on Rocky to
a younger boxer that was absent in the previous films. In Rocky Balboa, Rocky has to
fight again, he is unable to find a real heir for his legacy with Tommy in Rocky V. The
training session in Creed, as well as Rocky’s age/sickness, make it clear that, this time,
he is retiring for good, that no comeback to the ring is possible and the coming sequels
will be different from the first six films. Rocky is thus over as a boxer, but not as a
character. If the hero seems to be at his worst and unable to embody a boxing
champion anymore, how can he continue carrying the saga on his shoulders? If a sequel
is announced, producers are confident that Rocky can still attract crowds in the movie
theaters; it thus seems worth studying the power of Rocky as an anti-action hero.
Meekness and Sensitiveness
While the Rocky series has been described as the paragon of “Reaganite entertainment”
celebrating an idealized past and conservative values (cf. Andrew Britton)15 or the
assertion of white supremacy over a racial or a cultural other,16 I prefer to center my
article on the expression of humbleness and self-effacement embodied by the main
character. As Susan Jeffords explained, Hollywood films produced in the 1990s
promoted “the New Man” who represented a “more internalized masculine
dimension,” a character exploring “ethical dilemmas, emotional traumas, and
psychological goals,” The film industry offered “in a place of bold male muscularity
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and/as violence, […] a self-effacing man, one who now, instead of learning to fight,
learns to love.”17 With the Rocky series, it seems that this combination of muscle and
heart started as early as the 1970s, anticipating the latter trend. In most films, Balboa is
described as a fighter characterized by his genuine heart. In Rocky IV, right before the
match against Drago, Paulie’s comment “You’re all heart” encapsulates this peculiarity.
When explaining his authorial choices in The Official Rocky Scrapbook, Sylvester Stallone
stressed his desire to craft a compassionate everyman:
That night I went home and I had the beginning of my character. I had him now. I was
going to make a creation called Rocky Balboa, a man from the streets, a walking cliché
of sorts, the all-American tragedy, a man who didn’t have much mentality but had
incredible emotion and patriotism and spirituality and good nature even though nature
had not been good to him. All he required from life was a warm bed and some food and
maybe a laugh during the day. He was a man of simple tastes. […] But Rocky Balboa was
different. He was America’s child. He was to the seventies what Chaplin’s Little Tramp
was to the twenties.18
In light of these remarks, Rocky, often described as “a bum from the neighborhood,”
appears as an alter ego of Chaplin’s popular character, belonging to the lower classes of
American society and demonstrating the same sympathetic potential. As a result, being
a bum proves to be his real power, more than his muscles. Even if Rocky is obviously
not as astute as The Tramp, the film series demonstrates he can prove very resourceful
and draws from his emotional power to accomplish great deeds in and out of the ring.
Rocky puts on several costumes, corresponding either to the expression of his
personality or to his desire to become stronger. Throughout the series, Rocky owns two
major costumes: first a street costume composed of a black leather jacket, a hat, and
some mitts, making him look like a shadow in the urban night; and then a boxer’s
costume made of a pair of shorts, some gloves, and a gum-shield. Rocky’s boxing
paraphernalia echoes the evocation by Yvonne Tasker of Zavitzianos’s concept of
“homeovestim” – wearing clothes of the same sex – and Lacan’s “male parade” in which
men put on the garments of masculine authority, as ways to raise self-esteem and
regain authority.19 However, the boxing costume appears as an illusion of power and
matches only very partially Rocky’s identity. In times of trouble, when he learns he is
ruined in Rocky V, Rocky finds comfort not in the combat attire but his old clothes he
finds in the attic of his mansion. He puts them back on and becomes again the man
from South Philly. While the stars and stripes boxing shorts of Apollo can be passed on
from Apollo to Rocky (Rocky III, IV), from Rocky to Tommy (Rocky V) and finally to
Adonis (Creed), transferring some male power to the person who wears them, Rocky’s
street costume is only made for Rocky and is more meaningful for him than the shorts
which become a feebler signifier. The expression of Rocky’s meekness is related to his
sense of humor: he mocks his failings with the help of his foil Paulie, an overweight
drunk side-kick. Paulie is another loser but he lives with his shabbiness and flaws, with
no interest in introspection and no intense desire to change contrary to Rocky. But he
also admires his friend and comforts him when necessary: “If I could just unzip myself
and step out and be someone else, I'd wanna be you” (Rocky IV).
According to Frank Ardolino, Rocky may also resemble a small-town hero because of
his “overall innocence, social naiveté, his love of plain talk and direct action, and his
loyalty to family, friends and tradition.”20 The relationship with his wife Adrian adds a
romantic and sentimental dimension to the series, even in the last episodes when he
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continues talking to her after she is dead. It is also worth noting that, apart from Creed,
the series is devoid of sex scenes; Rocky and Adrian’s physical bond appears extremely
chaste. Stallone explained in 1977 that they were soulmates: “The movie was really
about two individuals – half people – coming together making a whole person.”21 Rocky
is less interested in Adrian’s looks than in her intellectual potential, and he really picks
a partner who can bring him what he considers he lacks. He looks for complementarity
in their relationship, but not for a situation of domination as he asserts his male
prowess mainly on the ring. The reserved and innocent representation of their love is
remarkable, especially if we consider that it strikingly contrasts with the exhibition of
half-naked male bodies, and participates in the rhetoric of modesty offered by the saga.
For Chris Holmlund, the simplicity and sensitiveness of the hero appears to be a trait in
Stallone’s films which stage “macho heroes who are not afraid to show their feelings,”
men who “often cry and cry out.” For example, Rocky is crying for Adrian when she is
in a coma (Rocky II) and in the following films he will deeply mourn her (Rocky Balboa
and Creed).22 Other scholars suggest that Stallone tends to play with the human duality
between power and weakness and on gender roles as well, making his action heroes
multifaceted characters. For Yvonne Tasker, “the performance of muscular masculinity
within the cinema draws attention to both the restraint and the excess involved in
“being a man”23 and Stallone tries to sell the “male star as something other than a
hunk/hulk.”24 She adds that the “drama of power and powerlessness […] intrinsic to the
anxieties about male identity and authority”25 is a main characteristic of the action
genre and of the star’s films. In Rocky Balboa, the character emphasizes the instability of
human life and his own fears: “You or nobody ain’t never gonna hit as hard as life… But
it ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving
forward”. Audiences are meant to understand that exposing Rocky’s vulnerability
through his sweet personality, but also through the sufferings of his body during the
training and the matches, is a way to reveal his power.26 His “musculinity” makes sense
because he is also sensitive, and his taunt body may appear as a shield to protect this
candid character. The reason why Rocky wins is not the yearning for fame or the desire
to show he is the strongest, it is love. His heart and his feelings for Adrian and old
Mickey make him overcome obstacles. Mickey’s line “Get up you son of a bitch ’cause
Mickey loves you” (Rocky V) illustrates the power of Rocky’s emotional trigger.27
Jérôme Momcilovic presents Stallone’s filmography as “the ideology of the immigrant’s
humility, of the effort of life-saving labor […] the exaltation of the father figure, the
laboring classes and family […] the myth of upward mobility and second chance.”28 This
definition emphasizing the idea of class awareness can apply to Rocky, whose entire
journey is synonymous with self-improvement both at the social and personal levels. If
Rocky, like other characters played by Stallone (Rambo for instance), starts as a
common man who is held back by inhibition and fear, he is gradually revealed as a
superior being.29 Yet, it seems important not to lose sight of Rocky’s struggle to remain
a decent man rather than becoming the ultimate superman. The stakes of the Rocky
series are regaining dignity and repairing a broken-self through a physical and
psychological transformation, showing how the hero surpasses himself.30 If we focus on
Rocky’s modest personality, we see that his constant struggle for self-improvement
goes beyond the sphere of boxing and social achievement. For example, even though
his father told him he was not much of a brain and should better use his body to
succeed, Rocky also tries to improve his intellectual skills with Adrian’s guidance. In
Rocky II, after he is humiliated for not being able to read correctly the lines of an
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aftershave commercial, Rocky trains himself to read correctly while in bed with his
wife. This new challenge will help him maintain a connection with his wife when she is
in a coma as he reads for her and writes her poems, and later on, his ability to read will
help Rocky behave like a role model for his son when he reads him children stories like
Pinocchio or Goldilocks and the Three Bears in Rocky III. Real or surrogate fatherhood is an
important aspect of the series because it participates in building the hero not as a
muscular warrior but as a kind man. Rocky IV, Rocky V, Rocky Balboa and Creed insist on
Rocky’s concern for younger generations (his son Robert, Tommy, Adonis) and his
desire to help them. If Tommy endangers Rocky’s relation with his son and finally
betrays him, Adonis is faithful to Rocky. He considers him as family, calls him “Uncle,”
and supports him while struggling with cancer. Throughout the series, Rocky – who
first appeared to be rather naïve – becomes a voice of experience, admittedly
sometimes unsophisticated and awkward, but thanks to his kind-heartedness, modesty,
and temperance he proves a reliable paternal figure, a secure refuge for Adonis in the
last film.
Softness and Marginality
Rocky does not so much long to be a champion but to be a better man. This aspect of his
personality is illustrated by his habit of standing in the background while his
opponents incarnate ostentation. As a bum, Rocky holds the power to remain discreet
and deferent while Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago, Tommy Gunn, and Mason
Dixon all boast and brag. Apollo Creed is a showman who transforms boxing matches
into gigantic shows with costumes, dancers, feathers, confetti, and famous singers
(James Brown) in Rocky I, Rocky II and Rocky IV. On the contrary, Rocky’s only displays
are his austere religious rituals, kneeling and praying in the bathroom and crossing
himself while in the ring. Lang’s exuberance is mainly verbal, angrily expressing his
rage against Rocky and society. Balboa is a man of few words, illustrating the saying
that silence is golden – even if he becomes more and more voluble in the second cycle
of films. Drago’s extensive use of machines and steroids to shape his dehumanized body
contrasts with Rocky’s training in the harshness of the deserted Russian countryside. If
Drago is almost turned into a robot, Rocky becomes a man of the woods, an American
mother-nature’s son who only needs snow, frost, and will-power to prepare himself for
the match. Both Tommy Gunn and Mason Dixon are lured by money and fame whereas
Rocky, after spending a few years in a lavish mansion when a champion, is back in his
old neighborhood where he tries to make a living by training young boxers at the gym
and then by running a restaurant. He knows that celebrity and dollars are transient:
the American dream of economic success might not necessarily mean progress. All in
all, despite all the power and muscle, the series manages to produce a “soft” character
spectators don’t have to be afraid of, an American hero who doesn’t stand as an
aggressive assertion of US imperialism even if he is still a spokesman of American
superiority.
In the series, Rocky does not always avoid pretention and garishness – remember the
ridiculous presence of the expensive robot in Rocky IV –, especially during his golden
years as a champion, but Adrian and Paulie remind him about what matters most,
namely respecting his relatives and being true to himself. What makes Rocky so
likeable for spectators and scholars compared to other action heroes is that he
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preserves his original “bum” identity, a status he once despised and badly wanted to
escape, but which finally proves more respectful than easy money and illusory glory.
By belonging to the margin of society or going back to it, Rocky achieves an unexpected
authority. According to Marianne Kac-Vergne, in action movies outcasts are considered
superior to regular elites because they have not been corrupted and they stand as more
authentic and more human. Outsiders have the power to regenerate traditional
structures of power.31 The bum therefore becomes a virtuous man for whom winning is
worth less than struggling and trying, this motto being given emphasis in the lyrics of
the Bill Conti’s soundtrack: “Trying hard now, It’s so hard now, Trying hard now,
Getting strong now.”32 In the tale of the humble Rocky – a working class hero, the value
of effort and sacrifice becomes more important than the prize.
The Rocky series has often been depicted as a modern-day fairy-tale, a rags-to-riches
story appealing to American and international audiences for holding universal
qualities. If the saga has been associated with the action or the sport film genres,
celebrating masculine might and a certain form of justified violence, the longevity of
the franchise is much more rooted in people’s attachment to Rocky Balboa. The
character has almost entered the American national pantheon with his gloves, robe,
and shorts being exhibited at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. and his
statue standing aligned with George Washington’s statue in Philadelphia. Yet, I argue
here, Rocky embodies modesty and decency rather than muscular strength and
patriotic pride. Even after all those years, his authenticity and uncomplicatedness is
still praised by Stallone in interviews:
He is of the people, and he has no sense of entitlement or superiority. Actually he gets
his power from being simplistic […] He’s completely without guile. He is “there” – he
really hasn’t changed […] he didn’t think of himself as any better than the person who’s
selling a fish or flowers. And I think I was trying to get that there is no egoism at all.
Nothing! He is completely, like, back where he started.33
The character is a selfless man with whom people can easily identify. Back in the early
years of the Rocky series, some people may have wanted to be like this brave man
fighting to get what he wanted; today, younger spectators can see in Rocky something
that may remind them of a nice protective relative while more mature spectators
perhaps see a man who is aging and facing the same issues as them. Surprisingly,
despite the boxing theme, we tend to forget that Rocky is a boxer because the series’
strength doesn’t lie in the repetition of the fighting motif but in the maturation and
complexification of the character away from the ring. As some scholars argue, the
Rocky series reworks the boxing genre towards the social realist tradition and could to a
certain extent be compared with Frank Capra’s films for its celebration of the triumph
of the common man.34
Ardolino, Frank. “Rocky Times four: Return, Resurrection, Repetition, Reaganism.” Aethlon: The
Journal of Sport Literature, 11 (1), Fall 1993:147-161.
Bacon, Kenneth. “Yo Adrian: The Rocky Saga.” Boxoffice, 151 (11), Nov 2015: 41-47.
Biskind, Peter and Barbara Ehrenreich. “Machismo and Hollywood’s Working Class.” In American
Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives, edited by Donald Lazere, 201-15. Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1987.
Conway, Brett. “To Roll back the Rock(y): white-male absence in the Rocky series.” Aethlon: The
Journal of Sport Literature, 22 (1), Fall 2014: 63-79.
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Cowie, Jefferson. Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class. New York: New Press,
2010.
Holmlund, Chris. “Introduction: Presenting Stallone/ Stallone Presents.” In The Ultimate Stallone
Reader edited by Chris Holmlund., 1-25. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Holmlund, Chris. “Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade: The ‘Mature’ Stallone and the Stallone
Clone.” In Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema edited by Steven Cohan
and Ina Rae Hark, 213-229. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Jeffords, Susan. “Can Masculinity be terminated.” In Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in
Hollywood Cinema edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 245-261. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Kac-Vergne, Marianne. “Une Hypermasculinité vulnérable : le paradoxe du héros blanc face à la
crise des autorités et la trahison des élites.” In Le Cinéma des années Reagan: Un modèle
Hollywoodien? edited by Frederic Gimello-Mesplomb, 213-223. Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions,
2007.
Kasprowicz, Laurent and Francis Hippolyte. “Le Corps body-buildé au cinéma: magie et
anthropologie d’un spectacle.” In Le Cinéma des années Reagan: Un modèle Hollywoodien? edited by
Frederic Gimello-Mesplomb, 193-212. Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions, 2007.
Litchenfeld, Eric. “I, of the Tiger: self and self-obsession in the Rocky series,” In The Ultimate
Stallone Reader edited by Chris Holmlund., 75-95. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
Momcilovic, Jérôme. “L’homme extraordinaire au cinéma: Remarques sur l’oeuvre d’Arnold
Schwarzenegger,” In Le Cinéma des années Reagan: Un modèle Hollywoodien? edited by Frederic
Gimello-Mesplomb, 181-192. Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions, 2007.
Schnieder, Nina. “You ought to stop trying because you had too many birthdays? Heroic Male
Aging in the Rocky films.” In Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS), 15 (1),
2014.
Setoodeh, Ramin and Kristopher Tapley. “Still Fighting.” Variety, 330 (13), Januray 2016: 44-49.
Stallone, Sylvester. The Official Rocky Scrapbook. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1977.
Tasker, Yvonne. “Dumb movies for dumb people: masculinity, the body and the voice in
Contemporary action cinema,” In Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema
edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 230-244. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Tasker, Yvonne. Spectacular Bodies, Genre and the Action Film. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Walkedine, Valerie. “Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy.” In Formations of Fantasy edited by
Victor Burgin James Donald, and Cora Kaplan, 167-199. New York: Methuen,1986.
Webb, Lawrence. The Cinema of Urban Crisis: Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014.
ENDNOTES
1. See Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies, Genre and the Action Film (New York: Routledge, 1993).
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2. Ramin Setoodeh, Kristopher Tapley, “Still Fighting,” Variety, January 2016, 48.
3. Setoodeh, Tapley, “Still Fighting,” 46-48.
4. Chris Holmlund, “Introduction: Presenting Stallone/ Stallone Presents,” in The Ultimate Stallone
Reader, ed. Chris Holmlund, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 15-16.
5. Valerie Walkerdine “Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy,” in Formations of Fantasy, eds
Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan (New York: Methuen1986), 177.
Chris Homlund, “Masculinity as Multiple Masquerade: The ‘Mature’ Stallone and the Stallone
Clone,” in Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, eds Steven Cohan and Ina
Rae Hark (NY: Routledge, 1993), 227.
6. Peter Biskind and Barbara Ehrenreich, “Machismo and Hollywood's Working Class,” in
American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives, ed. Donald Lazere (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1987), 211-213.
7. Eric Litchenfeld “I, of the Tiger: self and self-obsession in the Rocky series,” in The Ultimate
Stallone Reader, ed. Holmlund, 76-77.
8. Marianne Kac-Vergne, “Une Hypermasculinité vulnérable : le paradoxe du héros blanc face à la
crise des autorités et la trahison des élites,” in Le Cinéma des années Reagan: Un modèle
Hollywoodien?, ed. Frédéric Gimello-Mesplomb (Paris : Nouveau Monde éditions, 2007), 215.
9. Holmlund, “Introduction: Presenting Stallone/ Stallone Presents,” 4.
10. Anonymous, “Fifth film final round for Rocky,” Star Bulletin, 21 February 1990, B-5
11. Frank Ardolino, “Rocky Times four: Return, Resurrection, Repetition, Reaganism,” Aethlon,
Fall 1993, 150.
12. Ardolino, “Rocky Times four,”151-152
13. Nina Schnieder, “You ought to stop trying because you had too many birthdays? Heroic Male
Aging in the Rocky films,” Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS), 15 (1), 2014.
14. Ardolino, “Rocky Times four,” 151
15. Ardolino, “Rocky Times four,” 147
16. Brett Conway, “To Roll back the Rock(y): white-male absence in the Rocky series,” Aethlon, Fall
2014, 69.
17. Susan Jeffords, “Can Masculinity be terminated,” in Screening the Male, 245-246
18. Sylvester Stallone, The Official Rocky Scrapbook (NY: Grosset and Dunlap, 1977), 19.
19. Yvonne Tasker, “Dumb movies for dumb people: masculinity, the body and the voice in
Contemporary action cinema,” in Screening the Male, 242.
20. Ardolino, “Rocky Times four,” 149.
21. Stallone, The Official Rocky Scrapbook, 19.
22. Holmlund, “Introduction: Presenting Stallone/ Stallone Presents,” 3.
23. Tasker, “Dumb movies for dumb people,” 233.
24. Tasker, “Dumb movies for dumb people,” 234.
25. Tasker, “Dumb movies for dumb people,” 243.
26. Laurent Kasprowicz and Francis Hippolyte, “Le Corps body-buildé au cinéma: magie et
anthropologie d’un spectacle, » in Le Cinéma des années Reagan, 201.
27. The entire line refers to Rocky Marcianno’s cufflink used as a lucky charm: “If you ever get
hurt and you feel that you’re goin’ down this little angel is gonna whisper in your ear. It’s gonna
say, ‘Get up you son of a bitch ’cause Mickey loves you.” Rocky remembers the moment Mickey
gave him the present.
28. Jérôme Momcilovic, “L’homme extraordinaire au cinéma: Remarques sur l’oeuvre d’Arnold
Schwarzenegger, » in Le Cinéma des années Reagan, 183.
29. Momcilovic, “L’homme extraordinaire au cinéma,” 183.
30. Kasprowicz and Hippolyte, “Le Corps body-buildé au cinéma,” 197-199.
31. Kac-Vergne, “Une Hypermasculinité vulnerable,” 220-222.
32. Bill Conti, Gonna Fly Now, 1976.
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33. Kim Williamson, Boxoffice, December 2006, reprinted in reprinted in Kenneth Bacon, “Yo
Adrian: The Rocky Saga,” Boxoffice, 151 (11), November 2015, 46.
34. Lawrence Webb, The Cinema of Urban Crisis: Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014), 60; Jefferson Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and
the Last Days of the Working Class (New York: New Press, 2010, 329.
ABSTRACTS
The profitable Rocky franchise celebrated its 40th anniversary with a new instalment, Creed. As
Roger Ebert explained in 1976, Rocky is not so much about a story but about a hero. This paper
examines the construction of Rocky’s character as a paradoxical action hero, a boxer made
famous by his kind heart and mild manners instead of his muscles. The analysis of the seven films
reveals how vulnerability and humbleness are used as the pillars of Rocky’s fictional personality
and intensify the emotional dimension of the saga to bring the boxing film closer to the urban
melodrama.
INDEX
Mots-clés: masculinity; action hero; working class; sensitiveness; vulnerability; empowerment
AUTHOR
CLÉMENTINE THOLAS
Clémentine Tholas is Associate Professor of American studies in the English and applied foreign
languages departments at the Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle University. Her research interests
focus on early motion pictures in the US, namely WWI cinematic propaganda and the role of
silent films. Clémentine Tholas-Disset published Le Cinéma américain et ses premiers récits filmiques
(2014) and co-edited Humor, Entertainment, and Popular Culture during World War I (Palgrave, 2015).
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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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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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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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