But as someone who spent some unhappy years in a high school that valued football far too much (despite having a crappy time year in, year out), I was viscerally reminded of how much I hated and was hated by that world, here presented in a form so amped up I can imagine living in it about as much as I can truly imagine being a Masai warrior or a Prussian aristocrat.
I have to say: two thumbs. Perhaps the most overt and self-conscious bit of Americana we are presented, relentlessly, is the connection between football and religion. In none-too-subtle terms, FNL suggests that in this community football is religion. The perspective is not at all that of the bemused outsider eavesdropping on the huddle praying to Jesus. It is not that football is gilded with religious overtones or that the game becomes a ‘substitute’ for religion. Football is the community’s religion because it is the site of the community’s collective effervescence, of its coming-of-age rituals, of the determination of gender; it is the place where couples pair off for life. Football is the community’s catharsis-inducing spectacle of itself as something more than it is.
But the show is not about Hope in a desperate place, at least for most of the town’s residents. It’s not about moving-on-up but about the moment, about participating in the Gesamtkunstwerk of cheerleading, music, punishing athletic competition, tailgating, and, not least, watching from the stands.
Which –for a weekly television show that, like every television show, asks Americans to gather round the cathode-ray campfire at the appointed time each week and listen to the tales of the tribe (with commercial interruptions)-- a bit of a recursive quality. My first impression of the show was its redundancy: it not only recounted the same events as the film (both are based on the same actual events, after all), but in a broadly similar style. Having now seen the second episode I can see the show more on its own terms and predict –yeah, I know, along with all the critics—that it will end up being much better than the already fine film.
But even the possibility of its being redundant is already something of an event, or rather another data point in what I see as a broader trend: that television will become better than film. From a strictly consumer perspective, there are traces of this already in the growing “television” categories in the DVD section of bookstores. This is in part no doubt due to those dumb Americans only being able to pay attention in 20-24 minute chunks, and so on and so forth, but it also reflects a shift in the constraints of film and television as media. Movies increasingly all need to be blockbusters, which not only tends to homogenize what shows up in theaters but will also eventually make more of a mark even on home consumption as studios increasingly make movies only worth watching on a whale-sized screen with a cranium-shattering sound system. At least for the time-being it looks as if cinema is increasingly becoming spectacle and event, allowing “television” to fill in the void. I hate to admit it, but HBO has led the way here, first transforming itself from the television channel that shows movies to the television channel that had such a large percentage of the original programming worth watching that people became will to pay to watch television. It would be hard to prove –and so far a lot of the results are still mediocre—but with the wave of new dramas that have come out this fall it seems that 1) we might finally be leaving the Reality Television era behind and 2) that the bar on television writing and cinematography has been raised at least a little. No doubt this is less the dawn of a new era of artistic greatness than a passing breeze, so we should enjoy it while it lasts. So, for now, I am ready for some football.
Your review, “two thumbs,” is so cryptic that I'd be willing to watch a long-form television series based solely on the gradual revelation of its mystery.
As long as, of course, that were leavened with equal parts teen romance and some dude shouting “33 RED DESTROYYY!”
The first shocker is when the two thumbs turn out to be from the same hand of the same person. Pile on C Bush!
Adorno, Prologue to Television (1953), p. 52-3: “Commercial television atrophies consciousness, but not because the contents of its programs are any worse than those of film or radio. Admittedly one often hears the claim in Hollywood, especially among film people, that television programs lower the standard still further. But in this case the older sectors of the culture industry, many of which are perceptibly threatened by the competition, are surely using television as a scapegoat. A reading of some television scripts, admittedly hardly reflecting the entire creative production, leads to the conclusion that they are no less worthwhile than film scripts, which by now have become totally normalized and ossified.”
I thought the idea of one person giving two thumbs up was mildly funny --and even plausible. You must have seen two-fisted enthusiasm before? Maybe not since the 70s, but you've seen it.
But I had no idea I would unleash a firestorm of critical close reading! Two thumbs down to that--not only from the same hand of the same person, but the same thumb! Good luck with that koan . . .
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