Abstract
This chapter offers a contrapuntal reading of Peter Berg’s Friday Night Lights (2004) and Thomas Carter’s Coach Carter (2005), two films wherein high school sport adjudicates young men’s education and allegorizes economic prospects in the contemporary United States. The former is set in a predominantly white working-class rural community in 1980s West Texas and the latter in a predominantly black working-class urban community in 1990s Northern California. Both films feature individual salvation for the community’s young men tutored by a tough-loving patriarch and pivot on the masculine ambition to flee dead-end lives. However, these two films are not two versions of the same story. Rather, the success and possibility of Friday Night Lights is premised on the failure and impossibility of Coach Carter.
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Notes
- 1.
See Steve James’s 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, which follows the lives of two young black men, William Gates and Arthur Agee, who hope to turn successful high school basketball careers into high-paying professional contracts in the National Basketball Association (Gilbert and Marx 1994). It is also worth adding that the following discussion of the black-white racial dynamics of the two films is complicated, but not contradicted, by the demographic changes that have taken place in both locales over the last generation: Odessa, Texas and Richmond, California today have, according to 2010 census data, a clear Latino majority (51%) and plurality (40%), respectively.
- 2.
This racial bifurcation may account, in part, for the extended success of the Friday Night Lights franchise. Following the various runs of the film adaptation, a television series was developed by writer/director/producer Peter Berg. That series ran for five seasons (2006–2011) and garnered various critical plaudits, including a Peabody Award, a Humanitas Prize, and several Primetime Emmys.
- 3.
This depressing point was underscored dramatically by the release of the 25th anniversary edition of Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights in 2015. The three musketeers returned on this occasion to the Permian Panthers football field to reflect on their lives at middle age. While their stories are humble and there are pangs of nostalgia in their reflections upon high school greatness, it is suggested that they have each done well enough for themselves in the interim. Mike Winchell attended a local college and holds a stable career in the oil industry. He’s a bachelor living in a small town outside Dallas near his extended family. Brian Chavez graduated from Harvard and took a law degree from Texas Tech. After practicing criminal law for years back in Odessa, he branched out into various small businesses and he now lives with his fiancé not far from his childhood home. Jerrod McDougal owns an excavation and construction company outside San Antonio. He’s had his share of personal losses, including his younger brother to a car accident, and he lives alone after an engagement to be married fell through, but he’s managed to keep his life together despite the tribulations. Boobie Miles, by contrast, is doing a ten-year prison term in the Mark Stiles Unit near Beaumont, following a parole violation. His legal troubles have been relatively minor but consistent enough to disrupt most of his adult life. He worked a series of menial jobs, struggled financially, and eventually lost custody of his children to his former girlfriend some years ago. He’s become morbidly obese and battles a range of mental health issues (Bissinger 2015).
- 4.
McNeff is the co-founder and president since 1978 of the Miracle Distribution Center, an educational nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the study and dissemination of A Course in Miracles. In an earlier version of this chapter, I also unwittingly reproduced the urban legend that linked Williamson’s passage to Mandela’s inauguration, so I am happy to correct that mistake here.
- 5.
Williamson, a noted Los Angeles philanthropist, is also founder of Project Angel Food, a meals-on-wheels program for people living with life-threatening illnesses, and The Peace Alliance, a national policy initiative promoting non-violent conflict resolution. Her work has been celebrated by the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Rose, and Bill Maher, and she was recognized by Newsweek magazine as one of the fifty most influential Baby Boomers. She has sold over three million copies of her various books to date (Aron 2014). For a critical discussion of Schucman’s magnum opus in the broad context of Western esotericism, see Hanegraaff (1996).
- 6.
Richmond High School has continued to struggle academically by every standard measure since Coach Carter’s departure in 2002. The only major change has been to the demographics of the student body. Whereas the school served, through the 1990s, predominantly black students in the vicinity, it is now over 80% Latino and black students represent less than 10% as of this writing. This shift is part of a much larger trend, especially in California, of displacement and depopulation in historically black neighborhoods, a complex process of gentrification in which low-income Latinos and Asians often pave the way for the arrival of more affluent middle and upper class white residents to return to previously avoided black ghettos (Hwang 2016). This gentrification is strongly correlated with a re-segregation of public schools nationally (Brown 2016).
- 7.
Carter has, since his tenure at Richmond High School, served as the coach of the Los Angeles Rumble, one of six teams in the international SlamBall League. SlamBall is a form of novelty basketball played on trampolines while wearing protective gear. Slam Dunks are the eponymous means of scoring.
- 8.
Gordon (1997) speaks volumes about this perverse imperative. The black in the antiblack world, he maintains, is required to commit extraordinary efforts to the achievement of ordinary existence, while the latter is perpetually harassed, if not altogether foreclosed.
- 9.
Here the stars are all men, but there will be increasing numbers of Hollywood women’s sports films like Karyn Kusama’s Girl Fight (2000), John Stockwell’s Blue Crush (2002), Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby (2004), and Drew Barrymore’s Whip It (2009); women’s police films like Joel Coen’s Fargo (1996), Donald Petrie’s Miss Congeniality (2000), Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (2001), Gregory Hoblit’s Untraceable (2008), and Paul Feig’s The Heat (2013); and women’s military films like Edward Zwick’s Courage Under Fire (1996), Ridley Scott’s GI Jane (1997), Rob Cohen’s Stealth (2005), and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012); none of which will necessarily challenge generic conventions or offer visions of women or womanhood beyond that of, say, the Feminist Majority or the Democratic Party.
- 10.
There is an important elision here, as well, about Anglo-Latino conflict in and beyond Texas, one that not only obscures dimensions of the history of white supremacy and US imperialism, but also solicits—not least in the bond of the three musketeers—a racialized solidarity, against blacks, between white Anglos and their non-black Latino counterparts (Yancey 2003; Foley 2010).
- 11.
The moral victory, the reconsolidation of character becomes the primary focus, whereas the winning determined by the scoreboard operates as a byproduct of the more important development of self. The loss of the championship in Friday Night Lights is important, however, insofar as the moral victory is underscored by the loss of the brass ring. The fact that the featured team in Hoosiers actually wins might be taken as a sign of the times, both the Pax Americana of the 1950s (in which it is set) and the conservative restoration of the 1980s (in which it was released). The Permian Panther’s loss seems more resonant with the contemporary period, well after the end of the short American Century, the era of diminished returns, the beleaguered post-9/11 USA, a nation that can suffer a traumatic loss and keep moving. We should note that, Friday Night Lights forecasts the win next season, the gathering storm on the horizon of the New American Century. Coach Carter, on the other hand, holds out no such promise.
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Sexton, J. (2017). Fantasy and Desire: On Friday Night Lights and Coach Carter . In: Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66170-4_3
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