Walker Publishing Filed to Moving Image

Film still from Brett Kashmere and Astria Suparak, Jordan Wept, 2024. Courtesy the artists.

No Time for Winners

By Brett Kashmere and Astria Suparak

What does it mean that one of the 20th century’s most successful athletes—a six-time NBA champion, five-time MVP, undisputed GOAT, and global icon with career earnings of nearly $4 billion—has been re-immortalized as an avatar of failure and abjection in 21st-century visual culture? The Crying Jordan meme is a sign of the times; it demonstrates the increased power of (anonymous, decentralized) fan culture and a gradual erosion of the jocks vs. nerds hierarchy. But to what end? Nearly 15 years since its inception, the viral image continues to poke holes at the idolization of sporting stars while also reinforcing the toxically masculine aversion to vulnerability and moist-eyed emotionality. Additionally, the meme’s boundless, generative capacity exemplifies a turn in sports fanship as a creative practice. In the age of social media, fandom has splintered into a field of micro-practices that permeate the larger media ecology. From homemade highlight compilations to sports GIFs, Vines, Tik-Toks, and memes, much of these artifacts are ephemeral. They flow through individual media feeds in rapid response to live events as they unfold, are consumed by online communities broad and niche, but are difficult to retrieve and perhaps even remember after the fact. In this new paradigm, alternative realities flourish. No one is safe from ridicule, not even—or especially—an incontrovertible winner and embodiment of masculinist values and dominance. Rather than humanizing the notoriously apolitical and image-conscious Jordan, this weepy likeness instructs us that sports excellence, particularly for Black athletes, is never enough.

Crying Jordan signifies the disruption that fan cultures make into dominant narratives. The powers-that-be counter such disruptions through reassertion of editorial control. As we know, history is written by the victors, or these days, co-produced by the subjects. During the pandemic, we collectively re-experienced Jordan’s crowning on-court triumph via the ten-part ESPN Films–Netflix hagiography The Last Dance (2020). The indulgent but entertaining docuseries chronicles Jordan’s rise to superstardom as a member of the 1990s Chicago Bulls. The viewer is shepherded through this recent history by his indignant responses to trivial and imagined infractions, encapsulated by another now ubiquitous Jordan meme: “And I took that personally.” The Last Dance can be read as Michael Jordan’s revenge on the perceived diminishment of his legacy, welding nostalgia, sentimentality, a vast audiovisual archive, and final cut to reinscribe the supremacy of his mythology and brand.¹ Jordan wept, to what effect? And what affect.

As The Last Dance attests, mainstream sports cinema is, by and large, deeply conservative and conventional. “As they manipulate athletes’ histories into inspirational narratives and filter real events into sanitized sporting worlds,” Samantha N. Sheppard asserts, “sports films are made to appear factual and intrinsic, grounded in the historicity of the genre’s conventions."² In the United States, the sports film genre—as it has come to be defined through its codes, scholarship, production, and screening contexts, and broadcast platforms—is dominated by two typologies: fictive sports films, like Hoosiers (1986), White Men Can’t Jump (1992), and The Blind Side (2009), which often reinforce dominant attitudes and social and cultural stereotypes while distorting or whitewashing history for storytelling purposes; and commercial documentaries, including most of the titles in ESPN’s 30-for-30 catalogue, which typically focus on exceptional players, coaches, or teams.³

The sports film was not always a vehicle for utopic narratives and heroic portrayals. In the 1880s, precinematic scientific studies were conducted, such as Ottomar Anschütz’s Pferd und Reiter Springen über ein Hindernis (Horse and Rider Jumping Over an Obstacle) (1888) and Eadweard Muybridge’s animal and human locomotion photo series. Roughly a decade later, Étienne-Jules Marey produced his chronophotographic analysis of Olympic athletes, taken during the 1900 Paris Games. During the silent cinema period and into the 1930s, filmic treatments of sports tended to spotlight its spectacular and visual dimensions, namely athletic bodies and action: from motion experiments and actualities such as Sandow (William K.L. Dickson, 1894), featuring “muscle display performances” of the famed strongman; to fight pictures, many of which were, as the film historian Dan Streible reveals, reenacted matches or staged sparring scenes;⁴ and highlights of newsworthy college and professional contests packaged into newsreels.⁵ Media artworks like Nam June Paik’s Lake Placid ’80 (1980), a dizzying, effects-laden collage of motion on ice and snow, commissioned for the Olympic Winter Games; Bette Gordon’s loop-printed diving film An Algorithm (1977); and Paul Pfeiffer’s video sculpture Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (2001), which digitally erases objects and figures from basketball game footage, have carried forward the use of sport imagery as a springboard for formal exploration.

The preoccupation with hyper-gendered, muscular bodies in cinematic renderings of sport forms a continuity with classical depictions of the athletic body dating as far back as the Bronze Age. “When we think of the athlete’s body,” Judith Butler writes, “we are drawn to the image of a muscular sort of being; it is a body that we see or, rather, imagine . . . a body whose contours bear the marks of a certain achievement."⁶ This ideal of the athletic body, Butler suggests, exceeds its athletic function and conditions our desire as viewers. The fetishized spectacle of the athletic body is central to the production of the sporting gaze.

The paradoxical nature of sport—as a site of biopolitical control, collective struggle, and individualized fantasy—makes it a rich and captivating subject. Our film series, The Game is Not the Thing: Sport and the Moving Image, challenges and expands commonplace understandings of the sports film, charted across a period from pre-cinema to post-internet. As curators, our goal was to bring spectator sports, play, and alternative media and artists’ cinema into a productive dialogue by focusing on nontraditional forms and counter-narratives rather than commercial documentary and fiction sports films—which often service hagiographic or nationalistic agendas. We found exceptions and antidotes to the mainstream sports film by looking to nontheatrical cinema, experimental media, fan culture, and social media. Debunking the conventional wisdom that the worlds of sport and art are mutually exclusive, many of the film and media-makers included in the series create from a position immersed in sports culture and critically aware fandom. Engaging a diversity of approaches and perspectives, this series seeks to address some of the unseen political and economic flows of the globalized sports-media complex. What new insights might emerge from the collision of a heterogeneous mix of historical and contemporary sports media objects?

The Angel Reese–Caitlin Clark discourse is the latest example of how sports are instrumentalized to uphold white privilege, respectability politics, misogynoir, homophobia, and white saviorism. A microcosm of American cultural politics and an inexhaustible font of hot-take hyperbole, the Reese–Clark rivalry is a testament to the ever-complex imbrications of sports, race, gender, desire, and representation, reminding us that sports are not a refuge from the “real world.” Nor are they an “opiate for the masses.” The notion that professional sports demarcate a politics-free zone of pure entertainment is a fantasy. Sports are used to uphold hegemonies, hierarchies, classifications, and empires. Sports have been and always are political. Who gets to play? Who is penalized for what? Where are stadiums built? And with whose money? Eminent domain, drug and gender testing, antitrust exemptions, corporate sponsorships, tax breaks, bribery, and abuse scandals are just some of the ways power is flexed daily within what has been called a secular religion and a proxy for war.

In “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” Stuart Hall maintains that “there is no whole, authentic, autonomous ‘popular culture’ which lies outside the field of force of the relations of cultural power and domination."⁷ Sport may be a socializer of dominant values and an instrument of containment, but it is also a source of identity, passion, pleasure, and enjoyment, and a site of resistance. Disparate groups find fellowship through the adhesive of sports. As a platform for activism, sports hold the potential to change common perceptions, create empathy, and shift history. John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s raised-fist Black Power salute at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City—an image designed for viral distribution—gave expression to the realities of oppression and racial discrimination in the United States. After being ostracized from their sport for decades as retaliation, the two are now widely admired for their action and memorialized as heroes. The enduring resonance of Carlos and Smith’s iconographic gesture (despite being stripped of nuance, intentionally misinterpreted, and coopted) speaks to sport’s potential to transcend the shortsighted zero-sum narrative of losers and winners.▪︎

Watch the original moving image work, Jordan Wept, by Astria Suparak and Brett Kashmere below.

Experience the series The Game is Not the Thing: Sport and the Moving Image yourself at the Walker from October 11 through November 8, 2024. Get tickets and learn more here.