Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader

THE WOMEN’S SPORTS FILM AS THE NEW MELODRAMA

And that is the significance of these Olympics; an excellent storyline— better even than a soap opera. On Sport and Society this is Dick Crepeau reminding you that you don’t have to be a good sport to be a bad loser. y THE WOMEN’S SPORTS FILM AS THE NEW MELODRAMA Jean O’Reilly The 1984 film Just the Way You Are1 presents a love triangle at an upscale European ski resort among three talented, successful, independent professionals : elite skier Bobbie (Alexandra Paul), photographer Peter Nichols (Michael Ontkean) and physically disabled flautist Susan Berlanger (Kristy McNichol). Bobbie and her boyfriend Peter are working hard, Bobbie competing in her sport and Peter photographing the ski competition. Susan, unlucky in love and ever wondering if it’s only the brace on her leg or something else about her that turns men off, has impulsively canceled the rest of her European concert tour, booked two weeks at the ski resort, and replaced her brace with a plaster cast. If she can pass as an injured skier, perhaps she’ll experience how unimpaired people flirt and score. Bobbie, an aggressive, attention-seeking, impatient woman who might soon want to forgo sex to preserve her competitive energies, is too busy skiing and too moody off the course to hold Peter’s attention once he meets the charming, sexually eager, and enticingly evasive Susan. With her career temporarily on hold, Susan also has plenty of free time to devote to Peter. Unsurprisingly, the demanding sportswoman eventually loses her man to the less career-oriented flautist who is more interested in her ailing love life than her prestigious tour. It’s a bit disingenuous to highlight this particular narrative line from a film more concerned to explore attitudes toward physical disability than toward women and sports. Nevertheless, both the fate of Bobbie’s relationship and the tension the film establishes between being a successful woman (i.e, attracting men) and having a successful career are issues that appear often in feature films that focus on sportswomen. The rise of the women’s sports film, a boom that began in the early 1990s and includes such films as A League of Their Own, Love and Basketball , Blue Crush, and Million Dollar Baby, has generally been regarded as an encouraging correction to the historically meager media The Feminine Image in Sports and Media 283 284 WOMEN AND SPORTS IN THE UNITED STATES coverage of female athletes. But a closer look at what appears to be a group of forward-thinking films about strong women reveals a disturbing return to the stifling conventions of a much older, well-established Hollywood genre, the melodrama. Far from heralding the rightful place of women in sports, several of these films convey surprisingly subversive messages about the place of women in the sports arena, and in the world at large. Melodrama, a term Hollywood pirated from an older critical lexicon and reoriented to publicity use, is known as “The Women’s Film” as well. It dates back to the silent era with films such as True Heart Susie2 and The Big Parade.3 The genre came into its own in the Depression era films of the 1930s and the war films of the 1940s, and flourished with the lush, elegant women’s weepies of the 1950s. Classic melodramas always feature a female protagonist torn between, and ultimately choosing between, mutually exclusive desires. The eponymous main character in Stella Dallas ,4 hopelessly low-class, wants to be part of her daughter’s life but also wants her daughter to enjoy, unfettered, the upper-class life to which she is suited. In All That Heaven Allows,5 middle-class Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) loves and is loved by her younger, working-class gardener Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson), but she cannot marry him without embarrassing the children she loves and becoming the subject of hurtful small-town gossip. Melodramas are also known by their use of repression and excess. Characters, often female, are prevented by social and family pressure, often patriarchal, from pursuing what they truly desire, which leads to emotional outbursts and outbreaks of transgressive behavior. In melodrama , these transgressions are always punished; this contributes to the moral weightiness and the usually unambiguous distinctions between right and wrong that typify this film genre. Once highly popular, the melodrama lost much of its appeal somewhere in the middle of the women’s rights movement. Film scholars such as Brian Henderson have questioned the staying...