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Friday Night Whites
What do you call four Mexicans stuck in quicksand?
Quatro sink-o.
The point of this little joke is to twofold; first, I want to illustrate that I, of all people, am usually the last person to blanch and wither in the face of content that has to do with race, and, second, to illustrate that there is a fine line between "racial" and "racist" (i.e., it would be difficult for anyone but the most sensitive of politically correct, bleeding-heart wussbags to interpret the above joke as racist. Racial, yes, but racist? Certainly not. There are people who live in Mexico; they are called Mexicans. They speak Spanish. In Spanish, "four" and "five" are "quatro" and "cinco." And, furthermore, quicksand -- at least on any television program between 1955 and 1972 -- makes one sink almost instantly below the surface until there is nothing remaining but a pith helmet. Thus the delightful pun).
The point is, I'm still having a hard time deciding on which side of this fine line "Friday Night Lights" falls.
The film, adapted from H.G. Bissinger's 1990 book of the same name, tells the story of the Odessa (Texas) Permian High School Panthers' 1988 season. It has drawn parallels to "Hoosiers;" both deal with high school sports programs attempting to win a state championship in the face of overwhelming odds.
Another parallel that is being largely ignored is the fact that the teams in both films -- the Hickory Huskers and the Permian Panthers -- go up against almost all-black teams in the final, climactic game.
In "Hoosiers," apparently, some people (okay, probably just Spike Lee) had a problem with the fact that the movie depicts an all-white team pulling together and defeating a team that's predominantly black in the final game. On its face this complaint seems valid; Hickory might seem initially intimidated by the big, scary Negroes until they assert their ultimate superiority at the final buzzer.
When one stops to think, however, such a criticism amounts to utter silliness. I can't speak definitively about small-town Indiana in the early 1950s, but I can speak definitively about small-town Minnesota in the early 1980s: there were no black people. If your tiny farm town high school played a team that had mostly black people, that team was almost certainly from a huge, big city high school. If that team was from a huge, big city high school, it meant that your small farm town school was a big underdog, for talent-pool reasons much more than for racial ones. And until fairly recently the Indiana state high school basketball tournament operated in a one-tier system, meaning that all schools in the state, no matter how big or small, competed for the same title. Any team from any school as small as Hickory (enrollment: 161) is bound to be a huge underdog to a team from a school in a city so big that it has enough black people to fill a basketball team.
Not so in the Texas high school football world of "Friday Night Lights." Odessa-Permian competes in what moviegoers can only imagine is the largest class in Texas high school football, class AAAAA. Odessa, though it's called a small town by Odessians themselves in the film, is certainly not; the 1990 census listed Odessa's population at just over 86,000. Nearby Midland has a few thousand more people, but other than that it's at least a good 150 miles to the next city of any comparable size (in fact, it's exactly 150 miles to San Angelo; I checked). And we're made aware that Odessa-Permian has won its share of state football titles in the not-so-distant past. Underdogs coming out of nowhere, the Panthers ain't.
The Odessa-Permian team does have its share of black players, but the three characters with whom we spend the most time are quarterback Mike Winchell (white), fullback Don Billingsley (white) and safety Brian Chavez (Chavez. Duh). These three, along with peripheral black players like backup running back Chris Comer and defensive end Ivory Christian, lead Permian into the final game against Dallas Carter high school.
This is where it gets a little dicey; director Peter Berg has chosen to portray the Dallas Carter coaches and players as arrogant, strutting, dare I say "uppity" Negroes with little regard for basic sportsmanship or politeness. During a meeting between the coaches of Odessa Permian and Dallas Carter to determine the site of the state championship final (this is how that's handled, by the way? I find that incredibly hard to believe. But, I haven't read the book; I'm sure that's explained satisfactorily), the Dallas Carter representatives make it clear that there would be trouble if fans of the two teams sat anywhere near each other, and push hard for an all-black officiating crew.
At this point, both are excusable; the film makes it clear that in Texas in 1988 racism is still alive and, if not well, certainly able to get up out of bed and do a few laps around the hospital courtyard once or twice a week. The Dallas Carter people might have more than enough experience with white fans taunting and provoking their people, or with white officials screwing them on calls. So, okay. Fine. But I'm watching you, Berg.
Then we get to the final game (they've settled on the Astrodome, by the way). Just when it looks like the Panthers have stopped Dallas Carter on a crucial fourth down, what appeared to me to be the game's lone black official makes what the film goes out of its way to let us know is a terrible call, prolonging Dallas Carter's drive and eventually allowing them to score a touchdown which nearly puts the game out of reach.
Add this to the depiction of the Dallas Carter players as swaggering, cheap-shotting punks, and you've got what seems to me to be a surprisingly negative onscreen portrayal of big-city African Americans.
Sure, there are some black players on the Odessa Permian team who aren't too bad, Comer and Christian being the most visible. But who is the team's best player? That would be running back James "Boobie" Miles, who spends the first part of the film opening mail from the nation's top football colleges when, the film suggests, he might otherwise be studying or working out. Miles is portrayed as a loud, talkative, affectionate simpleton and, when he blows out his knee in the season's first game and aggravates the injury further a little later on, life as he knows it is essentially over. Perhaps he was acting "too black?"
Perhaps not. As I said, I've yet to make up my mind whether I really saw what I thought I saw in "Friday Night Lights." Usually, when people complain about racial issues I can't tell them to get over it fast enough, but, something about "Friday Night Lights" sticks in my craw. It's a movie that deals primarily with the unique pressures of big-time Texas high school football and touches on race as one of a few secondary thematic elements, but, that doesn't mean the question can't be asked. Racist, or racial?
I certainly doubt that the filmmakers had any intention to portray a large segment of black Texas in such a negative way, but I wish "Friday Night Lights" had addressed the issue a bit more elegantly.
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