Seven Oaks Magazine.

The huge majority of sports writing is more about a celebration of athleticism than about analysing the place of sports in society. A rare exception to that trend, especially in football, is H. G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, a look at a West Texas high school football team in the late 1980s. The film of the same name, released this year, falls back onto old sports film clichés, however, and while it tells a good story it lacks the social critique that made Bissinger’s book excellent.

Bissinger, the winner of a Pulitzer prize for his work for the Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote an honest exploration of the obsession small towns in the southern United States have with football, focusing on the town of Odessa and its Permian High school. The book explores the economic and political context of a single season in the life of the Permian Panthers, as they drive to play for the state championship. Through his discussions of the team and its teenage stars, Bissinger explores a town that had yet to truly integrate racially, a town whose economic fortunes were just as up and down as the oil industry that supported it.

Bissinger did all of this carefully, without strongly judging any of the people involved in the book. Nonetheless, his readers are left with a strong sense of how towns like Odessa perceive race, class and gender, all of it gathered in the nexus that is high school football.

Unfortunately, in the film adaptation of the book, much of this political subtlety is lost. In truth, the film still far exceeds the majority of sports movies in discussing the intersection of issues of class, gender and race. Especially when discussing class, the film is poignant and powerful. Tim McGraw, in a surprisingly good performance, plays a backup player’s father, who himself had once been a star at Permian. By the time his son is playing, though, he’s an abusive drunk, who torments his son for his on-field performance. McGraw’s character ultimately reveals, in one of the film’s better moments, that his frustration stems from knowing that this is largely his son’s last chance at being the hero, before he resigns himself to a life that is, so he suggests, characterized by working class drudgery.

Although the film is attentive to the lives of the working class men in Odessa, it has far less concern for the women of the town and the high school. The analysis of the cheerleaders for the team within the book, a group that Bissinger spends a considerable amount of time dealing with, is compelling and well realized. In the film it is reduced to a passing scene depicting the servile relationship between a cheerleader and her player (each cheerleader is assigned a player to take care of, including the expectation that she will bake for him every week). This scene required considerably more explanation to demonstrate the sickeningly conservative relationship at the its root.

Similarly, race is really only dealt with in passing. One memorable scene depicts the coach (played by Billy Bob Thornton) at a dinner party, in which his hostess casually described a black star for the team with the ‘N’ word. This is the only appearance of the epithet, a word that appears in almost every interview Bissinger did with a white subject within the book. Bissinger’s book makes clear that the town, despite nominal integration, remains strongly segregationist, with a dividing line made real by railway tracks. Two of Bissinger’s subjects are black, and one Latino, and he explores their experience of racism in the town extensively, and powerfully ties it into their place as athletes.

For the white popular culture in Odessa blacks and Latinos are either athletes or not present, and this sort of treatment has clearly had an effect on the team, the coaching staff and their fans. Within the film, however, this is almost totally ignored. It is a familiar formula in America – while class oppression is simply an obstacle that protagonists must overcome, racism and sexism are apparently most useful if ignored.

Despite all of this criticism, the film is entertaining. Indeed, by the time that the Permian Panthers arrive in the state final, the audience is clearly both watching the movie and cheering for the Panthers. This itself is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the film. Admittedly, it is a fictional film, and not a documentary – it is meant purely to entertain, and not to preach or educate. Nonetheless, its source material is investigative journalism, investigative journalism that reveals a thoroughly flawed high school sports system that exploits athletes at every turn. The kids who play for the Panthers are driven beyond their physical capabilities (one player suffers a career-ending injury when he is placed in a game before he has fully healed), and are treated both as heroes and as goats, depending on how the team does. In fact, they are treated as if they were professionals, but without the maturity or salary that that would bring.

The film documents this, as does the book, and everyone involved clearly understands that the pressures placed on these athletes, simply to entertain their hometown, is more than anyone their age deserves. But, where Bissinger’s book was careful to not repeat this abuse, the film uses their suffering to entertain again. The football scenes are extensive and spectacular, and the film is clearly not above using the real life emotional ups and downs of its characters (as chronicled by Bissinger) to tell what is on the whole an exciting athletic story.

This simply expands the scale on which these kids are exploited, though, as it is now an international audience of millions who enjoy watching them play football. While Bissinger rarely described football scenes, explicitly because he viewed that as replicating the crimes of the high school football system, the film glories in showing these off. It is a serious issue with the film, and perhaps highlights the impossibility for a movie made in this vein (in Hollywood, with stars and a big budget) to faithfully tell a story that critiques the human cost of our endless need for entertainment.