Page 217 - Sport Culture and the Media

198 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

reconciles its principal antagonists. Any Given Sunday is, above all, acutely
aware of the crucial importance of the media to sport, scanning the communi-
cative infrastructure (including a cameo by the director as a drunken sports
commentator!) almost as closely as it covers the sporting action on the field and
the power plays off it. At various points in the film, there are arguments about
the on-field tactics and personnel likely to be most favoured by the audience,
especially the vast TV spectatorship. The team’s economic dependency on tele-
vision is recognized, with its poor performance threatening its viability because,
as is pointed out, ‘Without the playoffs there’s no more TV money’. Any Given
Sunday is, then, a quintessentially American sports film in the tradition of Field
of Dreams and Jerry Maguire, both attracted to, and horrified by, the culture
that it has produced and reveals.
Sports films, it has been shown, tend to be characterized by a strongly
articulated national cultural identity. Bend It Like Beckham (2002) is, then, as
English (more specifically than British, although there is no English nation
as such) a film as Any Given Sunday is American. Gurinder Chadha’s film is
principally from the perspective of British citizens whose origins and continuing
cultural reference points are in the Indian sub-continent, a form of contem-
porary Englishness that has caused some discomfort to those adhering to a
traditional, white model of identity, even ‘a sense of crisis and dislocation’
(Maguire 1999: 203). Bend It Like Beckham is concerned with the afore-
mentioned popularity of the England and then Manchester United (now Real
Maddrid) footballer and with a desire to emulate him, but with the twist that
the person who wishes to be and ‘bend it’ like Beckham (a reference to his
famed ability to swerve the football around the obstacle of the human walls that
are built in soccer matches to protect the goal from free kicks) is a young girl of
East African origin (presumably one whose family was expelled by the late
Uganda dictator Idi Amin) living in west London, Jesminder ‘Jess’ Bhamra
(played by Paminder Nagra). The film examines the clash of various cultures,
especially as they relate to ethnicity and gender, with Jess trying to pursue her
sporting ambitions in the face of opposition from her traditional Sikh family. In
the process she establishes a friendship with the girl who recruited her to the
Hounslow Harriers, Jules (Keira Knightley), whose ‘tomboy’ appearance and
lack of interest in teenage boys, and some misinterpreted encounters with Jess,
leads her mother to believe, erroneously, that she is a lesbian. Problems of
cultural exchange, co-existence and integration are compounded on a personal
level by romantic rivalry between Jess and Jules for the affections of their coach,
Joe (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Predictably, Jess scores a dramatic winning goal in
a final by bending a free kick around a wall, which, in her mind, consists of the
women in her family who had tried to prevent her being there (her father assents
to her, at the last moment, leaving her sister’s wedding celebrations to play