Page 218 - Sport Culture and the Media

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in the second half). Ultimately, there are multiple reconciliations, and both Jess
and Jules leave for the USA on soccer scholarships, with Jess on the point of
departure spotting Posh’n’Becks being hustled through Heathrow airport in
celebrity fashion. Jess also asserts her independence from Joe, refusing to allow
her feelings for him to prevent her from taking up the opportunity, and so
striking a blow for autonomous, youthful feminism.
The film has various sub-themes, including the problematization of sexuality
in women’s sport (as Jules says, ‘Mother, just because I wear trackies and play
sport does not make me a lesbian’) and in loco parentis responsibility of
coaches (although sidestepping the controversial area of sexual harassment
of female athletes by male coaches; see, for example, Brackenridge 1997). Jess
and Joe’s afflictions are compared and contrasted: her leg disfigured by burns
and his career-ending knee injury; her problems with her parents and his
unresolved anger towards his father; she suffering racial abuse on the field by
being called a ‘Paki’, his experience, as an Irishman, of English hostility. Class
differences are also glimpsed within the Punjabi community and in the con-
sumerist tastelessness of Jules’s hyper-feminine, lingerie-selling mother (played
by Juliet Stevenson). But the grandest theme of the film is sport’s (especially
football’s) capacity to reach across and challenge divisions of culture, ethnicity,
gender and generation. In this regard, once more, the sports media are crucial,
with the the film opening with a fantasy sequence of Jess, in her bedroom
beneath a huge poster of Beckham, scoring a goal for Manchester United in a
televised match from a cross by Beckham. She receives high praise from real-life
BBC commentators Garry Lineker, John Barnes and Alan Hansen, until her
mother is interviewed by them and claims that ‘She’s bringing shame on the
family’. In Jess’s daydream it is television that is shown to confirm her cultural
status, the link between cultures that is also the benchmark of success. In the
film’s closing credits, it is noted that it was made ‘With the participation of
BSkyB and British Screen’, a case of sports television allowing film to enhance
its global profile. Michael Giardina (2003) is critical of the cultural politics of
Bend It Like Beckham, arguing that it ‘Effaces the everyday hardships and
struggles of daily life in favour of a reformulated, faux progressive New Labour
vision of race, gender, and class relations’ (p. 78). It is certainly a ‘feel good’
film, in common with most of those already discussed. Sports films often show
much human conflict and suffering, but they are usually resolved and assuaged
in the denouément. Bend It Like Beckham’s genial, woman-centred multi-
culturalism may be oceans apart from the macho sensory assault of Any Given
Sunday, but both films end in hugs and smiles and are testimonies to sport’s
symbolic healing power.
The association football boom in Britain has spawned new sports films like
the rise–fall–rise narrative Mean Machine (2001), in which jailed former