Page 56 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Sport on Film • 45

• westerns take place at the turn of the 20th century
• they are located on the edge of the frontier
• they have certain kinds of heroes (cowboys) and heroines (schoolmarms)
• the villains can be the corrupt sheriff, the psychotic killer, the criminal banker;
secondary characters tend to have certain needs—the townsfolk may be too
weak to resist the criminal element that may be attacking them
• plots usually involve actions that restore law and order—gunfi ghts, chases
• themes involve justice
• costumes worn by characters include cowboy hats and boots
• the dominant forms of locomotion in the western are the horse and the stage-
coach
• the weaponry of westerns is the six-gun.

Berger’s (1992) criteria may be useful in considering whether an identifi able genre

exists that unites all sport films, or whether there are separate genres or subgenres
for films featuring different sports. Genres overlap with each other, so it is also pos-

sible to consider whether sport is merely incidental to the narrative of films of an-

other genre: action movies, comedies, romances. There is considerable debate as
to whether sport films do constitute a particular genre (Jones 2005). There have,

however, been attempts to identify their shared qualities. For example, Jones (2008)
argued that sport films do have regular conventions such as the story of the underdog

competing against the favourite in Rocky, The Bad News Bears (1976; remade in
2005) and Hoosiers (1986). Similarly, Cashmore (2008) suggested that sport fi lms
have shared plot elements relating to the potential triumph or disaster associated

with the film’s climax. Rowe (1998: 352) also suggested that the genre of sport fi lms
includes a preoccupation with ‘the extent to which (idealized) sports can transcend or
are bound by existing (and corrupting) social relations’. If we apply Berger’s (1992)
criteria to a number of sport films featuring the same sport—baseball—we can begin

to consider whether certain features form a pattern within these fi lms.

Case Study: the Baseball Movie—a Genre of Nostalgia?

Many movies have been based around baseball and baseball players. The Web site
http://www.baseballmovie.com lists seventy-eight baseball films that have been

made since 1942. Twenty-six of the movies on the list have been released since 2000
alone. Just as the popular genre of the western says something about American cul-
ture, baseball also reinforces particular stories of social life. Ogden (2007) drew on
Barthes’s discussion of mythology to demonstrate how baseball has been constructed
throughout history as a sacred American national pastime that embodies its moral
character and core values. From its beginning, baseball was conceived as a uniquely