![]() ![]() ![]() Over the course of dozens of practices, you see the team’s members, in the peak athletic condition of their life, left panting on the ground. Gabi became a cheerleading celebrity as a tween but now has to deal with her family’s attempts to monetize her career Jerry is desperate to make it to mat but is also still grieving the death of his mother Morgan, effectively parentless, is so desperate to please her coach that she ignores her injuries.Ĭheer also gives viewers a front-row seat to the process of perfection. To do that, the series opens a door to the individual lives of the cheerleaders on the Navarro squad - their pasts, their families, and the various pressures that surround them on and off the mat, largely from adults with seemingly little mind to their long term health or livelihoods. ![]() It shows the darkness and levity, the devotion to individual and group perfection, that has accompanied the evolution of cheerleading from glee clubs with pom-poms to a fiercely competitive sport. But Cheer does something much more expansive and even more compelling. If the “plot” of Cheer - who will make it “on mat” (the performing team) at the championships? - were all it had to offer, I’m sure the series would still find its audience. Watching a really good all-girls squad is hypnotic, but watching a co-ed one feels like a revelation, like the full expression of the sport: This is what cheerleading could look like, like firecrackers exploding one after the other. Their beauty wasn’t in their faces (which I couldn’t even see, since this was pre-HD, and the camera essentially did not move) but their synchronization, which felt at once pulsing and alive and mechanically precise.Īnd there were boys on those squads! No boys would dare cheer at my school, for all the old-fashioned reasons you would expect. When they were disarticulated from their social setting, I saw in them what I saw, or at least hoped to see, in myself: discipline, skill, and strength. What mattered about those high school and college cheerleaders I watched competing wasn’t that they were cool, or hot, or rich. And the first thing that drew me to Cheer was the familiar, simple promise of watching elite cheerleaders on their journey from “very, very good” to “the best.”Įvery cheerleader of a certain age knows that the best cheerleading movie is not Bring It On, but the VHS of the national competitions you taped off ESPN and watched on repeat: at squad sleepovers, but also by yourself, dreaming of a basket toss that went that high and hit that crisp. The new six-part documentary, now airing on Netflix, follows a super-elite squad of cheerleaders at Navarro College, a junior college in Texas, as they train to defend their title at the national cheerleading championship in Daytona Beach, Florida. If you don’t get that, you haven’t been paying attention - or watching Cheer. But all kinds of people become cheerleaders, for all kinds of reasons and all kinds of rewards. When people find out I spent my teen years as a cheerleader, they sometimes react with a disbelief I find quietly insulting: You, a cheerleader? I think they mean it as a compliment. But the cliché has proven stubbornly resilient. ![]() Like all stereotypes, that image of the American cheerleader is periodically challenged (Gabrielle Union’s squad in Bring It On) and subverted ( But I’m a Cheerleader) or turned into the backdrop for a noir-ish murder mystery ( Dare Me). She’s Hayden Panettiere in Heroes, Kirsten Dunst in Bring It On, Minka Kelly in Friday Night Lights, Ali Larter in Varsity Blues, Kristy Swanson in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie, the majority of the female cast of Saved by the Bell and Glee, and any number of supporting characters across film and television over the last 50 years. And her status as a cheerleader is mostly for show: an opportunity to wear a costume that announces, over and over again, her place in the social hierarchy. She’s straight, and her boyfriend plays football. She’s the popular girl, the tan girl, the blonde girl, the skinny girl, and almost always the white girl. The American cheerleader is an exhausted cliché. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |