Varsity Blues (1999) / Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football (2011)

I've never been much of a football fan. In high school I went to one game, I think, and I have no memory of who we were playing or who won. I think I was at the school for something else and my friends and I were all "I guess we should go? We're already here?" Keep in mind, everything we said at that time ended with a question mark.

The movie Varsity Blues came out when I was a sophomore. It was a big deal in a pop culture sense because it was James Van Der Beek's first feature role since the debut of Dawson's Creek on the WB network. I was once told (favorably) that I looked like Dawson, which may have been the inciting incident to my lifelong tracking of The Beek's career. However, I opted not to see the movie when it came out for a few reasons. First, it was rated R, so there was a perceived obstacle with the age restriction (the lack of interest in football in my circle of friends should give you an idea of our squareness). Second, the advertising made the movie look really dumb. Say it with me now: "I don't want. Yer lahf."

Sadly, this movie did not impress. It's your basic Texas football story: Football = God, the coach is an asshole, and the lead is an underdog of sorts. There's no twist on the formula and there's really not much going on in the town of West Canaan. The central conflict involves Mox (Van Der Beek) coping with his new celebrity status as the replacement quarterback after the first string busts his leg. Now Mox has to work more closely with the coach (Jon Voight) who hates him, fend off the advances of the whipped-cream-bikini-clad lead cheerleader (Ali Larter, who should not be cast in anything), and making sure the other players achieve their high school football hopes and dreams. Eh. We're forced to believe that Mox's life is so hard, you guys. However, his plain Jane girlfriend calls him a whiner (which he is) and basically says "if things suck so much, why don't you just quit?" I guess the moral is along the lines of "triumph through adversity," but things aren't really adverse even in the hyperbolic high school student sense.

The biggest obstacle for me with Varsity Blues is that it did not represent my high school experience at all. A film that gets about as close as any film can in emulating my experience is the 2011 documentary Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football. I graduated from Fordson in 2001, three months before 9/11. This relationship bears significance because when I attended the school its population was approximately 85% Middle Eastern descent. Today, that number is closer to 95%. If the setting sounds familiar, the TLC series All-American Muslim took place in Dearborn and featured the same football team as one of the story arcs.

What this movie did much better than the show was provide a major social history before presenting the main narrative. Dearborn, MI was a struggling company town that has since thrived as more families moved into the area and expanded. The movie also attempted to highlight the class disparities within the town – Fordson is in the blue collar east end while rival Dearborn High is in the affluent west end. The attempts aren't a complete success, as the vehicular conspicuous consumption (sports cars and Hummers are not uncommon sights on Warren Ave) is not explained at all.

I understand from a story perspective why football was used as the focus. Football is a distinctly American game, and the purpose of the film is to show that Arab-Americans are just as American as any other demonym-Americans. The Fordson/Dearborn rivalry is one that has existed for decades and places Fordson as an underdog both from a class perspective and as the recipients of bad calls from referees. Also, a sport is much more visually interesting than, say, a person trying to open yet another restaurant in the city (which was a story arc from the reality series). However, the "Big Game" is the weakest part of the film. Despite the bad calls, Fordson won the game in a blowout, continue a long string of wins against the cakeeaters Pioneers.

I fully recommend Fordson to anyone who knows my hometown, because even though I was born and raised there I felt like I still learned something from the documentary. For people that I know personally, I would like to offer this movie as a primer of my background because there is no way I had the "typical high school experience," and I sometimes think people think I'm making stuff up (yes, our mascot really was a tractor). That being said, for just a general viewer randomly flipping through Netflix, I think the movie may be met with the same "so what?" All-American Muslim received. Which is a shame.