Cinematic Faith
A Christian Perspective on Movies and Meaning
9. Stop Taking My Hand!
Summary Points
- Hollywood’s cultural landscape presents a polarized view of men and women.
- The ideal male in Hollywood films is a virile, strong, unrestrained, and unattached man of action and adventure.
- The role of women in these Hollywood films is to be the domesticator of these rugged individualists.
- Contemporary films don’t always adhere simply to conventional gendered types, but awareness of them lets us see more clearly the ways storylines and characterizations affirm, clash with, or run against the grain of the traditional system.
Movie Clips
Wonder Woman (2017) “No Man’s Land” Scene
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) “Too Close for Comfort”
The Hunger Games (2012) Katniss and Gale in the Meadow
The Hunger Games (2012) Shooting the Apple Scene
The Hunger Games (2012) Star-Crossed Lovers
The Hunger Games (2012) They Don’t Own Me Scene
The Hunger Games (2012) Rule Change Revoked
A League of Their Own (1992) The Home-Plate Collision
A League of Their Own (1992) “There’s No Crying in Baseball”
Million Dollar Baby (2004) I Killed Her Scene (Cinematography)
Million Dollar Baby (2004) Final Request
La La Land (2016) “Mia & Sebastian’s Theme” Scene
La La Land (2016) “A Lovely Night”
La La Land (2016) Mia’s “Audition (The Fools Who Dream) Scene
La La Land (2016) “Magical Do-Over” Scene
La La Land (2016) Movie References
La La Land (2016) Making of Another Day Of Sun (Behind the Scenes)
The Blind Side (2009) Opening Monologue
The Blind Side (2009) “Do You Have Any Place to Stay?”
The Blind Side (2009) Thanksgiving Dinner
The Blind Side (2009) “Shame on You” Scene
The Blind Side (2009) “You Threaten My Son, You Threaten Me” Scene
The Blind Side (2009) Behind-The-Scenes
Fun Stuff
Aisha Harris, “La La Land’s Many References to Classic Movies: A Guide,” Slate, December 13, 2016.
Megan Harney, “Here Are All the Iconic Musical Reference in La La Land You Need to Know,” Business Insider, February 15, 2017.
History vs. Hollywood, compares the film’s story with real life accounts based on books, articles, and interviews. See “The Blind Side (2009),” History vs Hollywood.
Sidebar: There’s No Crying in A League of Their Own (1992)
“_A League of Their Own_ is based on the true story of the All-American Girls Baseball League, begun in 1943 to sub for the men at war. Though the teams continued playing ball until 1954, the girls mostly marched back into the kitchen when their Johnnies came marching home. It wasn't until 1988 that they were honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame.”1
—Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
People still debate the ending of A League of Their Own (1992). The film is about the inaugural season of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League during World War II, when the men’s league was put on hiatus because of the war. The story focuses on Dottie (Geena Davis), an outstanding catcher and the league’s best player, and her kid sister Kit (Lori Petty), who can’t get out from under Dottie’s shadow. Both are recruited, Kit on Dottie’s coattails, to play for the Rockford Peaches. When Kit’s sense of inferiority and bad attitude starts affecting the team, she’s traded to the Racine Belles. The two teams face off in the World Series. When her husband returns home from the war unexpectedly, Dottie decides to quit in the middle of the series. But with her team struggling, she comes back for the final game.
With the score tied, Kit comes up to bat. We know that Kit’s a sucker for high fastballs (an established pattern). Dottie walks to the mound and instructs the pitcher: “High fast balls. She can’t hit ‘em. She can’t lay off ‘em.” But to Dottie’s surprise, Kit hammers one out into left field, rounds the bases, and runs through the stop sign at third, as if racing for her life. Dottie—a look of disbelief on her face—holds the ball and braces, blocking home plate. Kit barrels into her.
The home-plate collision doesn’t happen all that often. It’s used as a highly dramatic, win-or-lose-it-all moment, and in this case it is as much about a “familial collision, a sisterly bond at once forged and shattered at the plate” as it is about the game, Ian Crouch observes in The New Yorker.2 We see Dottie and Kit collide in slow motion, three times from different angles for enhanced dramatic effect. Then there’s a close up of Dottie’s outstretched arm as she lies on the ground—the ball comes out of her hand. On purpose? Kit’s score counts, and the Racine Belles win the World Series. Afterwards, Dottie tells Kit, “You wanted it more than me.”
“Most of the movie is great, save for the ending,” Denise Warner writes in Entertainment Weekly, describing the game-ending moment in a word: “Uggh.” The way she sees it, “Kit is an annoying, whiny brat who can’t accept that her sister is better than she is at baseball. And to reward her at the end with the World Series title really sucks.”3 In response, Javi Perez, a writer at Playmaker Online, gives eight reasons why Warner got it all wrong. In the final game, Kit simply outplays Dottie, who can’t hang on to the ball. “It’s the essence of a sports movie,” Perez insists. “When two great players meet, the one who wants it more wins. Plain and simple. They both went through very different journeys to get there, one that was often contentious, and that’s what makes the movie so good.”4
There are two related questions: Did Dottie drop the ball on purpose? And if so, was that the “right” thing to do? One read is that Kit had become a better player, with deeper desire than Dottie, and therefore deserved to win the game. Another is that Dottie sacrificed the game for love of her sister. If the latter, we might ask: What about Dottie’s teammates? They’ve played their hearts out all season. And Dottie, the team leader and best player, effectively throws the game, handing the victory over to her sister and their rival, the Racine Belles. (OK, maybe I tipped my hand there a bit.)
Let’s look at it yet another way. Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), a former big-league player himself and now the manager of the Rockford Peaches, yells at one of his players: “There’s no crying in baseball!” This is the movie’s most memorable line of dialogue. It caps an especially effective scene that is part of a narrative pattern and layers it with implicit meaning. Evelyn’s outfielder mistake costs the Peaches their scoring lead. By drawing attention to the way a hit ball is supposed to be played by an outfielder, this scene sets up the climax with Kit at bat. At the same time, it expresses the story’s gendered theme and dramatic tension as well.
“Careers and higher education are leading to the masculinization of women, with enormously dangerous consequences to the home, the children, and our country,” game commentator Maida Gillespie (Laurel Cronin) editorializes. “When our boys come home from war, what kind of girls will they be coming home to?” Indeed, despite her supreme talent and love of the game, Dottie is ready to give up baseball on principle when her husband returns from the war. That gendered cultural expectation, however, is overwhelmed by a gripping story of women athletes who all love the game, have a competitive spirit, and want to be professional ballplayers—as it was, an exclusively white-male sports domain. They struggle against feminine stereotypes to earn the respect of fans and league officials; the threat of closing the league is a constant source of tension. Reluctantly, they acquiesce to getting makeovers, sliding bare-legged in short-skirt uniforms, and having themselves objectified for marketing purposes.
In some sense, how satisfactory viewers find the film’s ending is largely a matter of interpretation based on preexisting outlooks. We might understand these readings as privileging different values. The one view stresses competition, typically seen as “masculine,” while the other puts the accent on the sibling’s relationship over winning, emphasizing characteristically “feminine” values. Such a line of thinking is hardly farfetched considering how much the film is about gender equality. The ending of A League of Their Own then invites viewers to apply their own ideals and values to the situation depicted. The diverse reactions as to whether Dottie deliberately dropped the ball or not, and what value that action would have, have as much, if not more, to do with spectators’ own values as they do with their perceptions of those represented in the movie.
Peter Travers, “A League of Their Own,” Rolling Stone, July 1, 1992.
Ian Crouch, “There’s No Colliding in Baseball,” New Yorker, February 25, 2014.
Denise Warner, “I’m Still Not Over . . . The Ending of ‘A League of Their Own,’” Entertainment Weekly, September 2, 2013.
Javi Perez, "In Defense Of: Kit from A League of Their Own,” Playmaker Online, September 3, 2013.