Barclay's Premier League: Burnley vs. Arsenal 4/11/2015

In popular memory, sports break down to fleeting moments -- the brilliant goal, the pennant-winning home run, the career-ending knockout.  The rise of the highlight as a feature of first evening news programs and then Internet videos confirms this.  What can get lost is the mundane, work-a-day aspect of so much sports broadcasts.  The soccer match I'm going to write about tonight, despite being fairly important for both teams involved, oozes with that average, week-in-week-out feel.  It's a match between the second-best team in the league and the second-worst, where the result was never in doubt.  The British commentator at one point makes a wry quip that Arsenal star Mesut Ozil wouldn't have circled this match-up on his calendar when he signed up with the club, with the implication that, despite being given a plum TV spot, few fans would do the same.

European soccer leagues, where the most important domestic title is won in the round-robin league and not a knockout tournament, place more importance on these ordinary matches -- last year, a slip-up against lowly Crystal Palace may have cost Liverpool the title.  This importance is offset by the disparity in quality in these leagues, where most games involving elite teams are seen as a fait accompli, and any unexpected result is seen as a major embarrassment.  This game is theoretically vital for both teams -- Arsenal need to win if they have any prayer of catching up with league leaders Chelsea, while Burnley need to haul themselves out of the relegation spots, but the difference in stature between the two seems makes it seem anything but epic.

And indeed, the gameplay is far from memorable.  It's one of those games that is euphemistically called "scrappy", meaning basically that there are a lot of fouls and clumsy passes, and neither side performs all that well.  Arsenal score once and seem to be content to hold onto their lead for the rest of the game, with both of their highly-touted forwards rather muted.  Burnley put through a few good efforts on goal, but all are comfortably saved.  The game ends up as everyone envisioned it, and the commentary immediately begins focusing on the future: whether either team can achieve their goal before the end of the season.

Even the goal is scrappy, with the ball wildly careening around the goalmouth before bouncing off Aaron Ramsey's knee and into the net.  It's a play that seems more the result of numbers and dogged determination than actual skill, although doubtlessly Arsenal have practiced such set-ups on the training ground ad nauseum.  The number of strikes and deflections before the goal seem only fitting for a game that was defined more by hard work than brilliance.

So why do we watch these games, beyond a bizarre investment in the fates of professional athletes who have momentarily pledged allegiance to a particular brand?  Do we just gamble two hours of our time in hopes that something exciting will happen?  There is the fact that these games are part of an ongoing narrative, a narrative that at times threatens to overwhelm the action -- but the main beats of these stories, Arsenal's surprising ascendancy and Burnley's gritty struggle to remain in the Premier League, have been repeated better elsewhere, as in Arsenal's 4-1 triumph over Liverpool the week before or Burnley's improbable victory over defending champions Manchester City.

But still, there are operatic tones to the game that engross even as the stop-start play repels.  Burnley emerge as genuinely heroic figures, or perhaps tragic ones.  Every week, they seem to be trapped in a Sisphyean struggle, battling against the inevitable power of money and history [1].  In seemingly every game the commentators remark that they have put up a good performance in a losing effort.  In another context, their constant fouls would be seen as no more than dirty -- witness the hatred reserved for midtable Stoke City -- but here they take on the air of pluck, a lightweight intelligently tossing sand into his much larger opponent's face.  One constantly has the feeling that Burnley is not far away from a heroic equalizer, but despite Arsenal doing everything to let them back in the game, the moment never fully comes.

If you're into English nationalism, which many Premier League fans are, there's an added resonance to Burnley's struggles.  This is a team composed predominantly of non-celebrity English players, with names like Tom Heaton and Danny Ings, hailing from a small and predominantly white city and playing out of a stadium named Turf Moor.  They seem to have strolled out of a hazily-remembered but often discussed footballing past.  On the other hand, Arsenal is a team who were among the first to bring in foreign players, and are now dominated by them -- they are sponsored by Air Emirates, whose name adorns both their shirts and their stadiums.  I'm not suggesting that the gallantry of Burnley is entirely dependent on nationalist sentiments, but one finds a hint of them in an announcer's shocked statement that not one Arsenal player on the field is English, or the frequent press grumblings about "foreign mercenaries".  If we are inclined to gravitate towards underdog stories in sports, we must remember that such stories can be used to any kind of political end.

In the end, the game is forgotten almost as soon as it is over, with both teams heading towards more important chapters in their stories.  Perhaps there are those in the stands who will look back on this game as a landmark, their first live match or the site of a first date, but for most it will vanish into the endless roil of spectacle and boredom.  Arsenal are competing for different stakes than Burnley, but they are also finding themselves struggling against the weight of already-established history, with a large gap between themselves and the leaders and a dwindling number of games to make it up in.  Nick Hornsby once wrote that soccer fans exist in a constant state of bitter disappointment, and insignificant but tragic games such as this provide a clue as to why.

[1]Which is not to say that Burnley is noncommercial, or in any way rebelling against the oligarchical nature of modern soccer -- if anything, their goal is to become a major brand just like Arsenal.  But in sports, teams come to embody things that are not entirely logical.

Bellator 96

The question of sport versus spectacle is one that's haunted mixed martial arts since the beginning, but seems increasingly relevant now that the sport seems to be here to stay and its promoters are attempting to create a stable, mainstream platform for it. The UFC, which mostly focused on legitimate championship battles and the struggle to move up the rankings (plus a reality show and the occasional freak show fight), ended up beating out rival promotion PRIDE, which focused on showmanship and spectacle[1]. However, despite the introduction of official fighter rankings, the past year has seen several UFC title matches put together for the sake of a "big draw" that have little to no competitive justification. Jon Jones vs. Chael Sonnen is the most obvious one of these, but a similar case could be made for Aldo/Edgar, St. Pierre/Diaz, Aldo/Pettis, and now Rousey/Tate 2.

Bellator MMA, the UFC's most prominent competition in North America, would seemingly have a greater claim to legitimate competition. Its tournament format was designed in the name of objectivity, and makes unearned title shots like the ones mentioned above theoretically impossible. Of course, as ever, perfect objectivity is a mirage which always seems to be just over the next hill -- as I mentioned in a previous post on MMA. The presence of judges and referees already adds a layer of subjectivity to a seemingly self-contained cage fight. And while Bellator may not control who advances in the tournament, they do control the field and the bracketing. So there is some reality to the shade being thrown on Bellator's matchmaking as of late.

The four-man tournaments featured in this event, the first of the annual "Summer Series", have been cited by pretty much every MMA writer as an example of the promotion trying to game the system that it created itself. The light heavyweight tournament in particular is seen as a showcase for big-name signing "King" Mo Lawal, who now only has to beat a distinctly less-than-impressive field of losers from last season's tournament in order to secure a title shot. As such an air of perfunctoriness hangs over the entire venture. Still, without the tournament system one expects Lawal would have been given a title shot the moment he signed a Bellator contract. One can see the four-man tournaments as Bellator struggling with itself[2].

These divisions reveal themselves even in the opening hype video. The tournaments, carrying with them connotations of serious and objective competition, are present in only a subordinate role. The main focus of the video and its narration are on the card's three big names (Renato “Bablu” Sobral, King Mo, and War Machine, all former UFC and Strikeforce fighters), and their quest for “redemption” after recent setbacks. This is a nice narrative, but it puts the unavoidable focus on star fighters and their personalities. As in wrestling, the matches themselves will be staging grounds for these interior struggles – the video suggests that winning their match tonight would provide narrative redemption. This makes sense for King Mo and Babalu, who are trying to get over recent losses, but one wonders if a low-stakes MMA victory will really signify that War Machine has overcome his stint in prison[3]. Still, this sort of thing is common in sports narratives

The first fight of the TV broadcast, featuring the promotional debut of controversy-creator War Machine (yes, that is his legal name), is another example of sport and spectacle clashing. From a sporting standpoint, War Machine's match with Blas Avena is more or less irrelevant and probably doesn't deserve a spot on the main card. The former Jon Koppenhaver is an Ultimate Fighter washout and general journeyman who is mostly known for a spectacular flame-out involving ill-advised MySpace posts, a stint as a porn actor, and a couple of years in prison for assorted assaults and bar fights. The fight is against another journeyman, the 8-7 Blas Avena, and War Machine wins in easy but not particularly impressive fashion. Out of context, it all appears spectacularly pointless.

But of course, it isn't out of context, because any fight – like any sporting event, like any text – has a context which we are never not aware of. And Bellator makes particularly sure to highlight these contexts, as the hype video for the fight extensively references War Machine's time in prison (although not what caused it). Some have deemed Bellator's promotional use of War Machine's prison time as exploitative, and there's certainly some truth to that, but this is really a regular part of their presentation.

Bellator's pre-fight videos tend to focus as much on the athletes' personal lives and stories as they do the upcoming fight. Loving shots of family, mumbled stories about growing up in the favela, and shots of the fighter's hometown are commonplace. By contrast, the UFC's pre-fight videos tend to focus exclusively on what that fighter has done in the cage, along with an assurance that it will be a good fight and will most likely end in a finish. Ironically, the show whose format focuses so much on competition uses personal narratives much more in its promotion.

There is a reason for this outside of aesthetic choices (which also play a part). Bellator doesn't have the luxury of assuming that the audience knows who their fighters are. The UFC's athletes are not household names, other than maybe major stars like Silva and St. Pierre, but they do have a minor sports media centred around them and a large fan following who can be counted on to remember at least the upper echelon of UFC fighters. By contrast, Bellator doesn't get a lot of coverage from even the MMA media, and when it does that coverage is generally related to their shady legal maneuvering.

The pre-fight videos, then, are a way to provide an instant narrative for the fight. Major sports can generally rely on the media to create and cultivate these narratives, but Bellator has to do it themselves. Before the videos, this is just another MMA fight between two unknown guys with bad tattoos. After the videos, it's a struggle between a devoted father trying to provide for his family and a talented athlete who escaped from poverty. The tournament structure is also a part of this instant narrative, providing stakes for the fight and suggesting a progression that will unfold over the course of the season. The pre-fight videos put the fight in two separate personal narratives akin to what one might see from a Hollywood boxing movie. The viewer learns what happened before the fight and what can happen afterwards, depending on the battle's outcome. The fight becomes the intersection of a series of intersecting narratives and contexts.

Ultimately, these personal narratives are competing along with the fighters. Typically, a video suggests that the fighter in question needs to win, and that only a victory will provide narrative catharsis – the hero triumphant, the son making his father proud, the veteran proving he can still hang, etc. But there are two videos for every one fight, and only one fighter can win (barring draws and other bizarre circumstances). Thus any given episode of Bellator is a procession of tragedies: a father who does not win enough to support his family, a fighter whose MMA dream doesn't come to fruition, a lover who has to go home beaten and bloody to his girlfriend. These narratives are rarely emphasized on the broadcast – they exist as shadow narratives, suggested by the events that unfold but not explored or spoken aloud. It's customary for commentators to interview the winner of a fight, but rarely the loser.

The night is heavy on finishes, which is generally seen as a good thing. The finish is the money shot of MMA – it adds to a fighter's highlight reel, makes an impact on the viewer, and suggests triumph much more than an announcement by a panel of judges. Of all finishes, the most privileged is the straight knock-out, preferably from one big standing punch or kick, and we get a couple of those in Bellator 96. Babalu's loss, where the referee steps in to save an obviously messed up but still standing fighter, feels much less viscerally satisfying. Beyond the violence, there's a level of aesthetic beauty to the knock-out – the fluidity of movements, the singular element of the punch, the ripple of its impact against the opponent's cheek, the sudden loss of human function.

The Babalu-Noe fight is the only one that goes past the opening minutes – other than that we get a lot of quick finishes and one-round fights. This makes for almost ideal television – a fight is over before the first commercial break, and there's always a new fight around the corner. But after a while it starts to feel like having ice cream for every meal. A quick finish means little if it's easily attainable, and such results seem to suggest one-sided matches. And some of these were clearly created as showcase matches, notably War Machine/Avena and the Mo/Peteruzelli main event. On the other hand, Rich Hale and Ron Sparks are legitimate fighters who have looked scary in Bellator before, but from watching only their fights tonight they could easily appear as cans.

I can’t help but compare the overall aesthetic of this broadcast to Vince Russo's idea of “crash TV”, which he attempted to apply to wrestling in the late 90s to decidedly mixed results. The essence of Crash TV is that it never leaves the viewer alone with their thoughts – every thirty seconds something new is happening, and usually happening with bright colours and loud noise. This is the same philosophy that motivates the rapid-fire editing of reality television, and has even started to trickle down into scripted programming.

Legitimate sports like MMA can't be aesthetically manipulated as easily, and they usually have their moments of dull contemplation – that lull in watching a soccer ball being traded aimlessly around, or in watching two fighters circle each other for a long minute. The long action of a sport forms together a kind of rhythm interrupted by flares of bravura. Bellator 96 is all flares, with the advantages and disadvantages I've outlined above. It makes for a more immediately appealing product. But it's important to remember that Crash TV sort of destroyed wrestling, as the art of the long, gradually-building match was lost from the mainstream. This doesn't apply as much to MMA cards, which assemble themselves in their own aesthetic forms and are indifferent to the wills of their promoters, but it should give pause to the desire to see all knockouts all the time. The cards full of knockouts are more meaningful because of the cards full of decisions.

Still, there is a great deal of beauty in a show like this. The highlight is King Mo's ground strike to finish off Seth Petruzelli – a long, diving punch, like a fist from heaven, shattering his opponent and forcing him (it turns out) into retirement. It is good enough to make Mo look impressive in winning a fight he was the heavy favourite in. By contrast the War Machine victory, while quick, is pedestrian and even ugly.

The only fight on the card which escapes the trend of quick knockouts is the three-round battle between Babalu and Jacob Noe. It would be easy to turn this into a Hollywood story: the aging legend gets beaten up in the first round, comes back in the second, and then eventually passes the torch and rides out into the sunset. The opening video package follows this formula to the T, with lots of softly-lit images of Babalu teaching children jiu-jitsu and reference to his legacy. Instead of focusing on the importance of Sobral winning the fight, it basically retires him beforehand.

As is usual, there are different narratives that could be told of Sobral. He could be a villain, capable of acts of cruelty such as the illegal choking which got him kicked out of the UFC. He could be a failure, a man who has fought many big names but beaten few of them. All of these have as much grounds to them as the saintly picture Bellator paints.

As for the fight itself, it follows the script above, with the surprising comeback and the inevitable defeat. But it's not the barn-burner that Hollywood would depict. The fight has a lot of clinching against the cage, leg kicks, and slow fighting for position. It is the same story, but told in a cruder vernacular, or perhaps a different language altogether. Anyone can understand a one-round knockout; to understand a fight like Sobral/Noe and the narrative that weaves through it you need to be fluent in MMA.

And then there's the knockout. Instead of a punctuation mark, it is more of an ellipsis. Sobral is stopped on his feet, being questionably ruled unable to continue. Babalu's career, if it really is over now, ends with him complaining to the referee. It is the final fight everyone wanted, but everything is a bit off. The end of this battle is faintly pathetic. I mean that in the classical sense: it generates pathos, a strange combination of sorrow and fulfillment. One is unsure how to feel after this fight, but that uncertainty is more powerful than the simple, cliched satisfaction of the retiring fighter riding into the sunset.

This is where the easy narratives peddled to us by the sports media fail us. Bellator and others like it want us to believe reality is like a movie, with heroes, villains, climax and resolution. Of course, movies are full of uncertainty as well – rather, they present reality as the image of a trite and melodramatic sports film. But real life, even the heightened version of it presented by competitive sports, is the stuff of uncertainty, contradiction, and confusion. We need art – and yes, B-league MMA broadcasts are a kind of art -- that reflects these contradictions and finds the truth and beauty within them.

[1] As much as I'd love to see this as a vindication for competitive matchmaking, PRIDE's collapse had more to do with its shady business practices, including ties to the yakuza, and shaky accounting.

[2]It may be silly to draw an analogy between the practices of a second-tier MMA promotion and larger political tactics, but this struggle within Bellator suggests that institutions that are designed to merely create the illusion of fairness or accountability can nevertheless prevent gross injustice. Up here in Canada, the Parliamentary Budget Office is a good example of this. This doesn't mean that we should trust these institutions, just that we can use them as barriers to slow down the worst tendencies of those in powers. Bjorn Rebney may not exactly be "in power", but Bellator is owned by media giant Viacom, so it's not that much of a stretch.

[3] Everything in an athlete's life is a difficulty that they nobly overcome, even things which they are entirely responsible for. See The Onion for more.

The Reem 1-03: Back Home

We're in the midst of a kind of renaissance for sports documentaries, especially on television. ESPN's 30 for 30 series is the standard-bearer here, and has some level of objectivity, but most of the genre exists for explicitly promotional ends. Despite being essentially commercials, these documentaries are often quite compelling, visually striking, sophisticated pieces of cinema.  HBO's 24/7 series, used to promote its boxing pay-per-views, was the first to attain this kind of quality, and 24/7 has been followed in mixed martial arts by both the UFC's official Primetime shows and a bevy of fan-made web videos. Of this latter set The Reem stands out as a trendsetter.

The Reem is a strange mixture of hype video and cinema verité. It's shot in slick black and white and set to a soft hip-hop soundtrack that imposes a sense of flow and rhythm onto seemingly mundane moments like Alistair Overeem playing video games or walking through an airport. Some would say that this is just a very ordinary video dressed up in flashy film-school techniques, and there's a degree of truth to that. But technique matters, and even aside from it there's an undeniable charm to The Reem that deserves consideration.

A big part of the series's appeal is the quiet charisma of the athlete at its centre. Alistair Overeem is a masculine fantasy, a physically massive and incredibly conditioned man, once a lanky kickboxer but now grown into a literally larger than life figure. Joe Rogan used to sell Brock Lesnar by saying that he looked like the man who would play the cage-fighting world champion in a movie, and Alistair Overeem arguably fits that description even more. (For one thing, he doesn't have a tattoo that looks like a dick on his chest). And despite this he is quite soft-spoken and reserved, possessing a quiet confidence but not bragging about it much. When Overeem takes a limo home from the airport, he seems kind of abashed by the luxury, as if acknowledging the ridiculousness of his own success. Even when he attempts to call out Fedor at the end of the video he is polite and complimentary of Fedor's ability. Watching The Reem is not to imbue godlike traits in an ordinary man, as the average sports narrative would have you do. It is to begin to think of an almost supernatural man as ordinary.

The usual brash and arrogant sports personality often seems to stem from social awkwardness and introversion (in MMA, Brock Lesnar and Nick Diaz are the best examples of this phenomenon). Overeem seems to be the opposite -- his quiet nature belies an internal arrogance that it's hard to not get drawn into. It's this arrogance that cost him his last fight[1], and it's on display here when he points at a wall and remarks that "all my [championship] belts will be coming there". It's kind of hard not to be drawn into Overeem's outsized ambitions, especially when his physique seems to promise that he can accomplish all these things, and he makes for a strangely likeable protagonist. There is, after all, a thin and perhaps nonexistant line between arrogance and charisma.

The scene where Overeem looks at his trophy case is interesting as a whole. In one sense, this scene is a further confirmation of the promotional nature of The Reem, serving as a device to highlight all of Overeem's accomplishments over his decade-long fight career. But the scene works much more effectively than, say, a highlight video would. Trophies tap into Walter Benjamin's ideas of the historicity of objects. Benjamin believed that objects carried historical moments with them better than human memories did, with the ruin being a prime example. The trophy serves a similar purpose in this scene, acting not so much as a proof of victory but as a trigger for memory. Overeem spends the most time lingering on a small, dinky-looking plaque he won for his second fight. He says "Even that stupid plastic card thing that came with my second fight... I know what effort I put into it, I know what tensions came with that fight, I know I was always very dedicated...".  Overeem values the trophy not as an object in itself or as a marker for accomplishment but as a trigger for memory, a physical representation of the past.

From here we move into a training sequence that takes up most of the episode. The training montage has become a cliché by now, but The Reem uses it in an interesting way. Instead of the heavy epic-rock music from classic training montages like those in Rocky or The Karate Kid, the subdued but steady beats from earlier scenes simply continue. There's a kind of fluidity to the cuts between different shots of Alistair's training: instead of building to a crescendo, they're strung together in an abstract and obscure but fascinating way, a bit like visual jazz. There's the sense of process, of repetition and slow building, and the impression that all of these things - Overeem visiting his family, playing video games, training, fighting -- are all part of one continuous pattern. It's easy to see why the gym (traditionally the boxing gym, but a MMA gym serves the same purpose) has been so attractive to filmmakers from Clint Eastwood to Frederick Wiseman.  The gym combines ordinary, procedural reality, with the hyperreality of fight sports.

We get a bit of a sense of the other members of the gym, from Alistair's less-famous teammates to his trainers, but they are very much supporting characters, spending most of their interview time praising Overeem and establishing him as truly special. Overeem does stop to put over Siyar Bahadurzada, who would go on to achieve a bit of name recognition among MMA fans, although nowhere near as much as Overeem. Once again, the larger-than-life picture the other interviewees paint stands in pleasant contrast to Overeem's seemingly subdued personality.

It is a bit shocking to see Golden Glory painted in such an idyllic light, given how far south things between Overeem and them would go. In many ways this episode (unintentionally) sets up a status quo that is later dramatically knocked down. The episode also (more intentionally) lays out a path for the rest of the "season". Alistair lists his goals at the end in a combined interview/call-out, setting his sights on a fight with Fedor, the DREAM heavyweight title, and the K-1 grand prix. Not all of this would go according to plan, but "Back Home" establishes a clear pattern that affected audience's expectations. In this it is perhaps not so different from a typical TV show after all.

[1]There's a strange time displacement in watching and talking about this episode when you haven't seen the rest of the series but know what happens to Overeem in the future. It's like being spoiled, but not exactly.

UFC on Fuel TV 4: Munoz vs. Weidman

In addition to the usual low-wattage roster of a Fuel TV card, UFC on Fuel 4 suffers from occuring in the wake of the Anderson Silva/Chael Sonnen megafight, with most fans suffering from fight hangovers.  I watch these things pretty religiously, and I almost totally forgot about it.  In theory the point of these events is to build up new stars and give long-serving undercarders some TV time.  Outside of the main event none of these fighters are in sniffing distance of the top 10.  The question then emerges: is this event, wedged in the middle of a week bookended by more interesting ones, worth watching at all?  What are the merits to it as three hours (!) of television?

Some would simply suggest that it exists because the UFC wants to fully exploit its current popularity, expanding as fast as it can with no concern as to fan fatigue.  But this isn't really the case.  The UFC almost certainly runs these smaller shows at a loss: they're broadcast in the outlands of cable, usually fail to get a decent live crowd, and other than fighter salaries have all the same costs as a bigger-ticket event.  So it can't be greed.  The simplest explanation would be that the UFC has hundreds of fighters under their employ and a limited number of (healthy) stars, so sometimes you have to run a card without the stars just to generate enough fights for everyone.  That's closer to the truth, but it still suggests that the UFC is being run by its fighters instead of the other way around.  So it has to be that, somehow, these events contribute to the larger commercial and athletic (and those two are always in tandem, as with any other professional sport) project of the Ultimate Fighting Championships.

The nearest analogy would, I suppose, be one of those low-key episodes of a serial drama that exists to build characters and set up future events.  So it could be argued that while neither Mark Munoz nor Chris Weidman, much less the unranked talents that appeared on the undercard, are people you care about, in the future they may be fighting someone you care about, and possibly even become one of those people themselves.  Giving them the headlining spot is meant to introduce them to the promotion's "main stage", with the theory being that if the fans see these fighters in the main event, they'll start thinking of them as main eventers instead of undercarders.  (This applies mostly to Weidman, unknown before his recent upset of Demian Maia, as Munoz already headlined a not-as-small UK card last year).

The above partially-incoherent paragraph goes to showcase how important image and status is in the fight game.  Building a name that people remember (which usually involves building a persona) is frequently more difficult than making it into the top 10 or even winning a championship.  Take Chris Weidman, who has an impressive victory in the main event.  He's stopped a dangerous opponent, and the stoppage is even a memorable one, albeit mainly due to the referee's delay in stepping in when Munoz was clearly out of it.

But where does this leave him?  What separates him from Jake Ellenberg, or Johny Hendricks, or Michael McDonald, or any of the other surging crew-cut white guys?  Of course, this is a bit of an unfair question.  Not everyone has an uniquely marketable persona -- indeed, it would be impossible for each of the 200 or some odd fighters to all be interesting characters.  In fact, it's usually only after you win a championship that the marketing gurus start to work, as when they transformed Frankie Edgar into a mostly-unknown crew-cut white guy to a lightweight Rocky, helped along by Edgar's gutsy performances.  Even then, Edgar never really became a major draw, and who knows what'll happen with new lightweight champion Benson Henderson.

The UFC can't come up with characters wholesale, and similarly its athletes shouldn't be pressured to become media characters instead of focusing on their fighting (although those that do, like Chael Sonnen and Ronda Rousey, are usually rewarded for it).  So in that respect it lacks in the character department when both something like pro wrestling and team sports, where a team can maintain the image it's gradually developed for decades instead of constantly having to invent new ones for the latest rising star.  This is not so much a failure of effort as a failure of format, and it may explain why fight sports have never trumped the big four in America or sports like soccer or rugby internationally, but to me it's part of their appeal -- they present each competitor as an individual instead of appealing to tribalistic emotions.

But what the UFC lacks in characters it makes up for in spectacle.  This is the part that's made it most popular among young males, and which also draws all the criticism.  Supporters have long argued[1] that it's equally or less dangerous than established sports like boxing or football.  But of course, the difference is that in mixed martial arts the violence is overt, personal, and bodily -- there is no way to avoid it.  This kind of violence has undeniable biopolitical significance.  The representative of violent spectacle on this card would have to be the battle between James Te Huna and Joey Beltran.

(Most MMA screenshots are going to involve the referee standing awkwardly around on the fringes of some sort of action.  Although it's not as awkward as when the referee should be doing something, like the previous one.)

The Te Huna/Beltran fight isn't really a competitive exchange of skill -- despite some flurries from Beltran, it's mainly a beatdown.  And it's one that never reaches its conclusion, a testament to Joey Beltran's chin.  (The ability to take a punch is, as per usual, read as a sign of grit and authenticity.)  The two mens' striking is not very technical.  But the fight is aesthetically pleasing in its own way: its brutality, its sloppiness makes the stakes of combat seem so much more real than a fast-paced submission battle.  It looks like two guys fighting outside a bar, and that transmutes the situation into something we can understand and empathize with.  It seems as though either guy might go down at any time, restoring destructive value to the punches that usually just accumulate as statistics.  I don't want to be hyperbolic here, but a fight like this makes us believe that the UFC is real again -- hence why the announcers talked it up so much.

The rest of the matches were fairly obscure affairs, but they did their job of showcasing up-and-coming stars as well as a couple resurgent veterans like Rafael dos Anjos and Aaron Simpson.  The UFC is generally known for its competitive matches, and that continues here, although sometimes things fall through and you end up with an one-sided fight like Aaron Simpson vs. Kenny Robisnon.  But in general what you have is the next step in each of these fighters' individual careers, whether it be a step up in competition or a shift to a new weight class or an adversity to be either fought through or succumbed to.  Each fight has two narratives, one for the winner and one for the loser, but it's the winner's narrative that is generally highlighted, with the loser condemned to obscurity.  Such are the perils of competition.

In the end, the ultimate significance of this event is as of yet unknown.  If its prospects -- Chris Weidman, Francois Carmont, James Te Huna, etc. -- go on to major success and stardom, then it will have been an essential part of the UFC mega-narartive, a tapestry woven from hundreds if not thousands of individual stories.  If not, it will just be a strange detour that only the hardcores will have noticed.

Next week: "This crime hasn't happened yet."

[1]This argument is probably correct, but since it's such a young sport we haven't really seen the long-term implications of being a professional mixed martial arts fighter.

UFC on FX 4: Maynard vs. Guida

In some ways sports are the purest expression of the scientific ideology.  As much as we like to attach sentimental narratives to sports, the actual coverage of them relies heavily on numbers and mathematics.  This is not in opposition to the heavy narratives we attached to sports (which I described in my last UFC post) but rather in support of it: the idea of an unbiased, scientific testing-ground provides the stakes and legitimacy for the narratives we weave.

Mixed martial arts, then, is a bit of an abberation.  Desepite the constant attempts to inject statistics into the sport, it remains thoroughly subjective.  All of the methods for winning a match involve a decision on someone's part, whether it's a referee deciding to stop the fight, a fighter choosing to submit, or the judges deciding to score it for one side or another.  At some points this is merely an academic distinction, such as when a fighter is obviously knocked out cold, but it still doesn't have the obvious facticity of something like boxing's ten-count.  This particular event seems to highlight that subjectivity more than the usual, with the top-billed three fights all going to close and rather contentious decisions.

The first of these fights was between Brian Ebersole and TJ Waldburger.  Waldburger is one of those oddities, a veteran undercarder, who wracks up an impressive number of UFC wins in minor untelevised (or, as is now the case, televised on nothing channels) fights, then goes up to the main card to blank stares and is usually defeated.  It's not a bad career, but I'll confess to thinking of him as cannon fodder -- which is why I was so surprised when he came out of the gates and started kicking ass.

Ebersole is almost the opposite -- a fighter who's taken on competition that's only a bit better, but is a lot more high-profile.  This is mostly because of his fan-friendly oddness, from his fondness for cartwheel kicks to shaving his chest hair into a giant arrow.

He has a narrative -- the quirky older veteran making one last run at the big show, and he's not afraid to tell it via fan sites and social media, which is essential for a sport with a young fanbase.  That's why this was "the Brian Ebersole match" instead of "the TJ Waldburger match" even though, as the match itself showed, both guys are pretty equally skilled.

The match highlights one of the constant dilemmas of MMA judging -- top control vs. defense from the bottom.  There's a vocal set of fans that contend that judging unfairly favours the fighter who ends up on top when things go to the ground, mainly due to judges' lack of knowledge of the ground game (most MMA judges have their roots in boxing).  This has lead to the dominance of wrestling and the "lay and pray" strategy.  These people have more than a bit of a point.  Waldburger's actions in the second round are the kind of offensive gaurd-work, constantly going for submissions and sweeps, that more or less negates Ebersole's attempts at ground and pound.  On the other hand, none of the submissions really come close to succeeding -- should we disregard them as we would a missed strike?  Rate them as a successful attack, or at least successful grappling, because they stopped Ebersole from striking on the ground?  Or give the points to Ebersole for dictating where the fight took place?  After all, if Waldburger gets points for putting his opponent in an ineffective hold, surely Ebersole should get the same.

In the end, two out of the three judges saw it for Ebersole, which only gives more fuel to the bottom-game advocates.  It'll get marked down as a win just like the more definitive ones are, and absent any furor over the judging (which is usually reserved for more high-profile fights like the recent Diaz/Condit or Edgar/Henderson matches) it'll generally be regarded as a legitimate result.  As it should -- if you're going to have judges, you should take their judgements seriously.  But there's a moment of subjective choice and opinion here that's immediately papered over by the objective trappings of sport.

In the co-main event, veteran lightweight also-rans Sam Stout and Spencer Fisher completed their trilogy.  It's a bit of an odd trilogy, one without much in the way of story or stakes behind it, although at least it gives some identity to two of the lightweight division's very thick middle.  The decision, like the one before it, priveledged top control: in this case, the takedowns Stout landed seemed to overcome what I saw as stronger striking from Fisher.

The question of fairness is one that inevitably gets raised when it comes to decisions, but it's trickier than one would think.  Even if you disagree with the standard judging philosophy, which values takedowns and top controls over damage (within reason), it's a well-known one, and every fighter at this level knows that a takedown can often win them a round they would otherwise lose.  If the scoring system and its biases are public knowledge, then the sport becomes fair again -- nobody argues that football is unfair because it gives more points for a touchdown than a field goal.  Of course, this violates the premise of mixed martial arts, that it's the closest simulation to an actual fight possible, given safety concerns.  When people object to the priorities of judges, it's because they make it more abstract, and further away from the core concept.  Combat sports, unlike most other sports[1], has a claim to authenticity at its centre, as the ability to physically fight someone is (or at least seems) more inherently valuable, stemming from real-world occurrences, than the ability to kick a ball into a net.  The professionalization of mixed martial arts threatens that authenticity, even as it helps MMA as a sport qua sport.

There's also a bit of unintentional foreshadowing for the next fight, as a match billed for its excitement value, rather than its relevance, fails to be very exciting.  This isn't a scripted sport like pro wrestling by any means, but there are still roles certain fighters and certain matches are expected to play, and Fisher and Stout were given the role of "go out there and brawl".  Their failure to live up to this unspoken expectation was a minor and not-muched-noticed one, but it would set the stage for a more significant one later.

That is, of course, the now-infamous[2] Maynard/Guida main event.  The fight was billed as the best of both worlds -- two top lightweights fighting in a match that seemed sure to be exciting.  However, Clay Guida, long established as a fan favourite for his oversized personality and frenetic pace, played a very rangy and reactive gameplan, which involved moving around more than striking.  Until the last couple of rounds Maynard seemed content to play into that strategy.  As the fight wore on, Guida seemed to forget the "counterstriking" part of the plan and focus solely on dodging.

From a strategic standpoint, Guida's gameplan wasn't a complete disaster.  He lost by only the narrowest of margins (two 48-47 decisions to one) and many fan writers gave him the match.  But from an aesthetic standpoint, it was awful.  (Matthew Polly has a good summation of this, a rare thoughtful piece in the MMA media).  The fight evinced such revulsion that the fans, who began cheeering Guida, were chanting for Maynard by the end, a first for the usually dull wrestler.  In a way, this is a kind of accidental genius.  Pro wrestling, with the benefit of scripting, often tries and fails to change the audience's opinion of an athlete this completely, and the "double turn" is rarely successfully pulled off.  This is the benefit of sports: the audience can decide who the heroes and villains are, even if their decisions are capricious.

And the audience reaction is hardly irrelevant.  With the scores as close as they are, it's easy to imagine that the crowd's hatred of Guida's passivity might have been a finger on the scale.  Beyond that, the UFC is run without any kind of formal rankings or brackets, so popularity influences how a fighter advances or slides as much as their wins or losses do.  Maynard certainly seemed to grasp this, actively egging the crowd on and doing his best to make Guida look foolish.


The role of entertainment in MMA is a complex one.  Certainly in other sports people complain about boring teams, but you'll rarely see a boring win dismissed as illegitimate in the same way it often is in MMA fandom.  And, because of the informal nature of rankings and contendership, this is often true in the actual organization as well -- no matter how many times Jon Fitch won a match by wrestling a guy into a stupor for fifteen minutes, he wasn't going to get another title shot.  In part this is due to MMA's claim to authenticity, with the buzzwords often being "a real fighter" against "point fighting".  It may also be due to MMA's historical connection to pro wrestling, with many current UFC fans being past WWE fans who are looking for more authentic violence but still want a garauntee of entertainment.  Such judgements may seem less fair and less scientific than the clarity of other sports, and I've certainly argued in defense of "boring" fighters in the past.  But, for a sport as rooted in subjectivity as MMA, it seems oddly appropriate.

Next week: "You should practice your handwriting, so you don't embarass yourself after you die."

[1] The exception would, I suppose, be things like track and field and swimming, which are tests of natural abilities.

[2]"Infamous" feels a little historical for something that happened last week, but in the rapid age of media reaction, things become historical symbols of themselves very quickly.

UFC 1

Mixed martial arts is one of the few sports, and certainly the most successful one, whose invention took place in modern memory.  There are weird predecessor fights like Muhammed Ali fighting Antonio Inoki and whatever shit Helio Gracie got up to, but as an ongoing sport and not a freakshow it mainly dates back to the early 90s.  The consequence of this is that pretty much the entire sport has been recorded and is available for perusal by both legal and not-so-legal means.  And what's more, due to the relatively slow schedule, one can actually watch, say, all of the UFC events in order.

Doing this would, I imagine, have a curious effect.  On the one hand, the seemingly discrete fights and tournaments would merge into a broader narrative, one about the rise and fall of particular fighters, and the quest for legitimacy by the sport in general.  Narratives are what draw us into sports, and the narratives of mixed martial arts have the benefits of being largely true.  When we like a fighter, it's because of the way he presents himself, not because he's been slapped with a jersey with our hometown on it.  UFC 1 contains an easy narrative, one that's been reworked into founding mythology by the promotion in its later days: Royce Gracie, the smallest man in the tournament, comes in and beats everyone else because he simply has the better technique, and in the process demonstrates the efficiency of his Brazilian jiu-jitsu style over less effective martial arts.  In the new UFC intro video, the first thing we see is this event's fight between Royce Gracie and Ken Shamrock.

At the same time, there are moments of narrative discord.  This is, again, the case with all sports: the facts rarely fit the predetermined narrative exactly.  The plucky underdog hometown team makes a decent showing but goes down in the quarterfinals.  The intimidating, dominant fighter gets laid on for three rounds by a dorky wrestler.  And so on and so forth.  We can see that even in the heavily mythologized UFC 1: the finals are not Gracie/Shamrock, but Gracie against the now-forgotten kickboxer Gerard Gordeau.  Gracie/Shamrock itself lasts under a minute, and while being one of the more competitive fights, still looks very sloppy compared to modern MMA grappling.  At the same time as sports tend towards narrativization, they resist it.

UFC 1 (the "1" was, of course, added in later) hardly looks like the start of a global sport.  It portrays itself as an one-off exhibition of martial arts, and the one-night tournament format certainly doesn't suggest attempts at an ongoing league.  It's very much a competition between sports, with the matches subtitled as "Boxing vs. Jiu Jitsu" or "Kickboxing vs. Karate".   Speaking of the graphics, they evoke less of a sense of epicness and more one of 80s cheese.  Which has kind of come back around to epic again.

(Wait, is that GSP?)

There's a general sense throughout that an 80s martial arts movie has escaped the limits of fiction and entered into the real world.  The announcers do their best to sell it as a legitimate competition, by focusing on the nebulous "strategy" and the martial arts credentials of the fighters involved, but they don't really have the kind of legitimating framework that Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan (today's UFC commentators) now do, and it's hard to make up these kind of things on the fly.  Curiously, though things are much more brutal than the present-day sport -- in the first fight, Gerard Gordeau knocks out Teila Tuli's teeth, two of which were allegedly embedded in his foot for the rest of the night, while the commentators bemoaned the fight's early medical stoppage -- there's much less focus on the brutality.  There are no nu-metal highlight reels of brutal knockouts, and no direct comparisons to the gladiatorial arena like there was in one long-running UFC intro.  Watching it, it's kind of hard to decide whether it's barbaric or totally lame.

Of course, UFC 1 has an ending fitting for an 80s martial arts movie, with the small foreign guy in a gi winning everything despite seeming to be an underdog.  However, to some extent the fix was in.  The Gracie family was a major force behind the creation of the event, and it was designed to showcase the effectiveness of their style.  You can tell this early on from the fourth commentator who seems to be there entirely to heap praise on Brazilian jiu-jitsu.  That's not to say that it was Gracie against a bunch of tomato cans -- Ken Shamrock was certainly a legitimate competitor who would go on to have a storied career -- but he was far from an underdog.

One can begin to discern this in his quarterfinal fight, against boxer Art Jimmerson ("ranked 10th in the world by the IBF!").  Jimmerson comes in wearing one boxing glove, an absurd moment that would soon go down in UFC lore.  This was caused possibly by the ad-hoc rules summit[1] between the fighters that only highlights the unstable foundation that the entire event rested on, or it may be a comically literal attempt to embrace the mixture of martial arts -- one hand to box, one hand to grapple.  In any case, it's the boxer that comes off looking like a fool, as he is flabbergasted by the ground game and taps out despite not seeming to be in any particular submission hold.  Even next to the sumo fighter Jimmerson seems like a joke.

Once again, this seems to be according to plan.  The commentators predict and then describe Jimmerson's loss as caused not by his own skills but by being a boxer -- he's said to have "too many rules" and to be too limited in a "real fight".  This is a deliberate shot across the bow of the most developed combat sport, and an argument that mixed martial arts (a name the sport had yet to officially adopt) is more "real".  The rivalry between boxing and MMA continues to this day, with everyone from fans to promoters routinely getting in arguments about it, and the UFC using Jimmerson as a fall guy might be the first shot fired [2].

Gracie/Jimmerson also plays into another curious factor about this first event: most of the fights are rather one-sided.  None of the fights go past the first five-minute round, and the only one that seems really competitive is a sloppy but enjoyable slugfest between Zane Frasier and Kevin Rosier.  This is mostly because of the uneven development of skills, but in a way it adds a kind of verisimilitude -- after all, most streetfights are quick and one-sided.  The present-day UFC, with its carefully even matchmaking, comes off as more of a sport but less of a spectacle.

And that's the comparison that one can't help but make.  The UFC today is in many ways what UFC 1 disavows.  The opening credits state that there are "no rules, no judges' scores, and no time limits" -- all things that the current product has, and for good reason.  Mixed martial arts has become a discipline just like boxing has, dependent on its rules, and of somewhat questionable application in a real fight (can you imagine Ben Askren in a bar brawl?)  The weird combination of brutality, 80s cheese and spectacle has morphed into a sleekly marketed, carefully regulated sport.  It's a sport I really like, and the dominant narrative of the sport cleaning itself up and becoming legitimate after these early wild days isn't wrong.  But something's been lost since this crazy, fly-by-night first UFC, and even if we've gotten something better in return it's hard not to miss it.

Next week: "At first I thought it must have been a dream, but I had these waffly black and blue marks all over my leg, and my complexion was totally cleared up."

[1]The early UFC events were often marketed as having "no rules", but this is mainly a marketing ploy -- low blows, eye gouging and biting were banned, along with a host of unstated rules that the system couldn't have functioned without, like no weapons.  The "no rules" bit is, however, one of the few attempts to market this early product for its violence.

[2]The modern UFC more or less repeated the Jimmerson fight when they brought in James Toney to fight Randy Couture a few years back, showing that these early freakshows sometimes pop up in the modern professional product in what could almost be described as the return of the repressed.  Toney faired about as well as Jimmerson did, although he got paid a lot more for it.

Luck 1-03

Luck is a self-consciously slow series.  Its format, which examines an eventful week at a racetrack one day at a time, parcels out events at a drip [1].  So, when in this episode we learn that Walter's horse is going to race in two days, we realize that it will be in one or two weeks of our time -- at the midpoint of the season.  This isn't an aesthetic criticism -- in fact, I think it's a deliberate, quite well thought-out choice.  The characters also seem to embody this slowness in their aged bodies, with the long, worn-out looks of Dustin Hoffman and Nick Nolte telling the story of a long, glacial life that's mostly passed.  The same can be said of the desperate, middle-aged characters that hang around the tracks -- there's a reason that Marcus, the brains of the gambling quartet, is personally immobile, travels around in a slow electric scooter, and is constantly advising caution to his overly excited friends.  And all of this is, of course, a brilliant contrast to the subject that all these characters are fixated on: horse racing, an activity that consists of short, desperate bursts of speed.

The series' third episode (frustratingly unnamed except for the generic "Episode Three") brings this into focus by bringing Ace into contact with a character who seems to go against everything he stands for.  Nathan Israel, a young businessman working on one of his mysterious front companies is the opposite of the patient, calculating Ace, tactlessly trying to acquire everything at once, from money to knowledge.  His crime is not really anything he says or does, but rather his assumption is a finite, knowable place, one that he in his youth has already complete knowledge of.  Ace's main objection is that he hasn't had the slow life experience necessary to know anything: "Never lived a day in his life, gonna tell me why I did something".  Even his business area, derivatives, suggests a kind of recklessness and a focus on futurity.

In another series his impatience to get right to the point might make him a hip go-getter, but here it makes him something of a fool.  Throughout the episode I kept expecting Nathan to meet a grisly end, the kind of sacrifice of a foolish character that you see often early in HBO shows, both to assert the show's own willingness to cross puritanical boundaries (although at this point those boundaries are well-trodden) and as a kind of violent moral fable.  In a show like Boardwalk Empire or Sons of Anarchy, Nathan wouldn't survive the episode.  But creator David Milch, having already gone down that route in the premiere of Deadwood, knows what audience expectations are and subverts them quite considerably -- Nathan not only survives the episode, but ends up with a major opportunity, one that the more demure lackeys didn't get.  Of course, to seize that opportunity he's tasked with observing everything around him -- living slowly.

That same frustrating dynamic -- the slowness of life and the enticing attraction of speed -- is perhaps what drives gambling addict Jerry.  What comes across most in the gambling sequences, moreso than the importance of the titular luck, is how quickly fortunes can be won and lost.  In the first episode these men win more money than they would ever have at one time if they dedicated themselves to "normal" jobs, and this is portrayed as a cinematic, almost heroic triumph -- the get-rich-quick moment everyone dreams of, complete with soaring music.  It's a moment that feels so good it partly explains why Jerry keeps going to the casino and losing thousands of dollars each night.  When the stakes are so titanic, when everything happens so fast, there's a natural drama that neither characters nor audience can resist.

Of the foursome of gamblers Jerry's the most "TV-looking" one, resembling a conventional hero instead of the lowlifes he hangs out with, but he's actually the most troubled.  Unlike the other three, he has no plans for how to spend his windfall -- he just takes it right to the casino.  The conventional looks of Jason Gedrick create a strange dynamic.  We start automatically thinking of him as the hero, we start wanting to see him silence the jackass across the table from him -- in other words, we fall into the same narrative that Jerry himself falls into, which allows him to ignore the insanity of what he's doing.

At the same time, this episode lets us see a more positive side of Jerry.  He sets out to achieve the goal that Renzo, attempting the honest methods, couldn't in the last episode -- buying the horse they want.  Jerry's persistence in this matter, and his willingness to throw good money after bad, are the traits that enable his gambling addiction -- and yet here they get him what he wants quickly, and they do seem like a kind of heroism.  It suggests that it's not as simple as Jerry being a bad person, or a good person with a flaw -- the bad elements and the good are inverted sides of the same traits.  It's possible to sense in this a commentary on our ideas of a great narrative, and how poisonous they can be to everyday life.

The larger metaphor of the racetrack also sustains this ambivalence.  In every episode (at least thus far) we have a horse race as the centrepiece, a piece of cinematic excitement complete with heroic personal narratives.  But even as it pulls us in with the glory of victory, Luck lets us know the costs that the track imposes on everyone involved.  That's most dramatically illustrated in this episode's abbreviated race, where the veteran jockey Ronnie is thrown from his horse in mid-race, breaking a collarbone that's apparently been injured many times before. The long shot of Ronnie tumbling away from the retreating camera, being left behind by the callousness of the race (and, it's implied, the joy we take from it) tells the whole story -- well, that and the wince-inducing crack we hear as he tumbles.


What starts to emerge in this episode is the tight regulation of the bodies of the jockeys, who have an intensified form of biopower imposed upon them by both the sport itself and people like stuttering but menacing manager Joey.  Leon, Joey's hot young jockey, is seen in this episode collapsing in a sauna during his attempt to make weight through starving himself.  Once again the horses, the muscular beasts that the camera revels in, serve as an interesting contrast here -- they are all massive muscle, cared for exquisitely by trainers like Escalante, who would never dream of being as rude to his horses as he is to humans.  The jockeys, meanwhile, are forced to be almost nothing, a mere appendage of the horse, and are constantly the subject of verbal abuse.

(Then again, as we see in the first episode -- and in the filming process of Luck, apparently -- horse life is cheap.  They're celebrated as long as they're useful, and then discarded.  Maybe they're more like the jockeys than I thought.)

All of this is only scratching the surface of what happens in this episode.  I haven't really touched on the race plans of Walter and Rosie, probably the two least corrupt characters in the show, or on the strange relationship between Escalante and Jo.  Like many of the great HBO dramas of the past, it's not just an ensemble drama, but a sociological one -- what Milch is trying to capture here is not a particular character or group of characters, but a social group -- in this case, the strange and fading subculture that loiters around one dying racetrack.

This kind of sociological approach is typical of the modern cable prestige drama, especially those of HBO -- shows like Deadwood, The Wire and Rome involved a continually broadening frame, trying to capture as much as the world in question as possible.  This is one type of story that television tells very well, better than film or your average novel[2], if only due to the sheer amount of time a TV series has to work with -- and the way it can spread that time over months and years in the lives of the viewers, coming to seem like a separate world with its own continuity.  The story that's being told is then not about the arcs of any of the individual characters, but rather the ways in which the track draws together or breaks apart these characters as a community.

The way that Luck differs from the standard HBO show, however, when it comes to genre.  Most of its predecessors have fallen roughly into either the crime (The Sopranos, The Wire) or the historical (Deadwood, Game of Thrones[3]) genres.  Luck certainly has toes in both of these genres, with the involvement of gangster Ace and the setting of a rather backward-seeming part of the present day, and incorporates other ones like the sports drama.  But while it draws on a number of generic traditions, it's its own beast.  All comparisons to Milch's previous work aside, it's hard to think of a TV show past or present that's quite like Luck, and that's exciting.

In the end, no matter how far-ranging the show gets, it always comes back to Ace and Gus.  Thus far, every episode has ended with the two talking each other to sleep.  They spend some more time complaining about Nathan, but this time they seem like less badass old men and more envious, slowly dying creatures.  The vulnerability of these final sequences are inevitably a contrast to all of Ace's scheming and posturing throughout the day.  Ace goes to sleep, promising himself to some charitable endeavours tomorrow, while Gus is consumed with an image drastically different from his still, fading-to-sleep form: their horse, hazy and in slow motion, caught between its natural speed and Gus's imposed slowness.  In the episode's final shot, it becomes apparent that this contradiction can't last.

Next week: "The kitchen, it's dangerous."

[1]This one-day-per-episode format has been used before in television -- in Milch's Deadwood, obviously, but also in shows like Twin Peaks.  In a way this hearkens all the way back to classical theatre, where it was taken as an aesthetic rule that the narrative time of a play could last no longer than one day, and take place within a single general location.  While this is obviously rather restrictive for a complete story, the day matches up to the episode nicely as an unit of time -- it's in some way complete and distinct, separate from the next, but it also belongs to an ongoing continuity.  It's weird how the old ideas never really die.

[2]TV is certainly not the only medium that can, or has, taken this sociological view.  Long novels or other forms of serialized storytelling can do it -- think War and Peace or Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar comics, respectively.  Still, TV is unique in being able to do it in a really commercially successful and well-developed way.

[3]Game of Thrones doesn't take place in an actual historical setting, but it belongs to basically the same genre as shows like Rome or The Borgias.

Eastbound and Down 1-05: "Chapter Five"

The Wildcard entry is a slot I put into my usual weekly randomizer to get me to explore the wider world of television as a form and not just examine individual pieces. The channel numbers on my cable service go up past 1800, which doesn't mean there are 1800+ channels, but that still means there's a heck of a lot more that makes up the vast morass of television than the handful of cable dramas and anime series that I regularly watch. Eastbound and Down is not an exceptionally strange thing to find at the end of one of these wildcard randomizers. It is, however, a strange path that lead me to it.

Through ample use of random.org I landed on Eastbound and Down not on HBO, where it originated, but on The Score, Canada's third-tier sports network. The show can certainly be described as sports-related, centred around an arrogant baseball star who returns to his hometown retired and broke. But despite this episode ending in a climactic pitching contest, the actual sport seems to be beside the point in Eastbound and Down. Even for a sports network to branch into scripted programming it seems like a show like Friday Night Lights, which focuses much heavier on the sport in question, would be a better fit. In part this is a product of the cobbled-together nature of cable television – if you can pick up a good show in syndication*, grab it, even if it doesn't really fit your network's remit. This is why most cable channels, at least most of the ones anyone watches, seem to have little to do with whatever their name implies. (Can you believe that TLC was once an educational network?)

But there's more than that here. The Score airs Eastbound and Down twice a week, after both of the WWE's weekly shows. This means that the sports network is now pretty much airing two nights a week of scripted programming. This isn't just network drift. This is a question of whether the essential nature of sports requires it to be a legitimate contest with an unplanned outcome.

If we view the essential point of sports as an attempt to determine who the best runner or fighter or soccer team in the country or the world is, then the answer seems like an obvious yes. But the entertainment complex that's built up around sports has a different point entirely. If our interest was essentially in the competition, then team sports wouldn't be so popular – after all, as far as burning athletic questions go “which billionaire can hire the best people that can play the confusing sport known as American football” is not really at the top of the list. But the reason people turn into a sports game isn't just interest in who's the better competitor. The main draw is a mixture of athletic spectacle and emotional catharsis shaped by the storylines developed by the commentariat. This is a description that could just as well fit the draws of pro wrestling – or, for that matter, a Harlem Globetrotters game or ballet or the football sequences in Friday Night Lights. This all stems from the turn of the millenium, when sports realized in pro wrestling (which was finally abandoning the remaining shreds of kayfabe) and drama realized in reality TV the same thing almost simultaneously: that as far as entertainment goes, it really doesn't matter if a story is real, fake, or something in between. Eastbound and Down is a lot further afield than this (there's no element of athletic spectacle and unlike the WWE it doesn't formally ape a sports broadcast), but it's easy to see how there's a small leap from following the troubles of a disgraced ex-player in real life and following one in fiction.

So, uh, Eastbound and Down. I've only watched one episode of the rest of the series, in a rare bout of channel-surfing some time ago, but despite being a heavily serialized storyline it's not really hard to follow. Of course, it doesn't hurt that this episode (the unimaginatively-titled “Chapter Five”) begins with a recap of sorts, in which a despondent Kenny records an “audiobook” lamenting his problems and his descent to normal people status. Typically we would expect this to be the end of his character arc – the arrogant athlete made humble who commits himself to a life among regular people and not looking down upon them. But in Eastbound and Down, this is the lowest point for Kenny. As much as we're supposed to laugh at his ego and macho personality, the show is also a kind of celebration of that all-American brashness, and in this episode it becomes clear that the narrative arc of this season is not about Kenny's reformation but whether Kenny can resist being reformed, whether his attitude will survive contact with his new mundane life.

In part this is just a function of the show's set-up. Eastbound and Down is basically centred around Kenny as the comedic disruptor: he walks into normal situations and makes them funny. Virtually every line that comes out of his mouth is made into a joke. Even lines that are there purely to advance the plot are twisted into laugh-lines through both a twisted dialogue style and Danny McBride's macho-casual way of delivering it. For example, in a scene with Kenny and Stevie just talking in a car, there's a dialogue exchange like this:

STEVIE: I hope we get in a car wreck right now, I do. I hope we get in a motherfucking car wreck. I hope we do. I hope we get in a car wreck and then we can live in heaven.

KENNY: I'm not gonna get into a car wreck because I'm an excellent driver.

STEVIE: You're excellent at everything. I fucking hate it.

KENNY: I'm thinking we should just sit here quietly now, not really say anything, and let you just kind of contemplate the news I just dropped on you and let me kind of contemplate on my own pains and sorrows right now.

In this exchange Stevie has the major joke (the bit about getting into a car wreck and living in heavan), but even as something of the straight man Kenny still twists everything through his style. His responses are versions of what would be expected but strange versions. It's kind of exhausting at times, the barrage of jokes that constantly comes out of his mouth. In this way it's the type of comedy typically made by episode director Adam McKay and producer and guest star Will Ferrel – a man with cartoonishly exaggerated vices (usually played by Ferrel, but here with McBride) interacting with a mostly sttraight world. The arc of these movies usually trends towards the redemption of the main character, but while they can be redeemed they can never be truly changed, because it's their vices that make them funny and draw us to the film in the first place. As much as we migh not like hanging around someone like Kenny Powers in real life, we like hanging out with him on TV for half an hour every week, because he makes us laugh, and to that extent as viewers we don't want him to change. For television this dilemna applies even more: if the show is to continue after the redemption arc, what's going to make the comedy work?

This is why, essentially, the climax of the episode and I believe of the entire season – the pitching context at the used car dealership – is not one of redemption but of un-redemption, of Kenny Powers reclaiming his old arrogance. Faced with his old baseball rival, Kenny misses a couple times before taking his eye out with a vicious bean. This is, of course, a parody of a climax, complete with slow-motion celebration and dramatic music that contrasts well with the fact that a guy just got his eye torn out Dan Dorrity-style – but in the narrative it's also a celebration of Kenny's return to being an egoistic asshole.

Now, needless to say, this is kind of problematic. Kenny's machismo and other faults are mocked but celebrated by the show. On the other hand, less macho characters – such as his romantic competitor Terence or the bitchy city lady in this episode – are mocked a lot less warmly. Like the protagonists of Will Ferrel movies, while Kenny is a buffoon he's also meant to be a lovable one. In the A.V. Club review Nathan Rabin writes “I think by this point we love Kenny just the way he is: insane, arrogant and swimming with venereal diseases and substance abuse problems.” Kenny Powers and the comedic protagonist archetype he belongs to are loved because they embody pure untrammeled id: they can do and say the things that we know are wrong and a bad idea, but secretly wish we could.

I think there's a darker side to this character type too. There's a long line of loveable assholes which runs down the TV geneaology from Eastbound and Down to All in the Family, including such diverse shows as It's Always Sunny and The Sopranos. The loveable asshole is usually contrasted with a blue-state foil, the unloveable good person (Terence in this show, Bruce Mathis in It's Always Sunny, etc.) This is an interesting enough idea individually, but it's become so prevalent that it risks permanently inverting our morality. Read any forum or comment thread about The Sopranos and you'll find that the most despised characters are not the murderers and mobsters that populate the show but characters like Noah and the various psychiatrists who are only guilty of being kind of smarmy. This is the essence of red state politics: it's better to be ignorant than arrogant. If Obama was elected by playing Bill Cosby, then Bush the second was elected by playing Archie Bunker.

It's probably not fair to saddle that on Eastbound and Down, and it doesn't exactly fit the situation – after all, Kenny is more arrogant than any of his foils, but he does so in a more manly way, and that's supposed to make us root for him. The montage at the finale of “Chapter Five” where he embraces April in slow-motion after “winning” the pitching contest is obviously viewed through an ironic filter, but it's kidding on the square: we're supposed to celebrate as the he-man Kenny wins the girl from his effeminate rival. The audience's intended reaction is suggested by the reaction of the in-show audience at the dealership, who cheer on Kenny and take him as an inspiration to start living out their id and smashing stuff.

The love interest April also presents another problem with the “loveable asshole” character: women never get to inhabit this trope. If a woman does a tenth of the things that a character like Kenny Powers does, she's a bitch, and there's no such thing as a “loveable bitch” (see the “city bitch” in this episode, who is portrayed negatively for mostly just being bossy.) In the traditional sitcom the woman is there to be the ever-suffering wife, there to look hot and be the straight man and not do much else. To be fair April does get in some funny lines here, mocking Kenny's premature ejaculation in the previous episode, but there's an obvious visual difference between the genders here. The male half of the cast is a theatre of grotesques, with ugly faces and uglier hairstyles. April is a pneumatic brunette who's practically popping out of her shirt. The climactic kiss scene is reminiscent of those cartoons when an anthropomorphic cartoon critter would fall in love with a realistic-looking woman.

Eastbound and Down does have it's virtues. It's one of those shows that goes for a joke every three seconds and at that rate even with limited accuracy you're bound to get a lot of hits. Danny McBride's way of inflecting each line with Kenny is also quite wonderful, although it's worrisome that other than McBride the rest of the regular cast is outshone by two guest stars (Will Ferrel as a Ric Flair hairdo-sporting car salesman and Craig Robinson as Kenny's longtime baseball rival.) But there's still something that stops me from getting into it. The kind of ideological rant above might not have much to do with it – after all, what I've said about the “loveable asshole” can just as easily be applied to It's Always Sunny, a show I love – but there's still a lot of ugliness on screen, on an aesthetic level more than a moral one, and I have a hard time distinguishing between the ugliness I'm supposed to love and the ugliness I'm not.

* Strictly speaking this can't be called syndication, as Eastbound and Down only has thirteen episodes and not the hundred or so usually required, but the principle is the same. This is also a kind of ratings grab as syndicated shows always are, looking to capitalize on the recent E&D-related memes and ad campaigns.

Next Week: More of The Shield, now with Glenn Close.