the big game

An Ode to the Varsity Blues 'I Don't Want Your Life' Spoken language

Photo: Paramount Pictures

In the American pop-civilisation feedback loop, at the football-motion-picture show intersection between sports and movie theatre and how the two inform and reflect each other, lurks a line delivery that lasts simply a couple of seconds. Information technology is uttered in an emphasis that is not particularly Texan, but that misstep can be forgiven considering so much else about the moment works. The directness. The resentment. The very relatable sense of rejecting your elders and what they stood for because you're going to do your own thing, man. Yes, I am talking about the flick excellence that is James Van Der Beek sneering "I don't want your life" from Varsity Dejection, a '90s artifact that has endured the ravages of fourth dimension.

It was quite a decade for America'south game on the big screen — in all its camaraderie and bullying, capitalism and teamwork. If you thought the sport was a path toward self-empowerment and friendship, you had tearjerker Rudy (congratulations to anyone who invested in facial tissues before it came out) and Adam Sandler's surprisingly earnest The Waterboy (proving that Fairuza Cramp could be as funny as she was unhinged in The Arts and crafts and American History X). If y'all wanted a kind of cautionary tale about how football reinforces white Christian male gatekeeping, there was School Ties. If y'all wanted a romance about the partnership and loyalty needed to survive in such a competitive field, there was Jerry Maguire. And if you wanted Oliver Rock and Al Pacino at the height of their powers, there was Whatsoever Given Sunday.

Among all that, Varsity Blues — about a Texas high-school football team rebelling against its abusive jitney and belongings on to one concluding gasp of glory before graduation — got a piffling lost. It probably didn't assistance that the 1990 nonfiction volume Friday Night Lights : A Town, a Team, and a Dream, by H. One thousand. Bissinger, which was also about a Texas loftier-schoolhouse football game team, would be adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed past Peter Berg in 2004 and adapted past Berg once again into the universally beloved TV series that spawned the endlessly repeated "Clear eyes, full hearts, tin't lose" rallying cry. Against all that sincerity, cute cinematography, and the strength of Connie Britton's caput of hair, Varsity Blues — with its homophobic and misogynistic humor, subplot about a sex-teaching teacher who besides happens to be a stripper who knowingly performs in front of her students, and thinly sketched female characters — doesn't quite hold up.

Yet: What Varsity Blues did practise right was channel the anti-authoritarian vibe and then integral to movies most teenagers and high school, and Van Der Beek's performance is the key. Information technology might be difficult now to understand how big of a deal Dawson's Creek was when it premiered on the WB and threw adults into a frenzy with its narrative about teens daring to read books and take sexual activity (Oh, no!). Van Der Beek played the titular Dawson, and his persona was ane of a straightforward, yearning good guy chafing against others' cynicism. The Varsity Blues part of Jonathan "Mox" Moxon, backup to Paul Walker's gilt-god quarterback Lance Harbor, was right in Van Der Beek's wheelhouse.

Mox reads Kurt Vonnegut. Mox respects his girlfriend, Jules (Amy Smart), and her sexual boundaries, and he encourages his younger brother, Kyle (Joe Pichler), in his experimentations with various religious behavior. (The movie'south strangest moments, well-nigh respectable in their weirdness, include Kyle dressing up like Malcolm X in 1 scene and leading a cult in another.) Mox dreams of leaving the small town of West Canaan, Texas, and attending Brown University. And if he never played football again? Well, that's fine.

But in that location wouldn't exist a motion-picture show if Varsity Dejection didn't have some disharmonize before Mox leaves domicile, so screenwriter W. Peter Iliff (who also has story and screenplay credits on Point Break!) incorporates an array of obstacles. West Canaan Coyotes charabanc Bud Kilmer (Jon Voight) is a racist tyrant who pushes his players past their limit in guild to win. Equally a outcome, Lance suffers a devastating articulatio genus injury. Kilmer is and so abusive to Mox'due south shut friend and fellow player Billy Bob (Ron Lester) that the offensive baby-sit suffers an emotional breakup. And Lance'due south girlfriend, Darcy (Ali Larter), tries to latch on to the side by side large affair after Lance gets injured by attempting to seduce Mox in a whipped-foam and Maraschino-ruby bikini. It is, of form, the first GIF that comes upwardly when you search for Varsity Blues:

The second GIF event, though, is the picture show'due south most climactic moment, and it's what cements the picture show every bit a teen movie outset and a football movie second. The "sports are a unifier, not a hierarchy" scenes are solid: Mox and the other players stand up to Kilmer, shaming him out of the sport, and Lance coaches the Coyotes into winning the district championship with an unexpected play call that proves Baton Bob is an integral member of the team. Only it'southward the "I don't want your life" scene that lays bare the bitterness and discontent that bulldoze Mox and his peers to plow confronting their parents and elders, and patently you tin watch a ten-infinitesimal loop of it on YouTube? I say this like I oasis't already watched the 10-minute loop on YouTube. I can't assist it! I am transfixed!

Director Brian Robbins begs us to empathize with Mox here, and okay, sure, I will! The motion-picture show cuts back and along between Van Der Beek'southward Mox and his whiny begetter, Sam (Thomas F. Duffy), who played for West Canaan and has congenital his entire identity effectually those four years. While Sam tries to police Mox's attitude and tone, Mox glistens (he'south sweaty!) and glowers (he'south angry!). Cinematographer Chuck Cohen allows Van Der Beek the whole frame to have his little Rebel Without a Crusade cosplay, his little homage to "You lot're tearing me apart," his little moment as the guy who gets the final word. Between this scene and Van Der Beek's iconic weeping meme from Dawson'southward Creek, did anyone else and so accurately capture the emotional roller coaster that was beingness an early millennial convinced of one'due south singular integrity and pain?

Varsity Blues has a peculiar shadow of tragedy hovering over it thank you to the deaths of Walker and Lester in 2013 and 2016, respectively, and the disappearance of Pichler in 2006. Personas change, and Van Der Beek has morphed into a self-aware celebrity who gets how mockable some of his early acting roles were. What nonetheless works about Varsity Blues, though (unlike Mox'southward gigantically amorphous jeans and Scott Caan'due south Tweeder joking about drugging younger classmates and getting them naked), is the sense that Mox was onto something about how football really is America'south game — a valorization of individuality and sacrifice. What'southward more American than rejecting the status quo? Daring to go against the tide? Doing and proverb something that few others will do? That probably takes as much strength and fortitude as taking a knee when no one else will.

An Ode to the Varsity Blues 'I Don't Want Your Life' Speech communication