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Murderball
By Richard Leader
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Murderball is a documentary about quadriplegic rugby, played
in wheelchairs on regulation basketball courts. The film can be
divided into three components: footage of the personalities involved,
general information on quads (dispelling misconceptions about the
condition and how it does or does not impair movement and sexual
activity), with only minimal time spent on coverage of the sport
itself, beyond momentary flashes of fast-breaks and hard hits. Characterization
follows the same ternary model. It focuses first on Mark Zupan,
the most audacious and outspoken member of the American national
team, who has become the public face of both the sport and the movie.
The parallel stories of Joe Soares and Keith Cavill work as bookends
to round out the film. Soares is a former US Olympian in quadriplegic
rugby who, having failed to win a spot on the US roster, turned
to coaching the rival Canadian squad; the competition between the
teams binds the narrative across the two year period between the
World Championship and the 2004 Paralympics. At the other end of
the spectrum is Cavill, a young man undergoing rehabilitation after
a devastating motocross accident. Although he is introduced early
on in the documentary and is regularly summoned to the screen for
scenes presented for educational purposes, only towards its conclusion
is his attendance at a seminar on the sport hosted by Zupan revealed.
Keith Cavill being assisted by his therapist
Murderball is energetic and seductive. Any flaws in its
construction are paved over by a booming soundtrack: it is, after
all, an MTV production. It is also one of the best reviewed movies
in modern history. Of the 120 reviews collated by Rotten Tomatoes.com,
a website that tallies the scores of major and not-so-major critics,
only three are negative. Jeffrey M. Anderson’s single paragraph
take on it at Combustible Celluloid.com is hardly compelling in
its objection to Murderball’s “touchy-feely”
tendencies. A similar complaint by Bill White for the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer is rendered petty provided his incongruous
admission that he would have rather the film given over more time
to other sports at the Paralympics. If one’s argument is that
there is hardly enough murderball being played in Murderball
as it is, asking for even less is not quite on the level.
The sole holdout comes from Daniel Fienberg of Zap2it.com. He takes
issue with its craft, accusing the movie’s creators of being
unworthy of the great footage they collected (“It’s
an achievement of access, rather than filmic storytelling.”),
pointing out their unwillingness to actually treat it like a documentary
and not some sort of marketable cultural experience, a fair criticism
given director Henry-Alex Rubin’s own self-distancing from
the genre. Fienberg also singles out the Maxim roots of
Murderball, writer and co-director Dana Adam Shapiro’s
expedition to Sweden to first watch the US team play at the World
Championship was funded by the magazine (his article published in
November of 2002), something that might have influenced the amount
of sexual content included in the film. Feinberg writes, “The
point that these guys are like Spuds MacKenzie and Michael Jordan
rolled (pun probably intended) into one in a wheelchair isn’t
a bad one, but it could have been delivered without so much leering.”
The other 117 reviews are uniform in their praise. Most rely on
the film’s conceit that it is the first—or loudest and
most violent anyway—to treat the disabled without pity and
as authentic human beings. Indeed, the DVD release of the documentary
contains many additional scenes, some filmed with Larry King, of
the cast arguing that landing in a wheelchair was the best thing
that ever happened to them and that they might not rush to avail
themselves of a cure for their condition if one were developed.
They all might certainly believe that, and it is a respectable enough
claim, but it is by no means a given that they truly convinced audiences
to believe likewise: a tragic accident or childhood disease remains
tragic, even if the tale is told with a lot of cusswords and a heavy
metal soundtrack.
Critics in their reviews acted convinced of this conceit, rewarding
Murderball for it, although their acclaim is in some respects
disingenuous. If treating quads as utterly normal, unremarkable
people is the proper thing, focusing on what they do and not what
textbooks or mythologies say they are, one must wonder if critics
across the political spectrum would be so kind to a film celebrating
unrepentant masculinity in able-bodied men. When the producers of
Murderball and its fawning critics agree that they do not
pity the cast, it seems to be a case of protesting too much; the
endless admissions are too self-conscious and congratulatory to
be taken as legitimate. That is not to say that the film is exploitive
in the same way that the documentary accuses other movies of being,
of using the disabled as a feel-good parable of some sort, but its
dishonesty about how it regards its subjects opens up other avenues
for abuse.
Behaviors that might seem questionable when acted out by able-bodied
men in a nonfiction production are portrayed as healthy in disabled
men, their ability to perpetrate sexism serving as decisive proof
that they have successfully overcome the hand that life has dealt
them. While women are certainly harmed by this, as I will argue
below, the able-bodied producers of the film are also exploiting
the cast in order to writ large their own misogynistic fantasies,
audience sympathy for the men’s condition serving as a buffer
against complaints. All of this is covered up by the constant refrain
of “no pity.” This should not be surprising given the
Maxim and MTV origins of Murderball.
Critics were handed several red herrings when it came to gender.
First, there was the title itself to focus on, the fact that the
original name of the sport had to be changed to a more pedestrian
one in order to retain financial sponsors is nearly always mentioned;
some go on to point out that the exact opposite has transpired for
its filmic incarnation, migrating away from quadriplegic rugby in
order to attract viewers with the promise of sensational violence.
One of the most frequently described thematic points of the movie
concerns Joe Soares son, Robert, who has little interest in athletics
and is shown to be a disappointment to his father—who regards
his new Canadian team as his real family, his “boys”—until
a heart attack forces Joe to reexamine his own priorities. He eventually
allows Robert’s academic trophies to share the “Wall
of Fame” with his own. This seemed to satisfy most reviewers
on the question of masculinity, nearly all of whom cited this pivotal
moment in their own text: if aggressive and sedate forms of manhood
can coexist peacefully, even if one side is subordinate, manhood
itself remains inviolate.
Keith Cavill trying out Mark Zupan's rugby
chair
If Murderball communicates anything, it is that being
a man is superior to being a person; becoming a quadriplegic is
to suffer not just in empirical terms but also the fictive-reality
of emasculation. The veiled implication of this is that no woman
can ever suffer as badly as a man. Coaching at the 2002 World Championships,
Joe Soares prematurely takes a position on the sideline while the
American and Australian teams are shaking hands after their match:
a female official approaches him and asks if he can wait until they
are done before cutting across the gymnasium floor. He complains
unconvincingly that someone else had done the same thing during
one of Canada’s games and, as she walks away, uninterested
in a debate, he says, “Fuck you, bitch.”
These are the first words of Soares that the editors choose to
present the viewer. While they work well enough to paint him as
a hothead, framing him for the rest of the film, the exact slight
he believed he had suffered is more subtle and it seems unlikely
that most audience members would pick up on its specifics, at least
in a single viewing. Beyond just the asserting of her own authority,
the fact that a woman had the option of choosing to not deal with
him without suffering any consequences for her choice was even more
intolerable, necessitating the gendered insult toward her—for
the nonexistent yet seemingly real one he suffered from her.
Women exist all over the periphery of Murderball. They
lug tables with trophies around, pump gas, tie shoelaces, cheer
and gasp from the sidelines, and they are the target of inventive
practical jokes. They are patient nurses, nagging mothers, smiling
girlfriends, and panicked wives. They are not, however, players.
No mention of a women’s league is ever made, though injured
female veterans of the Iraq war are included in an introductory
lesson led by American national team: their military affiliation
having given them the barest of protections against sexism in this
case. This might be excusable given the narrow focus on the exploits
of a single team (with Soares and Cavill representing the past and
potential future of it) if it were not for the treatment of the
marginal female figures who are afforded screen time.
Mark Zupan and his girlfriend Jess
No matter how dependent upon women—fulfilling their roles
as caregivers, physically, emotionally, and sexually—the men
of Murderball might be, and time is certainly given over
to depicting imagery of care giving, that dependency is seen as
something that must be overcome: not through independence from women
but though the domination of women. Thus sexism is glibly inverted:
in a discussion ostensibly to quell misconceptions about the sex
lives of quadriplegics, Scott Hogsett, a member of the American
national team, states that the more pitiful that he is, the more
the women like him, reminding a questioner that “a lot of
girls like being on top.” The mirthful comments by the men
about women finding them non-threatening, and how this works to
their own advantage sexually, have a touch of the surreal when contrasted
by their ardent desire to have men find them threatening—and
the great lengths to which they go in order to ensure that they
do, several of them bragging of victorious fist fights. Heterosexual
activity, in a way, serves the same function for them with women,
given the ethic of patriarchy that surrounds all of us, regardless
of our individual intentions and aspirations.
The men of Murderball have MTV enforcing that vision of
patriarchy on them at all times. While the documentary was largely
unsuccessful when it came to drawing crowds to theaters, despite
it being one of the “best-reviewed films of the year, if not
the decade” according to its co-director, David Allan Shapiro,
it was a cross-promotional powerhouse. Mark Zupan was center stage
in this, finding his way onto numerous other Viacom owned properties.
While his guest appearances on Comedy Central’s Too Late
with Adam Corolla (Corolla formerly of The Man Show)
and the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on CBS were
hardly out of the ordinary—compared to his being tattooed
on A&E’s Miami Ink, the Disney/Hearst/GE owned
network that also backed Murderball — Viacom’s
MTV found the best use for the cast, teaming them up with the stars
of its Jackass for an episode that played on the network
to advertise the film before its eventual inclusion on the DVD.
Still from an educational video created by
Keith Cavill's physician
The Jackass Presents feature (“presents” as
the show Jackass itself is defunct, both its headliners
and the network have moved onto other projects) assembles MTV alums
Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, Chris Pontius, and Jason Acuna. The 20
minute production depicts them watching the movie, with reaction
shots, between more traditional clips of Murderball. A
variety of stunts were filmed—Zupan and Steve-O give each
other black eyes—and a substantial revisitation of the sex-ed
material of Murderball is developed.
While it might seem unorthodox to judge a movie using outside material,
this context is important: it seems to more accurately depict the
original vision that Shapiro and Rubin had for Murderball
than the film itself managed; they are seemingly unconstrained to
go in many of the directions they smirkingly hinted at in their
documentary, knowing they will be judged by teenagers and not Sundance.
They provided the setup knowing their culture would fill in the
blanks to their liking. As the cast of Jackass joins a
number of the rugby players in a bar for drinks, the discussion
turns towards the impending fame of the players given the release
of the picture.
Andy Cohn, winner of the league’s Athlete of the Year award
in 2002, asks, “I know you guys got the power to make, like,
girls kiss you… do you guys have the power to just
make girls kiss each other?” Under prompting from Steve-O,
two women in the crowded bar begin kissing and Cohn concludes, “That’s
how I know I’ve made it!” Later, Zupan assists Steve-O
in pulling down a woman’s shirt in order that the latter can
sign her breasts. Such antics continue as the players are goaded
into further acts and admissions, Steve-O proclaiming to their smiles
during one interview, “Every single one of these guys [Zupan,
Hogsett, and Cohn] had sexual intercourse with one of the nurses
that worked in the rehab …. They want you to know that everything
is going to be ok, and the second thing that they want you to know—is
that you’re getting laid!”
Jackass Presents: Steve-O and Mark Zupan
A further DVD extra, a deleted scene of Keith Cavill relearning
how to use various kitchen implements, opens with an interview with
Andy Cohn who speaks happily of his first sexual experience after
his accident, stating that more than just the physical act, the
fact that he could still “go out one night, meet a girl, and
get lucky” brought about a great feeling of normality; a story
that contradicts the Jackass Presents version of reality.
Cohn continues on to say another sentence, that one can go on to
do things “that you don’t think are possible anymore.”
While it is in some ways a good opening to Cavill’s struggle
to bake cookies, the sexual framing of it is fairly rude given the
immediate cut to footage of Cavill being lifted out of bed by his
therapist. These additional elements make it fairly clear that the
theme of Murderball, even absent the extras, is that recovery
and normalcy equals male supremacy. It should come as no surprise
that the rapper Eminem has taken interest in playing Zupan in a
still-hypothetical movie about his life, though he admits Cohn would
be less of a physical stretch.
Normalcy also equals white supremacy. While the players of the
sport at the national and international levels are uniformly white,
save for the presence of a team fielded by Japan, the producers
of Murderball go out of their way to film black men in
a specific light. One, his affiliation with the sport never made
clear, speaks of how women feel safe to approach men in wheel chairs,
only to launch into a monologue about how he does a “modified
doggy-style” in the bedroom. Another man is in rehabilitation
with Cavill and seems dubious of rugby and Zupan’s introduction
of it to their class. Finally, in a deleted scene, entitled “Blue
Doo Wop,” an African American hospital patient wheels down
a hallway at night, exclaiming, “I’m gonna find me some
bitches.” He convinces two black nurses, both female, to dance
for him as he keeps the rhythm.
White men have long exploited black men in the media to perpetuate
both white power and male domination of women. In Murderball,
it seems that the same thing is occurring with disabled men, public
sympathy rather than racism working to insulate the true instigators
from responsibility for their speech: Mark Zupan and the rest of
the team might have provided Henry-Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro
with the material, but its dissemination required them to live up
to a role demanded by men with far more power and influence than
themselves. This is not to say that the rugby players are blameless;
though they all come off as quite normal and decent men, normal
and decent are often not enough given the seduction of patriarchy
that can both compel and excuse depraved and indecent acts.
Murderball is a fine story and is one well worth watching.
It is also necessary to acknowledge that the story is only being
told, to the exclusion of myriad others, because the stars are white,
male, and of a certain background. (Almost all of the players became
quadriplegics as adults and as the result of accidents: I have been
informed that people born with disabilities are far less likely
to have received insurance or legal settlements that allow them
the financial freedom participate in such activities.) Still, even
with a jaundiced eye, it is difficult not to be sucked into their
lives. It features exciting, vibrant people—people who would
prefer to be men, more than anything else. That is, after all, our
cultural preference.
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