Wildcats (1986) – Textual
Listen, I want to thank you all for reading these words at all as this timeline unfolds. I do think that what we do here is important in some small way (not to get all Pa Bailey on you (It’s a Wonderful Life indeed)), and I appreciate your willingness to engage with critical thinking at a time when that is so sorely under-practiced. The more you read, the more Substack suggests Review Roulette to others, and the more these reviews get around, hopefully the more critical media literacy sticks in people’s minds. So, thank you for reading and sharing and telling your friends about our silly little reviews to keep art and cinema in the hearts and minds of people desperately trying to parse the chaos for a moment’s sanity.
With that goal of media literacy and critical engagement, I want to use this week’s review to clarify what I mean by “textual” as an approach for us to take on Review Roulette. Textual is one of our new approaches that I added to the Methodology two weeks ago, and in truth, I could have explained it better. So, this week we are fudging the wheel a bit to look at a textual analysis of a football film just in time for the Superbowl: Michael Ritchie’s Wildcats (1986).
In the Methodology post’s glossary of terms, I explained Textual like this:
Textual analyses look at the film as a text (a film text if you will. (Film text actually refers to any film when we are analyzing it, as in we read a film as a text.)). I want to look at the literal text of a film though. Some films have intertitles guiding the story, particularly silent films, and most films have a script of text. So, for a textual analysis, we’ll look at the monologues, dialogues, overlapping tirades, single sentences, or sections of speech that deserve a deeper look
I stand by this definition as I said, “I want to look at the literal text of a film though” and that is how it will be used on Review Roulette, but the first part, the non-literal definition of textual should be clarified. In film criticism, a textual analysis is any analysis of a film which we call film texts. Every review on Review Roulette is technically a textual analysis/criticism because we are analyzing the film text. When I say “read a film as a text”, I mean in the way a high school student may be prompted to read The Great Gatsby or Macbeth: breaking the text down into its constituent parts to understand it more deeply. What does the green light at the end of Gatsby’s dock symbolize? What is the role of the witches and how does the introduction of supernatural elements impact the story of Macbeth? A textual analysis is one that is critical of the cultural text you are reading, watching, listening to, or otherwise engaging with. That’s the contextual and colloquial definition to film studies. On Review Roulette, though, I want to take “textual” literally to look at the words of a film.
So, that brings us to Wildcats which is such a fun 80s film, I actually forgot about The Horrors for some time. I can’t think of a better plug for a film than that, honestly.
Wildcats is about Molly McGrath (Goldie Hawn) who leaves her job as a girls’ track coach in a prep school to coach boys’ football at an underfunded inner-city school in Chicago. Think Ted Lasso meets Stand and Deliver minus Remember the Titans with a tiny bit of Freedom Writers but not in a The Blind Side way. Coach McGrath is the daughter of a football coach and is mocked for thinking she could possibly be one herself. She is dared to take the job coaching the Wildcats whose only win in recent history was against a team who didn’t show up for the game. Coach McGrath wants to quit but is pressured into staying by her own pride initially and ultimately to teach the boys a lesson in both integrity and perseverance.
What this film does not do is pander. I had generic expectations for what this film would do: maybe have Coach McGrath bond with the team over their shared experiences of others telling them what they can and cannot be; maybe have a stand off between Coach and the team as a class or race issue; maybe depict the foul language in the film as a respect issue in which Coach demands they speak to her civilly because of her power over them. And I was wrong on every front. The only generic thing they leaned into was the boys initially not respecting or responding to Coach McGrath because she is a woman but one scene changes that definitively with one spectacular back and forth that I don’t think could have been written any better.
After the team desecrates her office and smashes her stopwatch, Coach McGrath challenges the boys to beat her in a run as an ultimatum (she would quit her job if any player outran her, or they would respect her if she outlasted them). While absolutely trouncing these boys in the pouring rain and mud, Coach McGrath explains that she ran the Boston Marathon twice and then prompts this exchange:
Coach: You owe me a new stopwatch, you pussies!
Player: Fuck you!
Coach: “Fuck you” what?
Player: Fuck you… Coach McGrath.
Coach: Better.
Which I think is perfect. This film could have easily used foul language as a crutch – as so many of these films do – to imply that the inner-city students are lesser in some way, less civilized as another football coach sees them in this film. But Coach McGrath never does; she actually defends their use of foul language as “linguistically correct” in one scene, and she uses it to meet them where they are in order to better reach them.
Coach understands that that player is frustrated and angry, and his choice of expression reflects the embarrassment the team feels having lost to her. Instead of telling him his choice of expression is wrong, she allows him to express those emotions as long as he affords her the respect of the title she has earned. It’s a funny exchange, but it’s also a really beautiful one that does the heavy lifting of so much emotional work on both of their parts without any condescension, pandering, pitying, or power plays.
In the same vein, the word “pussy” has a fascinating arc in this film. Initially, “pussy” is used aggressively in the graffiti the team spray painted in Coach’s office and in her response telling them they owe her a new stopwatch. Later, in a sexual double entendre about an opposing team, the Cougars, at a halftime pep talk:
Coach: These cougars will be furballs when we’re done with them!
Player (Wesley Snipes): Let’s go eat some pussy!
(As anyone familiar with football coverage knows, the sport is littered with double entendre and the film puts those to good use too, e.g. “do you even know how to get good penetration?”)
“Pussy” then comes back around as an endearing term emphasizing the bond between Coach McGrath and her team. As a gift before the city championship game, the players replaced Coach’s stopwatch with an engraving “Coach, we owe you. Love from your pussies”.
Looking at the text of the film alone shows us this gradual development of the use of the word “pussy” in increasingly jovial and even loving ways that grows in step with the relationship Coach McGrath fosters with her players. Her refusal to police their language affords them respect and serves as an acknowledgement that their way of living and speaking is not incorrect, so long as that respect remains mutual. I think a big part of this film’s success in building that relationship comes down to the language used in its foundation, and the script only continues to gradually evolve the tone of that language with each endearing moment.
(Also, not for nothing, Wildcats is the film debut for both Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, so that’s another fun layer to watching it now having seen where their careers went.)