I am married to a man who gets choked up when he sees highlights of the Denver Broncos first Super Bowl victory. I am also friends with a woman who calls all team sports "Stupid Ball." Since I tend to side with my girlfriend, I was not expecting much when my husband and I joined another couple to see Any Given Sunday. Not only is it a football film, but it is a football film directed by Oliver Stone, who enjoys exposing the dark underbelly of American culture. Indeed, Any Given Sunday showed more under the bellies of players in the locker room than I cared to see, and wore me out with its incessant vulgarity and profanity. I'd much rather sit at home reading T. S. Eliot. Then, suddenly, I realized I was watching T. S. Eliot. In a football movie.

Any Given Sunday is a tour de force dramatization of Eliot's classic essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1917), still required reading in literature classes across the country. Though I do not suggest Stone has been reading T. S. Eliot lately, I am going to argue that Any Given Sunday not only illustrates Eliot's thesis but also provides an allegory for the contemporary tension between supporters and detractors of the "postmodern turn."

The film focuses upon Tony (Al Pacino), the aging coach of a professional football team, who has sacrificed marriage and family to his passion for the game. When his first and second string quarterbacks are injured in the same quarter, Tony must put in the third-string Willie (Jamie Foxx), who disregards his coach's advice about time-proven strategies, playing, instead, according to the inspiration of the moment. Willie antagonizes the entire team as he makes his maverick moves, often getting into fights with his fellow players; however, for the first time in several years, the team is winning, attendance is up, and money is pouring in. While it is obvious which character represents "tradition" and which one "individual talent," the film disseminates the tension among multiple voices and images, implying that the dialectic between the traditional values of the community (the "team") and the autonomy of the individual fills more fields than the one where football is played.

Take the field of medicine, for example. We see a young doctor (Matthew Modine) whose concern for the individualized medical needs of the players runs counter to the values of an older team doctor (James Woods), who will sacrifice the health of one player for the sake of winning. Their strained relationship parallels that between the team owner, Christina (Cameron Diaz), and her mother (Ann-Margret). The latter, who tsk-tsks at her daughter's foul tongue, has followed the traditional female role as unemployed spouse and showy appendage to a power-broker husband, while her daughter displays gutsy, hardened self-reliance, making choices that are unusual in comparison not only to the actions of other beautiful women in the film but also to the precedents set by her more traditional father, now dead. "That woman," proclaims the aging football commissioner, "would eat her own children."

The differing perspectives of age and youth appear in a scene between Tony's oldish assistant coach and one of the hotdog linemen, both acted by former football stars. Jim Brown, who plays the coach, is famous in real life for quitting the game at the peak of his career, not wanting to destroy his body for the sake of more money. Oliver Stone, then, has Brown give his own real-life advice to a player in the film (Lawrence Taylor), who, despite his potentially fatal injuries, wants to stay in the game for the million-dollar bonus it will provide. This tends to be the pattern throughout the film: older characters are willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of the team, while the younger ones choose to sacrifice everything for individual glory and money. When the younger doctor questions the ailing lineman about his "balance," Taylor retorts that he needs to balance his checkbook.

Achieving balance is what this film is about, and the story is primarily situated in the tension between Tony's desire to "father" the team and Willie's desire for free agency, between the old way of doing things and the new. Stone symbolizes this dichotomy through a repeated juxtaposition of the football team's mascot, the image of a shark, that ancient biological form, and a jet that flies overhead in such a way that it echoes the shark's shape. Perhaps this is why Stone sets a key scene inside a jet plane, where Tony tells Willie to think of him as a father, and talks about his own love for Monk, Coltrane, and other jazz greats. Willie, who is listening to rap and will later make a self-aggrandizing rap video, tells Tony, "I don't get into the old stuff much."

Later in the film and Willie's career, the maverick star visits the home of Tony, who exhorts him like an Italian godfather addressing one of his family upstarts: "When you change plays, you are showing disrespect." Willie retorts, "Winning is the only thing I respect." Significantly, a television screen in the background displays the famous chariot race scene from the 1959 film Ben-Hur. We see Charlton Heston playing by the rules while trying to avoid being destroyed by a charioteer who will do anything to win the race. Stone then dissolves Heston's face on top of Tony's, making the viewer want to shout, "All right already! We get it!" Indeed, Stone later gives Heston a cameo role as the commissioner—who, echoing Tony, disparages Christina's ruthless, self-serving tactics.

But where the 1959 film set up Heston as a "good guy" battling an "evil" attacker, Any Given Sunday is more complex, illustrating the homily delivered by the team chaplain to the kneeling players: "It rains on the just and the unjust." Stone begins the film with a flash of lightning and includes several shots of rain soaking both traditionalists and individualists alike, as though to ask, Which approach is more just?

Stone's film thus follows the argument of Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which refuses to valorize one side over the other. Instead, Eliot sees individual distinctiveness and conventional values interanimating each other, so that a poet "must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past," while at the same time "the past should be altered by the present."

Eliot wrote his essay in response to critics of his day who, believing that "novelty is better than repetition," used the words "too traditional" as a "phrase of censure." Rather than mystifying originality and autonomy as manifestations of the authentically great poet, Eliot argues that "no poet, no artist of any art [like football?] has his complete meaning alone." We think of Willie, who is described by one newscaster as "a warrior poet, a new breed." But, as Eliot goes on to say, "His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead."

Significantly, Stone sets many of his characters among images of the dead. Several times, both in the press box and at home, we see Christina with a painting of her dead father, the former owner, behind her. The most telling images, however, are the photographs of dead sports heroes hanging on the wall of Tony's house. Willie, true to character, contemptuously refers to them as "ghosts," believing them irrelevant to his type of play. Stone's repeated interpolation of black-and-white photographs from the past as double exposures onto the mise en scene makes them literally appear ghostlike, a haunting presence within the game of football. As Eliot notes, "The most individual parts of [an artist's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert immortality most vigorously."

Any Given Sunday ends, like Eliot's essay, emphasizing the need for both tradition and individual talent. Tony recognizes that many of his traditional techniques no longer work and that he must learn how to extemporize, like Willy, who has also exposed one of the problems of traditional football: the racism, or "placism," by which 70 percent of the players are black, a few are coaches, and none are owners.

Willie himself, however, comes to realize that he can learn from the traditionalists, like Cap (Dennis Quaid), the aging first-string quarterback who repeatedly celebrates and submits to "team" values throughout the film. Though initially resentful that Cap was chosen to start in the championship game, Willie admits, "I learned more from watching Cap in the first half of the game than I have in the last five years." In the second half of the big game, we see Willie obeying the coach's call, followed by Tony telling his assistant coach, "Let the kid do his own thing." Then, just in case we haven't noticed this synthesis of tradition and individual talent, Stone dissolves Willie's face onto Cap's, followed by Tony's face onto Willie's, and topped off with a ghost-like image of a 1930s-era player. Soon after, we see Willie apologizing to his teammates in the huddle, and Christina apologizing to her mother "for the way I've been behaving." Finally, to keep the sentimentality from becoming too cloying, the film ends with a surprise event that outrages both mother and daughter but shows that Tony has authentically appropriated some moves from Willie.

So what's the big deal? Isn't it common sense that a balance must be sought between tradition and individual talent? If contemporary discourse about postmodernism is any indicator, apparently not. Many Christians demonize postmodernism by aligning it with all they consider to be "bad" about culture, especially that which is subversive of "tradition" and what might be called "team values." Yet one could argue that postmodernism is much more "team-oriented" than that which it defines itself against: modernism.

To a certain extent, what Eliot addresses in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is the modernist mystification of the autonomous artist whose unique genius enables him to transcend the status quo in order to create avant-garde art. For the modernist, community, tradition, and family were merely constraints on the artist, whose prophetic vision was clarified by rising above conventional ways of seeing. Hence the modernist tended toward secular humanism, believing that the artist, freed from the shackles of religion, could direct culture toward true enlightenment.

Postmodernism exposed the arrogance of modernism's repudiation of religious communities, arguing that all knowledge, whether of the scientist or the Sunday school teacher, is situated in a cultural tradition; in other words, the language in which we are trained to think molds what we perceive to be true. Therefore one's family—one's discourse "team," as it were—establishes one's identity. The most radical poststructuralists, those postmodernists who subscribe to the notion that reality itself is a construct of language, call into question the very concept of "the self," asking how people can have individualized "essences" if they think and act according to the way discourse has shaped them. ("Language thinks us," as one poststructuralist put it). Thus, while many modernists promoted "individual talent" to excess, poststructuralists often advance "tradition" (in the realm of language) to problematic extremes, making it impossible to theorize how individuals could step outside the linguistic system that molds their psyches in order to challenge injustices within it.

We could say, then, that taken not as a doctrine but as a diagnostic tool, postmodernism has the virtue of exposing fault lines in our culture. There are still plenty of Christians, for example, who, like old-fashioned modernists, assume they can access truth through their individualized, autonomous reading of Scripture, entirely unaware that biblical interpretation is embedded in our faith traditions. As my colleague Douglas Jacobsen puts it, such Christians operate by "a no-hermeneutic hermeneutic," entirely unaware how discourse has shaped their interpretive strategies. At the other extreme are Christians who so idolize tradition that, like radical poststructuralists, they disdain the possibility of a free agent who might protest and work to change traditional discourse from within. (It is especially ironic, of course, when such "traditionalists" are Protestant!)

Much of the confusion—and much of the heat—in debates over Christian responses to postmodernism centers precisely on the distinction between doctrine and diagnosis. Are Christians who have entered "the discourse of postmodernity" embracing a world-view that is, finally, alien to Christianity, or are they gaining insight into what is now the state of things, our common condition, the better to offer a Christian response?

Interestingly, Marxists and leftists more generally are fighting the same battle on their turf. There is no more hard-core Marxist on the American scene than the literary theorist Fredric Jameson, whose 1984 article in the New Left Review, "Postmodernism—the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," became the single most widely cited analysis of postmodernity. As Perry Anderson notes in The Origins of Postmodernity, Jameson eschewed "manichean responses to the postmodern" (the Marxist equivalent, that is, of Christian denunciations of all things postmodern), arguing in stead that "a genuine critique of postmodernism could not be an ideological refusal of it. Rather the dialectical task was to work our way so completely through it, that our understanding of the time would emerge transformed on the [other] side."1 But this strategy of Jameson's has been harshly attacked by some critics on the Left, who have charged Jameson with "accommodation" to the evils of postmodernism.

Those critics should have attended a lecture that Jameson gave in May of 1989 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. At one point in his presentation, Jameson said, barely suppressing a sneer, that Christian fundamentalism perfectly embodied the postmodern impulse. Unlike Marxism, which celebrates historical progress through the overthrow of tradition, both Christianity and postmodernism encourage "the synchronicity of the non-synchronous," which Jameson defines as "the co-existence of distinct moments in history." Indeed, Christians believe that Jesus Christ is as alive now as when he lay in the manger 2,000 years ago, and that he preexisted his moment of birth as co-creator with the Father. Jesus incarnates the synchronicity of the non-synchronous, a "perception," to return to Eliot, "not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence."

The balance Christians might work toward in their attitudes toward "tradition" is glimpsed, I would like to suggest, in Any Given Sunday. At one point Willie, the maverick quarterback, mentions his mother, who refuses to come to his games because they are played on Sundays, which are traditionally reserved for worship. Quite a bit later in the film, Stone provides several brief takes of an older African American woman, dressed in her Sunday best, hat and all, cheering on "my baby" from the stands. An eyeline matchcut from Willie to the hatted woman establishes him as her "baby." Stone has thus rounded out his presentation of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" with Willie's mother, who has obviously decided that any given Sunday can be the Heavenly Father's Day and her chastened son's as well.

Crystal Downing is associate professor of English at Messiah College.

Footnotes:

1. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (Verso, 1998), pp. 65-6.

Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.