suspension of disbelief: cinema of ass-beating

last night, the ucla bruins got their collective asses handed to them by the florida gators, 73-57. sure, ostensibly this has very little to do with film, but let me assure you, however, that the modern sports telecast does, in fact, deserve a place in the pantheon of 21st-century cinema.


florida's joakim noah takes it to the hole on ucla scrub lorenzo mata in the worst championship game of the year.


post-structuralist philosopher foucault wrote that studying systems of thought is "a matter not of knowing what is affirmed and valorized in a society or a system of thought but of studying what is rejected and excluded. ... madness has always been excluded." i posit that foucault would see the modern sporting event, say the ncaa finals or the season-opener ny yankees vs. oakland athletics, as the so-called "festival of folly"; e.g., roles are reversed and the spectator, aka the viewer (or moviegoer, have you) resorts to "alcohol and drugs as a way of contesting the social order," thus creating artificial madness (e.g., suspension of disbelief).
thusly, the same disbelief that a viewer undergoes to accept a celluloid narrative—at 24 frames per second——is not unlike the mental process a sports fan undergoes while watching his team play a respective sport: the madness of championing performance, be it athletic or aesthetic.
furthermore, the players themselves view the game with a common modus operandi. take, for example, barry zito of the oakland during last night's game at mcafee park (the park name is as well vis a vis a byproduct of industrial society disenfranchising the common man—another form of madness). zito, who went into the game confident in his stroke and even retired the first few yankee hitters, went on to give up seven earned runs in one and one-third innings.
fortunately for zito, cinema fans, deconstructionists and drunks alike, sports possess very little semblance to the psychopathology and "mental illness" of everyday life (this bodes well for oakland, who should step up tuesday night when ace rich harden takes the mound). as for cinema, however, the aforementioned suspension of disbelief rings true. what foucault refers to as the "tramautizing quality that our societies possess" can invariably affect even the most casual beer-guzzling spectator.
thusly, when the bruins or a's get their asses beat, it's not just a loss for cali sports——it's a loss for mankind.



oakland's barry zito, in an interview last thursday at raley field, said his 12-to-6 breaking ball was money—ny's alex rodriguez hit the pitch for a grand slam in the second inning of monday night's opening-night loss (photo by FFT, natch).