Sport as Cultural Shorthand: Commonsense Sporting Ideologies in Non-Sport Films

Sports has aspects that are typified to consider something “sport.” These aspects include, but are not limited to, competition, physical activity, play, dominance, aggression, a patriarchal hierarchy, among others. The cinematic world has used sports to communicate messages about their characters and drive plot development. This investigation is not concerned with sport films, which have sport as a centerpiece of the film. Rather, this presentation attempts to understand films that use sport, often in smaller ways, to build characters, provide an escape from the “real” world, and advance plot points. Generally speaking, these films utilize sport to advance the story with stereotypical depictions of the sporting world. A few films will be analyzed to discuss how sports are utilized in films that are not about sports but as plot and character developers. These films include Top Gun, Top Gun: Maverick, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Inside Out 2, The Fan, and The Dark Knight Rises. Understanding how non-sport content creators like directors, producers, etc. use sport allows researchers to analyze the ‘commonsense’ ideologies elicited through sport. Some of these representations and utilities are problematic as they represent certain groups of people, certain actions, or certain concepts attached to sport as normal. I challenge the representations of sport found in cinema through the historicization of sporting events, common ways of knowing sport, and making sense of how cinematic sport portrayals may be an issue for sport scholars.