Nimrod Nation vs. Friday Night Lights

I just finished watching Nimrod Nation, an 8-part documentary series on the Sundance Channel. The series follows a group of people from Watersmeet Township Michigan, a rural community in the western U.P. of Michigan. The primary story arc follows the boy's basketball team as they make a run at the state playoffs. But secondary storylines focus on the stark economic realities of rural America; rural cultural practices (hunting and fishing); and snow.

I found the show both interesting and refreshing. It didn't sanitize, romanticize, or infantize, the poor rural folk depicted in the story. The editing seemed to let the townspeople speak for themselves. The final episode of the series emphasized an important reality (part of life is dealing with disappointments), etc.

In contrast to my take on this show, Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times argues it is a reason why we should be watching NBC's Friday Night Lights. I offer this as exhibit A demonstrating why Ms. Bellafante is an ignorant snob, out of touch with reality. Friday Night Lights is a (poor) adaptation of a (poor) movie, which itself was an adaptation of an (excellent) book. The book's storyline focuses on highschool football in the late 1980s in Odessa Texas. It followed the real working class boys who played football, some of whom hoped to use athletics as a ticket away from the oil fields of west Texas, while others played for the reasons that most of us played sports (because it's fun and it helps you meet girls). The television show adaptation (in so far as I can tell, I suffered through three episodes last year and deleted the tivo season pass. The storyline was cliche, the characters plastic, and the writing droll. In short there was little of redeeming value.

Ms. Bellafante suggests that the creator of Nimrod Nation borrows conventions from FNL so much that "it almost seems to be rampaging on intellectual property." Her examples: focusing on high school sports in rural America, and splicing radio commentary over game footage). I suppose she has not seen one of the dozen sports based documentaries produced over the last two decades.

Anyway, while I am not an ivy league trained cultural critic for the New York Times, I can wholeheartedly recommend Nimrod Nation over Friday Night Lights.

amusement in other's outrage

The newspaper from the hometown of my youth has a story today about the conviction of a 21 year-old man who forcibly raped a young woman in the center of town. Thanks to the greater equalizer of the inter-tubes any and all may publicly comment on the story.
Apparently someone is discusted.

discusted wrote on Jan 25, 2008 6:15 AM:
" Why only 13 years? He gets off easy. The victim will suffer for her lifetime! Twenty five years should have been the punishment! "

Sociologically, I think these sentiments are important. Though the case described in the story is a statistical outlier (most rapes and other sexual assaults are not perpetrated by strangers; they often occur in situations that lack hard-edge concreteness for making decisions; and the meanings associated with the sexual conduct are contested), it serves as a lightening rod to absorb public outrage. This case lacks those ambiguities and murky waters that make this topic controversial. As such, any and all are free to vent away.

What's dangerous, however, is for positional advocates to turn to this story as the exemplar of all rapes/sexual assaults. Sociologist Joel Best has built his career showing how advocacy groups count phenomena using the most inclusive criteria possible and then marry the measurements to a-typical but compelling stories. This may help social movement organizations mobilize resources, but it also leads to policies where 17 year old boys are placed on sex-offender registries because they had relations with their 15 year-old girl friend, whose parents found out and contacted the authorities. (Which is not to say I am supporting adolescent sexuality... but I question the wisdom of administratively labeling a hormonally normal 17 year-old as a sexual predator. Sex offender registries evolved through this very process).