Brehm Center

            In January, Save the Last Dance was a surprise box office hit. With no stars to grace the marquee and a price tag of only $13 million, the film will make over $85 million in U.S. box-office receipts alone. The movie is a Romeo-and-Juliet story with an edge, told with dance as its primary metaphor. One reviewer described it as “ballet meets hip-hop.” Sara is a white, high school ballerina from a small town that Norman Rockwell might have painted. She has Julliard ambitions, that is until her mom is killed in a car crash and she has to move in with her estranged father on the South Side of Chicago. Sullen and disillusioned, she is brought back to life (and “dance”) by a smart, assured African American classmate, Derek, who is himself seeking his dream of getting into Georgetown and becoming a pediatrician. It is Derek who teaches Sara hip-hop, helps her overcome her false guilt over her mom’s death, and coaches her in her free-form, balletic dance for the climactic audition. The story is predictable, but the emotion and ambition real. And by the end we want both of these young heroes to succeed.

            Some older-generation viewers might find the movie uncomfortable because it portrays a white girl dating an African American. (“We didn’t do that in our day.”) However, teenage viewers have voted in favor of being color-blind by their overwhelming attendance. It’s just not an issue to them. And if there is a tension for the filmmakers, it is elsewhere, in the rightful jealousy of the black high school girls who resent having such a promising “catch” taken away from them by one of the few white girls in their school. But ultimately, for both black and white, love prevails. In this movie, relationships are more important than the boxes we often create for them.

The same theme is to be found in the popular movie Remember the Titans which played some months earlier and is now out on video. Here, again, is family entertainment with a message. Based on a true story but told more as inspirational drama than documentary, the movie recreates the story of the integration of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia in 1971. State champions in football, the all-white high school is merged with a black school nearby and a black coach, Herman Boone (played wonderfully by Denzel Washington), is brought in from the South to coach the integrated team. Part of the resulting drama has to do with whether the Titan’s much-loved white coach, Bill Yoast (Will Patton), who has been demoted to assistant coach in the changeover, and Boone, with his bottled-up rage over bigotry, can model a better way. Will the segregation that has characterized much of the town’s adult population be allowed to continue? We know what the answer will be (at least in this movie), but we still care how the players and coaches live into it. We clap and cry along with them.

            Just as Save the Last Dance avoids sinking to the level of cliché while following a predictable trajectory, so Remember the Titans dances around multiple sports cliches without being reduced to caricature. As one reviewer commented. The movie “ends up slipping every tackle and making it all the way to paydirt and glory.” And just as with Save the Last Dance, how Titans shows us a better way is through the wisdom of the teenagers it portrays. While the adults are scheming to maintain old structures, or are reticent to engage the new, it’s the students who want to win and thus come together to create a color-blind team. Black defensive star Julius Campbell becomes the friend of the white team captain Gerry Bertier, and even when personal tragedy strikes, their friendship prevails and the team proves victorious.

            Both of these teen movies are at their best when we are allowed to enter the high school world on its own terms and observe its chatter, its values, and its dreams. Neither is great cinema, nor were they created to be. Instead, they were filmed to be engaging entertainment with a moral. We know we are being manipulated, but whether through dance or football, we are inspired nonetheless. There is not meant to be much complexity here. Rather we are given reality-rooted fables that show us all a better way to live. We need not continue with our cautious patterns of polite segregation. In fact, tolerance needs not merely to be tolerated, but embraced.  

Both Remember the Titans and Save the Last Dance recognize that for those under twenty, intolerance is perhaps the number one sin. “Different strokes for different folks” is their proverb of choice. Whatever helps one to fulfill his dream, or to live out her choices, should be affirmed, even celebrated. Such a life-philosophy can have its limitations, but there is a lesson here for all of us. We in the church too often organize our lives around models of exclusivity. We want our Church to become multi-racial, multi-cultural, and gender inclusive. Yet our churches continue to be the most segregated institutions in our land. Rather than help all people to “dance” again, we make the steps so complicated and limit ourselves to only the “right” dancers. In the process the church’s celebration of the Good News becomes anything but.

            And yet we want better. Could these teen movies help us by their example? Do you recall the words of Isaiah? “ The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” (Isaiah 11:6) Perhaps part of that eschatological prophecy concerning inclusiveness can be understood to have begun already with our youth.

Robert K. Johnston and Catherine Barsotti

February 12, 2001