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REMEMBER
THE TITANS WARNS THE SUPREME COURT NOT TO RESEGREGATE
AMERICA
Although
the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional
in 1954, some 500 of the 1,500 school districts in the United
States had done nothing to integrate enrollment by 1968, when
the Supreme Court ruled that immediate integration was required.
In 1971, Alexandria, Virginia, finally desegregated schools,
and children formerly attending two other high schools were
bused to formerly all-white T. C. Williams High School. All
the football coaches for the white high schools had been white,
yet another barrier to be overcome by blacks. In Remember
the Titans, directed by Boaz Yakin, we view a remarkable
true story about reconciliation between the races in Alexandria.
During the film we see how initially hostile attitudes by
whites toward blacks became transformed into a joyous appreciation
of the virtues of having the races cooperate and learn from
each other. Before the first year began at that school, Herman
Boone (played by Denzel Washington) was named head football
coach. Genteel Bill Yoast (played by Will Patton), a coach
whose winning career made him eligible for the Virginia Hall
of Fame, was thus passed over for reasons of affirmative action.
At first angered at his replacement, Yoast was looking for
another job when he realized that a boycott of the team by
white players would jeopardize their chances for college,
so he accepted Boone’s offer to stay on as defensive coach.
Perhaps another reason for his decision was that he realized
that there was something special about Boone. At the summer
training camp, where black and white football players practiced
together, a similar transformation gradually occurred among
the 99 players, especially when they went to the battlefield
at Gettysburg and heard a stirring speech by Boone. Called
"Coach Coon" by his detractors, Boone encountered verbal brickbats
and even a rock thrown through his front window. Meanwhile,
the white players had to endure the wrath of rednecks, first
in Alexandria and then at other schools in the football league,
because they were playing on an integrated team. Clearly,
whites learned more from blacks about perseverance in the
face of prejudice, and the group spirit that developed is
credited with inspiring a string of victories at every football
game played by the T. C. Williams team with only one exception—the
national championships. At the end of the film, titles tell
us what happened to every prominent character in the movie,
and we leave the film impressed that they enjoyed happy and
successful lives because they were making history in 1971
for a town which, even today, is a model for racial integration
in housing as well as schooling. For many filmviewers, Remember
the Titans may seem a feel-good movie to be enjoyed
primarily because teenagers overcame great odds to win football
victories with the help of compassionate adults. But Remember
the Titans, possibly the best film ever made on the
positive results of racial integration, comes at a time when
the Supreme Court has been issuing rulings that appear close
to ending school integration as a goal for public education
in the United States.
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Supreme
Court justices might want to watch this film before legalizing
a new American apartheid. For this reason, the Political
Film Society has nominated Remember the Titans
for best film of 2000 in promoting human rights and best
film exposé for bringing to light facts not generally known.
MH
TIGERLAND
EXPOSES THE ABSURDITY OF MILITARY TRAINING FOR VIETNAM
American
combat troops in Vietnam were not particularly revered,
and there have been few war heroes aside from those who
suffered as prisoners of war in the Hanoi Hilton. Although
some have attributed the American defeat to various factors,
it was not until the release of Tigerland,
directed by Joel Schumacher, that the American public could
catch a glimpse of the deeply flawed military training before
assignment to Vietnam. Ross Klavan, one of the screenwriters,
based the film on his experiences. The movie takes place
in September 1971 at Fort Polk, Louisiana, where infantry
soldiers were given eight weeks of basic training and then
one week of combat training. The portion of the base for
realistic jungle combat training, with conditions approximating
those in Vietnam, was called Tigerland. We become acquainted
with several young recruits and why they were in the infantry.
Although most were drafted to fight for the lost cause,
Jim Paxton (played by Matthew Davis) decided after two years
of college that experience in Vietnam would be invaluable
for his chosen career as a writer. Paxton provides the voiceovers
at the beginning and end of the film, but most of the story
centers on Roland Bozz (played by Colin Farrell), who questioned
all the inhumane elements of the training and helped several
misfits to get discharged from the army. According to the
film’s tagline, "The system wanted them to become soldiers;
one soldier just wanted to be human." We see that most of
the training involved verbal humiliation, with no praise
even for successful marksmanship; although the purpose might
have been to uproot individualistic thinking, presumably
to show the need for teamwork, the actual effect was to
demoralize and thus sap the trainees of the will to fight
courageously or gloriously. We observe how young men were
instructed to use radio cables as instruments of torture,
presumably to extract information from future captured Vietcong,
and one hapless recruit assigned to maintain discipline
among his fellow trainees becomes the guinea pig when Bozz
walks away in disgust. Since the buddy system was not employed,
recruits channeled their anger due to the verbal humiliation
at one another, so many fights break out, and future psychopathic
killers emerge. One such lunatic is Wilson (played by Shea
Whigham). The climax of the film comes during a maneuver
in Tigerland, where Bozz and Paxton are hunted by Wilson,
who breaks regulations by using real bullets and injures
Paxton. The point of the film appears to be that American
soldiers were ill prepared to fight in a war that they knew
was unpopular because the training was utterly barbaric
and chaotic. Superior officers, knowing that no victory
was possible, were instead trying to train them to survive.
Nearly a docudrama of actual conditions of military training
for Vietnam, the Political Film Society has nominated Tigerland
for an award as best film exposé of the year 2000. MH
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