Hoop Dreams

I first saw this movie on the last week it ran in theaters in a majority black and hispanic Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. There were about three people in the audience, and having walked in drinking the kool-aid that I was about to watch a movie that told me that all things were possible in America, I found the movie a terrible let-down. One subject of this film, William Gates, is mentioned in the first 30 minutes by a local sportscaster as a name to remember in the coming years, possibly as a future NBA draft pick. It becomes clear by the end of the film that that dream is a bit elusive. If anything, unlike hooks, I felt the sad undercurrent message of the film was that Gates and Agee had slightly better chances of success only because of their basketball prowess. The twisted Chicago private school system seemed to favor their athletic potential over that of their (unseen) more academically talented neighbors. There seemed to clearly be something wrong with that picture, and I don't believe the filmmakers did anything to encourage it. That the private school in the film seems to exploit Gates and Agee is relatively clear. I don't see any glorification of that school with its relatively maniacal coach and mostly ethnically homogenous student body.

I suppose the ethical questions that I've considered about the film through the years concern the differences between what the filmmakers and the subjects themselves would consider to be their greater hardships and humiliations. There is a long sequence which depicts a mother methodically removing lightbulbs after the electricity has gone out in the apartment. It seems a relatively common occurence, and one that she doesn't seem to mind, but the camera lingers in a certain way to capture the "horror" of her poverty. At the same time, Gates's new baby appears without showing us a long drawn-out pregnancy. Documentarians make choices, just like every other artist. But I wonder if the dissonance here was one more of class than of race between the filmmaker and subject. The filmmakers could understand living in an apartment with a new mouth to feed. But they could not understand the terror of an apartment without electricity. And so that is where they placed the emphasis.