The Masculine Glory of Figure Skating??

Mariah and I sometimes argue about whether figure skating is really a sport. I say no for a simple reason: sport involves direct and objective competition against others. In track, for instance, the athletes compete directly with each other to see who can get the best time. They can see the other athletes next to them trying to run faster. In tennis, one competes directly against the opponent across the net. But in figure skating, the skaters simply try to impress judges who, in turn, seem to give their scores for completely subjective reasons. Sure, there are certain penalties for falling and missteps, but then sometimes the judges seem to discount them or increase them. And what about artistic merit? That’s the most subjective thing on Earth. But let me be clear: I don’t intend at all to belittle the strength, dexterity, training, and general physical prowess necessary to do the things that figure skaters do; I simply do not consider that activity a sport because there is no direct, objective competition between the skaters.

Into this semantic mess comes Blades of Glory, a brilliant figure skating comedy starring Jon Heder and Will Ferrell. Mariah and I first saw it in Chicago with Megan on a day when JJ had so much to write about Hegel that he couldn’t come with us.. The film mocks all of the ridiculous crap about figure skating that, in my view, comes from the lack of direct, objective competition between skaters. For instance, it mocks the possibility of ties when officials give two skaters the same score by having Chazz Michael Michaels (Ferrell) and Jimmy MacElroy (Heder) both win the gold at the beginning of the movie. All of the shoving and jostling for position atop the gold medal platform eventually escalates into a full-out fight between the two rivals, hinting at all of the needless tension that must exist between all of these highly trained athletes who have no way of really competing with each other in a fair way for the medals. Between Michaels and MacElroy, each skater believes himself to have earned the medal and performed better than the other, but there’s absolutely no way to settle the dispute on the ice. In real sports, such a dispute would be settled by an overtime period, or a tiebreaker method involving the comparison of win-loss records against identical competition; it would be settled by actual athletic performance, not by a bunch of pretentious, politically influenced fops posing as judges at a table.

But a wonderful side-effect of the absurdity of real-life figure skating is that it puts Will Ferrell at his best. I cannot stop laughing when he slaps the table, or whatever surface is around, and yells “Boom!” after making an offensive or egotistical statement at his circus-style press conferences or during other opportunities to speak. However, the highlight has to be the unglamorous masculinity Ferrell brings to a sport whose male population (so the stereotype goes) generally includes only effeminate prettyboys like MacElroy. But with Michaels, the skating world gets a hairy, slightly chubby, sex-addicted bad boy. While the film suggests that the female population as a whole finds Michaels irresistible, he’s clearly not very attractive, and it’s in these kinds of absurd situations that Ferrell is at his best.

Admittedly, no blog about Blades of Glory written by a straight dude would be complete without at least a brief discussion of Jenna Fischer and her role as the sister of the evil pairs team Stranz and Fairchild. The mainstream discussion of her attractiveness always focuses on how she “dresses down” in The Office so as to look like “an ordinary woman.” While this suggests that “ordinary women” are somehow less attractive than airbrushed, dolled-up movie stars, I happen to think that so-called “ordinary women” are often quite attractive! And in Blades of Glory, Jenna Fischer has another opportunity to “dress down” because she’s playing the role of the supposedly plain sister of the glamorous Stranz and Fairchild. Of course, she’s terribly attractive in that role. Her everygirlness, if that term makes sense, is irresistible. She even manages to bring that characteristic to the scene where she gets all dolled-up because her brother and sister have guilted her into trying to seduce the sex-addicted Michaels in order to create conflict between Michaels and MacElroy, the all-male skating pair. At any rate, Jenna Fischer’s appeal in Blades of Glory, though comedic, does compare to other legendarily attractive female performances like Penelope Cruz in Abre los Ojos and Parminder Nagra in Bend it Like Beckham.

We’ll see how Blades of Glory holds up in the long run, but I suspect that it will take its place alongside titles like Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, Grosse Pointe Blank, and Old School in the pantheon of great comedies that are always circulating in my DVD player.