To be sure, 2000\u2019s Bring It On<\/em> (released 20 years ago this week) leans into the same tropes. The teen comedy, written by Jessica Bendinger and directed by Peyton Reed, centers white, bubbly, blonde Kirsten Dunst, just after her well-regarded turns in Sofia Coppola\u2019s gorgeous, meditative adaptation of The Virgin Suicides<\/em> and the earnestly silly but commercial failure Dick<\/em>. As high school senior Torrance Shipman, the captain of the national champion cheerleading team the Rancho Carne Toros, Dunst is a little bit Cher Horowitz and a little bit Buffy Summers. She lives in a gigantic house, with a manicured backyard that looks out on the sprawling hills of San Diego. She has a seemingly chaste relationship with her older boyfriend, whose kisses she gamely tolerates. She\u2019s hardworking and loyal, goofy and generous. And she is, thoroughly and undeniably, a beneficiary of white privilege, a young woman whose entire cheerleading career has been built off work stolen from Black teenagers on the wrong side of town. Bring It On<\/em> is the story of Torrance\u2019s tenacity in weathering this betrayal, but it\u2019s a documentation of complicity and classism, too, and one of the few films of that moment to subtly interrogate the entitlement of its own protagonists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n From the opening scene of Bring It On<\/em> (which has spawned five direct-to-video sequels), we\u2019re meant to see these young women as passionate and dedicated about cheering, aware and conscious of their rarified position within their sport and their high school, and brusque and honest about their own intragroup backstabbing. An arch cheer, eventually revealed as Torrance\u2019s nightmare, introduces nearly all the main characters and gives us a glimpse into Torrance\u2019s perspective of herself. Starting with the line \u201cI\u2019m sexy, I\u2019m cute! I\u2019m popular to boot!\u201d is a bold move, but the cheer also makes room for detractors (\u201cAnd many think I\u2019m vile\u201d) and for the nastiness the girls often dip into (\u201cDon\u2019t hate us \u2019cause we\u2019re beautiful, \u2019cause we don\u2019t like you either!\u201d). These teenagers are as confident as they are standoffish (cupping their breasts in one moment; throwing up middle fingers in another), and the film\u2019s script is riddled with myriad insults either lobbed at the girls by outsiders, or between each other individually. Bitch<\/em>, whore<\/em>, slut<\/em>, cow<\/em>, and loser<\/em> are in constant rotation, and the recurring use of slurs for gays and lesbians aren\u2019t far behind. <\/p>\n\n\n\n As Torrance\u2019s senior year at Rancho Carne High School begins, she takes over the group from the preceding captain, the tyrannical Big Red (Lindsay Sloane), who left mighty big shoes to fill. It is now Torrance\u2019s task to lead the Toros to another national cheerleading championship\u2014a record sixth in a row. After years of teamwork, the team knows each other\u2019s strengths and weaknesses, but they\u2019ve also grown complacent. When Torrance\u2019s suggestion that they practice a specific pyramid results in a season-ending injury for one of her teammates, the squad is forced to accept a new member: the punky, outspoken Missy (Eliza Dushku, rounding out her work in Buffy the Vampire Slayer<\/em> and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back<\/em> with another bad-girl role). A transfer student from Los Angeles who wows the squad with her acrobatics but also insults them with her sneering description of the Toros as a \u201clast resort\u201d because the school lacks a gymnastics program, Missy makes immediate enemies with Torrance\u2019s primary antagonists, Courtney (Clare Kramer) and Whitney (Nicole Bilderback). And after she walks out of her first practice upon hearing Torrance lead the squad in a cheer set to DJ Kool\u2019s club anthem \u201cLet Me Clear My Throat,\u201d she drops a bomb: Every cheer that Big Red taught the Toros was swiped from the East Compton Clovers, an inner-city LA squad. While the Clovers were pioneering new moves, pushing the boundaries of the sport, and incorporating the sounds and styles of Black American culture into their cheers, Big Red was copying it all and using it to lead the Toros to a series of accolades and TV appearances. <\/p>\n\n\n\n When we meet the Clovers, the imitative aspect of the Toros\u2019 cheers becomes clear. The disconnect between this squad of nearly entirely white girls riding the pony, popping and locking, and doing the whip to hip-hop classics is crystallized by Clovers captain Isis (Gabrielle Union), her arms raised upward in a gesture of authority and power. Initially shot from below, Isis looks regal and commanding (fitting, given her royal name) before easily launching into the cheers that seem so much smoother performed by the Clovers than by the Toros. Her team is cocky and aware of their own greatness, with the bold green, orange, and yellow color stories of their costumes and accessories matching their swagger. When Torrance and Missy try to speed-walk away from the East Compton High School auditorium after their realization of what Big Red did, Isis won\u2019t let them leave unnoticed. She\u2019s the captain this year, and she\u2019s resolute: \u201cI know you didn\u2019t think a white girl made that shit up,\u201d is her scoffing response to Torrance\u2019s admission that she didn\u2019t know of Big Red\u2019s duplicity. Isis is aware of how she and her fellow Clovers are perceived by the world outside of Compton\u2014especially by the type of people who are members of the yacht club in Torrance\u2019s hoity-toity neighborhood\u2014and she\u2019s determined to prove them wrong. With one pithy observation, the Clovers describe the Toros\u2019 theft, and the privilege that protected them: \u201cPutting blond hair on it and calling it something different.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n How to right this wrong? Bring It On<\/em> charts Torrance\u2019s attempts to separate the Toros from the content they essentially stole, and the infighting and disgraces that arise from the squad now actually having to do their own work. Nearly everyone aside from Torrance and Missy wants to keep performing the stolen routine, convinced that their years of success (and the Clovers\u2019 race and socioeconomic status) will insulate them. When they\u2019re embarrassed by the Clovers attending a Toros football game and doing the same cheers more vivaciously and energetically, they decide to hire a professional choreographer. Another humiliation arrives at the regional championships, when they take the stage after the Clovers, who are exceptional, and another team who perform the exact same routine as the Toros\u2014they had hired the \u201cspirit fingers\u201d-espousing Sparky Polastri (Ian Roberts), too. Exposed as the frauds that they are, the Toros must finally grapple with an even playing field against the Clovers, and with a realization that their squad\u2019s history, zip code, and rich parents can\u2019t protect them (at least this one time). When Torrance delivers a check to the Clovers to ensure they can afford attending the national finals, convinced that she\u2019s doing them an altruistic favor, she\u2019s aghast by Isis tearing up the \u201cguilt money.\u201d All Isis wants from Torrance, she says, is that the Toros \u201cbring it\u201d: \u201cThat way, when we beat you, we\u2019ll know it\u2019s because we\u2019re better.\u201d And, lo and behold, they do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In hindsight, the broad strokes of Bring It On<\/em> feel like a precursor to the conversations we\u2019re having more and more often now about the physical and emotional labor weathered by Black Americans everyday in a society built upon white supremacy. In its willingness to make its white protagonists realize their own villainy and complicity, Bring It On<\/em> did what so many other movies of that time, with their deification of the white blonde hero, were unwilling to do. By the end of Bring It On<\/em>, you respect Torrance for her insistence on fair play, but you\u2019re thrilled by what the Clovers have finally achieved: dominance on a stage long denied to them, the bucket of gold at the end of the rainbow they\u2019ve been trying to find for years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Clovers\u2019 final routine is clearly the superior, their triumph is deserved, and their rattling of the ivory tower in which the Toros had so long dwelled is undeniably satisfying. Is that giving too much credit to a movie that also includes a scene where a male cheerleader brags about fingering a teammate through her Spankies? Perhaps. But put aside the typical teen-movie accoutrement of Bring It On<\/em>\u2014the cheating boyfriend; the cutely defiant new love interest (played charmingly by Jesse Bradford, all grown up from Hackers<\/em>); the endless jokes about oral sex; the subplot involving a \u201cspirit stick curse\u201d; the very<\/em> unnecessary car-washing scene, during which the majority-female cast walks around in bikinis\u2014and at its core, the film is about the seductive nature of privilege and classism, and the ease with which so many retreat back to them. \u201cIt feels like first,\u201d Torrance says when the Toros receive second place at the nationals, but that\u2019s white fragility for you. The Clovers win at nationals in Bring It On<\/em>, and in their victory, dared puncture the haze of white privilege that still permeates our culture both on and off the screen.\u00a0 The turn of the 21st century was ruled by a particular kind of comedic heroine. Blond hair, a bubbly personality, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":582,"featured_media":14754,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1429,1422,162],"class_list":["post-14751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-happy-birthday","tag-looking-back","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/582"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14751"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22743,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14751\/revisions\/22743"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/bring-it-on2-1024x576.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/bring-it-on3-1024x689.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/crookedc-01.svg\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"