Flashes of Panic

One of the “additional features” on the Murderball DVD is a segment in which the “stars” of the documentary, members of the USA “Quad Rugby” team (that is, rugby as played by quadriplegics, which doesn’t have too much in common with green-grass rugby, other than the violence,) appear on “Larry King Live.” At some point, one of them points out that not only is the film a documentary, but it’s a documentary about people in wheelchairs, which changes the image to, as he put it, “a movie people think they should see, not one they want to see. It’s not like that at all.”

And it’s not. (No movie which includes an episode of “Jackass” as an additional feature could be so classed. A and I agreed that would probably be the only episode of “Jackass” we’d ever see.) However, I did only see it because A was assigned to see it for a class. And I did learn a few things, like a definition of quadriplegic, and the “point” rating system they use to ensure a relatively similar level of physical ability among players on the floor.

At heart, though, it’s a sports movie, following a team (and their rivals’ coach, who was once one of them,) through a World Championship loss and the training cycle leading to their appearance at the Athens Paralympics in 2004 (leading me to wonder what degree of influence the Paralympics have on the architecture of the Olympics—do you build a gymnasium differently if you know you’re going to be repurposing it a few months later?) It’s about personalities. (One player is described by high school classmates: “He was an asshole before the accident, so any attempt to blame his grumpiness on the chair is misguided.”)

The point, stated over and over in the supplementary material, is that the players are “athletes first,” which would seem to go against the way they are introduced at the beginning of the film, with subtitles describing how they came to be quadriplegic. By midway through, it becomes apparent that the titles are less of an attempt to deliver an initial shock and more like a player card, listing the accidents and impairments the way runners list PRs. The point is driven home several times in the interviews with the athletes; most of them reject the idea of having full use of their limbs back. “Look how much we’ve done,” one points out. “We couldn’t compete for a gold medal before.”

Now Playing: End Of The Universe from Live Light (France, 11/1994) by Ride