The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training PDF
Preview The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training
ng uri he T Abby Josh Wilker The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training Josh Wilker studied writing at Johnson State College and Vermont College. He writes about his life through his childhood baseball cards at http://cardboardgods.net and in his book Cardboard Gods (2010). He lives with his wife in Chicago. Bad News Bears[FIN].indd 1 3/18/11 9:48 AM also available in this series: They Live by Jonathan Lethem Death Wish by Christopher Sorrentino The Sting by Matthew Specktor Lethal Weapon by Chris Ryan Heathers by John Ross Bowie Bad News Bears[FIN].indd 2 3/18/11 9:48 AM Deep Focus The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training Josh Wilker Series Editor, Sean Howe Soft Skull Press an imprint of Counterpoint | berkeley Bad News Bears[FIN].indd 3 3/18/11 9:48 AM Copyright © 2011 by Josh Wilker All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wilker, Josh. The bad news bears in breaking training / Josh Wilker; edited by Sean Howe. p. cm. ISBN 978-1-59376-418-0 1. Bad news bears in breaking training (Motion picture) I. Howe, Sean. II. Title. PN1997.B1955W55 2011 791.43—dc22 2011005457 Cover design by Spacesick Interior design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc. Printed in the United States of America Soft Skull Press An Imprint of Counterpoint LLC 1919 Fifth Street Berkeley, CA 94710 www.softskull.com www.counterpointpress.com Distributed by Publishers Group West 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Bad News Bears[FIN].indd 4 3/18/11 9:48 AM The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training Bad News Bears[FIN].indd 5 3/18/11 9:48 AM Bad News Bears[FIN].indd 6 3/18/11 9:48 AM 1 Stolen Vehicle Dear Looper, This will probably end up in a cruddy post office dumpster. No one is ever where they were. I found it while clearing out some junk after my old man croaked. A billion years ago I probably wanted to send it to you from Houston but we came right back too fast. Recognize the picture on the front? It is nothing now. They want to tear it down. I remember when we first saw it from inside. We walked out onto the field and wowed like a pack of stumbling drunks. The crowd the giant scoreboard the dome roof way up high. It was the best thing and I mean ever. You should have been there Looper and you were you always will be. Thats all I wanted to say. Your pal, Tanner Boyle Bad News Bears[FIN].indd 1 3/18/11 9:48 AM Flaws Love has nothing to do with perfection. The world is ban- daged together, a fractured thing at best. Light leaks out the cracks. That’s how I try to see it. So let me start with a brief, relatively inconsequential moment in the latter stages of the 1977 sequel The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. A flaw. The central figure, an under- appreciated and largely forgotten American icon named Kelly Leak, troubled and rebellious star slugger of a Little League baseball team, the Bears, is shown in full, from the side, reach- ing to pull back the curtain in his hotel room. The next shot shows Kelly’s arm and the view out the uncovered window. The view is an enclosed stadium in Houston, Texas: the As- trodome. The outside of the Astrodome has been shown once before from another vantage point and will be shown once more, later, from a third, just before the film moves inside the stadium for its climactic final act. No matter the vantage point, the view always looks the same: a large, impersonal, symmetrical structure surrounded by pavement. In the earlier shot, Kelly considered the Astrodome from behind the wheel of a customized van. Later, he will gaze upon it from the park- ing lot at dusk. The three viewings of the Astrodome seem, considering Kelly’s pensive squint and the swelling orchestral regalia in the soundtrack, to be meant as moments of reckon- ing, as if Kelly is grappling with the sense that his destiny lies within the looming symmetrical construction. 2 | josh wilker Bad News Bears[FIN].indd 2 3/18/11 9:48 AM I never really understood the idea of destiny. Life seems random to me, asymmetrical, entropic. It doesn’t add up. I find myself drawn to ragged narratives, bumbling human sin- cerity, the flawed. Which brings us back around, finally, to this: in the brief scene in the hotel room, Kelly is shown in full, from the side, pulling the drapes toward his body; then in the next shot, which is aimed out the window at the As- trodome, at the idea of destiny, Kelly’s arm is visible, and it is pushing the drapes away from his body. It’s a continuity mistake. The interior shot was taken in a hotel in California while the view of the Astrodome was taken in Houston. And so somewhere in between the two shots, the tiny detail of whether Kelly was pulling the drapes toward him or pushing them away was fumbled. It’s probably not something you would consciously notice unless you watched the movie repeatedly, as I have. But somewhere in your sub- conscious an undercutting, discordant note would sound, a little jagged flicker, a minute puncturing and subsequent in- finitesimal deflation of an ideal. Symmetry, destiny: illusions. This movie, which I loved at first sight as much as I’ve ever loved any movie, is sprinkled with these subtly unset- tling fuckups. It was cheaply and quickly made. Unimportant objects appear and disappear unaccountably. East is west, dusk is dawn. Shadows of camera equipment and boom mikes flicker in and out of one scene and a muffled, disembodied voice bleeds into another. The away team is the home team. The home team is the away team. Rules are blurred, batting orders jumbled. Upon close inspection, the movie begins to resemble a dream in the mind of a sleeper on the edge of the bad news bears in breaking training | 3 Bad News Bears[FIN].indd 3 3/18/11 9:48 AM
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