Let Us Now Praise Giant Men | To Live and Die in . . . Denver?
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Let Us Now Praise Giant Men is a basketball column by Liam Baranauskas. This edition is about Robert Altman’s The Player, the NBA finals, and buying VHS tapes at Pathmark.
I came to a realization while watching the Nuggets sweep the Lakers. I don’t hate the Lakers. I should, I know. Everyone who’s not an actual Lakers fan hates the Lakers—they’re the rich kids of the NBA, collectively embodying every stereotype of pretentiousness and entitlement associated with their city. But I like their uniforms, and I think it’s nice that they devote a front row seat to an incompetently sculpted wax figure of Jack Nicholson in tribute to the late actor. And when I was a kid in the 1980s, barely cognizant of sports except as a way of dividing good guys from bad guys (maybe with a vague notion that this was a proxy for larger cultural ideas), the Lakers were cool, typifying a stylish, graceful Blackness, especially in comparison with the very white, very doofy Celtics.
Given a choice between the Lakers and the Celtics, a child could tell. Magic Johnson was appealing. Larry Bird was not. Magic smiled and was handsome and threw no-look, behind-the-back passes; Bird scowled and was ugly and shot fifteen-foot baseline jumpers. Magic Johnson was named Magic. Larry Bird was named Larry.
Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of taste and how it develops—how we learn to like what we like. I think this is due to dreading the inevitability that, sooner than we think, all mass media will exclusively be created by AI. Although I think we can’t really comprehend the fallout from outsourcing our cultural mediation of the collective unconscious to objects with no consciousness whatsoever, I don’t fear the technology itself as much as I do the people and systems in charge of distributing its products. Studios and labels have long incentivized artists to do exactly what generative machine learning does: imitate what comes before. But we react to what’s different about a movie or song or book—the moments that reveal something we’ve always known but never realized, moments that are, by definition, new. We’ve relied on the people who make things to recognize these moments in their own work for so long that I can’t see how removing them from the process will lead to anything besides the homogenization of our shared well of collective dreams.
(I suppose it’s possible that there’ll be a mass uprising to reclaim art and beauty from the forces of corporatized convenience. But, I mean, come the fuck on.)
The NBA, with its thirty teams and maybe 500 players, is, compared to the infinite possibilities of creativity, a closed system. You sort your opinions of these teams and players with the illusion of choice—this guy’s cool, this team sucks—but every team or guy has the same goal: to get the leather ball through their team’s metal hoop more times than the other team does. This makes it a little like a preview of an AI-dominated media landscape. Just like no one’s going to start deflating the ball or making sandwiches in a professional basketball game, AI’s not going to give us a new Sun Ra or Beau Travail—work with an explicit goal to create something untethered to obvious influences. It probably could, but why would a studio executive tell it to? We’ll get work that succeeds or fails in its imitation—essentially, winners and losers. These are functionless goals for art, dead ends, non-starters.
But basketball is meant to divide winners from losers too, and I love watching basketball. I react to it, and those reactions feel good and genuine and like a part of me. I still dislike the Celtics, so when Boston’s improbable comeback against Miami in the Eastern Conference Finals fell short in game seven, I felt good about their misfortune, and kind of bad about feeling good about it. I also felt good about the internal conflict between the two feelings. I don’t really understand that last reaction, but I’m trying to figure it out.
As near as I can tell, the process of discovering what you like starts with establishing a cultural baseline, which (like my sorting of the Lakers and Celtics) happens without your realizing it. I guess it’s probably based in social identity, and also maybe you have a cool older sibling to play you Bikini Kill. From there you start to want to like things, looking for elements you react to in certain books or movies or songs to guide you to other things to obsess over.
When I was a kid, I owned a dozen or so VHS tapes of movies I’d liked when I saw them at the Colonial, our decrepit, now-shuttered movie palace that showed second-run movies for a dollar. I’d convinced my mom to buy me these tapes from the discount section at our local Pathmark. They were my movies. I knew them by heart. One led to another and would occasionally lead me to something outside of movies altogether. The first time I ever heard of William Blake was in Bull Durham, which explicitly takes the aphorism “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” as a guiding philosophy. It’s also a film that inspired in me a strange affection for Tim Robbins, and his character, Nuke LaLoosh, who’s dopey, gangly, and insecure, but still fucks, which basically makes him an aspirational figure for a twelve-year-old boy.
Liking Tim Robbins led me to The Player, Robert Altman’s movie about movies, which I watched on my Pathmark-purchased VHS more times than I can count in the mid-90s. I recently rewatched it for the first time in years, and, as happens with wonderful art, age had opened it up more. This time, I saw it as a movie about dirt, messiness, and the lengths to which powerful people like Griffin Mill, the Hollywood studio executive Robbins plays, go to make themselves appear clean. Metaphorical dirt—gossip and threats—spurs the plot, but it’s Mill’s reaction to this dirt, his need to wipe it away, that leads him to kill a spurned writer. Dirt is at its most threatening when it’s unique to the person who’s responsible for it (in this way, it’s kind of like art itself). After drowning the writer in a puddle, Mill notices his handprint on the victim’s car window. He smashes the glass, replacing the minor, personal mess of his smear with a bigger, more anonymous one.
Dirt is everywhere in the film, but (again, like art) it’s not necessarily bad. Mill is called into a police lineup while he and the dead writer’s ex-girlfriend, played by Greta Scacchi, are submerged in a resort’s mud baths, cucumber slices over their eyes, paying to be immersed in filth as a mark of decadence. When Mill stands to take the phone call, the mud slides off his impossibly long, impossibly white body like he’s coated in Vaseline, leaving his skin as clean as bone. That cleanliness is the film’s real menace: the early-90s sheen of oversized suits covering soulless bodies; minimally-appointed houses in the Hollywood Hills full of people lying to each other.
The theme of cleanliness as disguise comes across in a larger sense, too—the film’s structure eats its own tail, blurring the fiction of the film itself and its films-within-the-film to wrap up all its loose ends in a neat, ostensibly happy, and utterly false ending, then throws this scrubbed unbelievability in the viewer’s face. What you get is a story about the way stories can deflect truth even while they reflect it, a narrative about how the idea of “suspension of disbelief” treats the audience like a bunch of marks.
There’s nothing novel anymore about art that calls attention to its own construction, so I was expecting this ending to come across as obnoxiously meta in 2023. But it didn’t. I still cared about the characters, even as the film gleefully—but somehow sympathetically—indicted me for caring about them. Watching it again, the fact that the film’s approach to form was able to elicit (still!) an emotional reaction from me was exhilarating. I remembered how I felt when I first saw it. Holy shit, you could do that! The Player did it! Other stuff might too!
I don’t know who to root for in this year’s Finals. The answer should be easy. The Nuggets’ offense is aesthetically enjoyable—it’s frenetic, involving all the players and space on the court. Jamal Murray’s shot is mercurial enough to be both thrilling and maddening, and I like his emotional transparency—most of the time, players’ “mean mugs” look silly, but when Max Strus smacked Murray in the head as Murray dunked in Game 2 of the Finals, I believed it when Murray scowlingly ignored Strus’s attempt at a conciliatory handshake. And Nikola Jokić is an icon of implausibility, a savant of practical geometry with Andy Capp’s nose, a dude who moves at the pace of rising bread dough and spews passes as unpredictably as a sugar-high kid with a Super Soaker. Nothing Jokić does on the court looks like it should work until the moment it does, which should be an inspiration to anyone who likes things when they’re done incorrectly.
But liking something versus wanting to like it is easy when you’re talking about sports—you notice, when a shot’s in the air, whether you’re hoping it’ll go in or not. While watching the Nuggets dismantle the Lakers in the Western Conference Finals, I found myself hoping their shots would miss. I didn’t get it. Is it because Michael Porter, Jr.’s and Aaron Gordon’s faces make them look like jerks? Their dull uniforms (pixelated rainbow throwbacks excepted)? An unshaken stereotype of Denver as being full of hacky sacks and breweries making misogynistically named IPAs?
I guess what I’m left with is the lack of narrative about the team, which pains me to say, because it makes me feel manipulated by the clumsy storytelling of corporate shills. I’d like to think I’m above the manufactured rivalries and shoehorned historical narratives meant to contextualize a game’s storyline in the five minutes before tip-off. I have a hard time believing that anyone on the Knicks or Heat really cares about a thirty-year-old fight between Charles Oakley and Alonzo Mourning. But the Lakers have somehow (for me) retained the fundamental glossy joyousness of their 80s incarnations, even if nothing on the court reflects it. Meanwhile, the Nuggets are stuck without a story, at least one that’s easily recognizable. As a franchise, the Nuggets are a minor character. When AI writes the next movie about a ragtag bunch of misfits learning to play together under a gruff-but-lovable coach with a drinking problem, eight seconds of a montage scene will be devoted to their beating the Nuggets.
But if you don’t buy into the manufactured team narratives flogged by sports media, what are you left with? There are players’ backstories, but the NBA is as plagued by nepo-babies as a prestigious writing workshop, and anyway, backstory doesn’t really go too far when you’re trying to contextualize what the players are actually doing. I can only picture seventeen-year-old Jimmy Butler shaking the oil from a basket of fries at a Texas McDonald’s so many times before the image loses its poignancy. There’s really nothing there that enlivens an eight-foot push shot over Al Horford.
This dynamic between the stories we’re told we should care about and the ones we actually do care about applies to the whole Miami team. The Heat should be cool! They’re underdogs, collectively and individually, made up mostly of overachieving second-rounders and other teams’ discards, made cohesive through relentless conditioning and team-building. But the collective ethos of “Heat Culture” (and the easy narrative it creates) smacks of online hucksterism—a real high-seeds-hate-it-when-you-use-THIS-ONE-EASY-TRICK-to-make-the-NBA-Finals vibe. Weirdly, this connects them to the LeBron-era Miami teams, their ostensible opposites in athletic pedigree who nonetheless shared a performative arrogance that masked the dullness of their story. Those teams were easy to root against not only because of the competitive imbalance brought about by the then-new idea of forming a “superteam” (which should have been cool, too—three pals teaming up!) but also because James, with his intelligence, speed, and strength, seemed unfair on his own. The LeBron/Wade/Bosh Heat were the Winklevoss twins; the Butler/Adebayo Heat are some anonymous dude flexing in front of a Lamborghini on Instagram. Either way, I don’t want to root for anyone trying to get me to invest in their crypto scam.
When I was a teenager, in part through my small collection of VHS tapes and in part through reruns of The A-Team, I developed a laundry list of elements that I liked in narrative storytelling and art in general. These included slapstick, yelling and/or general rudeness, post–World War II Nazis in South America, grotesque masks (literal or metaphorical), hallucinations/dreams/visions, elaborate homemade contraptions, and elaborate homemade contraptions built in montage scenes soundtracked by a wailing electric guitar variation on a score’s theme. It’s rare for anything (besides The A-Team) to check off every single box on this list, but as a teenager I discovered a surprising amount of work that I loved touched upon multiple categories, at least in spirit: Hitchcock (via Notorious), Eyes Without a Face, Marathon Man, the Jesus Lizard, Duchamp, Flannery O’Connor. Even now, a lot of the new things that I discover I love connect to this core of what I liked to begin with. I didn’t have a map, but I found my way through what had once seemed an impenetrable wilderness. The gut-level resonance I felt when something moved me wasn’t caused by these objective elements, but they gave me a context in which to understand it. The incredibly specific bread crumbs I’d left behind hadn’t ended up constraining me to a single path. They’d opened new horizons.
Paradoxically, The Player’s artificial neatness made me realize that I love messiness, loose ends, elements that seem not to belong and are more wonderful because they stick out. Think the Flitcraft story in Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon; the obnoxiously loud Lou Reed backup vocals shouting “SWEETLY!” in “Lady Godiva’s Operation”; Roland Kirk’s grunts that are louder than any of the three saxophones he’s playing simultaneously. Is it so simple as loving work that pulls back the curtain on itself to reveal the human hands that made it? Maybe!
The Player’s perspective on artifice means it portrays aspiring writers as worse than thieving executives, because writers are willing accomplices in their own debasement. This makes them patsies. They can’t bring their creations to life without humiliating themselves. One of the film’s running jokes has them reducing their work to modifications of past successful properties: “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman,” or “a psychic, political, thriller comedy with a heart, not unlike Ghost meets Manchurian Candidate.” They’re looking to remove their own fingerprints from their work, and while only one is literally left dead by this process, they’re all diminished because of it.
So hypocrisy—an essential smudge on the human soul, what’s left when you erase everything else—serves a conflicting role in the film. It’s an explicit trait in almost every character, a flaw that shows their humanity even as it strips them of it, which means that when hapless writers sell out, it’s not artistically deficient, but an essential part of the process. So when the film presciently anticipates the way that generative AI will likely be used, it’s saying that removing the writer from storytelling is bad because it leaves in charge those who don’t recognize their own hypocrisies, and thus can’t recognize any of the other contradictions that animate us. This is made plain in a scene in which up-and-coming producer Larry Levy prompts Mill and the other executives at his studio to choose random stories from that day’s newspaper, which he immediately spins into elevator pitches for plausible-sounding scripts. “I’ve yet to meet a writer who could turn water into wine,” Levy says, “but we have a tendency to treat them like that.” Mill responds facetiously, “If we could get rid of actors and directors, maybe we’ve got something.” But strangely, the story’s sympathies, as in the rest of the film, aren’t entirely with him. Mill’s own hypocrisy, his defense of human-made messiness, is just another self-preservation strategy. He’s defending himself, not humanity, and would laugh at the idea that there’s no difference between the two.
An odd thing happened while I was watching game two of the Finals. I put my how-do-you-feel-when-the-shot’s-in-the-air theory to the test and found I was hoping for the Heat’s shots to fall and the Nuggets’ to miss. I never thought that, given the choice between rooting for beauty or a multilevel marketing scam, I’d pick the scam, but I took an honest accounting of my emotions and there I was.
But it was complicated. I found my loyalties shifting with the score—when the Heat went up double digits late in the game, I was hoping the Nuggets would come back. And I still took joy in Jokić’s magic, actually gasping late in the second quarter when he received the ball at the elbow and redirected it to a cutting Aaron Gordon for a layup in one impossibly quick, slow-motion maneuver. It was a pass like a horror movie jump-scare, visceral for its simultaneous surprise and inevitability, and Jokić might have been the only one of the millions of people watching the court who saw it coming.
The Heat are clearly not as good as the Nuggets. This doesn’t mean they can’t win the series, but everything they did in game two, even as they won, looked so laborious. Their trips down the court were struggles. They strained for contested jumpers and free throws. Empty Denver possessions, on the other hand, seemed like flukes. But hoping Miami’s ugly, scuffling offense succeeds isn’t the same thing as rooting for the underdog, and it’s not the same thing as hoping they’ll win.
Remember when I was talking about how taste develops from a cultural baseline without your realizing it? Well, because of geographic tribalism, I root for the 76ers, which means learning to like how their seasons invariably end in blowout losses in which they play with all the urgency of laid-off employees cleaning out their desks. No one hates the 76ers more than their own fans. We share this toxicity and call it love.
So finding myself rooting for “Heat Culture,” complete with toxic implications of burying regular dudes found at the Y within a cult that valorizes endless work and low body fat percentages, fits into this mode of hating what I love and loving what I hate. It’s also a paradoxical way of loving Jokić’s doughy possibilities and his bizarre, artistic vision of the court. Possibilities need constraints to show themselves. After all, we’re all dirt as well as stardust, and the dirt can’t ever really be washed away. Maybe I’m not rooting for an unambiguously happy ending for Jokić and the Nuggets because it wouldn’t seem real. I wouldn’t be able to suspend my disbelief.
I want to keep watching the Nuggets play, which means rooting against them. This minor, internal hypocrisy in rooting against systemic possibilities affirms my love for those possibilities, and somehow, this hypocrisy affirms me too.
Liam Baranauskas is a writer from Philadelphia.
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