What our society has become truly amazes me every day. The things we watch and enjoy as a culture are sometimes highly offense. I choose to look at the movie The Longest Yard for an in depth look at stereotypes in our society. After watching and studying this movie I can only ask myself one question: What have we become? The Longest Yard is a movie about a former NFL MVP quarterback (played by Adam Sandler) jailed for joyriding his girlfriend’s car. Crewe (Sandler) is forced by the jail’s warden to create a football team to play the very guards that lord over them.
Yes, The Longest Yard movie was very funny and entertaining to many audiences, but it featured many stereotypes we uphold as a people today. Many people enjoyed the movie nonetheless. Peter Travers, a critic for Rolling Stones magazine, says the movie was, “A mean, lean laugh machine. ” With you, I’d like to analyze the stereotypical elements we see in the depiction of the inmates, guards, and African Americans. Together maybe we can understand the hidden under tones of this silly movie. The hilarious movie The Longest Yard brought many viewers to tears from laughter.
I myself did not laugh during this movie. The stereotypical ways our society views African Americans was portrayed heavily throughout the film. Let’s take a look at one scene I found particularly disturbing. Crewe(Sandler), while constructing his team, realizes he needs better athletes to join his team. He decides to go to the basketball court to persuade some of the black athletes to join his team. The opening music for the entrance to the basketball court is heavy rap music and many of the black males have shirts removed and pack massive amounts of muscle on their bodies.
They show off speed and strength in their basketball skill on the court. Now what stereotype is this? Yes that every black male is athletic and dominates in sports. This is the stereotype that angers me the most. Every black male doesn’t have to be an athletically gifted, aggressive member of society. Yet, our society deems it so and thus justifies it okay for the movie director to include that in his movie. In sports, this stereotype is widely upheld, especially in high school athletics. When I played football in high school, I had to check myself sometimes.
Just because a team is all African-American is no measure of their athletic ability. Hopefully, with your help, we can begin to shed light on the serious points of the movie The Longest Yard. First, let’s dive into prison life at Allenville Prison. Guards control the entire prison with brute force. In The Longest Yard, the sadistic guards that run the compound regularly physically and verbally abuse the prison inmates. Now, before we go further in depth into their roles, what do you think of when you here the term prison guard? I, for one, think of a hulkish man that is violent, angry, and thoroughly muscular.
The Longest Yard plays on this public misconception very well. The guards in this movie are physical specimens with violent and angry attitudes. They terrorize the inmates and enforce the rules they want to upon them. This is used in the movie to help motivate the inmates to crush the guards in the football game. Are normal prison guards like that at all? I can state the answer quickly: NO! I have a cousin who is 5’6 150 lbs. and is a prison guard at a max protection facility. Physical prowess or aggressiveness plays no role in the guard’s role.
The one necessary need is that guards need to know the ways to control a wild inmate. Physical prowess or an aggressive nature is not needed to succeed in that area. Yet the movie depicts the guard’s team as thus. They are all of Caucasian descent and act like the stereotypical white male athlete. They curse, take steroids, and readily look for reasons to attack the inmates. There is, yet again, another hidden stereotype. Do all Caucasian athletes act that way? Not at all, for everyone is different and nobody is the same person. The guards in The Longest Yard are also aggressively racist.
They look to attack the black males of the prison at all times and act in any way to evoke a response from them. Yet this movie still can make anyone laugh. The overly aggressive nature of the guards is so unrealistic that many audiences found it hysterical. Maybe this is why the inmates of the movie were even funnier to watch. The inmates in the prison are very comical to watch and study. They are portrayed heavily as uneducated idiots. One side character in the movie sees a sign for football try outs and says, “What are football tree outs? this brings a great laughter from the audience as it is a funny portrayal of prison stupidity. This truth is that no prison’s inmates are that uneducated for they have libraries and education materials in almost all prisons. The inmates, not unlikely the guards, show very aggressive and vengeful attitudes and play with much anger during the game. You can see this in Crewe’s intro in the prison. He is stared at intensively by everyone in the prison and treated harshly. The most comical type of inmates in the movie was the homosexuals.
They were used as cheerleaders for the team and their skimpy outfits and outlandish ways could draw a laugh from just about anyone; except for some from the homosexual community. The cheerleaders in the movie were highly flirtatious and every time they entered a scene you knew something sexual was going to be said. I believe the homosexual community doesn’t want to be portrayed as all about the sex and nothing more. Yes, the scenes the cheerleaders were included in were funny but the director was also insensitive to the feelings of the homosexual community.
Somehow this movie still managed to get rave reviews for its many laughable moments. “Wow, that was a funny movie” states Peter Travers, a critic for Rolling Stones magazine. He was quite right in his review of the movie The Longest Yard. The movie featured many funny moments that kept the audience laughing at almost everything. Isn’t that the nature of comedy though? Many comedians make fun of stereotypes in an effort to make the subject seem less serious. Director Peter Segal regularly makes fun of any and all people in most of the movies he directs.
One thing the director added that I don’t agree with was stereotypes. He had his characters played out as society would see them, from the inmates, to the guards, to the super athletic black males. Yes, this made many of the scenes laughable but in the back of my mind I was angered. The Longest Yard only supports our societal views of people and the judgmental ways we see them. I agree with you if you enjoyed this movie as well, but I challenge you to help change our society for the better. Movies like The Longest Yard only helps to educate people on who people are before ever getting to know them.
