Although some of my dear Lacanian colleagues object to the too broad application of the term enjoyment, for the purposes of this text it would not be wrong to say that one of the key Lacan's a term used for the overall pleasure that sports give us. Because, the pleasure of cheering is always connected with suffering, since the dialectic between victory and defeat rests on the economy of pleasure and pain, what we gain and what we lose. Pleasure is, in the end, the most ecstatic when a certain amount of dissatisfaction and frustration has been accumulated in it. For Indiana Fever fans and supporters Caitlin Clark, the game against the previously undefeated New York Liberty last Saturday represented exactly that famous dimension enjoymenta: after missing five games due to injury for the first time since high school, Clark returned to the court triumphantly in her team's remarkable victory. If you believe the writer of these lines, what Clark played in the first half of that game was both the best and most spectacular game ever played in women's basketball: 25 points, shooting 6/8 from the three. (38 seconds was enough for her to knock down three in a row from the logo Three-point shooting is the most exciting thing modern sports can offer.) Enjoyment: not only immense pleasure, but also satisfaction, after a painful absence.
But the intensity enjoymentand is always a precise indicator that the phenomenon we are observing is not just related to sports or, if we take into account the large male fandom that Clark has, a simple libidinal projection. The political situation in America - different interpretative positions for interpreting reality - made the appearance of the charismatic basketball player, especially starting from her third year at Iowa, the subject of completely disparate interpretations that, in the most frequent cases with an imbecile negative overtone, said more about the critics than about her herself: as if Caitlin Clark had become a symptom in which everyone read what they wanted. Which, ultimately, only speaks of the hopeless impasse of contemporary American interpretation that unsuccessfully revolves around a vocabulary contaminated by daily political and ideological disputes, of which the most missed seem to be those related to the racial perspective. (Which, paradoxically, means that Caitlin Clark's international fans are in a privileged position.) So, tiresome, and some completely outdated political phrases are, therefore, used to describe the new one phenomenon, which is by definition a flawed strategy.
What is omitted in these interpretations is precisely what is most important: the often used phrase about Caitlin Clark as a transcendent dancer should only be taken in its true meaning, which is that she is a dancer who transcends ideological limitations and narrowness. The radical dimension of the so-called CC effect is that it is primarily aesthetic phenomenon: in the WNBA, a league that boasts of being full of athleticism and physicality, Caitlin Clark is bringing back the idea that skill - this is, art (techne, as the ancient Greeks called art) - the very essence of basketball as a sport. Style, distinctive iconography, craftsmanship: Caitlin Clark's three-pointers, which she shoots from almost 9-10 meters, superior Court Vision, the ingenuity of the assists, all of which reflect the inner beauty of basketball as a game. Isn't that, in a sense, the most radical revolutionary change in today's society: the larpurlartism of basketball, or as it would be translated in English: basketball for basketball’s sakeAnd here we find another dimension. enjoymentand watching Caitlin Clark's matches: the pleasure of emancipation from political prescriptions.
As pretentious as it may seem, it seems to me that in a discussion about a basketball player, it is worth introducing, in order to touch on the multidimensionality of her games i performance, and the deadline Roland Barthes from his book Sade, Fourier, Loyola: in the final analysis, Caitlin Clark is logotet, the founder of a new language, the inventor of a different language that we have never encountered before. (Wasn't the first reaction of all the new fans, in equal measure of astonishment and delight, the same statement: 'I have never seen anything like this before'?) Sports commentators, of course, very quickly identified the similarity with Steph Curry when it comes to the incredible ease of hitting long-range threes, but as the women's enjoyment always already separate, so is Clark's new language, or rather her almost perfect synthesis of shooting precision and imagination in distributing the ball, something for which we have no counterpart. Language is always a means of communication and making sense: hence it is not surprising that the members of the so-called Old Guard, even if we ignore a certain envy and jealousy they showed towards the rising star, could not even adequately understand the new phenomenon in their sport, simply because they do not speak that language which, in the entire mise-en-scène dictated by Clark, offers a different architecture of attack in basketball.
Finally, considering my position as a film critic, a film association that will, nevertheless, once again remind us of the autonomy of basketball. Howard hawks, the greatest American Hollywood director, author who represents, along with Alfred Hitchcock, the two poles that best define the artistic and semantic scope of cinema as such, were born in Indiana. Since the two Masters were in almost every way contradictory and contrasting, the difference was also reflected in the conception of female characters: opposite the Hitchcockian blonde stood the Hawkesian woman, a heroine with an unusually strong agency and charisma in Old Hollywood. Since in today's ignorant Hollywood Hawks' magnificent legacy has been completely sidelined - the only and surprising exception would, in fact, be the very good Twisters (2024) - maybe she showed up in an unusual place anyway, which is already deeply cinematic. Unlike her teammates on the Fever team, Sophie cunningham i Lexie Hull who would be, in the evoked film dichotomy, Hitchcockian blondes, Caitlin Clark is precisely the embodiment of the Hitchcockian woman, literally and in deed. Like the author's heroine Bringing Up Baby (1938) Only Angels Heve Wings (1939) and His Girl Friday (1940) - three masterpieces in a row, which would be equivalent to the aforementioned triplet of threes from the beginning of the text - Clark is, of course, tall, slim, brunette, eloquent, but more importantly, she combines, on the one hand, a charming frivolity and a specific humor as from screw ball comedy, and on the other hand, fanatical professionalism and excellence in action, which is Hawks' ideal combination.
U Cahiers du cinema from December 1953, in an essay dedicated to Big Sky (1952) Eric Rohmer has, emphasizing the director's genius, written a simple and cathartic formula: 'I don't think you can really love a film unless you really love Howard Hawks's'. The time has come for my favorite film-critic quote to be given an adequate paraphrase. In short, if one acknowledges the genius of a great actress, then the inescapable axiom is inevitable: You can't really love basketball if you don't love basketball Caitlin Clark.
Bonus video:
