This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between.
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I.
A few weeks ago, for no particular reason at all, I re-watched 9 to 5, a subversive comedy from 1980 about a group of women who take revenge on their odious boss. And as I watched, I recalled just how many times I had seen this movie before, mostly at a time when I was far too young to be watching a film like 9 to 5 in the first place.
This was often the case with certain “adult-themed” movies that appeared on HBO during the era. HBO, when it wasn’t cycling through Star Wars or Fraggle Rock, was like a free preview of adulthood; it was the Internet before the Internet existed. I understood enough about 9 to 5 to know that it was speaking to big themes (the ones I mostly encountered on the pages of MAD Magazine), but mostly, 9 to 5 was just really dark and really funny, even if half the jokes went soaring several miles over my head.
9 to 5’s stars were its women—Dolly Parton, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda—but its male foil was played by an actor named Dabney Coleman, who spends half the film trapped in the kind of sadomasochistic torture outfit that would take on an entirely new meaning in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Coleman’s character was a sleazy bigot who deserved his comeuppance, but he played this kind of character so unbelievably well that you couldn’t wait for him to show up on screen again.
Even then, I felt like Dabney Coleman was speaking to me, in a weird way. Hey, kid, you shouldn’t be watching this movie, he was saying. But in case you are, this is how not to be a man.
II.
(What does any of this have to do with sports history? We’ll get there eventually, kind of, but we’ve been around each other long enough to let our hair down a little, no? As the author Charles P. Pierce once wrote—or twice wrote—“My newsletter is my house,” meaning I get to decide how to decorate this place. I hope you dig the lava lamp on the mantel.
But fine, if you insist…)
III.
One of the best scenes in one of the best films ever made about professional football comes at the end of North Dallas Forty. It’s a movie I’ve written about multiple times in this newsletter, in various contexts, because it’s the movie that best captures the bargain that professional football players have long made in order to succeed: They sacrifice their bodies for a corporation, which means they are indispensable right up until the very day they’re deemed disposable.
In the midst of that scene in North Dallas Forty, as Nolte realizes he’s become the expendable one, he explodes with rage at one man who represents, to him, the most milquetoast aspects of that bureaucracy—a man who hides behind a false facade of masculinity, but isn’t really much of a man at all.
And that man is played by Dabney Coleman.
IV.
After his performance in 9 to 5, and for most of the 1980s, Coleman became the kind of ubiquitous character actor who mostly played sleazebags and assholes and hapless bureaucrats. He was the heavy in nearly every movie I watched over and over again in that era, from to Modern Problems (terrible) to Tootsie (great) to The Muppets Take Manhattan (transcendent). He exuded hyper-masculine bravado, then revealed himself as a coward. Every so often, he’d veer from that type, as he did in the cult kids’ film Cloak and Dagger (where he played both a superspy and and average dad), but mostly he leaned into what he did well.
In War Games, he played the skeptical middle manager who refuses to believe the cocky teenager about the impending end of the world. Wrote The New York Times: “The surly Coleman perfectly embodies the kind of well-meaning bureaucracy that may not be able to adapt in time to stave off an apocalypse.”
V.
In the 1980s, Coleman also starred in two short-lived sitcoms, both created by Jay Tarses (who may be best known as the lethargic coach from Teen Wolf): The first was Buffalo Bill, in which Coleman played a loudmouthed and egotistical talk-show host. The second was The Slap Maxwell Story, in which Coleman played a loudmouthed and egotistical newspaper sportswriter. Slap Maxwell is not available on streaming, but the stray episodes posted on YouTube show just how far ahead of its time this show was; it’s the most accurate embodiment of certain practitioners of an embittered profession that I’d witnessed on-screen, outside of the newsrooms I actually worked in. Both of those Dabney Coleman shows, wrote Matt Zoller Seitz, essentially set the template for the modern television anti-hero.
Dabney Coleman died last week at the age of 92, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why his career felt so impactful to me, and then I came across this old interview with him, in which he compares his characters to Archie Bunker, and in which he says, “These are the people we want to steer away from, and the people who cause real trouble in our society.”
Coleman then says his own character, Buffalo Bill, doesn’t have the power or capability to cause that kind of trouble. But I wonder if he’d still say that today, as we’ve seen the kind of colossal political damage an arrogant talk-show host can do. The more I think about it, the more I think Dabney Coleman was put on this earth to help us realize what kind of men we didn’t want to be.
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