There’s chaos inherent in great cinema. The French New Wave saw a group of critics create one of the most enduring arthouse movements on central tenets including their love for American B-movies. New Hollywood reveled in the death of the Hays Code and wrote a new cinematic vocabulary drenched in blood, pummeling the previous boundaries of popular cinema while reaching unprecedented artistic heights. Innovations and fascinations in film are often at odds with what is expected and what has come before. So it actually is in keeping with this tradition that one of the most vital contemporary cineastes in this age of blockbusters and the box office uploads his work to the internet for free. And it’s only reasonable that his newest film has many shivering in anticipation for 3+ hours of information about Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Dave Stieb.
On Tuesday, March 1st, one of my most anticipated films of 2022 will release its first part. Up there with Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Denis’s Fire or Both Sides of the Blade or whatever it ends up being called, and Hong’s The Novelist’s Film sits Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb, a four-part documentary slated to be parceled out on YouTube in two week intervals. It’s the latest in a line of work from SBNation writer Jon Bois that has stood out as one of the most unique and noteworthy of the 2020s so far, a coup against standard distribution systems and documentary form that has turned Bois into one of the most unlikely and essential auteurs of the millennium. Bois’s last two films, 2020’s The History of the Seattle Mariners and 2021’s The History of the Atlanta Falcons, followed the same format and took a similar approach: these are gargantuan documentary series focusing on an arc in sports history often treated as an afterthought. Both have stood out as among the best films of their respective years, an outstanding feat considering the vast number of people who would laugh off the very idea of their categorization as films. I am far from the first one to make this case: the Seattle Film Critics Society named Mariners the best documentary of 2020, and the New York Times cited it as an achievement. So how does Bois weave such art out of a series of YouTube videos?
Well, the first thing you’d have to talk about would be the charts. The diegesis of Bois’s work stems from granular data, represented by graphs and figures, numerical manifestations of every aspect of his subject. He’s dealing with sports, an arena where there’s a stat for everything, and he uses these stats to lay the groundwork for his stories. Both Mariners and Falcons take place on an expansive plane that eventually fills up to display the franchise’s entire history of wins and losses, the most basic of all stats. But the brilliance of Bois’s method is his slow pull back through more and more layers until the complete picture of what he’s communicating becomes clear. We begin with the wins and losses, mounting up to create seasons, and within these seasons lie more charts and more numbers. But you also start to see figures, stories Bois begins to unfold of the people who played for these teams. And these people have stats of their own, and these stats tell their stories as blips in the colossal register of sporting history. And all the sudden you begin to see what Bois is driving at: he’s exploring the random occurrences that make up the existence of a team or league in between Super Bowls or division title races. He paints a complete picture of his subject to illuminate their surroundings, and we watch as the surroundings inevitably begin to echo earth. Take Mariners: the portrayal of a franchise that has done what feels like immeasurable losing takes great pains in measuring it out to the millimeter, unfolding the agony of the long baseball seasons in between any hope with the same scrutiny and detail as those with relevance. Detours in the Mariners’ lost 80s are taken to explore the likes of Jay Buhner in a way resembling the riotously successful 90s and the focus therein on, say, Randy Johnson. Through this collage of figures Bois builds out his thesis, his underlying examination of the way the absurdity of sports reflects the absurdity of human existence. We have our parables, our heroes and villains. Ken Griffey Jr and Alex Rodriguez are positioned by Bois in opposition. Griffey is a beloved icon who (as far as we know) never took steroids, never relented and joined the dark side (who else but the New York Yankees), and consequently never won anything of substance in his career. A-Rod, on the other hand, juiced plenty, played the bulk of his career in the Bronx, and has a ring to show for it. Bois knows that the worship of these men as gods is incongruous with their very real status as athletes, yet he presents them as folk icons because culture insists that they are folk icons. Sports are an exaggerated and idealized vision of the real world that we partake in eagerly because of their resemblance to the real world. In all of his work, ranging from these films to shorter videos to multimedia internet novels, Bois fleshes out this concept. In Falcons, the story of Michael Vick serves as the jumping off point for an examination of the criminal justice system, Super Bowl 51 represents the polarization in national politics post-2016, and extensive analysis is centered around the parallels between football and the military. All of this flows naturally from the presentation of the charts and from the niche and largely unrelated anecdotes Bois digs up (one particularly relevant example from Falcons is a newspaper clipping wherein then Falcons coach Norm Van Brocklin makes multiple disparaging references to the Sherman Antitrust Act). He sees these grand histories as intricate tapestries in which every person involved played a role, and in which every game ultimately ends up secondary.
The question of whether or not to categorize Bois as a filmmaker is an open and shut one for me. Few people working approach his level of sheer cinematic intrigue, and nobody else mines it from a place as original or unexpected. And if he’s established as a filmmaker, it naturally follows that he’s a great one, blazing his own cinematic language while producing immensely entertaining work that juggles humor and drama with ease. He has cut out a niche in the cinematic landscape that nobody else could have ever filled, and the work he produces has continued to be appointment viewing. He is overlooked as an artist almost by design: nobody would expect any part of his MO to result in masterful cinema. But in the canon of 21st-century film, few deserve more recognition.
The Movie Files 