Abstract
This chapter analyses the use of brutal, injurious sports as metaphors in a range of sport dystopian films, beginning with Rollerball in 1975 and culminating with the latest entry in The Hunger Games series. It argues that sport dystopian films can draw on fantasies of the past and anxieties of the future to help understand the present. Within the sport dystopian genre, Rollerball and Hunger Games can provide a better understanding of how injury inflicted on the body as a result of competitive games can become synonymous with injury inflicted on the body politic, if we consider the intersection of sport, injury, race, and labour.
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Notes
- 1.
The beads and scarves worn by Smith and Carlos were specifically to protest the lynching of black Americans.
- 2.
A notable exception in future sport genre is the film Real Steel (2011). Although the film is not dystopian, it still offers an analysis for contemporary issues in sport. While Real Steel uses science fiction elements to image what Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot-boxing could look like in the future, the idea of a white, washed-out boxer struggling to find work has serious ramifications for our understandings of the brutality of bodily injury, “ownership” of prized fighters, and labour politics in boxing.
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Rickards, N. (2021). Vanguards on the Starting Line: Race, Work, and Dissent in Sport Dystopian Films from Rollerball to The Hunger Game. In: Wagg, S., Pollock, A.M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Sport, Politics and Harm. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72826-7_22
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