ABSTRACT
In the 1975 film Rollerball, a picture was painted of a dystopian future world dominated by global corporations, where a single sport form, the eponymous Rollerball, exists for mass consumption. Rollerball in the film is promoted as a bloodthirsty form of sportainment (Lipsyte, 1996) for the masses as a way of demonstrating the futility of individualism and for the corporations to maintain power and stability (Jameson, 1998). Following Jameson’s concept of cultural-economic conflation (1998, 2001), sportainment infers a blurring of the cultural authenticity of traditional sport with a more commercialised form – one that increasingly reflects economic interests. In the film, this blurring is epitomised by the films (anti)hero Jonathon E who is both desired and despised by the corporations as he represents compliance and resistance to corporate ownership and dictatorship. The corporate answer is to gradually increase the violence of Rollerball by taking it from sport to spectacle, making it more attractive to the masses, but also more deadly for the players. Jonathon E’s continued survival in this gladiatorial arena gradually comes to symbolise resistance to corporate ownership and power, suggesting that the game cannot now be owned solely by the corporations who have devised, organised and financed the game. In the last few frames of the film, when Jonathan is skating around the arena of the final game with the crowd chanting his name, we see that ownership of the ‘game’ has changed. No longer can the corporations singularly own the symbolic and normative value of the game, what it means and how it is valued and made relevant to and for society. Rollerball because of its socially significant status, because of the social, cultural and political contexts within which it is located and through its now altered relationship between the powerful and relatively powerless has altered the nature and meaning of owning a sport in this dystopian vision. This has been made possible by the ability of the film’s hero to humanise and emotivise the game through his 2reflexive action which has unleashed a transformative power that has spurred collective and individual action so that Rollerball becomes owned by the people and not the corporations.
