“I don’t know who invented that,” Caroline Sunvold, a former DCC, says within the collection. “That’s what sort of tears folks’s hips aside.” She ought to know. Ms. Sunvold, nonetheless in her 20s, has had hip and knee surgical procedure and, in some scenes, depends on a walker whereas she recovers.
Nevertheless, she misses the crew terribly and appears somewhat misplaced in her post-fan life. “It’s like DCC land is that this legendary, magical world,” she says. “And when you begin consuming that Gatorade, you don’t need to go away.” Ms. Sunvold even presents DCC audition coaching to her youthful sister, Anna Cate, who’s thrilled when she joins the crew, too.
Along with all its different attributes, the DCC—and this collection—promotes the historically female sweetness, helpfulness, and household values of its dancers. The group is, by definition, devoted to celebrating the success of others.
“Pondering of others is what cheerleaders do,” Ms. Finglass reminds her dancers.
It will also be a household custom, and we meet a number of ladies whose moms additionally cheered for the DCC many years in the past and stay deeply invested within the group. The emphasis on altruism and custom is recurrent, as are references to Christian religion. Dancers are filmed chatting warmly with residents of a nursing dwelling, praying earlier than meals and attending a gospel service (the place the pastor shouts, “God loves the Dallas Cowboys!”). The present devotes appreciable display screen time to the brand new dancer, Reece Weaver, a soft-spoken former Miss Florida’s Excellent Teen who says he dances solely to “deliver glory to God.” Ms. Weaver was engaged in the course of the collection, and her fiancé (now husband), she says, was the one man she would ever permit to place his arm round her.
This insistence on old school, female innocence even reveals up within the present’s title. The DCC calls its members “America’s Sweethearts” — an old school time period that claims rather a lot. “Sweetheart” evokes an ingénue in a Nineteen Fifties film — one thing like a girlfriend, however with none of the grownup sexuality. With this retro title, the DCC declares itself the chaste companions not simply of the Dallas Cowboys (whose gamers they’re contractually forbidden from relationship), however of all America.
Can we reconcile the “sweetheart” vibe with DCC’s bombastic appears to be like and seductive strikes? Not likely. The inherent contradiction of girls attempting to uphold apple pie integrity whereas carrying so little and dancing so provocatively is on the coronary heart of this collection, a reminder that the Madonna-whore dichotomy remains to be alive and, um, lively in in style tradition.
