What to Watch Flashback: Bring It On’s stealthy message and the fight over its iconic ending

If you think about it, there was no other way Bring It On could’ve ended, but not everyone saw it that way.

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Every week we take a look at a classic movie that’s endured in the cultural landscape, and remember why we were all so obsessed with it in the first place, and why it’s worth another look today

It would’ve been easy to write off Bring It On as a dumb high school movie about something as seemingly vapid as cheerleading.

Especially given cheerleading is largely an American cultural phenomenon. But Bring It On and its rival teams – the whitebread Rancho Carne Toros and the black-led Clovers – burrowed into the culture and to this day, we’re still quoting it, and bringing out those spirit fingers.

Not bad for a movie that the major studios passed on and no one wanted to touch, according to screenwriter Jessica Bendinger.

Eventually, Bendinger found a production company willing to take a chance – Beacon Pictures – and the film would go on to make $US90 million in cinemas, from a budget of $US11 million. And it did even better on DVD, where the frothy but surprisingly deep movie was rewatched again and again.

Max Wong, an executive producer at Beacon, told MTV in 2015, “I think that a lot of the nos and resistance that Jessica got when she pitched were based on the idea that nobody is going to want to see a movie about the stupid girls that you hated in high school.

“I was like, ‘I hated them in high school, and I would still see this movie’.”

Onscreen rivals, Isis and Torrance.

The thing about Bring It On is it did two things. OK, it did more than two things, but it had two overriding things. The first was that it was a fun teen movie with the riveting peppiness of youth – and familiar tropes.

It was funny, with lines of dialogue such as this between lead Torrance (Kirsten Dunst) and her mother: “You know, mothers have killed to get their daughters on squads,” to which her mum replied, “That mother didn’t kill anyone, she hired a hitman.”

But the smarter thing Bring It On did is it snuck in this story about cultural appropriation at a time when mainstream American culture didn’t even know the name for it.

The conflict in the story kicks off when blond-haired Torrance, the captain of the cheerleading squad from a well-to-do upper-middle-class school, discover the Toros’ five-time championship-winning routines have been stolen from the lower socio-economic, black-dominated East Compton High School.

A former captain, Big Red (Lindsay Sloane), had been slinking around the Clovers’ performances with a video camera. And now that Isis (Gabrielle Union) is the captain of the Clovers, she’s had enough and wants to make sure her team and their hard work will get the national recognition they deserve.

Kirsten Dunst was still in high school when she filmed the movie.

Bring It On’s choreographer, Anne Fletcher, hired another choreographer, Hi-Hat, to specifically work on the Clovers’ routines, and Fletcher then translated that into the awkward white-girl version. If you rewatch the movie, the Toros’ iterations of the Clovers’ rhythmic routines lack authenticity and pizzazz.

While there is a rivalry at the core of Bring It On, Bendinger argued there is no villain in the film. She told Variety in 2020, “The villain is your own behaviour. The villain is your own ethical, moral compass. Like, how are you going to behave in a situation? Are you going to choose well or choose poorly?”

Director Peyton Reed added, “It’s about cultural theft. Kirsten’s character realises the Toros are direct beneficiaries of this cultural theft. That’s the stuff that is really relevant about it. Gabrielle’s character, Isis, is a determined leader who is going to get to nationals and prove to everybody they’re the rightful ones.

“They have been fighting in obscurity to be the best, and they are the best and now they’re going to prove it to the world.”

But not everyone saw it that way, which points to how thorny progress around issues such as cultural appropriation are, mired in centuries-old prejudices both conscious and subconscious.

Union told EW in 2015, “This was a very subversive film about cultural appropriation and white privilege – provided there is blond hair and blue eyes attached.”

The film also starred Eliza Dushku, who at the time was on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But she was also aware and found “interesting” that some audiences considered her character the villain in the piece. She said, “The leader of a movement to make these suburban girls accountable for the theft of our hard work is called a villain? I think that’s very, very telling.”

By contending that Isis and the Clovers weren’t Bring It On’s villains, the ending was an important choice. The Clovers had to win the national championships and the Toros had to find the joy and grace in defeat. But not everyone agreed.

Reed told MTV in 2015, “I remember there was a whole debate about who was going to win, and there were people in the mix that were like, ‘Well, Kirsten’s the lead, the Toros have to win’. Well, nah, that’s not the story.

“She took that team from being a team that ribbed their routines from someone else, and she made them on their own work hard and do it on the up and up, and they did an amazing job. They came in second to the other team, and it was a life lesson to her.”

Wong reminded everyone that Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky didn’t win either. “The biggest thing about being a sportsman or a sportswoman is about grace in loss.

“It’s not about being a gracious winner, it’s about being a gracious loser, because generally that’s what happens when you play competitive sports. You have to power through that, and what does that say about [her] character?

“We loved the fact that this is a Rocky with girls, a Rocky for girls.”

Originally published as What to Watch Flashback: Bring It On’s stealthy message and the fight over its iconic ending