Splits: “The Cheerleaders” (1973)

 

ARE YOU HELPING WITH MY GOLF SWING OR ARE YOU JUST HAPPY TO SEE ME?: Getting your stroke right is all a matter of practice as amply demonstrated in Paul Glickler’s hard-hitting exploration of modern mores, radical feminist empowerment and the missionary position, “The Cheerleaders”.

       “The Cheerleaders”     (1973)

    With “The Cheerleaders”, director Paul Glickler answers the musical question: just what goes on in the heads of America’s annoying sideline screamers? If his film is any accurate indication, the answer is simple: very little thought as all roads appear to lead to the nether regions. The film follows the peculiarly successful season of the Amarosa High School football team-  peculiar as they have been colossal duds until a recent string of victories against superior teams  -and the particular circumstances involved in this mysterious turn of events. Being that this is a Jerry Gross presentation rather than one by Walt Disney, what are the odds that this mystery may find a solution not with Flubber but with rubbers?

      By turning his high school cheerleading squad into an uncontrolled group of insatiable succubi, the Glickler film reverses the popular role of horny male adolescents in their search for carnal nirvana, though “The Cheerleaders” presents its “heroines” in a distinctly different light: being deliberately, aggressively predatory with a specific reward in mind for their sexual servicing. Rather than the usual vacuous goofy male teen simply out to get laid to fulfill the demands of both the dopey teen comedy and their burgeoning hormones, the girls of Amarosa High’s cheerleading squad seem so naturally practiced in the fine art of the courtesan revelry as to make the antics in Fanny Hill seems like antiquated prudery in comparison. And while the spontaneous couplings are of sufficient frequency to raise alarm that the squad might eventually suffer from friction burns, the young ladies (whose indeterminate portrayed ages, led to provocative concerns over a possible portrayal and endorsement of underage carnality; a view which the filmmakers deplorably sniff aside as mere coming-of-age hijinks) are imbued with a motive of disturbing calculation for a greater portion of their libertine excesses: with the  their sexual congress unhealthily suggesting secondary school prostitution. None of the girls seem motivated by personal stimulative gratification, as much as the more mercenary reward of adding another win in their school’s hapless football team’s victory column by draining (so to speak) the opposing team’s players of stamina by strategically banging their brains out before the game. One wonders if the same stratagem is implemented for the school’s basketball, baseball and wrestling tournaments? Why not debate team meets and chess club matches as long as we’re talking about the blind promotion of school spirit? (In regard to the squad actually lighting a fire of enthusiasm under the collective student body, it might have occurred to someone in the planning stages of the film to have the girls show the slightest affinity for anything but painfully uncoordinated and tepid attempts at sideline rallying.)

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