When I was about 16 I got a taste for racquetball. Through my church youth group we had adult mentors that were selected from the church community, and mine belonged to a racquetball club. He may have only taken me to play once, but it was probably twice. In any case, I had enough of a blast that when I went looking at colleges the next year, I wasn't as interested in whether they had a good English program as whether they had racquetball courts on campus.
The answer, in most cases, was no. Most colleges I looked at had squash courts. I didn't know what the difference was, and think I still don't. However, it does seem like squash is the slightly more common sport.
Though I don't think either of them is that common anymore. It could just be that I'm not in a squash place in my life anymore, or a racquetball place, or a place involving an indoor court with white walls, two racquets, two men, and a small rubber ball. But I don't know anyone who plays either of these sports, and I don't think it's only because they aren't in those places in their lives either. It seems like an activity that reached its peak in 1989 and has played a diminishing role in the zeitgeist ever since.
Except at the movies, where it still serves its role as a trope for getting men together one on one for private conversation, and possibly confrontation.
Reminding me of this fact was Tamara Jenkins' Private Life, which I saw on Wednesday night. Racquetsquash (that seems like a good way to indicate my ambiguity about which is which going forward) hardly seems like what should be prompting me to write about this film, which I thought was excellent and has many qualities that would be better suiting for praising than nitpicking. But what can I say, this was what occurred to me, and I need to keep feeding this blog beast lest you stop coming to this site altogether.
In a movie that is otherwise an incredibly true and realistic portrait of a couple trying to adopt, artificially inseminate, in vitro fertilize or in some way or another produce a child, two men engage in what I considered to be a very anachronistic game of racquetsquash. The sport fits a lot more logically in the other films that came to mind, such as Splash! and Wall Street, which are just a few of the many in which men have convened in a small court to bond, communicate, or butt heads. If this were the old days and it weren't the Christmas season, I'd probably have scrounged the internet to find a dozen other examples for your edification.
But in 2018? Are men still getting together to smash these small balls at each other, almost like boxers going at each other for 12 rounds?
That's when it occurred to me that this is a trope, used as much for it symbolic value as its relation to the real world. As it has typically been used in the movies, the racquetsquash court provides a small, enclosed environment in which friends can be real with each other, telling each other the unvarnished truth about whatever is bothering them, or frenemies can try to intimidate one another into submission. It's either a safe space like the confessional, or a pressure cooker -- and the sweat pouring from their brows tends to indicate the latter. In either case, it's a place where men can be alone to blow off steam or bounce around ideas, and where they can't be overheard.
Interestingly, there wasn't much of either of the traditional uses of racquetsquash in Private Life. And perhaps that's an indication of how much we've seen scenes like this in the movies, that they've developed a third usage: connector scenes. Perhaps racquetsquash scenes are so familiar to us now that they can operate just as a comfortable bridge from one scene to another, with maybe a little exposition or moving forward of plot mechanics.
If it weren't after midnight four days before Christmas, I could probably produce some additional thoughts on this. But I'll leave off here.
And as for my own love affair with racquetsquash? I actually haven't played again since those one or two times in high school. Though would still love to, for just plain physical reasons if not metaphorical ones.
I'll finish by giving Private Life its due: It's fantastic. See it exclusively on Netflix, and add it near the top of your own 2018 list, as I have.
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