Skate Movies

     I was never a skater - I was much too uncoordinated. My few misadventures on a skateboard were enough to convince me that it wasn’t for me. Some of my friends were pretty good at it, but I was happy enough to watch. I did, however, spend countless hours on the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater video games. I still have a weird sense of pride for how good I was at them - I might not have been a stellar student, but I could rack up millions of points through calculated button mashing. These games introduced me not only to skateboarding, but also to bands such as the Dead Kennedys, Bad Religion, Suicidal Tendencies, Rage Against the Machine, and many other bands that became staples in my high school CD collection. So, despite never landing a kickflip, I get nostalgic when I see people skateboarding. That nostalgia has led me to check out a few movies that are about skateboarding. I say they are “about skateboarding”, but what I have found is that they are really about domestic violence, racism, sexism, religious fundamentalism, drug abuse, poverty and war, with the skateboards being a mere entry point into these worlds. Two films that fit this criteria are Minding the Gap and Mid90s. One is real, the other is fiction, but they tell pretty similar stories. Disaffected kids need an outlet, so they take up skateboarding. There’s some cool skateboarding shots, but where these films really succeed is exploring the reasons behind their disaffection, and how they deal with it.

      Minding the Gap is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen. It’s a Hulu original that got nominated for the best documentary Oscar in 2018, but still remains fairly obscure. It has a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. If I ever succeed in getting you to watch a single movie, make it this one. In 2006, teenager Bing Liu started filming his friends skateboarding, but also got them to talk about their families, their attitudes towards race, their hopes for the future. The story centres around three friends, one white, one black, and one Asian, all in Rockford, Illinois, a city with the dubious distinction of being the American city with the highest rate of domestic violence. All of these boys are victims of it. Over the next twelve years, Liu kept filming, as his friends experienced ups and downs, births and deaths - more trauma and heartbreak than success and fulfillment. In 2018, he edited the hundreds of hours of footage into a ninety-three minute long narrative - and we watch these people grow up in front of our eyes; think Boyhood, but with real people. Skateboarding serves as the backdrop, but the movie is really a meditation on how to break out of cycles of violence and poverty that entrench themselves in American families across generations.

Mid90s came out the same year and follows a similar clique, but in a much shorter time span. It is an impressive directorial debut for actor Jonah Hill. The story follows Stevie, a 13 year old living with his mom and abusive older brother. He makes friends with a group of local skaters, people like “Fuckshit”, named after the fact that he fills the holes in conversation with expletives, or “Fourth Grade”, named so because he is regarded as smart as a fourth grader. He finds acceptance with these guys, and for once can escape his older brothers torments. Stevie begins to act out: he experiments with drugs and alcohol; his new friends introduce him to girls; his brother convinces him to steal from their mom so he can buy a new skateboard. His mom is, of course, unimpressed, but she feels somewhat helpless in this situation. 

Watching both of these movies, I felt as if I had known these people - certainly, I knew people like them. That cannot be said for the documentary Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (if you’re a girl). Set in Kabul, Afghanistan, this film explores young girls who are enrolled in “Skateistan”, an international nonprofit that mixes skateboarding and education. Almost two decades after it started, the war with America continues to rage in the city. These girls have never known a day of peace. One girl, a twelve year old Reihama, tells the camera that "where I live it's tradition that when a girl grows up, she doesn't go outside." She then adds "I don't want to grow up so I can skate forever." Her thirteen year old sister is already not allowed out. Her mother was married at fourteen. Skating seems to be the only thing she looks forward to.

                           

This is a departure from the themes of fragile American masculinity explored in the first two movies, but there is a comparison to be made. For everyone, in all of these movies, skating is an outlet; when they skate, they are not worried about where the next meal might come, whether it’s safe to go home, or safe to leave home, or anything else - it forces them to concentrate on what’s in front of them. These are movies about vulnerable people, and whether or not they learn to kickflip or  go professional seems irrelevant to us - what matters is that they are safe, that they are cared for, and that they can open themselves up to others. Skateboarding might be what reels us in, but it's the stories of shared humanity that keeps us watching.