The Boys in the Boat
Eight Bodies, One Boat, and the Story We Refuse to Tell
There is a moment in any rowing race—any real one, not the cinematic kind—when the boat "swings." The eight rowers stop being eight rowers. The shell stops fighting the water. Coaches describe it in mystical terms because the language of competitive sport cannot quite hold what is happening: a temporary dissolution of the individual into a cooperating organism, where no one can pull harder without pulling everyone else down. It is, in the most literal sense available to the human body, mutual aid. You either row together or you do not row at all.
George Clooney's The Boys in the Boat is a film about this phenomenon that seems determined not to understand it. The movie takes one of the purest cooperative practices ever devised—a sport in which individual heroics are mechanically impossible, in which synchronization is not a virtue but a precondition—and stuffs it into the narrative cookie-cutter of American bootstraps individualism. We follow Joe Rantz, abandoned by his father, sleeping in a half-built car, lifting himself up through grit and good posture. The other seven boys remain interchangeable scenery. The boat is something Joe joins, not something he is constituted by. By the time we reach Berlin, the swing has been quietly converted into the triumph of a single hardscrabble kid, with seven indistinct teammates serving as the ambient texture of his ascent.
This is more than a screenwriting choice. It is an ideological reflex, and it tells us something about the stories late capitalism allows itself to tell about cooperation. The film cannot quite suppress its subject matter—rowing keeps insisting, every time the coxswain calls the rate, that this is collective labor—but it cannot bring itself to name what it is showing either. Cooperation is permitted as a technique deployed in the service of competition, never as a value in itself. The boys must learn to trust each other so that they can beat the other boats. Solidarity is instrumentalized; it is the means, never the meaning.
Consider what the film does with the Depression. The 1930s appear as backdrop hardship, a private weather system that Joe must endure on his way to glory. What is conspicuously missing is the texture of how working-class people actually survived those years: the breadlines organized by neighbors, the mutual assistance societies, the union halls, the immigrant benefit associations, the unemployed councils, the rent strikes, the cooperative stores. The University of Washington crew were not lone wolves who happened to find each other on the water. They were boys formed by communities of pooled survival, by logging camps and fishing villages and shipyard towns where you fed each other or you starved alone. The movie gestures at this—Joe's coworkers in a construction crew, a brief scene of communal labor—but it cannot let the gesture become the thesis. The thesis must remain the singular hero. Otherwise the film would have to admit that its own mythology of self-reliance is a story told by the comfortable about the desperate.
Then there is Berlin. The 1936 Olympics function in the film as the obvious villain backdrop: Hitler scowling from a box, swastikas snapping in the breeze, American boys defeating fascism with their oars. It is satisfying. It is also, looked at honestly, slightly absurd. The Olympics in 1936 were a state spectacle—the most lavishly produced ritual of nationalist absorption ever staged to that point—and the United States Olympic Committee participated enthusiastically, over the objections of the actual anti-fascist movements of the period. The boys in the boat were not sent to Berlin by their communities. They were sent by the same kind of institutional machinery, on a smaller and more democratic scale, that built the spectacle they were supposedly disrupting. The film cannot register this because it has already accepted the premise that the meaningful contest is between flags, between nations, between great men in great boxes. The eight working-class kids become, by the closing reel, an extension of the American state—their cooperative achievement reframed as national property.
What would an honest version of this story look like? It would begin not with Joe alone in the woods but with the dense web of obligation and care that allowed any of these boys to reach a university at all in 1933. It would treat the boat itself as the protagonist, refusing to elevate one rower above the others, the way the sport itself refuses. It would notice that the cooperative practice on the water was not an exception to American life in the Depression but an intensification of something happening in countless kitchens, picket lines, and meeting halls across the country. It would treat Berlin not as the climax but as an ironic complication—a moment when a genuinely cooperative achievement got conscripted into the iconography of competing states, both of which had every reason to want the deeper lesson buried.
Because the deeper lesson is inconvenient, and it has nothing to do with grit. It is that human beings, when placed in a situation where they cannot succeed alone and cannot succeed by dominating one another, are entirely capable of producing something that looks, from the outside, like a small miracle. The shell moves faster than any of them could move themselves. The water seems to give way. This is not metaphor. It is mechanics. And it is available not only to eight college boys on Lake Washington but to any group of people willing to admit that the romance of the self-made individual has always been a story we tell at the expense of the people who actually made us.
The Boys in the Boat shows us the swing and then immediately looks away from it, anxious to get back to the comforting plot of one boy's rise. It is a handsomely made film, sincere and well-acted, and that is precisely what makes its evasions worth examining. The footage knows what the script will not say. Watch the rowing scenes with the dialogue muted and you will see, briefly, a different movie—one in which no one wins because no one is competing, in which eight bodies briefly demonstrate a possibility that our political imagination has spent a century trying to forget.
There is a moment in any rowing race—any real one, not the cinematic kind—when the boat "swings." The eight rowers stop being eight rowers. The shell stops fighting the water. Coaches describe it in mystical terms because the language of competitive sport cannot quite hold what is happening: a temporary dissolution of the individual into a cooperating organism, where no one can pull harder without pulling everyone else down. It is, in the most literal sense available to the human body, mutual aid. You either row together or you do not row at all.
George Clooney's The Boys in the Boat is a film about this phenomenon that seems determined not to understand it. The movie takes one of the purest cooperative practices ever devised—a sport in which individual heroics are mechanically impossible, in which synchronization is not a virtue but a precondition—and stuffs it into the narrative cookie-cutter of American bootstraps individualism. We follow Joe Rantz, abandoned by his father, sleeping in a half-built car, lifting himself up through grit and good posture. The other seven boys remain interchangeable scenery. The boat is something Joe joins, not something he is constituted by. By the time we reach Berlin, the swing has been quietly converted into the triumph of a single hardscrabble kid, with seven indistinct teammates serving as the ambient texture of his ascent.
This is more than a screenwriting choice. It is an ideological reflex, and it tells us something about the stories late capitalism allows itself to tell about cooperation. The film cannot quite suppress its subject matter—rowing keeps insisting, every time the coxswain calls the rate, that this is collective labor—but it cannot bring itself to name what it is showing either. Cooperation is permitted as a technique deployed in the service of competition, never as a value in itself. The boys must learn to trust each other so that they can beat the other boats. Solidarity is instrumentalized; it is the means, never the meaning.
Consider what the film does with the Depression. The 1930s appear as backdrop hardship, a private weather system that Joe must endure on his way to glory. What is conspicuously missing is the texture of how working-class people actually survived those years: the breadlines organized by neighbors, the mutual assistance societies, the union halls, the immigrant benefit associations, the unemployed councils, the rent strikes, the cooperative stores. The University of Washington crew were not lone wolves who happened to find each other on the water. They were boys formed by communities of pooled survival, by logging camps and fishing villages and shipyard towns where you fed each other or you starved alone. The movie gestures at this—Joe's coworkers in a construction crew, a brief scene of communal labor—but it cannot let the gesture become the thesis. The thesis must remain the singular hero. Otherwise the film would have to admit that its own mythology of self-reliance is a story told by the comfortable about the desperate.
Then there is Berlin. The 1936 Olympics function in the film as the obvious villain backdrop: Hitler scowling from a box, swastikas snapping in the breeze, American boys defeating fascism with their oars. It is satisfying. It is also, looked at honestly, slightly absurd. The Olympics in 1936 were a state spectacle—the most lavishly produced ritual of nationalist absorption ever staged to that point—and the United States Olympic Committee participated enthusiastically, over the objections of the actual anti-fascist movements of the period. The boys in the boat were not sent to Berlin by their communities. They were sent by the same kind of institutional machinery, on a smaller and more democratic scale, that built the spectacle they were supposedly disrupting. The film cannot register this because it has already accepted the premise that the meaningful contest is between flags, between nations, between great men in great boxes. The eight working-class kids become, by the closing reel, an extension of the American state—their cooperative achievement reframed as national property.
What would an honest version of this story look like? It would begin not with Joe alone in the woods but with the dense web of obligation and care that allowed any of these boys to reach a university at all in 1933. It would treat the boat itself as the protagonist, refusing to elevate one rower above the others, the way the sport itself refuses. It would notice that the cooperative practice on the water was not an exception to American life in the Depression but an intensification of something happening in countless kitchens, picket lines, and meeting halls across the country. It would treat Berlin not as the climax but as an ironic complication—a moment when a genuinely cooperative achievement got conscripted into the iconography of competing states, both of which had every reason to want the deeper lesson buried.
Because the deeper lesson is inconvenient, and it has nothing to do with grit. It is that human beings, when placed in a situation where they cannot succeed alone and cannot succeed by dominating one another, are entirely capable of producing something that looks, from the outside, like a small miracle. The shell moves faster than any of them could move themselves. The water seems to give way. This is not metaphor. It is mechanics. And it is available not only to eight college boys on Lake Washington but to any group of people willing to admit that the romance of the self-made individual has always been a story we tell at the expense of the people who actually made us.
The Boys in the Boat shows us the swing and then immediately looks away from it, anxious to get back to the comforting plot of one boy's rise. It is a handsomely made film, sincere and well-acted, and that is precisely what makes its evasions worth examining. The footage knows what the script will not say. Watch the rowing scenes with the dialogue muted and you will see, briefly, a different movie—one in which no one wins because no one is competing, in which eight bodies briefly demonstrate a possibility that our political imagination has spent a century trying to forget.
Mini Review: In rowing, a boat “swings” through the dissolution of the individual into a cooperating organism. It is literal mutual aid; individual heroics are mechanically impossible. Yet George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat forces this collective sport into the cookie-cutter of American individualism. By reducing seven rowers to the ambient texture of one boy’s ascent, the film exposes our cultural inability to value solidarity as anything more than a competitive tool.
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