Review Section
Garry Ross, Director. Seabiscuit. 2003

Jonathan Burt

I watched Seabiscuit a few hours after England had won the rugby union World Cup with a drop goal in the last 40 seconds of extra time to beat Australia by 20-17. This victory came at the end of a week in which bombs had exploded in Istanbul aimed at British targets and coincided with a controversial state visit to London by President Bush.

For a moment all this was forgotten when, on Sunday morning, England’s victory was splashed across the front pages of the national press. It appeared as if a “nation” had been brought together and the gravity of world problems was, if not forgotten, then momentarily relegated in importance. The question arises, though: What does it mean for a nation to be brought together in terms like these, the fairy tale moments of sporting heroism, which are so bound up with transience? What part of a nation’s identity does this concern?

Seabiscuit was a horse who carried the expectations and fulfilled the dreams of millions of people as well as offering a distraction from the economic hardships of the 1930s. Yet, in the film Seabiscuit the horse never quite comes into focus. The cultural significance that Seabiscuit carried as a mass icon, his place in relation both to the politics of the time--the late 1930s--and the lives of those involved with him erases something of him as the horse that he was.

I am not making a point here about the failure of the film to capture the animal’s alterity or purely nonhuman aspects but rather that Seabiscuit, paradoxically, is not given center stage in his own story. Nor does the film provide any space where we might meditate on, or in some ways see for ourselves, what made Seabiscuit such an extraordinary horse--though, on the voiceover commentary, we frequently are told that he is.
Of course, he does win some extraordinary races. Yet, despite this, there is a principle of interchangeability at work in which the humans are, in fact, the real heroes and Seabiscuit becomes a model for specifically human hopes, giving rise to an optimism that any ordinary person can rise above the crowd. Whereas, on deeper consideration, what we really might learn from the example of Seabiscuit is that the horse was so unusual and rare--and the circumstances of his success so particular--that the chances of rising above the crowd are, in fact, millions to one. In that sense, Seabiscuit raises interesting questions and paradoxes about the manner in which human relationships, memory, and national interest revolve round the figure of a horse who, in himself, somehow is not quite so important.

Seabiscuit is a film marketed as a story about a horse who brought a nation together in the late 1930s, a restorative during a period of depression and economic hardship. Based on Hillenbrand’s book, first published in 2001, it tells of an oddball horse whom Hillenbrand describes as “a smallish, mud-colored animal with forelegs that didn’t straighten all the way. “[He] spent nearly two seasons floundering in the lowest ranks of racing, misunderstood and mishandled” (2003, p.12)

The three men of the story, Charles Howard the owner, Tom Smith the trainer, and Red Pollard the jockey, are also men who, like Seabiscuit, are in some sense damaged. Charles Howard loses his son in a truck accident and then is left by his wife. Tom Smith is a quiet cowboy who prefers to sleep outdoors and has something of the horse whisperer talent about him. He is portrayed as out of place in the modern world. Red Pollard is a jockey whose family suffers in the depression. He is abandoned by them to survive as best he can by boxing and riding. The boxing causes him to lose his sight in one eye. As the composed shots of this group that are frequent throughout the film indicate, joined also by Howard’s second wife Marcela, they form an alternative family. Brought together by Seabiscuit who, in turn, overcomes all sorts of obstacles to become a great champion, they are, as one of the final lines of the films suggests, “fixed” by the horse and made whole.

The other important theme that runs through the film and has a key bearing on the status of Seabiscuit as a horse is technology; specifically the motor car and the radio. The sale of motor cars is the key to Howard’s self-made wealth. Old photographs of the Ford assembly line and the car industry, so important to the downfall of the economic importance of the horse at the beginning of the twentieth century, mark the beginning of the film. In addition, it is the increasing availability and growing cheapness of radio in the 1930s that turns the popularity of Seabiscuit into a mass phenomenon. These themes are brought together in a wry detail in the film when Seabiscuit wins his classic head to head race against War Admiral in November 1938. Red Pollard, who--because of a broken leg--could not ride that race, listens to it on the radio. At the end of the race broadcast, there is an advert for the sponsors: National Oil.

Throughout the film during Howard’s bravura displays of showmanship in his promotion of Seabiscuit, he refers to a better future. He speaks the language of optimism for the underdog. But what that future really holds as represented by Howard himself is increasing industrialization, the extension of the mass media, and electrification. All this means a different role for the horse. The future for horses is the world of entertainment: films, horseracing, hunting, and riding. However, to use the horse as the symbol who bears the hopes of this very future provides an element of anachronism. Rather like the Flash Gordon book and game that belonged to Howard’s dead son, which he looks at on occasions during the film to remind him of the boy, it is like the mythology rather than the science of space travel. Hillenbrand has remarked that the story is about the people and not the horse.
Lots of my readers say, “I’ve never been to a horse race” or “I don’t like horses,” but they say they liked the story. I think that’s because of the people in it--and that was always my focus, these three men. That’s why the cover of the book doesn’t have the horse’s head on it. I’ve made a very deliberate decision to focus on the faces of the people so that you know that this is a human story.

Somehow this displacement is further reflected in the way in which the film was made. The production, as is usual in animal films, needed a variety of horses to play Seabiscuit, including horses who could race and horses who could do other things like rearing angrily or biting. Ten horses were used as well as a specially designed vehicle, known on set as the S.S. Seabiscuit, on which were mounted two equicizers with realistic horse heads for close shots of jockeys in action. In fact, the production purchased more than 50 thoroughbreds to film the racing sequences. This was necessary, given that there could be only a few takes for any race and the animals could race only every other day. Certainly it would be difficult to make this kind of film in any other way, given the physical and legal constraints of working with animals.

That so many horses are needed to portray one horse, however, contributes to a sense of disarticulation to the point that this filming method actually comes through onto the screen. As the British film critic Newman (2003) perceptively notes in his review of the film: “[T]he character most neglected here is the title star, who is never invested with the personality the script insists the champion had.” What the audience is presented with is an amalgam of moments (kicking the stable walls, lying down with a horse and a dog) to indicate the different sides of Seabiscuit’s character, which the film considers enough to portray an animal--a composite of clichéd character effects.

I began this review with some remarks about the relation of sport and nationhood. In Seabiscuit, the kind of nation that Howard promoted the horse as appealing to was composed of the no-hopers, the man who starts with nothing and makes good. At the time, however, the kind of nation bonded by horseracing was of a very particular kind.

One of the most important shifts in racing, coinciding also incidentally with the rise of the motor car, was the disappearance of the black jockeys who had been a key component in American racing history, especially toward the end of the nineteenth century. These slave jockeys managed to get round the limitations of slavery if they became successful riders and some became very famous (Thomas, 1999).

From the early 1900s, black jockeys began to disappear due to racism, opposition and resentment at their fame and potential economic success, and also the migration of blacks from southern farms to northern cities. Thus in the year 2000, Marlon St. Julien was the first black jockey to ride in the Kentucky Derby since 1921. Prior to that, however, in the years between the first Kentucky Derby in 1875 until 1903, 15 of the Derbys were won by black jockeys. This obviously is a much more radical exclusion from history--there are only two black jockeys in the Horse Racing Hall of Fame--than the partial decentering of Seabiscuit that one finds in this particular film. It does, however, occupy a similar conceptual space. In the case of Seabiscuit, on film the therapeutic role he seems to play for individuals and masses alike makes him merely a servant, almost a slave. In that sense, his role in his own achievement comes to be effaced.

References

Cassidy, R. (2002). The Sport of kings: Kinship, class and thoroughbred breeding in Newmarket. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Hillenbrand, L. (2003). Seabiscuit: The true story of three men and a racehorse. London: Fourth Estate.

Hotaling, E. (1999). The great black jockeys: The lives and times of the men who dominated America’s first national sport. Rocklin, CA: Forum.

Newman, K. (2003, December). Seabiscuit. Sight and Sound, 13, 51.

Saunders, J. R. & Saunders, M. R. (2002). Black winning jockeys in the Kentucky Derby. Jefferson: Mcfarland & Co.

Thomas, J. D. (1999, February). Black in the saddle. Village Voice, 10-16.
 

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