Table Talk: The Last Dance (2020)

The Last Dance as a cultural moment

Aren: If you’re a sports fan, you’re watching The Last Dance, the documentary series about Michael Jordan and the 1997-1998 Chicago Bulls season, the so-called “last dance” for the basketball dynasty. Just like how you probably tuned into the Bundesliga this past weekend, even if for just a quick peek at sports happening around the world, as if the sight of it was enough to convince you that, yes, sports did exist once upon a time. So I think we’re covering well-trodden ground here, as The Last Dance is enormously popular and has been the subject of so much coverage within sports journalism, both written and audio. But there are still some things to dig into, especially about The Last Dance as a work of filmmaking.

Anders: I think that The Last Dance became a common cultural touchstone for the last month, even beyond starved sports fans. I’ve talked to people who I didn’t know were even basketball or sports fans who have enjoyed it and looked forward to the new episodes each week. I think it might be worth thinking a bit about its cultural impact, because it’s rare that cultural works gain actual mass traction in this day and age of fractured and niche products. I think that some of it had to do with the weekly roll out: there’s something about having a week between episode drops to discuss and debate that makes it more communal than just binging an entire series.

But it also points to how Michael Jordan was more than just a basketball star. I commented on Twitter about how I was a skinny little white teenager in Saskatchewan, from a family that didn’t really follow basketball, but in the mid-nineties I was so into Jordan I had a pair of Air Jordans and a Jordan jersey (that was so big then that I can still wear it as an adult). Jordan transcended his sport. He was a true superstar. And for many people this is an opportunity to learn more about a person who was a superstar before the age of Instagram and Twitter let us into their lives all the time.

Aren: That’s true. The Last Dance achieved the level of monoculture in an era when that’s almost impossible. But along with the popularity comes controversy, and I think the doc has divided some people. The dividing line appears to come down to whether you think the series is a genuine investigation into Michael Jordan as a sports superstar or a fancy bit of self-mythologizing on MJ’s part. What do you think?

Anders: I think it’s a bit of both. For someone who was too young to really follow it the first time around, I’m sure it’s a fascinating look into the details and events of the Bulls’ six championships and some of the personalities that surrounded Michael Jordan in achieving them, such as Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman. But even my framing of that shows how deeply the self-mythologizing hits; those are Michael’s championships! Everyone else is a supporting character. On the other hand, I think that’s largely accurate. Sure, Scottie Pippen and coach Phil Jackson were there for all six championships, but does anyone really doubt that without Michael it wouldn’t have mattered?

Aren: Just look at the 1993-1994 season when MJ retired to play baseball for the Chicago White Sox AA team to get your answer: the team was well coached and Scottie Pippen had an MVP-calibre season, but they fell to the New York Knicks in the playoffs.

Anders: There’s also the fact that a camera crew followed the 1997-98 team around offering us behind the scenes footage, footage that was locked away for over 20 years until this point. I think there’s some people who wanted more, and who feel that there was nothing in the footage that would explain why MJ waited so long to allow it to come to light, and thus, that there’s still something held back, that it’s been edited to portray Michael as favourably as possible. I don’t know; as Donovan Bennett and JD Bunkis pointed out on the Sportsnet Free Association podcast wrap up on this series, in the age of constant locker room access, it seems kind of banal, but at the time, in the late-nineties, it was not very common. Also, let’s be honest, and we can talk about this a bit later, but does Michael really come across as perfect in this?

Aren: Not at all, but a critical portrait of Michael Jordan is never presented upfront. You have to look beyond the direct address and start to take all the structural interests as a whole to get a fuller portrait of Michael Jordan here; the show never straight up tells you to think of him in a bad way. So I think a lot of people assume that because the documentary doesn’t go out of its way to reveal dirt on Michael Jordan, and in fact actually disputes some criticisms leveled at him, such as his first retirement really being a punishment for gambling infractions, that it’s pure fluff. Which I would dispute.

Documentary filmmaking structure and footage

Aren: I think the most impressive aspect of the show is the wealth of footage on display. Not only having that crisp 35mm footage of the Bulls’ season, which is so incredibly superior to the standard definition television broadcasts from the nineties, but also the access to the locker room and every little moment of the Bulls as a team. So often the strength of a documentary relies on the footage alone, and so in terms of archival footage, The Last Dance is a triumph.

Anders: That crisp film footage is amazing. Whenever it is contrasted with the actual television footage of the time, I’m stunned that we ever watched sports on that low a resolution. I was a high school student at the time and in my mind’s eye, it was a lot clearer. It reminds me how good we have it as sports fans in recent years, in terms of both picture quality and access.

Aren: It’s like video game graphics—you accept what is presented at the time as the best possible version of that presentation, and so treat it as such.

The storytelling structure, which simultaneously tells the story of Michael Jordan’s career and the 1997-1998 NBA season, is also clever, with each episode moving through the season a bit as it covers MJ’s past. I give the series credit for having such a clever structure, which isn’t ordinary for sports documentaries of this type. The conversation between the past and the present, and the way that they’ll cut between a young MJ in the eighties, MJ in 1998, and present-day MJ can make for some nice juxtaposition. It shows that director Jason Hehir and his team of editors have some savvy filmmaking chops and are not just relying on the tried-and-true formula of dramatic close-ups of interviews and swelling music (which they often use as well). There’s something to the filmmaking itself.

Anders: Yes, one of the things that this did a good job of is creating a narrative out of the existing material. I think that people often think that documentary is simply discovered, that it is an objective record of reality. This makes it clear how documentaries are crafted, stories are written. If one wants to get a bit philosophical, it makes it clear that all history is narrative. Because cause and effect is never so clear in real life, until we make it so in retrospective. Sometimes narrative can clarify and help us to see how actions and decisions affect the outcome. But sometimes it can obscure and push a particular angle.

I think it’s hard to separate the crafting of narratives from the debate we mentioned above, of whether this film series is an honest account of the period or a piece of hagiography. Because, yes, obviously the narrative is selective and incomplete. Otherwise it wouldn’t be narrative! But what people who complain too much about it miss is that it is inevitably going to be someone’s story. This just happens to be Michael’s account. Perhaps the issue is that his power means we’re not going to get the other angles, but it is interesting how some privilege an imagined alternative narrative to the one we got.

Aren: I don’t doubt that there’s some incriminating footage somewhere that MJ refused to allow into the final product, but I’m not entirely interested in the idea of visual smoking guns, that visual evidence of MJ’s pettiness is somehow more powerful than verbal accounts of it. And as you say, The Last Dance is MJ’s story. Every documentary has a point of view and this documentary takes his.

Anders: I would say the one thing that I think is a place for criticism is that the structure of each episode does become a bit repetitive. After a few episodes the structure of looping back to the earlier stories and past seasons becomes a bit mechanical. But it’s also fascinating to experience as the flashback structure gets less distant, by “Episode IX” and Episode X” the viewer isn’t taken back to the 80s or players’ childhoods, but just the season before. Those shrinking temporal contrasts create an interesting pattern.

I suspect that there is one sense also that the film ends up not being as truly momentous as it could have been. I can’t help but compare it to another ESPN documentary series, OJ: Made in America, which went beyond sport and is a nearly unparalleled insight into sport, celebrity, and race, and how they play in America. The Last Dance never quite goes there, even if there are moments if it seems like it could.

Aren: Yes, but that’s more a result of marketing expectation than anything to do with the story of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls. ESPN hyped it because they currently have nothing else to hype.

Talking heads and half-truths

Aren: The talking head approach is a standard for sports documentaries, especially ESPN’s own brand of 30 for 30. The Last Dance is essentially a balance between talking head interviews reflecting on past events and archival footage of those events, so in that respect, it’s a very standard documentary. The pristine and heretofore unreleased nature of the archival footage gives it a substantial advantage in the footage department, but it’s still archival footage. However, The Last Dance really likes to show off with the variety of people interviewed, from past and present NBA superstars such as MJ and the other Chicago Bulls’ players to Isiah Thomas, Charles Barkely, Reggie Miller, and the late Kobe Bryant, to sports broadcasters and journalists like David Aldridge and Bob Costas, to even presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. In some sense, they’re showing off who they can get.

Anders: Absolutely, there’s a showing off aspect, but it also goes to suggest the importance of this team to American life of the last 30 years, that we need to get the president’s take on this! 

As far as non-basketball interviewees, I found the contrast and comparison between Barack Obama and MJ interesting, especially as African-American men who achieved the greatest heights of their respective fields of endeavour. Thinking about how people react to them, both as global celebrities and representations of the best of America, but also how the public perception masks some of the darker aspects of their achievements, whether MJ’s bullying or Obama’s drone strikes. But perhaps that’s a different discussion, but good documentaries spur thought with those kinds of connections they allow you to make.

Aren: Yes, who you choose to ask to discuss a topic is as important as what they say, so having Obama reflect on MJ says something and draws inevitable comparisons between them.

I also like how the filmmaker often presents MJ with an iPad showing an interview with another player and then films MJ watching the interview simultaneously with us so we can see his reaction, such as his memeable laugh at former Seattle Supersonics’ All-Star point guard Gary Payton’s suggestion that if he had guarded MJ earlier in the 1996 NBA Finals, the series would have turned out differently. It’s a way of playing into the fact that MJ is a stakeholder of this documentary and that the series would not have happened if he had not allowed the footage to be released, which came with the agreement that he could veto what was added. It engages with the fact of whether we’re supposed to take the documentary as MJ’s perspective in a clever, meta way.

Anders: Absolutely. Plus, it also grants a kind of humanity to MJ. You can see his delight, annoyance, and surprise at times.

Aren: And his pettiness. The trash talk that exists to this day, especially between Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan, is ridiculous. The level of animosity that still exists is pretty staggering. MJ can never let a slight go, even if it’s an invented slight, as is revealed to be the case with some of the legendary trash talks that supposedly fired him up during various playoff series.

Anders: As a friend of mine put it on Twitter, you could make a drinking game for every time Michael says: “It became personal for me.”

Is Michael Jordan the real villain of The Last Dance?

Aren: There’s all this talk in The Last Dance about heroes and villains in this series. The late Jerry Krause, the Chicago Bulls General Manager who was adamant about entering a rebuild before MJ and Scottie Pippen had even left the Bulls’ dynasty, is the obvious villain, but because he’s dead, he could never be interviewed to give his side of the story, so it’s a pretty one-sided portrait of him. The Bad Boys Pistons and Isiah Thomas are the other obvious villains, as they were the brutally physical team that MJ and the Bulls had to overcome in order to win their first NBA Championship. 

But as the series went on and more stories about MJ’s pettiness were revealed, and as we saw how he still held these grudges in the modern day, I couldn’t help but wonder whether MJ ends up the real villain of this series, since he is arguably the greatest basketball player of all time, one of the greatest athletes ever, and one of the most beloved cultural icons of the 20th century, and he basically is shown to be a perpetually dissatisfied, petty bully.

Anders: I don’t know that he’s a villain, but he defies our contemporary desire for our heroes to be “relatable” and squeaky clean. He is, as you say, a petty man, who took pleasure in vanquishing anyone who he perceived as being a rival or slighting him.

Aren: I’m overstating it to be provocative, but I do think The Last Dance captures the weaknesses of this man who could seem superhuman on the basketball court. The fact that in so many ways he was a wounded child forever obsessed with what his father thought of him—literally wanting to fight his brothers to win his father’s approval—and that the tragic loss of his father made sure that he could never really get closure with that lack of approval; for him, there’s always a void of paternal approval that could only be temporarily held at bay by winning at all costs. 

So he is undoubtedly the hero of this story of the Bulls. He is the reason they won six championships in six Finals appearances. But he is also the antagonist of every other person involved, including his teammates. He’s the one they had to prove themselves against. He is the one who forced them beyond their comfort zone. He is the one who made things too personal. Thus, he’s the tragic hero here too; a man always getting in the way of closure and his own healing. He’s the endless source of conflict and a man that is self-admittedly addicted to competition.

Anders: My takeaway, which is perhaps buying into the mythologizing too much, but hear me out, is that Michael Jordan is one of the last of a kind of celebrity who could be compared to a legendary hero from the Greek or Roman myths. Like Achilles or Agamemnon, he’s not perfect, he’s deeply flawed and not always “good.” But he is great, if we can still accept that distinction.

The Last Dance (ESPN)

Directed by Jason Hehir; produced by Michael Tollin and Jon Weinbach.