Figuratively Thinking

Reviled, envied, lusted after and deified, the cheerleader has been doing cartwheels through the American psyche for decades, and now she’s got some new moves. Joining her in an unlikely comeback: the beauty queen. Long lampooned as a phony backbiter, Miss Whatever is emerging from a long stay in the Land of the Un-Hip to become a potent symbol for filmmakers.

The worlds of cheerleading and pageants have been fitfully refashioning themselves to suit the times. In a spate of recent and upcoming movies, filmmakers use these resilient sex symbols to reexamine what it means--and what it takes--to be an American beauty. Among them:

* “Bring It On,” a surprise hit (about $45 million at the box office in three weeks) starring Kirsten Dunst, takes an affectionate look at the world of competitive cheerleading as two squads battle for the national championship. The football team hasn’t won a game all season; these sisters are doing it for themselves.

* “Beautiful,” opening later this month, stars Minnie Driver as a woman obsessed with winning a national beauty pageant.

* “Miss Congeniality,” set for a December release, has Sandra Bullock playing an FBI agent who reluctantly poses as a pageant contestant to catch a terrorist.

* “Sugar and Spice,” to be released early next year, follows a pregnant cheerleader (Marley Shelton) who recruits her squad to rob banks so she can start a new life. It’s not a farfetched premise; at least two cases of gun-wielding cheerleaders have made headlines in the last couple of years.

* “But I’m a Cheerleader,” released this summer, is a coming-out story about a cheerleader (Natasha Lyonne) who just happens to be a lesbian and who is sent to a “camp” to be reconditioned as a heterosexual.

This follows a decade of dispiriting pop culture portrayals in images culled from the ‘90s: Sullen cheerleaders limply lead a desultory pep rally from hell in Nirvana’s 1991 “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video; feral Wanda (Holly Hunter) huddles with a hit man to knock off her daughter’s rival in 1993’s fact-based cable movie “The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom”; perky blond cheerleader (Mena Suvari) is transformed into a rose-enfolded sex object via the addled fantasy of a suburban loser (Kevin Spacey) while his own daughter (Thora Birch) halfheartedly cheers the home team to victory in the 1999 Oscar-winning “American Beauty”; small-town beauty queen lies in a hospital bed being fed by tubes as she recovers from a bout of bulimia in last year’s “Drop Dead Gorgeous.”

The creators of the new films, mostly women, brought their own baggage to the table when embarking on their projects.

Oscar-winning actress Sally Field directed “Beautiful” and had to work through her own misgivings about beauty pageant culture to find a story worth telling.

“On the one hand it seems incredible to me that in this day and age, we’re still rating women on their physical appearance,” she says. “On the other hand, a lot of young women I talked to really found opportunity they would never have through the pageants. Many said this was the only way they could get an education. And so many are from very rural places and have no other hope for getting that kind of money.

“Still, it seems very ironic that one of this country’s largest scholarship programs for women’s education is beauty pageants.”

Spotting a New Breed of Athletic Cheerleaders

Jessica Bendinger got hooked on competitive cheerleading, the subject of her “Bring It On” screenplay, several years ago when she happened across ESPN’s annual telecast of the National Cheerleader Assn. finals, held each January in Orlando, Fla. Here was a new breed of cheerleaders--athletes first, cutie-pies second.

Explains Bendinger, “It used to be about girls cheering on the boys, the old gender roles, versus now: You’ve got this death-defying, risk-taking thing. There was a real polarity I wanted to explore. You’ve still got the sexual roles in place and at the same time this futuristic extreme-sports attitude: ‘Not only can we do this, but we’re winning more trophies than the team.’ ”

Bendinger tried out for the cheerleading squad at her Connecticut high school, didn’t make the cut and wound up playing on the girls’ basketball team.

“In my high school, cheerleaders were the sexual icons. All the boys lusted after them, the girls knew they had the control, they had the power over the boys,” she said.

“Everybody has such a charged feeling about cheerleaders. Whether you want to smack ‘em, date ‘em, be them, whatever.”

For Bendinger, cheerleading offers respite from an irony-drenched been-there, done-that culture.

“When I went to the National Cheerleading Assn. championships, I was overcome with this bittersweet feeling in appreciation of these cheerleaders. Of course they’re cynical; they’re exposed to all the information overload everybody else is. But they’re pursuing this old-fashioned thing. Here’s this [little] pocket [in society] where you can be unabashedly enthusiastic. That, to me, is rare and sweet and pure. Here’s this safe place to be enthusiastically cheering, really, for yourself.”

Jamie Babbit, director of “But I’m a Cheerleader,” was hardly a fan of the pompom squad while attending high school in Ohio during the ‘80s. “I definitely kind of hated cheerleaders because they represented a type of perfection I’d never achieve,” she says.

But when Babbit was developing her story about a girl sent to a homosexual “rehab camp” for therapy, she decided to make the heroine a cheerleader as “a kind of shorthand. I wanted the lead to be a cheerleader because I wanted her to be an all-American girl.”

“Miss Congeniality” was written by Mark Lawrence, who interviewed pageant contestants and FBI agents while researching his fish-out-of-water story. “The FBI is this very closed world,” he says. “Your life becomes very tunnel vision. And in a funny way, that’s very much like the beauty pageants. All you think about is the state competitions, what’s your talent, how are you gonna walk. You’re really going from one obsessive world to another.”

The ‘Slightly Surreal’ World of Beauty Pageants

Lawrence attended the Miss USA finals in Branson, Mo., and found the world of beauty pageants “slightly surreal. Using hair spray on your buttocks to keep your swim suit from riding up is one of the details I’m trying to forget as quickly as possible,” he jokes.

“It’s so easy to have a condescending attitude. But the other side is, women do have to have platforms, and these programs [for community involvement] are not just something they slap on their resumes. . . . They’re out teaching underprivileged kids three days a week while I’m just writing about it.”

“Congeniality” director Donald Petrie learned firsthand that women still take beauty contests seriously. While casting the movie in Texas, he said, “we had girls audition, and when they found out our [production] dates, they decided they couldn’t do the movie: ‘Oh, it conflicts with Miss Texas.’ ”

Francine McDougall, an Australian director, was astonished by America’s cheerleading subculture when she signed on for “Sugar and Spice.” There are no cheerleaders Down Under.

“I had a very negative preconception about cheerleaders,” she admits. “I just didn’t understand why girls would want to cheer on boys. To me, it seemed a very odd thing.”

Once she began work on the film, McDougall says, “I discovered that these are amazing athletes who can do stuff that makes me put my hands over my eyes. You’re afraid they’re going to tumble down and hurt themselves.”

A real-life cheerleader coach was hired to teach the “Sugar and Spice” cast how to compete. Recalls McDougall, “If you could bottle cuteness, you’d have this tiny blond woman who just beamed. You didn’t get that competitive vibe from her, but when she started training the girls, we were all kind of taken aback. When it was time to whip them into shape, she really instilled in everyone the idea that this is serious business. For her, it’s a sport, and she does compete.”

“Sugar and Spice” subverts “good girl” stereotypes for comic effect; the pregnant cheerleader insists on wearing her outfit even as she grows more and more plump. But McDougall says her aim was not to debunk the cheerleader mystique.

“The movie’s not so much getting down on the good girl, or about cheerleaders going bad, but the idea that bad girls can come from anywhere,” she says.

“We have preconceptions about where ‘bad’ people come from, but the way people perceive these roles can change. The kid who used to be the nerd becomes the Internet millionaire.”