‘I Am Pleasing to Everyone’

Netflix is out with a new delectable documentary series, America’s Sweethearts, about tryouts for the 2023 Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. Why should I, someone who’s never reviewed anything other than a book, be the one to review it? For starters, a sick day had granted me the ability to guzzle it down in a single seven-hour stretch. The show scratched just about every itch that I have: As a former cheerleader who spent much of this year in physical therapy to address a chronic back injury, I find watching people hit moves with a precision that I can no longer even approximate to be deeply satisfying. I also love a documentary that examines American culture without saying it’s doing that—even better if it doesn’t seem to know it’s doing that. America’s Sweethearts is a show about the cult of femininity, of which I consider myself—depending on the day—a subject or a survivor. Plus, growing up in rural California in the 1990s, at the height of NFL monoculture, I had a babysitter from San Antonio named Lisa who drove a Ford Bronco with the Cowboys logo emblazoned on the side, and had two chihuahuas at home named Troy and Emmitt. I had to watch this show.

It begins with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders director, Kelli McGonagill Finglass, and choreographer, Judy Trammell—themselves former DCCs, as squad members are known—culling through video auditions of writhing young women. The candidates have clearly spent their lives not just dancing but performing as soloists, which is an altogether separate skill. Finglass’s and Trammell’s favorites possess beauty and superior technique—those are the price of entry—but also a preternatural quality that makes people want to look at them. And I did.

Read: Cheer is built on a pyramid of broken bodies

As they make their way through the process, the rookie and veteran candidates—any of whom can be cut—form deep relationships impossibly fast. Even the ones who have known each other only a few weeks call each other best friends. They bawl when their best friends are cut from the team. The most-uttered phrase on the show must be “I love you so much!,” often appearing in scenes with lots of runny mascara and a group hug.

Similar moments no doubt played out among the girls that I cheered with in high school, but many of us had been in dance classes together since we were in tiny tutus. I grew skeptical of such displays of emotion during my brief, embarrassing stint in a college sorority. I was dealing with freshman-year loneliness and so my mom pushed me to rush. But when I found myself at the center of groups of shrieking women declaring their love for one another while  throwing themselves into meaningless activities, I felt more alone than ever. My sorority, like the Cowboys cheerleaders, had only a handful of women of color—just enough to head off any accusations of you-know-what—and we mostly kept to ourselves. I got out of there as fast as I could.

The football games, when they begin on the show, provide a high of their own. Being a cheerleader at a football game is thrilling not because you’re the center of attention—you’re not; everyone is watching the game—but because you’re in a place where everyone has gathered for a particular purpose, and you have a role to play. The cheerleaders talk about how putting on their uniform feels like putting on a cape and becoming a superhero. Weirdly enough, I feel the same way about covering the news now. We’re all still gathered for a particular project, except now it’s reporting on the state of American democracy. The outcome is uncertain, but I have a job to do; it gives me a sense of direction—one that feels to me now, of course, like a much more important one.

Just before this, I’d watched a different documentary: Manufacturing Consent, featuring Noam Chomsky, who’d been in the news. He talks about sports as a way to control the masses, and group activities like sororities and cheer squads as a way to breed subservience. America’s Sweethearts seemed to reinforce his theories completely. The show’s characters are content, soothed by the strict hierarchy of their world. They hate to disappoint, but when they do, their path back into their coaches’ good graces is clear: Perform better, and you will be absolved. The satisfaction this provides is so deep that squad alumnae—some in their 70s—return to the stadium to perform together annually. They take the performance deadly seriously, and many cheerleaders say on the show that their years on the squad were the best in their entire lives.

By contrast, the life of a godless, skeptical grump, which Chomsky pushes, and to which I am more naturally inclined, is a bit of a bummer. As I’ve aged, I’ve come around to the fact that birthdays are worth celebrating, that it’s okay to take a day off from your mission, that being grateful—as the women on the show remind you they are incessantly—isn’t necessarily naive. And I’m much happier for it. So who’s right, Chomsky?

All of that happiness comes with a lot of hard work. Those who earn a spot on the team do so because they learn to push through pain, put off having surgery, survive on four or five hours of sleep in order to take on extra jobs that supplement their marginal incomes.

And because they are women, they must look perfect while performing all of this work. They must be windup dolls of positivity. At one point in the show, a binder that is said to contain the answers to the question of “What is a DCC?” flips open. I had to hit “Pause” to read and reread one page, which sums it up thusly:

“I cost nothing”—that one got me. The cheerleaders are expected to keep smiling as they’re given impossible standards to uphold. They’re told that their kicks aren’t high enough (which sometimes seemed to be a euphemism for the fact that Coach Finglass just didn’t like them), then that they look like they’re trying too hard and need to relax, then that they look like they have low energy, then that they need to eat more to fuel their bodies, then that they’re not skinny enough. More makeup. Too much makeup. Too blond. Not blond enough. The most scathing criticism must be met with a smile and a “Yes, ma’am.”

My favorite character was Reece Allman. She was by far the best dancer, impossibly alluring, whether she was cheering or during the Latin ballroom-inspired dance that she did for her tryout. (After her tryout, a judge asked to pause the competition for a moment so that he could fan himself.) In interviews in her bedroom, she said that her dancing abilities were a gift from God and that she wanted to use them to bring him glory. She said that she didn’t want people to see her at all when she was onstage—that she wanted them to see Jesus. But when she is onstage, you cannot look anywhere else. And you cannot—or at least I could not—see Jesus.

Reece also explained that she was engaged to the first boy she’d ever talked to, an absolute sweetie who got a job at a power-washer dealer, selling parts in Dallas so that they can live together. He said that Reece, seemingly one of the most confident dancers alive, shook visibly from fear the first time he put her arm around her. This story made it all but clear that they had not yet consummated their love. How could someone who had never gotten laid ooze so much sexuality? That contradiction is the Cowboys-cheerleader way.

Read: Why don’t more people consider competitive cheerleading a sport?

According to reviewers, this is the worst show by Greg Whiteley—the creator of Cheer and Last Chance U—because it goes too easy on its characters. Daniel Feinburg wrote in The Hollywood Reporter that it was “frustratingly caught up in the mythos surrounding its subjects,” and that it felt “more like a well-polished commercial than an eye-opening documentary.”

Feinburg is right, but what makes the show interesting is how easy it is to see beneath the veneer. In the last episode, Sophy Laufer accuses a cameraman of grabbing her butt while she’s dancing. The police get involved but decide that there’s not enough evidence to charge the man. But the scenes are revealing anyway, because Coach Finglass’s reaction—raised eyebrows and surprise that the cheerleader wants to press charges—suggests she might not have been as supportive of Laufer if the cameras had not been rolling. (She also describes the incident differently from the filmmakers, saying the police had determined that no assault occurred.)

Laufer is the youngest one on the squad—only 19. She’s interviewed right after it happened, wearing gobs of makeup, which makes her look only more childlike. But in this moment, she becomes a woman, not through her appearance, but by forgetting about the rulebook (I am pleasing to everyone) and reporting the incident so that something similar—or worse—doesn’t happen to anyone else. She steps out on her own, and the other girls have no choice but to support her. “We’re so proud of you,” they declare in a pile of hugs.