Released April 19 in the middle of confinement, The Last Dance, documentary series on the exceptional career of Michael Jordan, could not have been better. Co-produced by ESPN and Netflix, and directed by documentary filmmaker Jason Hehir, the program immerses us in the greatest athletic exploits of the athlete, from his beginnings in 1984 to his second retirement in 1998, and promises to make us discover the real Michael Jordan.
In ten episodes, The Last Dance makes us (re) live some of the most beautiful moments of the NBA, and calls on our nostalgia of the 1990s with the help of perfectly edited and selected archive images. It is, to date, the most watched ESPN documentary in history. For sports fans and laymen alike, The Last Dance will therefore have been the cultural phenomenon of spring 2020.
This enthusiasm is understandable, as a pandemic requires, we have been deprived of all the major sporting events that should have, in normal times, punctuated the current season. Without Roland-Garros, without Euro football, without Olympic Games, without NBA season, there is not much left for us to vibrate … if not the memory of the greatest basketball player of all time and his exploits legendary. What could be better, in such circumstances, to reproduce the joy and sense of community brought about by sport, than to contemplate a glorified compilation of the best actions of the Chicago Bulls?
In this sense, the documentary was very timely, as illustrated by the many reactions online: “I love The Last Dance as a substitute for sports competitions, and as a trip of intense cultural nostalgia ”, writes an American critic.
Concentrated nostalgia
For the spectators in need of comfort that we were, The Last Dance was indeed a gift from heaven. Alexandra Vignolles is a teacher-researcher on consumer behavior and nostalgia, and like nearly 24 million Netflix subscribers, she watched The Last Dance in April. “As a nostalgic of the 1980s and 1990s, and as a big fan of Michael Jordan, I had chills. I had spiky hair in front of each episode on my sofa. ”
If there is one thing The Last Dance succeeds wonderfully, it is its concentrate of nostalgia. With its many archive images (plus interviews with the main actors of the time), the documentary takes us straight back to the time of the 1990s; the golden age of hip-hop, oversized t-shirts and tinted glasses.
Even the soundtrack of the documentary, from Puff Daddy to Fatboy Slim via Pearl Jam, feels like a 100% nineties time travel. “Music, like perfume, recipes, smells, dishes, are levers of nostalgia, it really serves to awaken the senses, and they chose songs that are specific to these years in the documentary”, confirms Alexandra Vignolles. Not to mention the visual Proust madeleines of which the series abounds: there are the old vintage pubs for the Air Jordan, emblematic sneakers in the name of the player, but also the images of his participation in the shooting of Space jam, the Looney Tunes movie.
The 1990s was the peak of American cultural influence around the world, whether in music, film or consumer products. It is therefore not surprising that we have felt, as far as France, such affection for the series. Especially since a large part of its audience – 30-something subscribers to Netflix – grew up at this time, which further accentuated the nostalgic effect. “Early childhood is probably more nostalgic than other times, because much less goes wrong at that age. When you are younger, you are more innocent ”, says David B. Newman, researcher in social psychology at the University of Southern California.
Nostalgia for nineties, it’s a real phenomenon for a few years, that we find as well in fashion, marketing, decoration, or Instagram accounts dedicated to the decade, like this one which counts more than a million subscribers. As Alexandra Vignolles points out, studies have shown “That it takes about twenty years to notice a phenomenon of nostalgia among consumers”. We have therefore reached the number of years necessary to appreciate again, the gaze bathed in tears, the fleece clothing, the cyclists in lycra and the joggers that open on the side.
Candy effect
“In consumer behavior, in marketing and even in psychology, we speak of“ nostalgic marker ”, explains Alexandra Vignolles. Certain products, celebrities or brands are temporal “markers” or “anchors”. There are some worldwide, like the death of Kurt Cobain for example, but there are also markers specific to certain countries. ” In France, the 1990s corresponded to the Chirac period, or even to the 1998 Football World Cup, so many cultural markers that arouse deep nostalgia today, and only today: “In the 2000s, it was not at all the fashion for t-shirts with Chirac who fraud in the metro “says the researcher.
What The Last Dance offer, it is therefore a certain distance from the time before, a soft, benevolent, and slightly distorted look at an era whose memories are starting to fade.
The unprecedented success of the documentary can also be explained by the great period of anxiety and uncertainty in which it came out. According to Alexandra Vignolles, “Nostalgia has always existed and it is accentuated by periods of crisis. So inevitably, during the Covid period, we will instinctively return to the films that we have already seen, return to the products, foods or rituals that we know and master. In the face of uncertainty, nostalgia reassures us. ” The series would therefore have served as “Sweet, sweet in a time when it was not very funny”.
A very selective vision of the time
A real shot of nostalgia, The Last Dance is suspended out of time, but also out of any political or social consideration. In the world of documentaries, the 1990s appeared as an era of total recklessness – a kind of enchanted parenthesis for the United States and the rest of the West, perfectly situated between the fall of the USSR and the attacks of September 11 2001.
In a lunar archive scene for the spectator of 2020, an American journalist qualifies for example the announcement of Michael Jordan’s retirement as “The biggest news of the year [1993]”. While the news no longer offers us any respite and each year since 2015 seems to be fighting for the title of worst year in history (at least on social networks), difficult not to regret the period, apparently blessed, in which we immerse the documentary.
If our current vision of the 1990s can be summed up in the credits of Friends, the prowess of Michael Jordan and the problematic outfits of Gwen Stefani, the reality of the time was obviously much more complex. As the Chicago Bulls won their second NBA trophy in 1992 and Jordan achieved international star status, racial riots tear apart Los Angeles following the acquittal of several white police officers who had beaten the African-American Rodney King – a context also explored by another ESPN documentary released in 2016, OJ: Made in America.
“The interesting thing about nostalgia is that part of the story is often overlooked, observes David B. Newman. When we remember Michael Jordan’s time, we sometimes forget the political events that took place at the same time to focus on basketball. We say to ourselves “it was really a marvelous period” and we ignore the context. ”
No annoying subject
Like his star athlete, The Last Dance is entirely focused on the sport and the legend of Michael Jordan, without ever seeking to go further. A legitimate bias, which nevertheless makes documentaries a smooth entertainment, “Without roughness” according to Alexandra Vignolles. This is no doubt due in large part to the fact that Michael Jordan had a say in the documentary. The series therefore avoids any angry subject.
The tyrannical tendencies of the athlete are excused by his brilliance – without them, we are told, Jordan would not have been the best. And even as we explore in depth his relationship with his father, Jordan’s first wife and their children are almost completely erased from history, and we will never know what was the impact of the competitive obsession of the athlete on his family life.
As for the societal and political context in which the star was evolving, he is briefly touched on about a controversy which Michael Jordan had been the subject of in 1990, by refusing to support a black senator from North Carolina (his State of origin), which campaigned against a notoriously racist Republican. The basketball player then said, much to the disappointment of some fans: “The Republicans also buy sneakers.”
The documentary also involves Barack Obama, who claims that “In this society, any successful African American must carry a burden. Often America admires Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama very quickly … as long as we do not create controversy around subjects like social justice “. But this problem, quickly swept away, only represents a few minutes in ten hours of images. We have no right to think about it on the part of the athlete himself, except for a gap “I was not involved in politics, I was an athlete, I only thought about that”. No visible reminder from the interviewer, who once again confirms the tone of the documentary, more reverent than journalistic.
In this, The Last Dance is in the image of its main subject: more concerned about Air Jordan, the simplistic nostalgia of a bygone era and the legend of Jordan, than by the real impact of the star in the American culture of the time. An extremely entertaining, often comforting image of Epinal, but closer to the fiction series than to the documentary.
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