‘America’s Sweethearts’ Is an Accidental Feminist Documentary Made by a Witless Man

I have never watched a Dallas Cowboys game. Actually, I’ve never watched a football game in its entirety, regardless of the teams playing. But I did watch the show Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders: Making the Team with the same ferocious interest that I’m sure football fans watch football with. It’s like Toddlers and Tiaras meets Dance Moms, but the dancers in question are adult women with full-time jobs and families. What brings them all together is their obsession with the Dallas Cowboys “organization” as they refer to it, and what that organization represents to them, as Americans and as dancers. This is not to say it’s about dance, no matter how much they assure you it is. Anyone watching from the outside can see that these women are athletes before they are dancers, and that they’re telling themselves a story about what “dancing” on the sidelines of a football game “means,” when the real message is more sinister, if predictable: they’re objects for sexual fantasy.

Such was the underlying theme I expected from the new Netflix docu-series, America’s Sweethearts, which follows 2023’s team of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and their coaches, Kelli Finglass and Judy Trammell, both former DCC themselves, as they audition, rehearse, and perform for the season. Director Greg Whitely is familiar with the specific challenges of cheer as a sport and of professional sports in general: he also directed Cheer and Last Chance U. One might have thought that spending so much time with professional cheerleaders would allow him to see beyond the outer glam, but no. When asked what he thought the thesis statement of the series ultimately was, he talked about a close-up shot of a cheerleader’s heavily mascaraed eye:

“There was a cheerleader that we were following—Kelcey,” he describes. Kelcey played an important role both on the team and in the documentary. She worked full-time as a pediatric nurse by day and served as team captain by night. She got engaged during filming and spoke about being stalked by a fan. I was intrigued by her calm strength; I could tell she was the kind of person you’d love to have on your team.

Whitely loved her eyes. He found them so captivating that he asked his “genius cinematographer Jonathan Nichols” to zoom in on them real close.

“It occurred to me, as we were looking at it, that there is a certain beauty standard, not just for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, that all women everywhere have to adhere to or strive for. I noticed that, as you went into that eyeball, it’s really the one part of the human face that you can’t adjust with makeup, and yet, it is breathtakingly beautiful … Almost to say that, ‘Yes, here is this beautiful woman, but when you get closer, she becomes more beautiful, not less.’ That was what we had found: There’s this organization, it gleams, and there’s this sisterhood that, yeah, these cheerleaders are beautiful, they dance great—but when you get closer to them, and to who they really are, and to their history, it’s not perfect. It isn’t without its flaws or its cracks. But it’s also more beautiful than I think people accounted for.”

He’s on the right track — he knows there’s something there about beauty standards and the pressure they put on women, but he’s also admitting to just learning about them for the first time, which is shocking and embarrassing, and then he ends up making it about as trite as a HomeGoods sign that reads “Beauty comes from within.”

The interviewer takes it one step further, remarking that this theme of beauty culminates in the last shot of the series, where a bare-faced Kelcey smiles at the camera shyly following a montage of her and her teammates taking off their makeup, calling it a “metaphor for how vulnerable they’ve been throughout this process.”

“That’s great. I wish that would have occurred to me. I didn’t know why I liked it, but now it occurs to me that what you just said is right. There was a certain level of vulnerability, a certain façade that we had to get rid of, to do the kind of show that I wanted to do,” Whitely responded.

I mean, oof. Somehow this witless man managed to make a documentary about complex, beautiful women that did indeed explore themes of beauty and vulnerability and American misogyny, he just didn’t know it.

One of the other main characters of the series is Victoria, whom we witness struggling with depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder. She ultimately decides to retire before her fifth year on the team because she wasn’t happy there. Every scene Victoria appears in drips with sadness and vulnerability, despite Whitely not realizing it.

Don’t let his cluelessness lead you astray: America’s Sweethearts is a surprisingly feminist portrayal of one slice of American culture that, come to think of it, passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. It’s streaming now on Netflix.