You Say You Want an Evolution: Sneaker Cinema’s Narrative and Aesthetic Ground Zero

What sneaker cinema is amounts to the sport shoe’s role in adding narrative or stylistic significance to a film’s mise-en-scene, themes, characters, or plot lines. And to be clear: ruby red and/or glass slippers, white loafers (of the kind that travels from Peter Sellers’s foot to a platter of pâté in Blake Edwards’s The Party), or edible ankle boots (like the one Werner Herzog eats in 1980’s Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe) need not apply. Sneaker cinema is just what it implies, involving footwear ostensibly designed for the physical rigors of specific training and sports competition, whether or not it’s utilized as such within the diegesis. And although this essay principally discusses known athletic brand names, it’s not an essential component of sneaker cinema (e.g., the fictional “Parrish” sneaker has an important narrative function in 1995’s Jumanji).

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At a recent holiday hoodang, well lubricated by the spirit(s) of the season, I felt compelled to apologize to my father for subjecting him to years of bratty, mood-swinging behavior (well into what we would reasonably call adulthood). In his usual, gentle way, he was dismissive of all of it save for one recurring pattern of tantrum-laced theatrics that had particularly disturbed and confounded him over the course of our lives: my powder-keg reaction whenever he tried to push (i.e., purchase for me) some off-brand, non-sanctioned pair of godforsaken sneakers that could be sensibly afforded on a split-family budget. Was it strictly a paying-for-the-logo kind of situation, he ruminated, just as he had thirty-something years ago and since, or was it about who endorsed the sneaker or what? Holy frickin’ hell, Dad – you still don’t get it. Sigh, I’m sorry … again.

From an inordinately early time in life, I had been absorbing gobs of genre film with my father on weekend trips to movie theaters around Boston – a fountain of ten thousand hours of awe and inspiration. Earliest memories roll back to any and all Godzilla movies and seeing Kevin Connor’s The Land That Time Forgot on the big screen in 1975; these are titles that a three-year-old absorbs with all appropriate seriousness.1 Later, around the age of ten, I grew equally seriously passionate about basketball and, thusly, generally ceased to be quite as seriously passionate about anything else in my life beyond those two pursuits. In the fall of 1984, we decamped to see James Cameron’s original The Terminator. Dad couldn’t have seen it coming: in the film’s opening act, newly-arrived-and-nude-in-present-times Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) ducks into a department store to evade police and outfit himself, and when he clandestinely touches down from behind a changing curtain, the miracles he’s attached to his previously bare feet are a pair of high-top, black with silver Swoosh, Nike Vandals. Furthermore, when Reese/Biehn slingshots the Vandal’s signature velcro strap across his ankle, punctuating his growly, on-the-run cool, the film’s sleek futurism, and the sequence’s nod to the fury of the fast break, my eyes went all Kool-Aid Acid Test spiral. The Terminator synthesized my aesthetic and narrative impulses into one singular visual moment, unveiling a coded language that spoke directly to anyone who straddled that rarefied space in the center of a cine-cultural Venn diagram.

That Terminator touchstone helps to define what sneaker cinema is and should be.

First, what sneaker cinema is not is what that cinematic sneaker moment led directly, inevitably, to: the appropriation of the cultural and graphic significance of observable brand athletic footwear in a film for the sole purpose of marketing and selling it as a product, and not as an integral component of the film’s diegesis. If sneaker cinema is really on a vast spectrum, then the Vandal’s appearance in Cameron’s sci-fi pulp lies at one end, and the shameless, cross-promotional monstro-hybrid of a feature-length commercial that is 1996’s Space Jam occupies a spot at the far opposite end (Bill Murray, notwithstanding). Michael Jordan, in fact – or more importantly, his Air Jordan sneakers – sits unironically at both poles of the spectrum (more on that later).

I’ll reaffirm my full awareness of the sneaker as an undeniable consumer product, and when installed on a giant, or even medium-sized, screen, well, there’s a strong chance that some – nigh, multitudes – may be susceptible to a subliminal desire to procure what they’re seeing, to physically, psychically ingratiate themselves into the world of film cool. Folks buy sneakers for the way they look, the way they perform, but it’s equally undeniable that the general viewing public is frequently throat-kicked into buying items that a character (or movie star) wears in a film (or not wears, as the case may be; I’m looking at you, Clark Gable, o killer of undershirts), regardless of its athletic relevance or practicality in their own offscreen, off-court lives.2

And sometimes it’s difficult to mitigate whether the appearance of brand footwear in a film warrants derision simply because it inherently screams automatic, naked marketing and only whispers anything related to narrative. Alex Proyas’s I, Robot (2004) flirts with this when Will Smith’s technophobe cop of the near future puts on a pair of “vintage” Converse All-Star Chucks; the paradoxical clash of vintage vs. technology theme that snakes through the movie falls as gently as a war hammer on the plot, the sneakers feel unduly, overtly doted on – both visually and in character dialogue – and Smith often seems to be shilling something in his screen performances, even when it’s not about the shoes. It’s all too much for the Chucks to feel organic, and its presence fails to push or impact the narrative. In short, it’s product placement, nothing more. Likewise, the featuring of the Nike Cortez on Tom Hanks’s feet in Forrest Gump (1994, Bob Zemeckis), whose made-for-the-zeitgeist exploits and hollow platitudes feel as slickly telegraphed as an actual Nike commercial, is a grab at iconoclast immortality, akin to a personal campaign for an Academy Award nomination. Watch these films again and decide for yourself. As high-falutin’ arbiters of cinema, though, we must decide whether the appearance of a Nike Vandal or an Air Jordan has a narrative – rather than a strictly marketing – function, and therefore holds possible artistic aspirations.

What sneaker cinema is amounts to the sport shoe’s role in adding narrative or stylistic significance to a film’s mise-en-scene, themes, characters, or plot lines. And to be clear: ruby red and/or glass slippers, white loafers (of the kind that travels from Peter Sellers’s foot to a platter of pâté in Blake Edwards’s The Party), or edible ankle boots (like the one Werner Herzog eats in 1980’s Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe) need not apply. Sneaker cinema is just what it implies, involving footwear ostensibly designed for the physical rigors of specific training and sports competition, whether or not it’s utilized as such within the diegesis. And although this essay principally discusses known athletic brand names, it’s not an essential component of sneaker cinema (e.g., the fictional “Parrish” sneaker has an important narrative function in 1995’s Jumanji).

So, what qualifies? If Terminator is a ground-zero home-base starting-origin point, the next concentric circle hits on 1985’s The Goonies. In it, reverberations of the era’s pop culture canvas the mise-en-scene: Corey Feldman’s Mouth wears a Prince Purple Rain concert shirt, Josh Brolin’s Brand is clad in “Let’s Get Physical”-flecked workout clothes, and Nike, again, is underneath them all. In fact, Brolin’s character, like Biehn’s before him, is rocking the black/silver colorway of Nike Vandal. Mouth looks to be sporting all-black Cortez; Jeff Cohen’s Chunk has on runners (a perfect sartorial juxtaposition to his florid Hawaiian shirt); Mikey’s (Sean Astin) pair has three Velcro straps over its tongue; Data (Jonathan Ke Quan), of course, has his oil slick-ejecting Sky Force Hi’s; and, maybe sleekest of all are Martha Plimpton’s/Stef’s pink high-top canvas units. Never is the kids’ footwear explicitly pored over by director Richard Donner; their sneakers exist as extensions of the characters themselves, lived-in and scuffed like kids’ stuff inevitably is, custom-made for each of their offbeat, outsider personalities. Product placement adjacent? Maybe, but the narrative synergy here whoops any notion of capital gain.

Radiating outward, the zone now encompasses the borders of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). Just a few years earlier, Spike Lee as his Mars Blackmon alter ego rode the Michael & Air Jordan Cultural Takeover into the pantheon of most memorable and effective advertising campaigns of all-time, but now Spike Lee the Director employs the gorgeous, Tinker Hatfield-designed Air Jordan IV, white with black & cement flourishes, as a sociopolitical commentary on late-century race relations, and one of the film’s most important characters.3 When Clifton (John Savage) accidentally scuffs Buggin Out’s (Giancarlo Esposito) pristine Jordans as he passes him on a Bedford-Stuyvesant sidewalk, it ignites a cross-racial back-and-forth, a spillover of tensions that have been roiling on the literal hottest day of the year. The scene’s imagery is culturally, almost allegorically, deterministic: Savage’s character sports a Celtics t-shirt with Larry Bird’s number 33 on it – basketball’s tall white duke – while Esposito’s character rocks the colors and emblems of Africa, around his neck and as an adornment on the laces of his Jordans, a distinct personal enhancement. When Buggin asks Clifton why he wants to buy a brownstone in a black neighborhood anyway, the answer of “It’s a free country” isn’t gonna fly with the gathering crowd of young black Brooklynites. Buggin fires back with, “Free country?! I should fuck you up for saying that stupid shit alone.”

The divide between the racially privileged and the urbanely disenfranchised established, the focus shifts back to the sneakers. Someone barks from the background that Buggin should just “throw them shits out.” Having lived at this unholy intersection of unreason and panic most of my life, I can assure you that overreacting – catastrophizing – to a mere blemish upon an irrationally priced/worshipped sneaker is a very real thing. A scuff/mark/stain is tantamount to the suffering of Job, and its shout-out here is one of Lee’s most astute observations of sneakerhead and hip-hop culture in any of his films. It’s important to note, too, no other sneaker in cinema shares the dichotomy of the Air Jordan; its place in the cultural evolution of footwear in this country is assured, for good and bad. For all its visual appeal and performative excellence, the scene of the kind that plays out in Do the Right Thing played out in real life during the heyday of the cult of Brand Jordan too often, only with real kids’ lives getting cut down in the desperation to acquire – absorb like an energy source, really – the status and relevance that the Air Jordan demarcates. It’s why Buggin Out is so protective of his pair: while outsiders may seize his land, the same of the kind that have oppressed and colonized and taken away, no one will shake the fierce dominion he holds over his footwear.

That same year, Back to the Future II – and, again, sneaker Zeus Tinker Hatfield – introduced the world to the cine-mythological Nike Air Mags, the self-lacing moon boots that Marty McFly escapes future hooligans in. Outside of the fantastical aesthetics and technology of the sneaker, its narrative usefulness is apparent, a placement of a product that helps to delineate the story of a time-hopping teenager, a species of human generally prone to making sense of his world through cultural signifiers.4 Its commercial appeal was always a separate thing altogether, as Nike didn’t make the Mags available to the public until 2016, and then only in limited quantities, when the fantastical technology became fantastically possible. It’s also a fantastic financial investment, currently fetching $6,000 a pair.5

Certainly, Nike isn’t the only brand to insinuate itself into narrative cinema. The PF Flyers in David Mickey Evans’s The Sandlot (1993) are lionized by local baseball kid legend Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez (Mike Vitar), and similar to Do the Right Thing’s discourse, the attainment of the PF Flyers holds the possibility of transcendent, near magical, status. In Sandlot’s case, a crisp new pair of Flyers – all-sleek black with white and green “PF” patch on high-top canvas – operates the way athletic shoes are supposed to, powering Benny to “run faster and jump higher” and retrieve a valuable Babe Ruth-signed baseball from the clutches of a giant, beastly dog (and tell me, purveyor of fine footwear, of the tactile jolt you feel when Benny pulls the fresh PF pups straight from its shoebox womb, attendant tissue paper rippling just slightly, the newness an addictive agent).

If the Jordans act as a conduit for Buggin Out’s barely simmering bravado and righteousness, then the PF Flyers are the vehicle by which Benny unleashes his athleticism. In both cases, the sneakers enact narrative sacrifice by acknowledging it’s not really the shoes at all in the end, it’s the men lacing them up. And it represents a watershed for sneaker cinema, the next step in the evolution of its relationship to story.

“At a certain point, the costume weds with the actor and there’s a character.” (Bud Cort, on working on the 2004 film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou)

In 1950, Adidas released their first, revolutionary indoor soccer shoe, the Samba. In 1957, the Samba’s genetic code was injected into Adidas’s new training creation, the Rom (short for Roma), its jagged gum sole and traditional three-striped minimalism finding its way onto the peds of Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others.6 To date, though, its most striking contribution to sneaker cinema is on the big screen feet of Bill Murray and his Team Zissou crew mates in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Anderson’s sartorial inclinations flood his filmography – think of Ben Stiller and his kids outfitted in red Adidas track suits in The Royal Tenenbaums, the impeccability of Ralph Fiennes’s uniform in The Grand Budapest Hotel, or even Anderson’s own two-sizes-too-small corduroy suits – and here along with costume designer Milena Canonero, who once helped Stanley Kubrick conjure both menace and absurdity in the militaristic S&M whiteout garb worn by Malcolm McDowell’s Alex and his Droogs in A Clockwork Orange, they immortalize the white with yellow/dark blue/light blue official Team Zissou Rom shoe.

Anderson and Canonero create costumes for their eccentric, sometimes broken characters to revel or hide in; the sneakers here are further visual and narrative proof that the melancholic, shambolic Steve is holding onto the increasingly fraught pieces of his oceanographic documentary empire in appearance only, albeit one that adheres strictly to its chimerical aesthetic. But, sweetly, and because of their genuine affection and loyalty toward him, Zissou’s crew, all but his wife Eleanor (Angelica Huston) who has funded much of his ventures and is grandly over it, allow themselves to buy in – fresh-out-the-box Roms, red knit caps, and all. The binding, bonding athletic shoe, the colorway that matches the sorrowful whimsy of the film … it’s the next growth phase of the sneaker on film: now, as emotive symbol. It’s also important to note, again, that the Zissou sneaker wasn’t made available to the public buying market until 2017, thirteen years after the film’s release – at that, a limited number sold out immediately at $255 a pair.7

Of course, there are countless other examples in this vast sneaker cinema to be discussed, debated, and dunked on, so the conversation continues. I mean, I haven’t even breathed a word yet about the 1992 Nike Air Max short film (okay, commercial) starring Charles Barkley and Godzilla, both of whom I grew up admiring and conflating, and who could be the subject of a separate essay altogether. To my end, I realize now my father has only himself to blame for all of this. Instilling a love of cinema – and therefore, of cinematic sneakers – was your idea, Dad, so most of those childhood histrionics were of your own doing. I accept your apology.

Works Cited

“Air Jordan 4 Retro – Reviews by 305 Basketball Players & Experts.” Sports Shoe Reviews, runrepeat.com/air-jordan-4-retro.

Empirical, American. Costumes: Life Aquatic. YouTube, 28 June 2009, youtu.be/dIG9QqgHFhg.

Friendly, David T. and Mick Partridge, directors. Sneakerheadz. Netflix, 2015.

Jones, Riley. “The Science Behind the Shoe: 20 Innovations That Made Adidas.” Complex, Complex, 1 June 2018, www.complex.com/sneakers/2014/09/science-behind-tshoe-20-innovations-that-made-adidas.

“The 50 Greatest Sneaker Moments in Movies.” Edited by Complex, Complex, Complex, 4 Oct. 2017, www.complex.com/sneakers/2011/07/the-50-greatest-sneaker-moments-in-movies/.

“Tinker Hatfield’s 30 Greatest Footwear Designs.” Edited by Nick DePaula, Nice Kicks, 23 Jan. 2019, www.nicekicks.com/tinker-hatfields-30-greatest-footwear-designs/.

Woolf, Jake. “Adidas Made Steve Zissou Sneakers and Actually Sold Them to the Masses.” GQ, GQ, 28 June 2017, www.gq.com/story/adidas-senakers-steve-zissou-life-aquatic.