Sporty, traumatised men

Masculinity and the bodily inscriptions of cruelty in Szabolcs Hajdu's White Palms1
György Kalmár
Department of British Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary
kalmar.gyorgy@arts.unideb.hu

Abstract:
The present paper interprets the award-winning Hungaian film White Palms / Fehér tenyér (Szabolcs Hajdu 2006) in a
wide social, cultural and historical context, from the point of view of such issues as sport, identity, nationality,
masculinity, trauma and loss. So as to explain why and how the film diverges from the international genre patterns and
in order to reveal the full cultural significance of the film's narrative and subtle bodily metaphors, the article explores
the influence of local conceptions of history and nationhood on sports, and, in turn, analyses the compensatory nature of
sports in the discourses of nationality and masculinity. Furthermore, it theorizes the symbolic, representative potentials
of the athlete's body in terms of the king's two bodies theory, and calls attention to the ways this body fails to undergo
the kind of idealization customary for the king's body in medieval law or the athlete's body in the victory narratives of
mainstream cinema. Following Kaja Silverman, the article connects this failure of idealization to an ideological crisis
characteristic of Hungary before as well as after the fall of communism.

“Hold your ankle. Come on, hold your ankle! What did I tell you? I said, hold your ankle!” – shouts
the coach to the child Dongó, while hitting him with a folded skipping rope in the gym. But the boy
slips out of his hands, runs out, grabs his clothes, throws them out of the dressing room's open
window, and jumps out. “Dongó, are you crazy? What is wrong with you, you little wretch?! Where
are you going? Come back, fuck, do you think that anyone will take you seriously except for me?
You are nobody! You are a gymnast! Do you know what that means, you wretch? It means that your
muscles have taken hold of your shitty little bones! The fibres have hardened and your growth has
slowed down! You are ours now! You belong to us, gymnasts! Don't you hear?! You belong here, to
the gymnasts!” – he keeps shouting through the window, while Dongó hastily puts on his clothes in
the street. “Fuck you” – he says half aloud, then he lights a cigarette and goes to the Russian circus
in town, so as to replace an acrobat who has fallen ill...
If there is something like “Hungarian sports film,” Szabolcs Hajdu's White Palms (2006) is
definitely one of the genre's outstanding examples. However, similarly to the best sport films, White
Palms is not specifically about sports. In these films sport, as boxing according to Scorsese, is “an
allegory for the theatre of life” (Crosson 1): one could argue about both the sports film and sport in
general that it carries metaphorical meanings, and is “always closely bound to social meaning”
(Babington 9), in other words, its significance is inseparable from its social, cultural and historical
context. It is quite symptomatic that while discussing the most canonical Hungarian sports film,
Two Half-Times in Hell (Zoltán Fábry, 1973) in his cult Hungarian radio show, Róbert Puzsér and
his guest do not say one single word about football, and discuss the film entirely in the context of
fascism, terror and power. Probably, for the same reasons, few spectators of White Palms would say
that it is about gymnastics. Surely, a significant part of the screen time is filled with sport scenes,
we see the trainings during Dongó's childhood, his work as a coach in Canada, moreover towards
the end of the film the “great contest,” the hero's ultimate test also gets to be arranged (arguably one
of the essential components of the sports film genre). What is more, the film mostly applies
documentary aesthetics, shot with hand-held camera, without extra-diegetic music, and even the
dialogues are very brief. The filmmakers have cast professional sportsmen for all the leading roles
of this semi-biographical film: the child Dongó is played by two Romanian gymnast brothers, Orion
Radies and Silas Radies, his Canadian disciple and later rival, Kyle Manjack is played by the world
champion Kyle Shewfelt, and the main character, Miklós Dongó is performed by Miklós Hajdu
himself, the director's brother, whose life inspired the story. These men, who work with their bodies
1
This article was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and
by OTKA 112700 Space-ing Otherness. Cultural Images of Space, Contact Zones in Contemporary Hungarian and
Romanian Film and Literature pályázata támogatta.
in their everyday lives as well, also rely on their bodies, gestures and silent gazes when it comes to
acting. Moreover, as many amateur actors of the film, they also often improvise. Putting the body to
the forefront in this manner – as the critic Gábor Gelencsér has pointed out (302-303) – is one of the
most striking characteristics of the “new Hungarian film” of the 2000's: Hajdu, as Kornél
Mundruczó in Johanna (2005) or György Pálfi in Hukkle (2002) and Taxidermia (2006), also
distances himself from the traditional direct social criticism of Hungarian films by way of staging
and thematizing the body in new ways, by turning it into an active shaper of the film language.
According to Gelencsér, this is what allows these directors to “speak about the social-political-
ideological context of the past and the present in an original and authentic voice, as opposed to the
failed attempts of the 90's” (302).
As a result of its documentalist style and the highlighting of the body, White Palms manages
to look authentic to the Eastern European spectator: it deftly avoids the claptrap dramaturgy of
Hollywood-style sports films, yet, by applying typically space- or body-based visual metaphors it
creates a film text rich in figurative meaning. In the childhood training scenes one feels that the
bodies' disciplinary practices stand for a social-political allegory with subtly revealed personal
dramas, and in the Canadian and American sports scenes one also notices the daily struggles and
alienation of an Eastern European post-communist subject in “the West.” Thus, White Palms is not
only about the life of a gymnast or the remembrance of state socialism. As one could argue that
films about the past are usually “trying to solve the problems of present day identity issues” (Murai
10), Dongó's solitary figure also makes one face some of the key issues of the early 21st century
post-communist subject. Here the sportsman can be seen as a contemporary cinematic version of the
alienated artist figure of 20th century novels and art films: he may stand in the spotlight from time to
time, but he lives on the margins of society, often in heterotopic spaces (see: Király 174), in a sort
of reflexive distance from “normal” life, thus his figure affords us a view of our own, well-
disciplined lives from a new angle. One of the greatest merits of the film is that it manages to
achieve this with very few words, in austere and melancholic images, and with simple shots
communicating alienation, loneliness and vulnerability.
And yet, White Palms is still a sports film, as the genre is by definition a hybrid one,
incorporating other genres as well. Apparently sport, in spite of all its inherent drama and visual
pleasures, requires narratives or themes of another kind in order to create a powerful, effective film
experience. For example, the sports film often mixes with the biopic, as in White Palms, Rocky
(John G. Avildsen, 1976), Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980), Ali (Michael Mann, 2001), or partly
in Chariots of Fire (Hugh Hudson, 1981), with the historical film, as in the above mentioned Two
Half-Times in Hell, Szabadság, szerelem / Children of Glory (Goda Krisztina, 2006), or Invictus
(Clint Eastwood, 2009), but there are successful cases of its combination with the family film, as in
The Warrior (Gavin O'Connor, 2011), and even with the Bollywood-style musical, as in Lagaan
(Ashutosh Goariker 2001). In all these examples sport functions as a kind of 'carrier': the sporting
bodies become the bearers of symbolic significance, the signifiers of all kinds of ideologies, values,
attitudes and other identity-elements, thus in the dramatic situations of the film's contests the
spectator can cheer the characters as if one's own identity, career or life were at stake. From this
point of view Hungarian sports films suit the international trends. This symbolic tendency is quite
obvious when, at the dramatic climax of Two Half-Times, the female companion of the German
colonel frantically yells Das ist ein Spiel!, yet the colonel, seeing the humiliation of his team, shoots
a Jewish-Hungarian player dead, but similarly clear in the childhood scenes of White Palms, at the
enumeration of bruises (traumas), when the boys are tending to the injuries they suffered during
training.
The present paper interprets Szabolcs Hajdu's award winning White Palms in a wide social,
cultural and historical context, from the point of view of such issues as sport, identity, nationality,
masculinity, trauma and loss. It tries to answer such questions as How does White Palms change the
generic patterns of the American sports film? What is the significance of narratives of victimhood
and loss in an Eastern European context? How does the film present the relationship between the
state socialist past and the democratic present, between East and West? And: What
characteristically Eastern European constructions of masculinity appear in the film?
White Palms, which was one of the first films marking the emergence of a new generation of
post-communist filmmakers, tells the story of the life of a Hungarian gymnast in a loosely
structured narratives that jumps back and forth in time between the childhood of Dongó in a
provincial town in Eastern Hungary in the 70's and 80's, training with a sadistic coach (Gheorghe
Dinica), and his work after the regime change in Canada as a coach and in the USA as an artist at
the Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas. The above mentioned key concepts of my analysis, similarly to
the film, are as important and timely in Hungary in 2015 as at the time of the shooting of the film
almost ten years ago. The sports policy of the Orbán governments, and particularly the
government's often criticised football stadium programme clearly show that sports are crucial
elements of Hungarian identity-politics, so much so that the elevation of the level of Hungarian
football may hold the promise of future election victories. The representation of sports in Hungary
has a peculiar history, one that differs from those of the “great” western societies analysed by
international sports historians. I would argue that the film's narrative, symbolism and its
constructions of masculinity can only gain their full significance in this uniquely Eastern European
context.

Sport and national identity in Hungary

One may assess the paramount importance of sports in the discourse of national identity in Hungary
even by listening to the sports news one single time on one of the national radio or TV stations.
Usually the sports news coverage starts with the results of Hungarian athletes, and (quite
annoyingly) often do not get any further than that. Apparently the news that a Hungarian athlete
made it through the qualifiers of a big international event, or finished it at the 15th place, is more
worthy of mentioning than the names of the ones who actually won that competition. Most
Hungarians are proud of their countrymen's sports successes, these outstanding achievements are
among the last sources of the country's national pride (in a manner similar to the successes of
Hungarian scientists). It seems that according to the symbolic logic of sports, as soon as a player
puts on the national jersey and steps on the field, one becomes the synecdochic representative of a
whole nation, therefore his or her success or failure is almost automatically interpreted as that of the
whole community. These achievements (or under-achievements) may be as significant events in the
sports fan's identity games (so as to use Anikó Imre's term), as the “matches” of international
politics. (After the matches of the national football team or the international matches of Hungarian
clubs club usually there is a whole torrent of comments and analyses on the pages of social media,
such that the events of world politics seldom provoke.)
It is easy to recognize the compensatory logic of sport in these discourses of national
identity: though the importance of the country has immensely shrunk during the “stormy centuries”
of history, “we” can still show “what is the Hungarian spirit” and be equal to the great nations of
our times. Apparently, the more uncertain or miserable life is, the more important sports become.
Arguably the best example of this cultural phenomenon is the role of the “Golden Team” in the
Stalinist-type dictatorship of the 1950's. The “golden” national football team, which nobody could
beat in the world for four years from the summer of 1950 on, “did not only legitimize the regime: it
was also the compensatory-symbolic binding element of a terribly oppressed society” (Fodor and
Szirák 110). While the average Hungarian citizen of the Rákosi regime could easily feel like a
disempowered, wretched nobody living under a cruel and inhuman dictatorship, the figure of the
“golden foot” Ferenc Puskás appeared in the urban legends of the time as a kind of “folk tale hero”
or the “tough lad who outwits the people in power” (117). It is also quite telling that “when in 1982
secondary school and university students were asked what they considered to be the most glorious
events of Hungarian history, the most common answer apart from the 1848 uprising against the
Habsburgs was 6:3” – the victory over the English football team in the Wembley in 1953 (Réti 126).
Hungarian sports films often follow this trend, and especially team sports (as football or water polo)
become easily the symbolic representations of the nation: the German-Hungarian football match in
Two Half-Times in Hell is as much of a symbolic representation of an ideological and political
conflict as the 1956 Hungarian-Soviet water polo match at the Melbourne Olympic Games in
Szabadság, szerelem / Children of Glory.
Seeing all these links between the discourses of national identity and sport, it may not be
surprising to realise that the roots of our contemporary representation of sports go much deeper into
the past than either the modern Olympic movement or radio and TV broadcasts of sports events.
Though with the invention of the modern concept of nationhood the athlete's body gained new kinds
of significance in the 19th century, which was further strengthened by the modern Olympic
movement's nation-based ordering of competitors, these nationalistic discourses carry on and
reinterpret a much older tradition of representation. I argue that the representative symbolism of the
athlete's body works in a manner similar to the way the king's two bodies did in pre-modern
European societies. What connects these two seemingly distant signifying practices is the
transferability of symbolic meanings between a living, natural body and a public one. This tradition,
which Ernst H. Kantorowicz called the theory of the king's two bodies, distinguishes between a
living, mortal, natural body on the one hand, and a public, symbolic, immortal one on the other.
When a king died and the next took his place, the symbolic meanings associated with the second
body were transferred to the natural body of the new king, thus elevating him into a new position.
When there was no new king to follow, the public body could be transferred onto an artificial body,
an effigy, that served as the carrier of the king's symbolic powers (see: Belting 41). I would argue
that similarly to medieval kings, sportsmen and sportswomen have “two bodies” as well: at the
moment of putting on the national jersey they acquire the second, symbolic body, they go through a
transubstantiation analogous with the king at his coronation. The athlete's body (or its TV or filmic
image) is as open to symbolic resignification as that of the king (or a wooden effigy). Moreover,
one could argue that these representations, the visual image of the athlete and the effigy of the king,
are created precisely in order to take on these meanings. This is why the winning athlete's success
becomes the glory of a whole community (when they listen to the national anthem together with
him in front of the TV), and this is why the present day failures of the Hungarian national football
team are followed by several days of national mourning... As Kantorowicz has pointed out apropos
of the king's two bodies, these corporeal significations can be interpreted as the continuation of a
mystical tradition (Kantorowicz 196, Balogh 40). According to this historical narrative, the
symbolism of Christ's body, the concept of the corpus mysticum went through several displacements
through the centuries. First it was extended to the church (Kantorowicz 196-197), then to the king
(this is the main subject of Kantorowicz's book), and finally to the nation in the 19th century: “This
concept of a body without decline, ageing, weaknesses and imperfections lived on in the idea of the
immortal nation. This political body always signifies the community, with the king as its head and
the community as its subjects...” (Balogh 40). I would argue that the way the symbolic dimension of
sports gained strength in the 20th century can be read as yet another displacement in the history of
the corpus mysticum. Its time came when the civilizing process (in the sense of Norbert Elias's
theory) reached the point when direct nationalistic discourses were more and more replaced by
those of national sports, just as fighting and direct physical violence in everyday life was gradually
replaced by competing in sports.
As I will show later, Dongó's relation to sport, competition and victory is also strongly
shaped by the duality of the personal, living body, and the public, symbolic one. Mapping the
Eastern European modifications of this corporeal symbolism is as important for the understanding
of the behaviour of the characters and the inner logic of these constructions of masculinity as for the
full comprehension of the causal relations driving the narrative.

Stories of loss

The above theorised symbolism of the athlete's body is probably not specific to any geographical or
cultural region. All the more characteristic of Hungarian culture of sport, however, is the application
of the popular master tropes of the local view of history to the history of sports. The most striking
characteristic is the immense popularity of the tropes of loss and decline (widely used in local
historical narratives) in stories and films about sport. If one compares Hungarian sport films with
international, and especially American, examples, perhaps the first difference one notices is the
distance Hungarian films keep from the “affirmative pleasures” (Babington 9) of the “victory
narrative” (17) so definitive of the genre. In Hungarian sports films – though they usually
incorporate several key elements of the international generic pattern – one seldom sees “real
heroes,” that is, people who realize the dangers or problems of their communities, decide to fight
these even it means facing conflicts or putting themselves in danger, and finally change the course
of fate by overcoming the difficulties.
The small gymnasts in White Palms do not seem to be chasing glorious, heroic successes.
Rather, they look like suffering, helpless victims of a cruel, humiliating regime. The training
programme of “Uncle Feri,” the coach, does not produce brave heroes with straight backbones and
eyes on the horizon, but rather distressed, wounded boys with averted eyes, people who have
gradually lost their ability to feel happy or at home in the world. The typical punishment of the
boys, when they have to bend down and hold their ankles without a word or a move while the coach
spanks them with his sword, clearly indicates the “positions” relating to heroic masculinity
practised here. If one can risk generalizing comparisons between the national cinemas of the former
Eastern bloc, one could argue that this lack of heroic characters affiliates Hungarian (sports) films
with Czech cinema (see: Mazierska 24), however, White Palms and most other Hungarian films do
not present this situation as (at least partly) funny, as the Czech examples, but rather with a strange,
tragic apathy. The lack of heroism could also connect Hungarian films with the Romanian New
Wave, yet, as Hajnal Király argues, usually “in Romanian films protagonists tend to have at least
one big and intense monologue” reflecting the cause of their miseries, whereas “in the Hungarian
films under analysis these remain undeclared and are revealed in a poetical, often symptomatic
representation of places and bodies” (179).
In White Palms one never sees the childhood victories of Dongó, all the competitions he
won: the medals and certificates decorating his room are only fetishized by his parents, their display
is just another part of the humiliating show that they force upon their son in front of others.
Moreover, the parallel editing montage of the final, most dramatic sequence of the film juxtaposes a
traumatic childhood incident (when Dongó falls from the high trapeze in the circus) with the world
championship of his adulthood, suggesting that it is because of the traumatic mark left in Dongó by
his accident that he makes a mistake in his final jump, thus “only” winning bronze medal.
Apparently, other Hungarian sports films also share a liking of lost battles: the last shot of To Half-
Times shows the dead bodies of the players, and even Péter Tímár's film (1999) about the historical
victory over the English, 6:3, or Play it Again, Tutti! / 6:3, Avagy játszd újra Tutti! places the “great
victory,” “the match of the century” into the distance of a dream-like, nostalgic, bitter-sweet fantasy
of a mentally challenged refuse collector. Dongó's story, if one only considers “the facts” building
up the narrative, could also be arranged into a victory plot: all the victorious childhood
competitions, his survival of the fall, his recovery, his (presumably) financially successful work in
Canada and the USA, his world championship third place and the victory of his trainee – all these
events could very well constitute an “American style” affirmative narrative highlighting how one
may overcome difficulties and gain success. Yet, these affirmative emotions never gain precedence
in White Palms, one only feels the protagonist's loneliness, vulnerability and alienation. Even the
scenes that take place in the New World there is a pervasive sense of apathy and “emptiness” (so as
to use Júlia Széphelyi's term). Is it merely the usual art film topos of the alienated (anti-)hero, the
rejection of the simplifying, ideological approach of American genre cinema, or is it rather the
manifestation of certain local cultural traditions?
In my opinion both aspects are important for one's understanding of the film, and if one
looks at the second one (the traditional local constructions of narrative and masculinity), one may
also understand better Hungarian cinema's traditional distance from the clichés of genre cinema.
The most important cultural phenomenon to be acknowledged in this respect is the long standing
popularity of narratives of decline and loss. I would argue that these tropes have been in use for
several centuries and function very much like performative master-tropes in Hungary (in the sense
that Judith Butler uses these concepts in her theory of body and gender). In the present context I
understand by this expression such congitive constructs that were once mobilised successfully to
explain historical events of great emotional charge, therefore they became master-tropes, principles
widely accepted in the region, used again and again for the explanation of more and more events,
until (in a Nietzschean fashion) people forgot that they were metaphors and mistook them for the
truth. The process when certain tropes or cognitive models become invisible master-tropes through
repetition is a well-known one in psychology, it is there in Freud's theory of trauma, it is the basis of
Butler's theory of performative reiteration in the construction of embodied gender identity, but it can
also be applied to conceptualisations of history as narrative. As a recent thematic issue of the
Hungarian sociological journal Korall entitled “Narratives of victimhood” clearly indicates,
narratives of loss and decline have been widely accepted conceptualisations of history in Hungary at
least since the 18th century. The popularity of such constructions of masculinity as the martyr or the
victim are deeply intertwined with these narrative master-tropes. It was the literary historian Béla
Németh G. who first clarified the tendency in poetry, naming this type value- and time-contrasting
poems, the basic rhetorical structure of which is the stark contrast between the glorious past and the
woeful present. It is important to realize that many of the most canonical poems of Hungarian
literature – poems included in primary and secondary school cirrucula, works strongly influencing
Hungarian identity politics – belong to this type, among them the Hungarian national anthem by
Ferenc Kölcsey.
This cultural heritage, which obviously has a great impact on local formations of
masculinity, becomes even more significant for the present study when we realize that the rhetorical
construct of “once a fort, a ruin now” did not only shape 19th and 20th century Hungarian poetry and
popular views of history, but it also appears in documentaries (see: Győri), feature films and even
sports history. One of the most amusing chapters of this otherwise grim story is the media response
to the humiliating 6:0 defeat from the Soviets at the Mexican Football Mundial in 1986. As Zsófia
Réti observes, “most popular interpretations … understood the match in terms of a symbolic clash
between the two countries” (127), and staged it as the latest episode of the long series of national
tragedies in Hungarian history (see: 127). She argues that “the past glory and subsequent fall of
Hungarian football is a generally accepted model shared by the vast majority of the community. The
1986 match suits this narrative perfectly...” (130). Accordingly, the newspapers on the day after the
match placed the event in the national misfortune narrative, and often associated it with the defeat
of the Hungarian army by the Ottoman Turkish at the battle of Mohács in 1526 (which marked the
end of the independent Hungarian Kingdom, its partitioning between the Ottoman Empire, The
Habsburg Monarchy and the Principality of Transylvania). This episode of Hungarian sports history
indicates how the traditional national misfortune narrative can become a master trope capable of
paradigm-expansion, thus offering ready-made answers for present (sports) events.
I would argue that the above mentioned master trope and the cultural phenomenon one could
call the Mohács-syndrome effectively shape White Palms and Hungarian sports films in general as
well: it influences the directors' choice of stories, their interpretation of the events, the lack of belief
in victory-narratives, and the constructions of masculinity deemed “authentic.” What distinguishes
White Palms from the various texts and films affected by the trope is that Hajdu's film highlights the
causal relationship between past and present, trauma and its effects, thus it seems to be consciously
investigating the inner logic of Dongó's miseries, losses and ineffective search for freedom.
The influence and results of the above detailed tropology become even clearer when one
compares the cinematic presentation of Dongó's body with some of the principles of the king's two
bodies theory. The most striking difference is that while White Palms investigates the wounds that
stop someone from becoming a heroic winner, the weaknesses and faults of the king's natural body
are overcome and overwritten by the perfection of the political body (Kantorowicz 7). According to
the “mainstream” conceptualisation of the two bodies “doubt cannot arise concerning the
superiority of the body politic over the body natural” (9), in other words, all bodily weaknesses are
effaced by the symbolic meaning written on and over the natural body when royal power is
bestowed upon it. I argue that this “mainstream” operation of medieval body politics is still
discernible in the victory narratives of mainstream sports films: in these enabling, affirmative
stories we witness how the natural, living body is overcome by the symbolic one, erasing all signs
and effects of former weakness. By contrast, White Palms tells the story of trauma and loss, it tells
about the failure of such a fantastic-fantasmic overcoming of difficulties through the
transubstantiation of the body. White Palms tells about the situations when the natural body is
stronger than the symbolic / ideological / political body, when the sportsman does not become
super-human. Thus, Kantorowicz's two body theory calls attention to the differences between the
philosophies of the body applied by different sports films: while Hollywood-style victory narratives
usually show how the hero works through and eventually overcomes all difficulties, how he or she
trains strenuously, how one turns one's living, fragile, imperfect and mortal body into the
immortality and perfection of the victorious ideological / political body, the not-so-elevating, but all
the more human stories of loss as White Palms reveal the preponderance of the living body, that is,
its failure to become an idealised fantasy-construct. Though the latter type of narratives can be read
as authentic representations of a most human situation, in the context of sports films in general they
are more of an oddity than a typical case. In Masculinity at the Margins, apropos of American
wartime cinema Kaja Silverman theorises such bodies of failure and underachievement by
highlighting how they are connected to communities in historical times when the ideological belief
needed for idealising constructions of gendered subjectivity is weak (see: 15-23), and following
Silverman I have theorised such bodies of Hungarian post-regime-change cinema in those terms
(see: Kalmár). As Silverman has argued in case of such films as The Best Years of our Lives
(William Wyler 1946) and I have argued apropos of Kontroll (Nimród Antal, 2003), the successful
interpellation of the subject (in the Althusserian sense of the term) depends on the subject's belief in
the dominant fiction and ideological formations of the community. Following Silverman I argue that
historical trauma can considerably weaken a community's belief in such idealizing narratives, which
also leads to the rejection of certain fantasmic, “heroic” types of masculinity. In other words, the
incident when Dongó momentarily loses his balance and makes a step back after landing can be
interpreted as the failure of the symbolic / ideological / political body to overwrite the living,
personal body (and the traumas carried within it). In other words, in White Palms the “wiping away
of every imperfection” (Kantorowicz 11) of the natural body cannot take place.
Let's compare Dongó's story with the victory narrative of Invictus! In the latter film, the
unexpected victory of the South-African rugby team at the 1995 Wold Cup that the country hosted
soon after the fall of Apartheid is associated with the inner strength of Nelson Mandela (Morgan
Freeman), the country's first democratic president, and the moral ennobling of the rugby team. The
film suggests that the team wins because the long years of political imprisonment could not break
Mandela's humanity, and with the help of the team's captain (Matt Damon) he overcomes all racial
prejudice and transforms the racially selected, almost all-white team into a symbol of the “Rainbow
Nation.” The “uplifting” ideology of the film, the elevation of the body by something invisible and
immortal, is summarized by the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley, quoted several times in
the film:

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

The poem summarises mainstream sports films' approach to the body: it is about idealism and
idealisation, the strength of the inner self, about the unconquerable soul that can overcome all
(physical, emotional) difficulties and traumas. This essential super-self is not affected by physical
conditions, it remains self-identical, always self-possessing, master of its fate. It does not take long
to recognize the similarities between this essentialist, idealist approach, and the affirmation of the
political body's privileged status in the king's two bodies theory, according to which “not only is the
body politic 'more ample and large' than the body natural, but there dwell in the former certain truly
mysterious forces which reduce, or even remove, the imperfections of the fragile human nature”
(Katorowicz 9). However, this view of the body, which appears as an empowering, uplifting attitude
in Invictus, seems more like a sadistic, inhuman denial of the physical and emotional determinants
of human life in the Eastern European context of White Palms. According to the latter view, one can
never be an absolute “master” of one's fate, one cannot completely obliterate the wounds one
received throughout one's life, moreover, the attempt at such mastery may easily lead to cruelty. As
László Strausz points out, the presentation of the human body as a “memory-container” (26) is quite
characteristic of the new Hungarian film of the 2000's: in these films bodies “carry within
themselves the characteristics of the historical times surrounding them in the form of imprints” (28).
In other words, contemporary Hungarian (art house) films tend to apply a pattern markedly different
from the one seen in Invictus: here bodies are not the sites of the dramatic struggle in which the
spiritual overcomes the physical and the present overcomes the past, but rather the places where the
strength of the past and its traumas show.
However, it seems that in White Palms the symbolic resignification of the athlete's body, the
way it is endowed with a second, symbolic, invincible body is not only problematic because of the
preponderance of the living body and the imprint of traumas carried in it. It is not only that in the
Eastern European context the belief in the dominant ideological fiction necessary for the smooth
(and naive) internalisation of idealising formations of subjectivity is missing. The childhood scenes
of White Palms suggest that Dongó is consciously and tactically resisting these physical processes
of ideological indoctrination. In White Palms becoming an “invincible” hero through endowing the
natural body of the athlete with a second, symbolic one is presented as the in-corporation of the
ideological norms of an inhuman social order. A fine example of this approach is the scene when,
presumably as a result of the bruises and scars found on the children, a few parents enter the gym
while the training is still going on. The coach tries to send them out, but when the father of a
recently wounded boy decides to stay, he orders the young gymnasts to practice the jump over the
vault. Now, when he is being watched, the coach decides to encourage the boys with kind words
instead of the usual curses and beatings. When it comes to Dongó, who is the most talented in the
whole team, he deliberately messes up the jump three times in a row: he does not assume the role of
the gymnast to show up with, he does not perform for the glory of his cruel coach. The scene can be
interpreted as an example of Eastern European tactics of resistance, an allegory of the way films
from the region may reject idealised, heroic character types together with the ideology of such
invincible heroism. When Dongó stops short at the vault, pretending not being able to jump, and
stares right up to the coach, it is not only an image of a teenager in rebellion against the adult world,
but also more than the subject of state-socialism in passive resistance: in this image White Palms
also marks its resistance to subject-positions that try to efface all that is human in us for the sake of
an image of perfection. White Palms – as all films of Hajdu – presents characters who must swim
against the current, establish themselves not by relying on the dominant ideologies and values of the
societies around them (as in Invictus), but by resisting them. Needless to say, such narratives do not
lead to “perfect” bodies and glorious, uplifting, happy endings: the symphonic orchestra of the
dominant ideological order never plays for such endings.
The competition between Dongó and his Canadian trainee, Kyle, at the world championship
is a prominent example of these differences. In the TV interviews before the contest Kyle clearly
states that he came to win, while Dongó says that what matters most for him is to show after all
those missed years that he can do gymnastics. Yet, with a wry half-smile he adds that he does not
like to lose. This difference regarding one's relation to the idealised-ideological “second” body
becomes even more visible when we see Kyle posing for the press photographers after his victory
(while Dongó simply disappears). Kyle's naive posing, his unreflected enjoyment of the second,
invincible body, his belief that the two bodies may coincide, that he is the winner, together with the
flashes of the photographers momentarily blinding the film camera turn the scene into a self-
reflexive moment of the film, a commentary on cinema itself. This scene may remind one of Kaja
Silverman's comments on idealisation in The Threshold of the Visible World, where she argues that
the most important ethical problem posed by genre cinema's idealising approach is that it offers the
spectator an illusionary, day-dream-like experience of being one with the ideal (that one can never
really live up to in everyday life), the euphoric joy of which effectively disables one's intellectual
and critical awareness, thus making the spectator completely blind to ideological manipulation (39).
With the image of the “heroic” winner posing in the blinding light of idealisation, White palms
seems to call our attention to this dangerous effect and the ambiguousness of the masculinities
produced by it.

Past and present, East and West

Resistance, however, does not make Dongó either free or happy. White Palms is not The Matrix
(Wachowski Bros., 1999). Whereas in the life of Mr. Anderson aka. Neo (Keanu Reeves) sports
(martial arts) are associated with resistance and the expression of autonomy, they belong to the
potentially liberating cyber world where physical boundaries may be overcome in the celebration of
the perfect, cyber-super-human body, in White Palms sports remain a material, bodily practice, and
distancing from “mainstream” types of masculinity never creates autonomous, self-reliant
characters who live happily on the margins of society and its dominant ideology. In White palms
resistance does not lead out of the system, there is no outside to the Matrix of power. In other
words, resisting the dulling forms of ideologically overcharged assujettissement (to use Foucault's
terminology) still leaves one empty-handed and confused. Let us recall the scene when one day
Dongó turns back from the door of the gym. We see him peeping through the half-open door as the
other boys are all standing in line and Feri, the coach calls out his name. A perfect example of the
interpellation of the subject in Althusser's sense, one could say, yet what happens here is rather the
reverse of Althusser's famous example: when witnessing the order, or system created by the Law
(the gym, the straight line of boys, the uniforms, the coach and his whip-like sword), our
protagonist turns away from the Law. In classical genre cinema this would be a moment of joyful
self-liberation, as such examples as John Huston's 1981 Victory, an Americanised 'remake' of Two
Half-Times (with Micheal Caine, Sylvester Stalone and a victory plot) show. But when Dongó turns
and runs away, there are no joyful, uplifting images of freedom. We see the little boy wandering
aimlessly around in the grim, labyrinth-like housing estate, while the hand-held camera never
allows us to look around and place him in a large, liberating space. We never feel that now Dongó
can look at his life from a distance, that he can see through things and is now free to make the right
decisions.2 In other words, by rejecting the ideological coordinate system of society and the
2
For a more detailed analysis of desorientation and the lack of freedom in contemporary Hungarian and Romanian
films see: Hajnal Király's article „Leave to live” in the bibliography (especially 174, 180).
idealized athlete identity, Dongó seems to lose his orientation. He goes to see his mother, working at
a nursery school, yet he only looks at her from the distance, through the bars of the fence. He goes
up to the top of the apartment building, looks around (in a shot reminiscent of Béla Tarr's shot of the
housing estate in the opening scene of The Prefab People / Panelkapcsolat), yet the view of the grey
blocks in the grim, November weather does not suggest freedom or joy: Dongó is standing close to
the edge of the ten storey building with his head slightly bowed, and the camera moves around him
in a way that makes the spectator dizzy. It is rather the fear of falling that appears here. It is quite
telling that the scene ends with the image suddenly darkening when the camera looks into a dark,
deep pit between the buildings.
As all the childhood scenes take place in Debrecen, and most events of Dongó's adult life
take place in Canada and the USA (except for the world championship), the relation between past
and present is partly told through spatial metaphors. Yet the relationship of the two kinds of spaces
does not simplify the relations of the state socialist past and the democratic present. In the opening
scenes of the film we see Dongó's arrival to Canada as a coach, but the metal-glass-neon world of
the Western city seems as chaotic, dizzying and maze-like as the above mentioned housing estate in
Eastern Hungary. Moreover, Dongó's first experiences do not have the traditional meaning of
coming to the free land associated with New-World arrivals, nor does it make us feel that he has
come to a more home-like place where he can experience a more authentic subjectivity. In this
scene White Palms relies again on spatial and bodily metaphors: Dongó sits down next to the door
of a building so as to enjoy the thin Canadian sunshine and to celebrate his arrival with a cigarette.
Yet this scene of smoking – traditionally used in Hungarian cinema as a motif of philosophical
reflection and rest – is almost immediately disturbed by a security guard, who informs Dongó that
he cannot smoke there, as it is too close to the building. He suggests that Dongó moves over to the
two other “banished” men standing, smoking and talking noncommittally about the weather at the
curbside. Dongó moves on, joining the two others. He does not talk to them, just looks at his shoes.
So much for the illusion of freedom. Similarly to so many other protagonists of post 1989
Hungarian cinema, he cannot find his home in the much desired West (see: Király 177-178). The
way he is ordered around again, how his freedom is limited, the sight of him hanging his head and
the cold inauthenticity of the three men's conversation give the spectator quite a clear idea of his
new life in Canada.
The relationship of the past and the present, Hungary and the New World is further
complicated by the difficulties he meets in Canada as a coach. We get the impression that Dongó
has been dreaming about freedom all his life (the opening shot of the first retrospective sequence is
that of Dongó watching a bird sitting on one of the beams of the gym), yet when he hits a boy
playing too wildly at the training in Canada he becomes the agent of the very violence that he was
running from. Moreover, his next assignment as the coach of Kyle, the talented young teenager with
behaviour issues, is also presented as a trap. As all these examples may imply, the relationship
between past and present, Debrecen and Calgary is not depicted so much as a contrast, but rather as
a relation of causality. As Gábor Gelencsér remarks, “the results of the heartless disciplining of his
childhood trainings surface in his adult behaviour,” and “the childhood failure foreshadows as well
as explains the ones he suffers as an adult” (306). White Palms does not create a politically or
ideologically motivated opposition between the state-socialist Debrecen and the “free” Calgary.
Rather, it show the events through the subjective filter of the protagonist. In this sense, the film can
also be read as a trauma narrative, as it reveals the life-long effects of past traumas on the present
(see: Strausz 25). Let us recall Dongó's work at the Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, the last scene of
the film! Due to the ever moving, often off-focus hand-held camera, and the quick, montage-like
editing, the street views of Calgary and Las Vegas are as confusing as the state-socialist housing
estates (only faster, less static maybe). Yet, the representation of Dongó's life in las Vegas also
includes some memorable static long shots, where he is alone in large, empty, technological spaces.
Dongó's solitary figure standing on the roof top, smoking between two taller buildings before the
show can be read as the image of post-traumatic subjectivity. He stands alone in a geometrical,
empty, glass-and-concrete-and-steel environment, “in the most rootless city in the world” (Strausz
25), there is no other organic form except for him, there is no chair to sit, no view of the
surrounding space, no perspective. Again, Dongó looks entrapped in a bleak, labyrinthian,
technological space. As the later show itself, this long shot that we can contemplate in silence can
be interpreted as a surrealistic, post-traumatic, dreary emotional landscape.
If there is any difference between past and present, East and West, that is told through the
differences between approaches to coaching. The childhood gym is a prison-like, dystopian place
characterised by such motifs as the disciplinary fencing sword of the coach, the lining up of the
kids, the brutal punishment of the ones out of line, the permanent sadistic atmosphere, the
premeditated humiliation of boys in front of the girls, the exclusion of the parents from the
trainings, and the close ups of the wounds and bruises on the boys' bodies. Since Miklós Jancsó's
The Round Up / Szegénylegények (1966) the lining up, the pointless ordering around and constant
shepherding of the mute, humiliated men is an established trope of oppressive power in Hungarian
cinema. When Gábor Gelencsér referred to “the Kádár era as a training plan,” he pinpointed
precisely this parallel between training in competitive sports and the totalitarian methods of
socialization in communist dictatorship. This parallel is further strengthened by the close
connections between gymnastics and the disciplinary and supervisory mechanisms of modernity.
Miklós Hadas, in his seminal work on the history of sports and masculinity in Hungary, argues that
“gymnastics is meant to create the bodily foundations of modernity” (168) in the sense that “it
deepens and extends the institutionalisation of the civilizing process” (166), and encourages a kind
of attitude in which there is a great emphasis on “self-exploitation, self-discipline and self-restraint”
(167). He believes that gymnastics “can be justifiably interpreted as the incorporated ethos of the
modernizing citizen, as par excellence body politics” (155), as it “involves one's conditioning for
delayed satisfaction, thus it entails a considerable potential for modernization: during its cultivation
there is a great emphasis on repetition, practice and monotony-tolerance. These activities are
conducted with the guidance of a 'foreman' (later a gymnastics teacher), and they are practised in
groups and require self-discipline and alignment (176). White Palms recognises and productively
utilizes this link between the state-socialist social experiment (which can be regarded as an extreme
example of modernity), the alienation in modern societies, and the potentially cruel self-disciplinary
techniques in gymnastics. (Let us only recall the emphasis White Palms lays on the aligning of the
boys – one of Hadas's key concepts.) Apparently, the gymnast (similarly to the citizen of modern
societies and the sad little boys in the film) “primarily fights with oneself” (Hadas 156), and he
tends to take his internal struggles with himself, wherever he goes.
As I have noted above, the burden of the past and the inner struggles can be distinctly felt in
Dongó's Canadian and American life, even if here we see different strategies of training and
coaching. In Canada the parents can constantly supervise the trainings from a room with reflexive
windows next to the gym. When Dongó hits the misbehaving kid, all the boys freeze and stare at
him in silence. He looks at them, and then looks towards the mirror with the parents behind. In
White Palms this is a moment of self-reflection, both literally and metaphorically, both for Dongó
and the post-communist spectator, a scene calling attention to the destructive after-effects of past
traumas. When Dongó has to abandon his work with children and starts coaching Kyle he manages
to motivate him and make him train by starting to train himself. Yet, as we have seen, he cannot feel
at home here either: his troubling past remains with him all his life (see: Strausz 25, Király 177). It
is this burden of the past that makes him lose his job with the children, makes him lonely and
outcast, and this is why he fails to win gold medal at the world championship.
The connection of individual and social, literal and figurative meanings, which has been
recognized as one of the crucial principles of the athlete's body, works in this case as well: through
Dongó's story White Palms subtly talks about relevant social issues of post-communist societies.
Contemporary Hungary's relationship to its state-socialist past is as ambiguous, fuzzy and un-
worked-through, as the former Kádár regime's relation to the Stalinist-style Rákosi-regime of the
50's or to the 1956 uprising. This problematic, undiscussed and unprocessed relation to the past may
very well be a major hindrance regarding the country's post-communist socio-cultural development.
As one of the (recently passed) leading Hungarian sociologists, Elemér Hankiss has stated apropos
of the late Kádár-era,

“apart from a few taboos, one can publicly talk about almost any aspect and problem of life,
which is obviously a great achievement in the Eastern-European context. On the other hand, it
is also true that the above mentioned taboos often make it impossible to explore the deeper
causes of social problems. As a result, they prevent finding thoroughgoing solutions to these
problems, and also keep public thinking in a permanent state of uncertainty and impurity.”
(Hankiss 49, also quoted by Réti 130)

This “permanent state of uncertainty and impurity” is still one of the essential determinants of
Hungarian memory-politics. I would argue that these unspoken taboos work similarly to traumas
resisting verbalisation: they both form blocks in the processes of remembering, in one's “healthy”
relation to the past. As opposed to some other post-communist countries, in Hungary the leaders of
the past regime were not banned from public services, the former state party managed to remain a
major political force (after a slight name change and facelift), much of the documents of the former
secret service were destroyed, the list of the agents was not published for decades, and the leaders
of the former communist bureaucracy successfully transferred its political might to economic
power. As the historian János Rainer M. argued at a 2015 conference in Budapest, doing justice to
the past and its victims was not either complete or successful in Hungary, where “the history of the
state security agencies is that of the destruction of documents” (see: “Rejtve marad a múlt”). These
processes, as the EU's yearly country reports and other studies indicate, have undercut Hungarians'
faith (or “ideological belief”) in the new democratic system, and probably contributed to making
government corruption a national sport in the country. Apparently, starting a new life is as difficult
on the level of the society as on that of the individual.
White Palms was shot at the time when the results of this “uncertain and impure” relation to
the past were not only felt, but also indicated by the media and sociological researches. The film,
however, does not engage with these issues in a didactic way, but rather expresses the results in
subtle visual metaphors. Probably most people who saw the film remember the mark of the coach's
sword in the mat on the floor, carved out through all the long years, or the wounds on the boys'
bodies, or the mark of Dongó's foot in the mat at the world championship, the indent that marks his
mistake. These are all traces, symbolic marks left by objects and bodies, telling us about the effects
of the past preserved in bodies. These “impressions” and wounds are the central motifs of the film:
they tell about the way certain painful experiences penetrate people to the bone. It is this past
carried in our bodies that makes it impossible to become winners or heroes blissfully blinded by the
white light of victory, it is this embodied past that comes to the fore time and time again, revealing
the fragile, living, human body behind the “ideal” one constructed by power and ideology.

Bibliográfia:

Babington, Bruce. The Sports Film. London, New York: Wallflower Press, 2014.

Balogh László Levente. „A magyar nemzeti áldozatnarratíva változásai.” Korall 59 (2015). 36-53.

Crosson, Seán. Sport and Film. London, New York: Routledge, 2013.

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---. The Threshold of the Visible World

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Széphelyi Júlia: Négyszázegyedik csapás (Hajdú Szabolcs: Fehér tenyér)

http://www.filmkultura.hu/regi/2006/articles/films/fehertenyer2.hu.html