Throwback Thursday: The Stark Relevance of North Dallas Forty, 36 Years Later

North Dallas Forty, released 36 years ago this week, was hailed by some reviewers as the most incisive satire of football ever produced. Newsweek reviewer David Ansen wrote that it "isn't subtle or finely tuned, but like a crunching downfield tackle, it leaves its mark." North Dallas Forty is a work of fiction, based on a semi-autobiographical novel by former Cowboys receiver Peter Gent (who also assisted Frank Yablans and director Ted Kotcheff with the screenplay), but it is faithful to the realities of the game: some scenes reenactments of events from Gent's own career, others simply grounded in the universal truths of life in professional football during the 1970s. Three and a half decades later, despite football's metamorphosis into an unimaginably large business and cultural force, North Dallas Forty's critiques have remained startlingly familiar and relevant.

In the movie, Nick Nolte portrays Phil Elliott, an aging and physically broken wide receiver for the North Dallas Bulls who is increasingly fed up with football's individuality-squelching culture. The names and teams are fictional, but their real-life analogs are obvious. The football establishment—from coaches to fellow players, from executives to ownership—denies Elliott his humanity, reducing him to nothing more than a cog in a machine, another body to be thrown into the meat grinder. The film is a vicious deconstruction of how the NFL treats players as if they deserve nothing, and then discards them—a process that damages not only the players themselves but the people unfortunate enough to be around them.

North Dallas Forty is comprehensive in scope. It's a deep dive into the emotional vulnerability of football players, from the treatment of hulking 6-foot-5 offensive lineman Jo Bob as a "baby" who must be allowed to fuck anything that moves in order to maintain his confidence, to the admission by the star quarterback Seth Maxwell that he has never actually loved anyone in his life. The way labor is exploited in professional football is put under a microscope, from surveillance by off-duty police officers to pressure from coaches and teammates alike to shoot up with painkillers and play despite increased injury risks. And the soulless attitude from coaches and executives is captured in characters like B. A. Strother, the Tom Landry analog, who tells Elliott, "A winning team is 45 finely meshed gears working together in perfect synchronization. One of those gears flies off on its own, I pull it," and who tells his own team, after reading off a list of statistical milestones they failed to achieve, "No one of you is as good as that computer."

It shows how football culture sees women as objects, to be used and discarded quickly. When Elliott attempts to separate a drunken, raging Jo Bob from a woman who rejects his advances, his teammates treat him like he's insane, baffled at the idea that such an act could be worth undertaking. Maxwell, in his role as quarterback and team leader, comforts Jo Bob and prevents him from taking his rage out on Elliott by telling him, "Hey, man, he's just trying to keep that little dolly from raping you." Later, we see how healthy relationships with women as equals are discouraged. Maxwell, sharing various pills and beer with Elliott in the training room, discusses a wild orgy, complete with descriptions of large pink dildos and the loss of innocence for the team's hyper Christian backup quarterback. Maxwell then turns his attention to Elliott's developing relationship with a woman he met at a party in one of the film's early scenes: "I hope you haven't fallen for that chick. Breaks your concentration."

Concussions are not featured in the story—the hard plastic shell helmets and metal facemasks that contributed so heavily to the CTE epidemic had only been in use for a few years by 1979—but the physical toll that years of football takes on its players is clear from the opening scene: an exhausted Elliott waking up and rifling through pill bottles, eventually washing them down with day-old beer. "You last long enough, you'll realize the only way to survive is the pills and shots," Elliott tells a young teammate.

"Not me, turkey, I've got respect for my body," responds the receiver, who has been resisting the painkilling shots necessary to stay on the field. "You'll get past that," Elliot prophetically tells him. We last see Elliott's young teammate crying in the locker room. He gave in to the pressure, shot up his hamstring, and tore it beyond repair in final minutes of the final game in the movie.

Painkillers, broken bodies, questionable involvement of off-duty police, domestic violence and generally awful treatment of women, and the treatment of labor as fungible and fundamentally worthless—all of these things remain in today's NFL, constantly creating new headlines and new outrage, even as the stories within are old as the league itself. Jo Bob could just as easily be Ray McDonald, who was defended to the end by both 49ers and Bears management. Elliott, who in the film is eventually kicked off the team (officially, at least) after he's photographed smoking a joint, calls to mind Josh Gordon, who was suspended for the equivalent of second-hand pot smoking. North Dallas Forty comes from another era, but it continues to serve as a critical and dark reminder of the bleak underside powering the entertainment juggernaut that is the National Football League.