Sarah Ramos Brings It Back

Sarah Ramos’ Instagram videos take a scenic route through these nostalgic remembrances. She pulls out some of the most memorable scenes from movies and approximates them with something better than memory: she captures the feeling of knowing a movie so well the words can feel like your own.

As Torrance, the captain of the reigning champion Rancho Carne Toros cheerleading squad, the golden girl of the late nineties, Kirsten Dunst, finds herself to be the villain of another team’s story; as Isis, Gabrielle Union is the head cheerleader of the East Compton Clovers who fights for her squad to get the recognition that’s been stolen from them. In an oral history made for the film’s fifteen-year anniversary, Union talked about how the interpretations and perceptions of her character were at complete odds from how she played the part. “When people do reenactments of my scenes, they turn me back into a caricature that we didn’t want,” she said. “I was like, what did you get about me speaking that somehow turned into neck-rolling, finger-wagging, just awful, crazy stereotype that you imagine in your head with this dumb Black woman telling a white woman no and enough is enough?”

Later sequels and versions of the original Bring It On lost the plot on the original ideas of repetition, imitation, and appropriation, the comedy giving way to more caricature. More recently, the public imagination around cheerleading has taken a turn for gritty realism. Netflix’s documentary series Cheer was about a team of reigning champions that seemed to take its narrative arc from The Body Keeps The Score, while the adaptation of Megan Abbott’s Dare Me turned cheerleaders into a film noir femme fatale fantasy. In rewatching Bring It On (twice) before watching Sarah’s interpretation, I thought about the mantra often spoken by Monica, the coach on Cheer: “You keep going until you get it right,” she often said of her technique, “and then you keep going until you can’t get it wrong.”It’s not that Bring It On doesn’t have high stakes—it’s that audiences experience those highs and lows with the same buoyancy as watching a well-executed pyramid on the mat, as seeing an athlete propel herself down a mat using her own legs as a springboard. By the end of the movie, order is restored to this almost-reality, but this scene is tense and perfect, all the characters in perfect harmony with their roles. In this version, Sarah and Laura Harrier, Vanessa Chester, and Meagan Holder all hit their marks on this confrontation with a loose, snappy quality, an imitation of a scene about the appropriation of a skill, their voices echo dialogue most everyone I know has learned by heart. “I swear, I had no idea,” Torrance says. “Well, now you do,” says Isis. When enough is enough, that’s all anyone has to say.