>Everyone loves football. Football has accomplished and inspired many things, and in the movie Remember the Titans football helps one school overcome racial barriers. The movie starts begins with Coach Boone being named head coach for football at T.C. Williams High School in Virginia. The movie focuses a lot on the football players dislike and prejudices towards the opposite race, and how through the game of football they are able to overcome those obstacles and become a team and friends.
Through this movie we can learn about how people get to know each other. How we let people in and at what rate. It’s a form of communication that theorists Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor called Social Penetration Theory. It turns out the movie Shrek taught us something about this theory too, because Altman and Taylor say people are like onions… they have layers (“Ogres are like onions. Onions have layers, ogres have layers. Got it!” Shrek 2001). In order to get to know someone you have to move through those layers, yet you can only get as far as a person will let you in. Also, Altman and Taylor say once a person has achieved a “layer” the person revealing things about themselves cannot get that “layer” back. For example, if you break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, you cannot take back how much they know about you. In order to make it so they don’t know you too deep anymore, you must change yourself and your beliefs. Also Altman and Taylor say that we allow people access to our “layers” through a wedge format. Once they learn about a layer of our lives they do not get the whole layer, they get a section, and generally we let them into a section of our lives deeply, while keeping other sections of our lives hidden from them.
Now you may be wondering how this applies to the movie Remember the Titans, well the boys get to know each other through the Social Penetration Theory. They learn about each other by what they choose to reveal, this is called Self-Disclosure. The boys are willing to share more of the surface level things about themselves before they go more in depth. On the bus when all the players are forced to sit by a person of a different race Julius tells his friend Blue to shut up, Gary chimes in to agree with Julius, revealing that he did not appreciate Blue’s singing either. As the boys are at camp, Coach Boone forces them to get to know each other by making them ask each other questions. The boys only ask surface level questions like, “what’s your Daddy’s name?” and they only answer questions of the same depth. No one is willing to share more information than the other person, which fits right in with Altman and Taylor’s Social Penetration Theory’s law of reciprocity which states, people will only share equal levels of openness in the beginning of a relationship.
Another observation of the Social Penetration Theory is that people will “penetrate layers” more quickly in the beginning but it gets harder and takes more time to penetrate layers the closer you get to the core of a person. Julius and Gary demonstrate that during their confrontation during training camp. Gary yells at Julius for not doing his job, and Julius comes back at him with accusations that Gary is a bad leader. In this confrontation Gary tells Julius, “I think you’re a waste of god-given talent”, and Julius tells Gary, “well, attitudes reflect leadership, captain.” This confrontation suddenly propels Gary and Julius more towards the center of each others “core” and from there a friendship begins. After this confrontation, Gary and Julius almost become inseparable, but they get to know about each other much slower.
Something that the Social Penetration Theory does not address is how people get to know each other by doing things. The boys on the football team not only develop a bond because they talk to each other, but because they are doing things together. Their training week was hell and that difficulty helped bring them together. In the movie, a pivotal moment in the boys relationship was when Coach Boone took them for a run to the battlefield of Gettysburg. It was a long, hard run but the boys fought to make sure every team member made it. While they were there Coach Boone spoke to them and encouraged them to stop fighting the battle of racism, because that was already done for them. This was the moment it seemed to click for some of them and the boys really became a team after that. But they bonded by experiencing something together, not by talking to each other. Men in particular tend to bond this way.
The movie Remember the Titans is a great movie for many different reasons, one being that it is a great movie about overcoming the racial differences in 1971. But this movie is a great example of how people get to know each other. How through self-disclosure people are willing to reveal surface level stuff faster, and the farther down you get to a person’s “core”, the more time and effort it will take to get there. So, the next time you’re getting to know someone and you’re frustrated because its taking a while, or things aren’t going the way you planned. Remember that people are like onions, they have layers. Remember that it sometimes takes a while to get to those layers. Remember the Titans.
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