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The movie Friday Night Lights is a movie about the 1988 Permian Panthers attempt to win the Texas football state championship. It focuses around the lives of the players, and how much football means to their lives and the community as a whole. The movie begins with the first day of the football team’s fall practices. Right from the beginning the viewer is shown how important football is to the community when one of the parents charges the field, interrupting practice, to yell at his son for fumbling the football. As the season continues the star player, Booby Miles, is suffers a season ending injury. This is significant because not only does it force the team to grow closer together, but also it show how much each player has invested in the season and that each player relied on football as the means of getting out of the community one day. The team makes it to the state championship game but suffers a heart-breaking defeat in the final seconds of the game.
I think the movie is a very accurate depiction of the Great Plains lifestyle. The physical landscape shown in the movie is flat, arid, treeless; all characteristics of Webb’s Great Plains. The lifestyle of the Great Plains is illuminated by the communities’ involvement and obsession with the high school football team. This region is so overlooked by our culture that residence of the Plains have a longing for something worth national recognition. I think this is displayed in the support of Plains universities athletics programs by the community. Athletics are looked up to so much because it unites the community and showcases to the nation that there is something out here and that the Plains are a region not to be underestimated or overlooked.