Film: White Men Can’t Jump (1992)
Written and directed by: Ron Shelton
Starring: Rosie Perez, Tyra Ferrell, Wesley Snipes, Woody Harrelson
Listen, Those of the Male Persuasion,
There are words for male and female. So many words. But what does it mean to inhabit an identity?
I have long wondered why it is considered an insult for a man in America to be branded as a woman. Unless he thinks doggedly that he is acting only as a man would act. If he wants to be a man and suggests he is a man to all around him, and he acts like a woman, then someone calling him out on it is simply someone saying he is fragmented from the reality he really wants in life. Perhaps such a rejoinder can be helpful, in certain situations, without being derogatory to women or men.
Yet calling a man “a boy” is different, and this movie White Men Can’t Jump is about big boys hustling. They pretend to be men. They think making money makes them men. But truly, they are boys who want to play and win games. They don’t adequately protect their loved ones, and their interest is more in one-upping an opponent than in thinking of longevity, stability, and healthy relationships with people off the basketball court.
Integrity is not a value for them. Winning is.
Wait, does this sound a lot like current and past U.S. Politics?
A person can have a man’s body and be a boy. Or he can be a boy in age, yet a man.
So the difference between a boy and a man is maturity, not age. And how do we recognize maturity?
What we see in White Men Can’t Jump are two guys who love to hustle. Billy (played by Woody Harrelson) and Sidney (played by Wesley Snipes) love to act and perform, and play on stereotypes, and “talk smack” to each other. Who can get the best one-liner? Whose insult is the saltiest? And it’s fun to watch this all happen on Venice Beach, Los Angeles, where lots of Jokers come out to play. Once, on Venice Beach, I stopped to watch some guys perform with audience participation, and we were all having a lot of fun until the dudes started coming around with their baskets every few minutes asking for cash. It felt too much like the Catholic church so I left.
White Men Can’t Jump is so LA (El Ay), in the way it is about hustling and performing to get ahead. Making quick cash to pay off your debts, to appease your woman, to impress the brothers around you.
But what happens when it is time to grow up? How do you let the dramatic highs and lows of the hustle go—for the sake of True Living?
Where the heck is God in all your dribbling, bros?
The truth is, there are a lot of jobs that involve hustling, with a focus on winning. People can get so focused on winning their game, their case, or getting their next client, or making the big deal, that they lose the Deep Down reason they want to be on this planet doing whatever it is they came to do.
(Or maybe, they just focus on the hustle to distract themselves from the truth that they don’t want to be living on this planet.)
Two guys playing each other and the people around them, being bros in one minute, enemies in the other, making it all about the money and the fix, and what to do for the next game, and the game after that, and who said what and how are we going to approach it…. Well, that is U.S. politics and the current presidency, and corporate America, too. It’s the bro-hood culture we’re all too uncomfortably mired in. And the slam-dunks are too few for it to be enjoyable to watch.
Boys will be boys, I guess? Unless? Or until what?
Let’s talk about the women in this movie. (There are no girls.) Sidney’s wife is Rhonda (played by Tyra Ferrell) and Billy’s girlfriend is Gloria (played by Rosie Perez). These women don’t work regular jobs—they are home, with their own dreams, waiting for the man to “win,” alternately angry and turned on, running from creditors and thieves. They put a lot of trust in their guys to reach their goals, but usually, the guys are just making big messes.
For me in this film, Gloria (played by Rosie Perez), steals the whole movie. She knows Billy is a boy, but he is a sweet boy, so she keeps loving him. The problem is, he can’t be trusted with money and decision-making. He lets her down again and again, and she forgives him because he keeps trying, but there is always a final straw. Billy knows that Gloria is like a guru to him, and he looks to her for life lessons. But in the end, he chooses his bro and his fix rather than investing his money in the way that would allow a future less about hustle, more about grace, ease, communion, and purpose. With her.
Billy’s more interested in performing tricks and impressing people, than he is in setting a stable ground and maintaining a relationship with someone who loves him. This is why Billy is a boy, not a man. And that is how you know the difference between a boy and a man. The boy wants to show off. The man wants to stay clean.
Sidney tells Billy, “Four words: Always listen to the woman.” But Billy is mad that Sidney tells him this only after he ignored Gloria.
“Why didn’t you tell me that sooner?” Billy asks.
“You’re a man. You have to make your own decisions.”
The problem is, Billy doesn’t know how to make his own decisions. He’s looking to everyone else to tell him what to do. It’s either about impressing someone, running away from responsibility, or fearing how his lover will react when something goes wrong. Nowhere does he have an inner compass guiding him in a clear direction. He just acts from habit, fear, ego.
Ew, dude.
A true man is a navigator you can trust to get you to the destination for all the right reasons, and who doesn’t get distracted along the way.
And this is the crux of White Men Can’t Jump—that we all have to make our choices in life. Many people feel caught in situations where they don’t feel they have a choice. They feel pressured to do what is expected, or what other people want them to do. But who we choose, and when we choose, and how we choose, says a lot about us. Gloria forgave Billy, and that made Billy think she would continue to enable his bad behavior. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that at all. Forgiveness is not enabling. So Billy kept doing the same stupid stuff, and he lost the person who was looking out for him most in the world. Sidney, his bro, who he is trying so hard to impress? Sidney is only focused on his own interests. (Sidney’s had some history lessons—that’s why.)
We all have cards to play, even when we’re getting pressured toward a certain trajectory by our peers. A boy succumbs to peer pressure, but a man does not. A man thinks about his values and his goals, and he makes decisions in alignment with those values and goals.
A man knows how he got to where he is, and he doesn’t blame anyone else for his successes or failures. He knows his life is in his own hands.
A woman? I guess for a woman, it is the same. She may just have a little more hutzpah in the way she goes about things.
(And we are all the better for that.)
We have a lot of boys hustling in courts these days, and ain’t no one like Gloria seeming to make enough traction to stop them…yet.
So it’s time for men to be men, whether they can jump or not.
(And women might gotta be men, too, right now, for a while, honestly.)
Yours truly,
Ms. Wonderful
*White Men Can’t Jump is streaming on Hulu.
Saturday Vinyl Playlist, April 12 2025
