Diego Maradona and the psychodynamics of football fandom in international cinema

Abstract

Taking a psychoanalytic approach, the article examines and compares how three films explore the psychodynamic processes of fan investment in Argentine former football star Diego Maradona. These films illustrate how his meaning as an international cultural icon is refracted by specific fan experiences and fantasies, and are variously informed by, and critically explore, the myths of virtual death, resurrection, redemption and geopolitical opposition to global capitalism associated with him. In the 2007 British documentary In the Hands of the Gods, five ‘freestyle’ footballers from the UK embark on a pilgrimage to his home. Their geographical movement through North and South America is presented as an opportunity for psychological rebirth and self-realisation through their affinity with him as a supremely gifted individual, rather than a representative of the disciplined world of team sport and its international rivalries. The 2006 Argentine road movie El Camino de San Diego ironically depicts its fan protagonist’s obsession with Maradona as a misguidedly narcissistic distraction from a geographically fractured and enduringly economically weak post-crisis Argentina. Finally, Emir Kusturica’s 2008 movie Maradona by Kusturica reflexively explores how Maradona’s enigma and contradictions as an object of fan investment and political figure of redemption confound his attempts to explain him. Kusturica’s fantasies return inevitably to himself, raising the possibility that ‘Maradona’ may be a ‘neutrosemic’, or inherently meaningless, fan text.

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