On Losers
March 29, 2025 | By Sharla Moody BK ‘22, YDS ‘25
image description: an aerial view of a residential area in the winter
This winter, I watched Little Miss Sunshine (2006), a road trip comedy-drama movie about the Hoovers, a family that is, to put it mildly, really struggling[1] [2] . Deeper than that, the film is also about winners and losers. The father, Richard, is an aspiring motivational speaker on the cusp of landing a book/media deal of some kind. His wife, Sheryl, is stretched thin between work and parenting. Sheryl’s brother, Frank, is a scholar of the French modernist novelist Proust who has fallen on hard times, abruptly finding himself to be a jobless jilted lover. After a suicide attempt, he moves in with the family. Richard’s vulgar father has moved in with the family as well after being kicked out of a retirement community for his drug use. Richard and Sheryl’s son, Dwayne, is a teenager who has decided to take a vow of silence after reading Nietzsche, and their daughter, Olive, is a seven-year-old who hopes to one day be Miss America. After Olive discovers that she is a finalist for Little Miss Sunshine, a beauty pageant in California, the family crowds into an ancient Volkswagen bus to get there in time. Along the way, the worst possible thing happens to each individual character: Richard learns he has not gotten the deal; Frank runs into the graduate student he had fallen in love with at a gas station while buying dirty magazines for the grandfather; the grandfather dies at the motel during their overnight stop; Dwayne learns that he’s colorblind, meaning he will never fulfill his dream of becoming a fighter pilot.
Only Olive stays chipper and upbeat, though her happiness is still fragile. Richard, the father, sees the world as divided between winners and losers. In the opening scene, giving a motivational speech, Richard says that “at the very core of your being is a winner waiting to be unleashed on the world.” While this dichotomy fuels his motivational mindset, it also describes his entire outlook on the world and his family. When seven-year-old Olive orders pancakes a la mode at a diner, Richard cruelly explains that ice cream can make her fat, and that no one who wins Miss America is fat, and doesn’t she want to win Miss America one day? Later, we see Olive sucking in her stomach and asking questions about ice cream to a teenage pageant queen. Being a loser, Richard believes, is the worst thing a person could be. A child’s—his daughter’s—confidence, happiness, and ease within her body can be sacrificed on the altar of winning. Losing (and being associated with losers) is out of question, and the best way to ensure that one doesn’t lose is to learn the rules of the game and strictly adhere to them[3] .
Dividing the world between winners and losers might compel the most competitive to succeed. Who among us has not wanted to be a winner? No one who comes to Yale sets out to be anything less than a winner. For most, if not all, Yale students, admission is simply a big win in a history of wins. In gym class, we all wanted to be picked first. In high school, we all strove to be valedictorian. It’s why we spend countless hours in libraries or in front of computer screens. We winners know better, right? Rejecting that sugary slice of pie at the Christmas party, gunning for the most prestigious jobs and fellowships, selecting for the smartest or most beautiful (or any other superlative) companions—aren’t these just ways winners win? In the winner-loser dichotomy, weaknesses and indulgences must be purged and pushed through.
This isn’t to say that financial stability or knowledge or health are not real goods. They are. But seeing the cultivation of these goods as “winning” and the failure to reach them as “losing”: does this perspective do anyone any good? It seems to me to be an outlook rife at Yale and beyond in the real world which can be, if one isn’t careful, even more status-driven and vapid than an Ivy League institution. If I want to win in the world, I must learn what the objective of the game is, and do everything within my power to reach it.
For the typical Yalie, the game after college goes something like this: A nice job in a hip coastal city after graduation, making a salary above the nation’s median family income, perhaps return to school after a few years for a JD or an MBA or an MD, surrounded by brilliant friends of similar status, marriage to someone with comparable educational background, healthy children who play travel ball and violin and debate in suburban private schools. Above all else, success in the game is measured by worldly output: the cultivation of a career, the house in a good ZIP code, getting and staying fit. Not all Yalies may feel this way, and surely many, if not most, deviate from this plan down the line. But the truth remains that the game played at Yale is one of continual striving after status, even if the metrics by which one determines success change. Is this not why senior societies loom over Yale undergraduate culture, why we pay such close attention to what our peers plan to do, why we use social media?
The world after Yale differs according to where one ends up doing whatever it is that one does, but the winners-losers distinction persists. Think of the black sheep in your own family, the friends who go to less prestigious schools, the athletes that don’t get drafted for the pros at the end of college. It’s easy—perhaps even unconscious—to imagine everyone existing in a shifting hierarchy one constantly strives to wind up on top of. Even if I genuinely want to resist the winners-losers mindset, I find myself in constant comparison with others, tallying the score of a game that I say doesn’t matter but in fact does matter in some way to me. As much as I deny that the game matters, there is still a part of me—probably a massive proportion of myself, if I can bear to be honest—that wants to win more than anything else. I want to win so much that if I don’t consciously think about it, I find that my own life goals and aspirations and dreams are someone else’s, manufactured by LinkedIn and advertising and glamorous peers. The cardinal sin of the winners-losers binary is that it accepts the terms of the game without question. Richard doesn’t question whether his daughter should be competing in pageants or whether Miss America is a title a seven-year-old girl ought to organize her life around achieving. Winning the game matters more than whether the game makes sense, more than even knowing whether winning is desirable.
It comes as no surprise in Little Miss Sunshine, then, that when Richard finds that he himself is a loser after his book pitch isn’t picked up, he suffers such a profound crisis. As the movie unfolds, Richard begins to see himself as a loser not only in his career but also as a husband and father. He soon begins to see his family as a family of losers. What kind of grandpa gets kicked out of a nursing home for shooting heroin? What kind of teenager takes a vow of silence after reading Nietzsche? Has any little girl ever looked less fit for pageantry than Olive? What family piles into a beat-up Volkswagen bus to travel for a kid’s beauty contest? By Richard’s own standards, his family has lost the game, if they were ever even playing it to begin with. They’ve lost so badly they don’t even appear on the scoreboard.
What a realization! Throughout the course of the film, after each successive loss, Richard sees himself as further and further from the winner identity upon which he built his life. In the film’s conclusion—the specifics of which I won’t spoil, because it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen—this is not so much a bad thing anymore, because Richard realizes that his love for his family supersedes any silly measuring up in the game put forth by the world to which he has spent his life capitulating. In fact, Richard loves his family even more because how they fail reveals just how empty the winners-losers binary leaves him [4] .
To say it’s easy to absorb and live according to a winner-loser mindset would be an understatement. It’s as natural as breathing air, and all too easy to see oneself as a loser, which is more than fine, because seeing oneself as a winner is where the real trouble starts. At Yale, surrounded by constant opportunities to compare and tally the score, one must be especially diligent in resisting the allure of the game. What makes Christ so special is that He loves losers—and loves losers far more than he loves winners. He provides an alternative value system to the game, one that promotes the weak, the poor, the imprisoned, widows, losers. This system challenges any notion of the game that might be proffered up by Yale and the world beyond. It calls us to greater love for one another, even and especially when we lose. Winning is not the object of this system. The goal is to wring every ounce of pride from life.