Talking Movies: The perfect game

As spring turns the grass green, my fancy lightly turns to thoughts of baseball. The fancies of movie producers must also turn in that direction, because 42, the new biopic about Jackie Robinson, is just opening.

I have a theory about American sports. (Even the best theory can’t contain the whole truth about its subject; so let me warn you right away that my little theory leaves out a lot.) In brief, it’s that our sports, especially baseball, are all about nostalgia. “Is this heaven? No, it’s Iowa.” There, in a nutshell, is the meaning of baseball: the longing for rural America and its family values.

Historians are people who tell you that everything you believe about the past is false. So it’s no surprise that all historians sourly agree that Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball in Cooperstown in 1839. However the nine-position-three-strikes-four-bases game was concocted, it was being referred to as our “national pastime” as early as 1856. Baseball really took off after the Civil War and more or less grew in popularity throughout the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Thus, the rise of baseball coincides neatly with the rise of America as an industrial power. As various cultural historians have pointed out, baseball becomes a pastoral retreat for those whose lives were being radically transformed by cities, capitalism and technology.

The great political question posed by our most mythic baseball movies is: Can our rural Jeffersonian values survive in the new dog-eat-dog world of modernity? Take the most stirring of them all, Barry Levinson’s The Natural (1984), based on Bernard Malamud’s fine novel. It opens with golden scenes of Roy Hobbs as a young boy running through a wheat field to catch fly balls thrown to him by his dad. Roy (Robert Redford) grows to be “the natural” who goes off to the city to make it big, immediately is corrupted by its alluring charms and then must make a comeback as an older, wiser ballplayer. After he successfully resists the temptations of money and sex, he hits a light-shattering series-winning home run and is now able to have a family with his childhood sweetheart. The last scene is of Roy throwing flies to his own son in the wheat field. He’s finally rounded the bases and made it back home.

Because our baseball logic implies that we must hearken back to our founding values or else perish by the anarchic forces of modernity, the love of baseball fits nicely with a genteel form of conservatism. It’s no surprise that the conservative columnist George Will is obsessed with baseball and routinely declares that it “suits the character of this democratic nation.” But even the progressive mind likes to indulge in nostalgia. Movies like A League of Their Own (1992) and The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), as well as the just-released 42, show that family values and personal virtue can be connected to progressive principles like feminism and civil rights.

Phil Alden Robinson’s Field of Dreams (1989) presents a more complex version of baseball mythology, though its diamond-in-the-middle-of-a-cornfield stays true to the idea that baseball is rooted in our agrarian past. Based on W.P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe, Field of Dreams is about many dreams gone awry, the dreams of the 1919 Black Sox (who were famously corrupted by money and threw the World Series), the frustrated dreams of the main character’s father, the disappointed and confused dreams of the 1960s (represented by James Earl Jones’s character, a disillusioned radical) but most of all the dreams of a man who wants to become a farmer and reconnect with his family. The mystic voice of the movie says, “If you build it, they will come.” It refers literally to the surreal baseball field in a cornfield but symbolically to the potential of America as a land of dreams.

The interesting thing is that after the efflorescence of epic baseball movies in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, baseball has entered a new stage in our astroturfed imaginations. Football, our current national sport, is about the nostalgia for war, violence and manly courage. By comparison the beauties of scorecards and stolen bases seem quaint as George Will’s bow ties. Now we’re nostalgic for baseball itself, or else we must try to update it à la Moneyball. Someone needs to do a movie about building a baseball diamond on the gridiron!

Nostalgia often gets a bad name. Yet everybody is either a nostalgist or a futurist, and I myself prefer the good old days to the brave new world, even though Eden never existed and New Jerusalem will never arrive. Is this heaven? I doubt it, but let’s play ball. And then watch some movies.

Scott Samuelson teaches philosophy at Kirkwood Community College and blogs about music with his son at billyanddad.wordpress.com.