Field of Dreams

Contradictions afflict Field of Dreams (1989). The writer Terrence Mann stands in that fabled baseball field and intones about the wonders of American baseball, assuring the farmer Ray Kinsella, who built the field, that people will come to see it: "People will come Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh . . . people will come Ray. People will most definitely come." Terrence, of course, is African American, and his mournful recollection of "all that was once good and . . . could be again" simply doesn't make sense to me. At the very same moment he makes this speech, he is surrounded by white baseball players from an era when he wouldn't have been allowed on the field. More than that, they're all standing in a baseball field surrounded by miles of corn (cornfield in the middle of Iowa, a home of the Aryan brotherhood). Should these issues bother me?

I always find the film moving (above and beyond the fact that it's a moving picture) because of the father-son theme, the focus on having a chance at recovering lost dreams or fixing past mistakes. I resent the way it compels my emotional reactions. All of us would love to recall the past, say things to those we loved that we never said, undo mistakes, take back intended or unintended injuries—the film exploits this desire. It makes us weep over impossibilities, and in this I find it incredibly dishonest.

The film is open enough about the fact that it is a fantasy: it is Field of Dreams, after all. It is in some way supposed to be a film about the 60s—the writer Mann was an iconic hero of that decade, and Ray and his wife Annie apparently met then—they both idolized Mann. They have come to a point in their lives when they need to recover purpose and hope, so building a baseball field in the middle of the cornfield they rely on to keep their farm afloat, and chasing down the highway for a long lost writer, is how they regain their directions. The same holds true for Mann, embittered and cynical, who needs to regain the passion that made him a great writer. And finally there is Moonlight Graham, played effectively by Burt Lancaster, who played one inning in baseball and never got a chance at bat. And of course the Chicago Black Sox themselves, who want another chance to play baseball, the film's ultimate dream, symbolic of the lost hope and chances that this film pretends can be recovered. Just for the record: the 60s are far better as an idealized memory than as a reality. I'd rather remember them then return to them.

I hated the film What Dreams May Come (1998), a DGI recreation of heaven that covers some of the same turf as this film. What Dreams May Come shows an afterlife where we can reunite with dead family members and undo our mistakes, where all our bad decisions and misbehavior in this world of sin and pain don't really matter. Field of Dreams is more imaginative, more interesting, and it does offer characters we can care about. But ultimately it offers the same lie.