Field of Dreams. Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
“Is this Heaven?”
”No, it’s Iowa.””
It is my belief that Field of Dreams is a perfect movie. Released in 1989, it was the progenitor of a wave of earnestly sentimental 90s films steeped in Americana that could never be made today. The concept is wildly strange but also strangely intimate, Kevin Costner was in the full bloom of his career before the coming avalanche of boondoggles like the Postman would pull him back to Earth, and James Earl Jones narrates a lot of it. Also, it’s about baseball. And farming. And dads. What could possibly be more American?
I cannot watch this movie’s finale, in which a son engages in a simple game of catch with his dad, without bawling. That is how powerfully effective its premise is. It takes a very simple idea of what America is - farming, baseball, family - and distills it into this mildly supernatural fable that strikes at the heart of every middle-class white American man like a viper. When Trump supporters pine for an imagined past, this is it. This is what they are imagining, a world where yesteryear’s baseball heroes emerge from a cornfield to help an every-man reconcile with his father through the mystical power of the astral plane. And look, here’s the thing. It works. It works so well, and then some.
Part of that is in the skill with which it’s executed. Drawn from the very strange mind of moderately commercially successful writer W. P. Kinsella, it unfolds gradually in stages that tease out the mystery of what is happening without ever trying to explain it. From a purely technical standpoint the narrative moves in perfectly measured steps. I don’t want to describe the plot, but it’s immaculately structured with an all-time great hook (“If you build it, he will come”) and each act adding new and fascinating dimensions to what came before, culminating in a gut-punch of unresolved father issues set against the backdrop of a beautiful baseball field in the middle of nowhere that basically represents everything America stands for.
Now, clearly this is a fable made by and for white Americans. And you know what? That’s OK. It is still a beautiful fable. And it does capture some of that fleeting essence of where America was in 1989, the memories of Vietnam still echoing in the consciousness of the Baby Boomers, this idea that America was changed in some fundamental way after the 1960s and 70s and here was a film serving up a tailor-made fantasy that let them go back again. And it did it all through the halcyon prism of baseball, that most American of sports, at once boring but also deeply intertwined with our national narrative.
It’s beautifully filmed, wonderfully acted, the narrative structure is unimpeachable, and it does capture in some ephemeral and unexplainable way the essence of what white people imagine America has been and always will be. And that game of ghost dad catch gets me every time. A perfect movie.
