Field Of Lies

This essay was originally on my old weblog, then re-written and printed in Chin Music in 2003. Allegedly, anyway. They never sent me a copy in spite of repeated requests. So here it is again:

I recently subjected myself to the torture that is Field Of Dreams, a film I hadn't seen in so long that I'd relegated it to the "harmless" file in the back of my head. Dusted off and re-assessed, I have to put a warning label on it. This movie is not harmless. This movie is representative of everything that is currently wrong, and always has been wrong, with the way we look at baseball. Field Of Dreams is not a good movie. That alone is not, of course, offensive; there are very few good baseball movies. In fact there is exactly one: The Bad News Bears. Failing in a genre in which failure is the norm is no crime - what makes Field Of Dreams an affront to decency is that it is morally corrupt. More precisely, it's pure fucking evil. The reason it's pure fucking evil is because it sells a dangerous lie that is ultimately not only damaging to the sport of baseball, but to art, and to the truth of the human experience.

Field Of Dreams was conceived of and made by Baby Boomers, those overweight, out of touch oafs who are always looking for any excuse to justify their greed and moral weakness while assuring the world that they still carry with them the spirit of their generation - the ragged but proud glory of "The Sixties."

Fuck "The Sixties." Anybody who uses that phrase reverentially is automatically full of shit and can be counted on to have never been a part of anything more radical than perhaps having tacked up a poster of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the wall of their college dorm. These spineless creatures drank, drugged and fucked their way through college and their early twenties, and when they had their kids - my generation - they told us not to do the same. They echoed Abby Hoffman's "Property is shit" line until they realized they wanted a little property themselves. And they wanted a lot of expensive toys, too. So as they grew older and became more and more out of touch with generations that followed - as they turned into their parents - they didn't do what countless generations before them had done. They did not move gracefully into middle age. They went kicking and screaming like the spoiled brats they always were. The Boomers were the first American generation of whiny, narcissistic shitheads, their sense of entitlement only surpassed by their hubris as they grabbed - and continue to grab - what they want when they want it, and fuck everybody else. The Boomers don't like being reminded that they're out of touch; that they've become everything they always hated; that they've pissed all over the world and that maybe they should be held accountable for it rather than be allowed to make somebody else clean up the mess while they clean up the profits. Nope, they want to have their cake and eat it too. So to justify their miserable existence, they use pop culture to get the word out that they aren't so bad after all; at least part of my seething hatred of the Beatles can be attributed to spending my entire childhood listening to alleged adults quote those corny hippie lyrics as a solution for everything from world peace to how to fix a leaky faucet.

What Field Of Dreams is really about is providing Boomers with justification for selling their souls. It's another version of the Boomer lie, the one that tells you that you can be a socially responsible person with the strength of your convictions and you can still make a shitload of money doing it. When push comes to shove in Field Of Dreams and the character of Ray Kinsella is going to lose his farm and, thus, his ability to support his family if he sticks to his guns, we are assaulted by one of the last in a long succession of the script's flowery, officious, smoke-pouring-and-sparks-flying-from-the-bullshit-detector speeches, this time from James Earl Jones's character, who assures Kinsella that his hard work and commitment have not been in vain because people will come to his ball field to watch the magical dead ballplayers play catch. They'll suddenly decide to take a vacation in Iowa without knowing why. They'll get bored with Iowa City and, again, without knowing why, they'll drive to Ray's farm, and they'll want to see the game.

And Ray can charge twenty bucks a head.

That's what this movie is really about: Stand up for what you believe in, even if everybody else thinks you're nuts! Uh, yeah, well, but only if there's a safety net underneath... wait, strike that, you've worked hard, why settle for a safety net? You're an American: you deserve to turn a healthy profit! At its heart, Field Of Dreams isn't about standing by your principles while simultaneously dealing with fiscal responsibilities; it's a fairy-tale about social responsibility in which right action is rewarded with a good income, and in which the money that is inevitably a byproduct of organized social action (in this case, presented as a vaguely Quixotic stand against sanity by a moron from Iowa) becomes the end to the means. If it were simply bullshit, it wouldn't offend so much. But it's sneaky, manipulative bullshit that is designed to ease the guilt of those Reagan Democrat yuppies who had spent almost a full decade looting the country by the time this film was released.

Field Of Dreams is a movie based on an inherently dishonest, cynical concept that urges us not to confuse ourselves with the facts. I'm sure I can't be the only one to find the whole ugly thing to be an insult to all human intelligence. Ray Kinsella is clearly an idiot at best, a dangerous sociopath at worst. His wife is almost as culpable; her decision to stand by her man in spite of his reckless idiocy is akin to handing the killer the bullets for the gun.

Besides all that, the movie never explains what the ballplayers' cut of that twenty bucks a head will be. Sure they're dead, but they are, after all, ballplayers so it's only logical to assume that they'd be demanding a fair cut of the scratch, if only for a little afterlife booze and pussy. All the dimbulb Kinsella did was build a field - who's actually out there putting on the show that people are paying for? In a surely unintended way, the movie effectively takes the side of ownership over players. Field Of Dreams continues in the shameful American tradition of romanticizing and simplifying the motivation of professional entertainers, a tradition that has caused and continues to cause serious damage to the level of quality in American entertainment, whether it's sports, movies, music or any other type of talent-based entertainment. By ignoring basic financial realities in favor of portraying entertainers as people who are only vaguely concerned with money in an eccentric, absent-minded way, this concept stacks the deck against the vast majority of them, portraying as frauds any of them who consider the facts of life in a society in which money is a necessity; if you're concerned about earning a living, you can't be good at what you do (if you are, it must be in a contrived, calculated way), and you certainly can't have the same love for it as someone who would continue to do it full-time even in the face of poverty. Such thinking benefits only one group of people - those making the bulk of the money. The ballplayers in Field Of Dreams are portrayed as being happy to just play ball for the sake of it while Kinsella rakes in the profit. If there were ever a sequel to Field Of Dreams, logic would dictate that we would see a tale of dead ballplayers on strike with their ghostly union head administering a spectral ass-kicking to Old Man Kinsella. Ideologically speaking, Kinsella's ball field resembles North Korea's Propaganda Village more than anything else; it is a laughably transparent attempt to continue to sell a lie that we should have shit-canned years ago. Yeah, it is so, kid. Comiskey screwed his players one time too many. It is so, and stop pretending to be so shocked, ya little brat.

On top of everything else, as if cynical, guilt-ridden self-justification disguised as narrative isn't enough, in true George Will fashion this piece of celluloid fluff abuses a great sport to spread its fertilizer. Field Of Dreams is the kind of movie that used to be made before Jim Bouton wrote Ball Four. We know better now. The baseball players in Field Of Dreams ought to be completely unbelievable to any viewer over the age of ten because Bouton told us so and he did it almost twenty years before Field Of Dreams was filmed. But the Boomers ignored him. To this day we are fed a ludicrous myth about the game of baseball and the men who play it; this in spite of the myth being beaten to a pulp starting with Bouton and continuing with tell-all ballplayers up to today. Even Mickey Mantle - whose fans would've gladly lynched Bouton after the publication of Ball Four - eventually wrote his own book that should've killed the ugly baseball lie. But Bouton, even though he tried - now here's a guy from "The Sixties" who wasn't a phony, and who had the strength of his convictions, and who wasn't afraid to admit, publicly, that yeah, he could be a real asshole sometimes, too, and who took a hell of a beating for telling the truth - even though he tried to put the lie to rest, Bouton ultimately failed because the Boomers wouldn't let the myth die. Baseball was a metaphor; it was their Capra-esque connection to a mythologized innocent time - the 1940s and 50s (ah yes, those magical times of segregation, Joe McCarthy, and the censorship of everything from Catcher In The Rye to Alfred E. Neuman) and, in the case of the writer of Field Of Dreams, it represented a common bond between father and son that had been ripped apart by "The Sixties." Sure, says the movie, in its patronizing tone, the upheavals of "The Sixties" were necessary, but some things are timeless, like good ol' baseball.

Bullshit. Bullshit, and fuck you and all your friends - not for buying into the lie, but for insisting on selling it to the rest of us. Fuck you, Baby Boomers, for telling your kids not to do drugs or fuck while you snorted coke off of your secretary's tits and your wives back in the suburbs got fucked up on Valium and experimented with bisexuality. Fuck you for not even trying to bridge the gap between social responsibility and the realities of life in this country, thus allowing fringe comedians like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky to take center stage and turn the Left into a colossal joke. And fuck you for romanticizing a game; for turning it into a bullshit symbol to justify your inherent lameness; for writing gooey, poetic nonsense about it being a metaphor for life; for getting all Doug Henning on the rest of us about the magic of baseball. Grow up, you fucking retards. Baseball is eighteen grown men on a field throwing a ball, catching a ball and hitting a ball with a bat. It isn't a metaphor for anything. The men who play it are not heroes. They are just men. Some of them are creeps and some of them are terrific guys and most of them fall somewhere in between.

Art is supposed to speak to the human condition, not lie about it. Let's stop lying. Baseball is a great game, a uniquely American game. But it is just a game. Movies like Field Of Dreams tell us seductive lies. They may be pretty, but they're still lies. See this movie for what it is, see its corruption, see its condescension, and at the very bottom of the warped heart of movies like Field Of Dreams, see the truth about the men who make them: that there are no depths to which they won't sink to avoid the terrible truth that their generation wasn't and isn't so important after all.