Field of Dreams is Garbage
I don’t like writing negative articles. Or to be more specific, I don’t like writing inflammatory articles. In my mind, there’s a difference between writing something critical that’s levelheaded and writing in metaphorical Caps Lock, and anger is only engaging to read if it’s genuine. Most of the time, I don’t have the energy to sell it. That and writing negative articles means you have to spend way more time with art you hate, which is a taller order than you may think. And all the more caustic articles I’ve written are my least favorite.
But sometimes, you wake up, and you’re in a foul mood. Maybe you’re beefing with Paypal and you fucked up your back again with your horrible posture. So here we are, and I think Field of Dreams is one the most overrated movies of all time, if not the most.
“Overrated” is a term that means next to nothing anymore thanks to the internet, and “overrated” doesn’t always mean “bad.” In a healthier world, we’d understand that we’re simply talking about the gulf between how high something is critically and culturally beloved versus what one thinks that thing actually deserves, and I wouldn’t feel the need to write a condescending reminder of this point. But I don’t think we live in that world, and I think Field of Dreams is both overrated and terrible.
“Why?” you may ask. That’s kind of a difficult question for me to answer. If you’re standing in front of an approaching tidal wave, you aren’t running from a specific droplet of water or two. But I don’t have all the time, patience, or bandwidth in the world to get into everything I don’t like about this film. So as per usual, I narrowed it down to three aspects.
It’s the worst kind of sports movie.
I loved sports when I was a little kid. I had a jersey for my local football team that shall not be named, as well as one for the Caps. I had posters and a Sports Illustrated Kids subscription and I filled out March Madness brackets and so on and so forth. Then I discovered my love of the visual narrative arts, and I went through an unfortunate period of rejecting everything that came before. If you had asked me what I thought about sports in general back in high school or even early college, I would’ve told you I hated them. I don’t know how I would’ve phrased that distaste, but whatever I would’ve said, it was because I wasn’t mature enough to appreciate anything that wasn’t an indie movie or a prestige TV show. Snobbery is worse the younger you are.
Nowadays, I don’t have a problem with sports. I don’t feel anything on the rare occasion that I do watch a football or a baseball game, but I don’t begrudge anyone who does. The problem I have is with everything around sports. I think many of the organizations and owners that run major sports leagues don’t fundamentally respect the humanity of their players, and the fact that fans are willing to tolerate the behavior of, say, the NFL, is genuinely repugnant. Even if I didn’t have a problem with professional sports leagues on an institutional level, the behavior of many sports fans would be enough to turn me away forever. Say what you will about Rick and Morty fans. At least they never started a riot.
Furthermore, the way we talk about the bodies of athletes, as if they’re cattle or on an auction block, makes me genuinely uncomfortable. And I find the presentation of most sports broadcasts, with the constant obstruction of ads, graphics, and other various forms visual pollution, completely unacceptable. (Though to be fair, the same can be said for all broadcast network shows.) The list goes on.
However, I’m still capable of enjoying sports movies. To stick to some recent examples, I like Creed quite a bit and were I to rank my top ten films of 2019 so far, High Flying Bird would probably be among them. I don’t think like there’s an obligation for sports movies to point out the flaws of the organizations that run their respective sport. (Though High Flying Bird might be the most damning sports movie I’ve ever seen.) The only duty sports films have is tell an effective story. Like every other genre, they don’t have to be bad as a rule.
But yeah, I don’t like the vast majority of the sports films I’ve seen.
Most of the time, it isn’t “dislike” so much as casual indifference. Most of the clichés we attribute to sport movies can be found in Hoosiers, and though I understand why one would find the familiarity of it comforting or the story affecting, I find it disposable. Sometimes, it’s nitpicky bullshit. Bring It On, for example, would’ve been a more effective film if it had followed the substantially more interesting black cheerleading squad instead of the Dunst and gang. Sometimes, it’s cases like Varsity Blues, which is an abomination on every level.
(Seriously, fuck Varsity Blues. I realize 1999 was a different time, but even then, date rape advocate Tweeter should never have been let off the hook at the end of the movie with “And Tweeter drank beers because, well, Tweeter drinks beer.” The only acceptable fate for Tweeter is “And Tweeter was garroted in the courthouse by the father of one of his victims.”)
Of course, every sports movie should be judged on its own merits, but most of the time, it boils down to sensibility. Sports movies tend to stick close to a formula and they tend to trade in a particular kind of sentimentality that I personally find off-putting. I’m at peace with the fact that most of the time, these movies won’t be for me, and I try not to judge anyone who finds meaning in them.
I draw the line, however, at dogmatism. In Ebert’s four star review of Field of Dreams, he wrote of the idea of Field of Dreams being a religious film. “It’s a religious picture, all right, but the religion is baseball.” To be fair, I don’t think Ebert was referring to baseball in the religious sense that one must now spread the good sport’s word in the name of holy Baseball. I think he’s referring to a more emotional bliss some find when they give themselves to a higher power. Nevertheless, however he meant it, Field of Dreams being a religious movie about baseball is precisely the problem.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned about pop culture in the last decade or so, it’s that we need to re-evaluate what it means to be fan. We do not have a healthy relationship with the art we consume or the people who create it. When an actress plays a new character we don’t like in a beloved franchise, we bully her off the internet. We make embarrassing petitions for the sake of media coverage. We dox people when we don’t feel like they “belong” in a certain community and we jump on counters at McDonalds if they don’t have a limited edition sauce. The way Field of Dreams worships baseball is the reason we have behavior like that.
Is it fair to criticize Field of Dreams because it unintentionally invokes behavior that didn’t really come into prominence until the age of internet? Probably not. But I’d argue that a lot of the sentiment that drives this kind of behavior was present back in 1989, even if we didn’t have as big a megaphone for it as we do now. Look at the way Ray and Annie both worship Terrence Mann. Look at how Ray’s father destroyed their relationship partially because of his father’s worship of baseball. Look at how the movie wants to forgive the the 1919 players because, umm… baseball, I guess. (I’m aware that there’s credible evidence that Shoeless Joe didn’t take part in the scam.)
But even if the specter of toxic fandom didn’t loom over Field of Dreams, I still find the movie’s worship of baseball incredibly strange.
The best sports films, I feel, are either peripherally about sports or emphasize their characters more than the sport itself. Raging Bull is a boxing movie, but it’s not about winning the big fight or “believing in yourself.” Instead, it’s a movie about toxic masculinity and the psychology of someone whose passion involves intense levels of socially acceptable violence. The Wrestler is a wrestling movie, but it’s really about someone trying to survive in a world where the only thing he was ever good at is also what destroys his body and everything good in his life. (We can debate whether or not The Wrestler counts as a sports movie, but I do because Randy “The Ram” is unquestionably an athlete.)
Even in the more traditional sports movies, your Rockys and your Hoosiers and what have you, sports are a means to an arc. Characters grow and change through engaging in a game with their teammates. With their coaches. With their mentors and friends and loved ones. The game is won, but it’s satisfying because now our protagonists will have a better life regardless of whether or not they ever play the game again. The protagonist of a decent sports movie does all the heavy lifting, and that’s why we root for them. The sport won’t do it for them.
In Field of Dreams, baseball is basically a god. It will stop a bank from foreclosing on your farm. It will heal your daughter if her uncle accidentally throws her off the bleachers. It’ll fix your relationship with your dead father and it will transport you to the past. You just have to do what it tells you and believe. Baseball, in Field of Dreams, is to literally be worshipped.
It’s healthy to be honest about what you love, and it’s healthy to learn how to communicate that dissent in a healthy manner. Or at the very least, it’s healthy to not be in denial about the culture you love’s shortcomings.
I love video games. It’s an industry filled to the brim with incredibly talented people who produce profoundly beautiful and meaningful work. Yet, the video games industry is hopelessly addicted to predatory gambling mechanics, it treats its labor force with utter disdain, and the behavior of the worst video game fans is horrifying, to name but a few problems with gaming as a whole. To pretend these issues never existed would be deeply dishonest, and to believe video games will come from the clouds and save you from your problems is giving the industry more credit than it deserves.
Baseball isn’t immune to such issues. It also has a history of abusive labor practices, I’d happily go piss on Cap Anson’s grave and anyone else’s who were involved in erecting the color lines, and there was a little incident when some players conspired with some gamblers to fix the 1919 World Series. I don’t know enough about the incident to know whether or not the players really pulled it off, and whether or not they did, I lack the perspective to know if their lifetime bans and posthumous punishments are overkill. But I find Field of Dreams’s desire to absolve them strange. It’s a symptom of a movie that deeply, desperatly wants to believe that Major League Baseball never did anything wrong, that it never could, and that it never will.
Pretending this is the case isn’t helpful. Not to the MLB, not to fans, not to anyone. The impulse to see the league through rose colored glasses is understandable. But it’s also dishonest. You don’t need to be a realist to see why.
Speaking of being a realist…
I resent the implication in Field of Dreams that I’m some grumpy asshole because I don’t buy into its suffocating sense of sap.
If Field of Dreams has a villain, it would be Annie’s brother Mark. The first time we meet Mark, he brings up a few points about Ray’s decision to build a baseball diamond in his cornfield. Mainly, that Ray doesn’t actually like farming and that plowing down your only source of income to build a non-commercial baseball diamond may bankrupt him.
We the audience heard the voice that told Ray to build the diamond, and Hollywood storytelling has taught as that we should probably take it at face value that the voices are real. You don’t need me to explain dramatic irony to you. However, it’s worth noting that Mark isn’t exactly in the wrong. It’s reasonable to assume, for example, that Mark loves his sister and he wants what he thinks is best for her or that he may not want to see his niece uprooted from her life because the bank foreclosed on her home.
How do Ray and Annie react to Mark’s perfectly reasonable concerns? They make wisecracks and don’t take a single word he has to say seriously. The film itself even treats Mark like a joke when it reveals his wife and mother, both dressed so conservatively that one could easily imagine them holding a torch at a witch burning. The next time we see him, it’s revealed that Mark can’t see the ghosts of the ballplayers. He doesn’t “believe.”
Mark is the embodiment of the nay-sayers. Those who want to poo-poo this man’s crazy quest to follow the voice he hears in the cornfield. He’s Ebenezer Scrooge. He can’t see the magic, thus he must be some curmudgeon who hates happiness.
In effect, Mark is a stand-in for myself. Someone who doesn’t care about baseball and someone whose version of joy doesn’t rely on “going with the flow.” It also doesn’t help that the actor who plays Mark, the great Timothy Busfield, has red hair like myself.
The next time we see Mark, it’s implied that he’s pressing Annie to sell the farm while Ray’s on the road with Terrence. The time after that is when he makes Ray the offer and accidentally throws Karin off the bleachers. It’s only when Dr. Graham appears from nowhere and gets the hotdog out of Karin’s throat that he’s able to see the ballplayers and urges Ray not to sell the farm.
Mark is so throughly vilified that the message to me is clear: If you don’t buy into the whimsy, than you’re a big meanie. If you can’t give yourself into the feeling this movie’s offering, then you’re just a fuddy-duddy and you can go fuck yourself.
I’ll admit that I can have a bit of a grumpy side, and that I tend not to steer toward optimism. I’ll also admit that I’m not one for spiritualism. Most of the joy in my life comes from the simpler things I can find in the material realm. Art. Friends. Conversation. Nature. I’m not always the beacon of mental health, and though I have some beliefs that make me sound unhappy, I don’t consider myself hopeless.
However, even if I did, I don’t think any of that is why I don’t like the sensibility of this film. It has everything to do with storytelling and taste. I don’t buy into this movie’s viewpoint because I don’t think said viewpoint is earned. The way Ray and Annie laugh off Mark is cruel. The ways this movie casts off dissent, whether it be dissent from the characters in the film or dissent from any of this film’s possible detractors, is childish. I’d have a problem with his movie’s rhetoric about America’s past if I was convinced that the people who made this film had any true understanding of it beyond, “Baseball was good.”
At best, I think Field of Dreams understands emotion as well as a five year old. At worst, I think it’s disconnected from humanity to the point where it might as well be hurling its shit around in its padded cell. But worst of all, I think this movie thinks its audience is stupid.
Look at the PTA scene. Look at how these characters talk. At what they say to each other and how it’s supposed to make us feel. How contrived and cutesy it is. Look at what it thinks counts as reason. Look at what it thinks counts as humanity.
Field of Dreams doesn’t respect your intelligence, it doesn’t respect your emotional maturity, and it doesn’t respect your taste or individuality. You’re either on one side line of the line this movie pissed into the mound or you’re on the other. You’re either a dreamer or you should jump.
But many of us know that nothing is that simple. And by “many of us,” I mean those who’ve grown up, or at the very least, those who’ve read a Dr. Seuss book. We don’t need this kind of dynamic to find happiness. We find it through respect. Something Field of Dreams knows nothing about.
Also, I hate everything else about this movie.
I like the three sections format. It allows me to talk about a wide breadth of subject matter while making sure that I have some sort of limit. It also makes the articles seem shorter than they actually are because the section names break up the text into chunks and blah blah you don’t care.
As I wrote the outline for this article, it came time to think of a third section. The problem was that I couldn’t pick just one. So I ran down the list. And before we get into that list, I realize this sounds like a petty rhetorical device so I could list more aspects of Field of Dreams I don’t like. Normally, you’d be right. But I’d rather risk coming off like a hack than spend one more hour pounding my head against the table trying to think of something more specific.
First, I thought of talking about structure. Judging by the amount of time I spend complaining about structure, you may have figured out that I don’t think it’s particularly well done here. Field of Dreams does have the barest necessities to call itself a story, but the connective tissue between the story beats are often based on arbitrary information, characters make decisions with barely any motivation, and much of it relies on the exact kind of whimsy I don’t buy into in order to make any sense. It needs to happen, so almighty Baseball makes it so.
Then I thought about discussing the visual aesthetic of Field of Dreams. Specifically, how this is the rare movie whose visuals I don’t like because it looks good in a way I find perverse. There are many fantastic looking shots, and many camera movements are deployed for great effect. But all the visual lushness is only used to further enforce its feral sentimentality. It’s a bit like looking at a Kinkade painting. Yes, I want to go sip tea in that creekside cottage and it’s all very cozy and inoffensive. But that painting doesn’t exist for honest reasons. That painting exists for the sake of the window in the now shuttered photo store in the mall or the poster at your local Staples that demonstrates what you can do with the copiers.
(Now that I’m thinking about it, if I had to boil my thoughts on Field of Dreams down into one sentence, it would be that it’s the Thomas Kinkade painting of movies.)
One idea I had was to pick something super specific to nitpick. After all, Field of Dreams gives plenty of options on that front. For example, I hate the incredibly obvious visual metaphor of the baseball players disappearing into the cornfield, the idea being that in America, baseball is as natural and essential as that which grows from the ground and makes life livable. In The Confessions of Nat Turner, the leader of the slave rebellion told Thomas Gray that he saw drops of blood on the corn in the fields. The implication being that America grew from the metaphorical blood of the slaves. I don’t have a thought connecting these two ideas. But every time I think about the baseball players disappearing into the corn, my next thought is usually of Nat Turner.
It’s around here where I gave up. I felt like a dog chasing his tail. Call it bitterness. Call it incompetence. Call it what you will. I dislike so many factors of this movie that I couldn’t pick just one more.
For the sake of this conclusion, I tried to think of something I do like about Field of Dreams. I couldn’t. Maybe if I thought hard enough, I could. But I didn’t see why I should. I’ve seen movies that I find more offensive and movies that have made me angrier. Hacksaw Ridge and Sex and the City 2 come to mind. But nobody outside of elderly Oscar voters and friends who want to destroy my spirit are trying to convince anyone that they’re any good. Sadly, that’s not the case for Field of Dreams.
I know people my age who love this movie, including friends who have never played baseball or never had to resolve something with their fathers. I’ll never understand why.
