I have just created something totally illogical.
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To slightly alter the familiar refrain, no one ever watches the same movie twice. At least, not if you’re watching closely. Our experience of film — or books/music/etc. — is usually even more about us than the artifact itself. We bring more into the experience than we often admit. I don’t think I’ve seen Field of Dreams in two decades, and watching it now, in my late 30’s, I’m watching a different movie.
It’s still mostly the same; an airy, fantastical, sentimental homage to baseball’s lasting power to connect us to the past, and make adults feel like children again. It’s the sort of film that rarely gets made anymore: a family-friendly, adult-oriented, live-action drama — and with a supernatural bent at that.
But watching it at this stage of life, there’s a resonance for me in Ray’s fear that he’ll miss his last chance to ever do something surprising or remarkable. He’s about to enter the next act of his life, and he’s more aware of his mortality than he was as a younger man. It’s a bonafide mid-life crisis, because let’s be honest, even for the luckier amongst us, our late 30’s is likely right smack in the middle of our lives.
The film picks up his story right after he’s left his life as a city-dweller and moved his family to a farm in the middle of Iowa. By anyone’s standards, that’s about as surprising and remarkable as it gets. And still, he’s nagged by the fear that he’ll live his entire life having never done something beautifully illogical on a grand scale.
That means more to me than it could have when I was a teenager, or even in my 20’s. As the familiar genre of mid-life crises shows, more of us than not are familiar with the question — which can range from niggling to oppressive — Is this all there is? We’re not the hero of our story the way we’d once imagined we’d be. Perhaps we’re at a point in life where anything that may have resembled potential has withered on the vine. Is this it? Is it too late?
And so, the film functions as a bit of wish fulfillment. In the midst of his ennui, a voice comes to Ray Kinsella and tells him what he needs to do. Sure, it’s still an insane gambit, but he only needs to find the courage to follow instructions, crazy as those instructions might be. He’s worried he’s out of chances to be the man he’d once dreamed he’d be, and then a disembodied voice speaks to him out of a corn field. It’s not exactly a burning bush, but building a baseball field is a relatively easy sell. So he creates a totally illogical thing, but he doesn’t do it ex nihilo.
That sounds pretty good, but we don’t get voices in corn fields. Ray Kinsella got a road map to a new frontier outside of the life that felt like resignation. The rest of us don’t get that. Here’s to hoping we still might find heaven in a cornfield.
Up Next: One of the all-time greats: The Bad News Bears. The ’76 version, obviously.
