Costner and the Amazing Technicolor Nostalgia Machine

Please read my new Reason essay on Field of Dreams!

Happy first weekend of the Major League Baseball season, pals! And though it’s not quite as ambitious as “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch,” I do have a long magazine essay posted on this April 1 over at Reason that I’m excited to share with you:

“The Expensive, Seductive Nostalgia of Field of Dreams: Why are so many filmgoers and politicians eager to prop up baseball's boondoggles?”

It’s the culmination -- so far, anyway! -- of 34 years of stewing over a single movie, on which more below. Here's how the thing starts:

Ask a full-grown man why he's choking back tears at the mere mention of the 1989 baseball fable Field of Dreams, and he is almost certain to cite the film's famous final scene, in which 33-year-old Kevin Costner, voice at once hopefully boyish and soggy with the emotionalism of looming middle age, says to an anachronistically clad young ballplayer, "Hey, Dad? You wanna have a catch?"

While technically the answer to a series of supernatural riddles -- at the movie's outset, Costner's character, Ray Kinsella, hears a disembodied voice in his Iowa cornfield repeating If you build it, he will come, after which he irrationally constructs a ballpark -- the baseball-mediated reconciliation between the son and a younger version of his father resonates with anyone carrying unresolved conflict with a parent, or shame over youthful hotheadedness, or just bucolic memory of childhood sport. There's a good reason that Field of Dreams is the third-highest-grossing baseball movie of all time (adjusted for inflation), and there's a good reason it remains the go-to source at live games for inspirational audiovisual clips.

But there is another, more insidious piece of symbolism in that very same scene. As the camera pans out from the father-son reunion and into the twilit summer sky, we see a line of cars snaking in from miles around, fulfilling a prophecy delivered minutes before by the novelist character played by James Earl Jones: "People will come, Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up in your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. 'Of course, we won't mind if you look around,' you'll say. 'It's only $20 per person.' They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it."

As prediction, let alone brazen self-reference, the speech is uncanny: People have indeed been coming by the thousands each year to the Dyersville, Iowa, farm and ballfield where the movie was shot. Major League Baseball (MLB) held special regular-season games there in 2021 and 2022, with the requisite Costner narration and players materializing like cinematic apparitions from the outfield cornstalks. Yet it's not precisely the past these pilgrims are longing for, but rather an ersatz depiction of an idyll that never existed, one that neatly evades decades of messy, real-world dysfunction -- in baseball, in America, within families.

By demonstrating that people will indeed shell out good money to feel nostalgia for make-believe, Field of Dreams helped create the template for the modern baseball industry: Build expensive, "retro"-looking stadiums and get taxpayers to foot the bill by selling them a mixture of gee-willikers Americana and economic analyses every bit as magical-realist as the source material. Camden Yards, the single most imitated construction project in MLB history, was funded with $482 million of public money (in 2022 terms) and greeted upon arrival in 1992 by The New York Times with the headline: "Field of Dreams Comes True in Baltimore." [...]

The movie's contrived nostalgia has implications broader than the forcible redistribution of general tax funds to a narrow and already profitable segment of the entertainment industry. Field of Dreams doesn't just honor the cherished memories of our childhood; it insists that baseball back then, and therefore America itself, was better. "It reminds us of all that once was good, and could be again," Jones' character Terence Mann booms out, in a baritone that's been heard at thousands of MLB games.

We have adjectives to describe the insistence on a superior past, and they tend toward the pejorative: vestigial, atavistic, reactionary. Exaltation of lost glory necessarily discounts the present; reimposing the ancien régime requires tossing aside today's players, often with casual recklessness. Audiences embraced Field of Dreams because it's a sumptuously shot, well-crafted movie with compelling actors and an Oscar-nominated score, yes, but also because they worried then -- and continue to worry now -- that something valuable is vanishing, that the best of baseball and the country of its birth is in the rearview mirror. That the only path to redemption is believing, twice as hard this time, in a fairy tale. One that narcissistically absolves our own active role in the decline.

Intrigued? Click the link for more, or save it for later then come back after, as the rest of this here Substack is basically a supplemental backstory.

(Intermission music care of The Baseball Project.)

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Done? Cool.

So, for most of the past three decades, my attitude toward the corn-ball movie was best expressed by this tasty 2002 quote from the peerless literary baseball writer Roger Angell: 

My least favorite baseball film is Field of Dreams, which is such baloney, sweet and gooey. Ballplayers loved it, though. It left them in tears. But they weren’t the only ones. I remember coming out of a screening of that awful film and running into my friend and neighbor Mike Wallace. “Wasn’t that awful?” I said, and then noticed he was weeping.

Not for the first (or last) time, Angell was leaving breadcrumbs for me that I lacked the wits to sniff, so taken was I with the sick burns.

I, too, had rejected Field of Dreams upon arrival for the fatal and all-too-common baseball-movie flaws of mawkish sentimentality and unconvincing on-field play. But it was the aforementioned audacity of the ending that sealed it. You’re going to tell people who just lined up to pay money for a nostalgic baseball fable that the moral of the story is that restless-dreamer types should pursue some harebrained scheme so that people will line up to pay money for a nostalgic baseball fable? Appreciate the balls, if nothing else.

Add in the subtext of Boomers reconcile boring adulthood with idealistic sixties youth -- already a well-worn trope by that point -- and this was a recipe for intense, contrarian loathing. I recall some late-‘90s sunset-to-sunrise pub session in Prague, in which the topic for the evening was Where Did It All Go So Horribly Wrong?, and after many false starts and shotgunned beverages, we settled on that closing shot of Field of Dreams. Successfully marketing a leached blenderita of the ‘60s -- no danger or ferment, just self-absorption and vibe -- to an audience that didn’t flinch at being insulted felt like some fresh new hell.

But a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires noting that things had not gone Horribly Wrong, that we were being dudes in our 20s (a thankfully temporary condition); and that the millions moved by a well-crafted film were bringing their own complications to the story.

By the time I started writing for Reason, another line of critique had opened up: The film’s most famous line was being (mis-)used by politicians to justify showering tax dollars on stadium projects, which were then sold to taxpayers using hoary appeals to heartland American values. With governments now serving as landlords, the undeserving recipients of that public largesse then acted like ungrateful tenants. “If You Build it, They Will Leave,” I probably wrote on too many headlines.

The economic illiteracy and facial immorality of redistributing tax collections to well-off businessmen is one of those subjects that can make you a little crazy. It is a rare consensus in the peer-reviewed literature that such “economic development projects” are never worth it from the perspective of taxpayers and governments (the latter of which also routinely deploy eminent domain to seize the property of smaller owners to clear enough space), yet new billion-dollar boondoggles get greenlit every damn year.

I have written about such shenanigans from the Florida/Miami Marlins (again and again), the Washington Nationals, the Yankees, the Orioles, the Angels, the minor leagues writ large, and -- in one of the most egregious examples on a per-dollar basis -- the very cornfield made famous by Field of Dreams.

You can bang your head against a (ye olde retro-looking) brick wall about this stuff, or you can seek to try to understand why people want to, even need to, believe in such fairy tales. Here’s where Jackie Robinson and his old fan John Thorn helped me out.

I have always had an instinctive distrust of nostalgia, recognizing it as a stalking horse for complaining about modernity, and an evasive maneuver for sidestepping recent discomfort. Which in baseball as often as not involves race.

I wrote about it at length 10 years ago, and reference it in today’s essay, but discovering that Jackie had written and compiled a fascinating and now-forgotten oral history of baseball desegregation just two years before the appearance of the sport’s most treasured book, Lawrence Ritter’s pre-WWII-era oral history The Glory of Their Times, was quite the eye-opener. Why did mid-‘60s audiences (and mid-‘70s young readers like me) just latch onto Glory and never let go?

Well, for one, it’s just a great and evocative book, portraying a bygone world through the medium of continuity that is the National Pastime. We shouldn’t assign any malign motives to eager readers of a good book that happened to end just as desegregation began, just as we shouldn’t disparage fans of Field of Dreams just because all of the players who came in from the cornfield -- including such key post-desegregation figures as Gil Hodges -- were white. Better to fill out our understandings of enduring artworks through considering the contexts in which they were both made and received.

Enter John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian. In his 2011 book Baseball in the Garden of Eden (which I only got around to reading in 2021), and in our subsequent conversation about it, Thorn communicated a generous and I daresay wise spirit of inquiry. It is best to know, as well as you can, the unvarnished truth, of course. But that knowledge is also incomplete without considering the role and contours of myth, particularly on the part of the very consumers whose passions sustain the game we love.

So, consider this piece a preliminary attempt to more fully grok, and therefore respect, a cultural phenomenon I have long resisted. Hope you enjoy it!