Take Me Back to the Ball Game: Nostalgia and Hegemonic Masculinity in Field of Dreams

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 1, 2000 Take Me Back to the Ball Game: Nostalgia and Hegemonic Masculinity in Field of Dreams Joakim Nilsson The financial and critical success of the film Field of Dreams attests to the wideranging appeal of its main character and the nostalgic ideals he embodies. One critic exclaims that “Field of Dreams soars beyond dreams” and describes the film as “a fantasy about belief, hope, fathers and sons, passion for life. A masterwork of wonderment,” while another describes it as “a magical movie. It’s so perfect, it’s like a miracle—a completely original and visionary movie.”1 Wes D. Gehring argues that Field of Dreams is a “populist” film in the tradition of Frank Capra, for like populism the film celebrates “adherence to traditional values and customs (mirroring the phenomenon’s [populism’s] strong sense of nostalgia)” and a “general optimism concerning both man’s potential for good and the importance of the individual” (36). And Caroline M. Cooper, citing an interview of Bill Clinton by Tom Brook, explains that Field of Dreams is, after High Noon (1952), the favorite film of President Clinton. He loves it, apparently, because of its message that “if you build it, they will come”; he finds it a “fabulous fairy tale” which “makes people feel that anything can happen.” (163) Marketed as “a glowing tribute to all who dare to dream” (according to the back of the video box), the film has been embraced by filmgoers and critics alike for its perceived universal message of the power of hope and dreams, ideals which remain at the centre of American cultural mythology. But not all critics see the film as so endearing and benign. Critical of the emotions generated in audiences by the film, film historians Leonard Quart and Albert Auster suggest that Field of Dreams achieved popularity because it provides a great many simplistic soliloquies about the need to dream and to recreate the innocence of childhood ... but its alternative vision is apolitical and nebulous, consisting of little more than a set of greeting card platitudes. (172– 73) Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30 (2000) 53 Rather than accepting Field of Dreams as an expression of timeless American values, and as “a glowing tribute to all who dare to dream,” Quart and Auster, as well as other critics, have situated Field of Dreams historically and ideologically within the tradition of “Reaganite entertainment.” Most discussions about eighties films and their identification with the ideological program of Ronald Reagan are indebted to Andrew Britton, whose seminal 1998 article, “Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment ,” provided a definition of “Reaganite entertainment” and identified its features and their ideological implications: right-wing utopianism, escapism, a wish to rewrite history, a focus on fathers and patriarchy, and magical solutions to historical and political dilemmas. Thus the very aspects of the film—hope, idealism, nostalgia—which viewers like Bill Clinton, and critics like Bobby Fong, praise—“The magic at the heart of the novel, the film and the Iowa field is a pastoral vision compounded of yearning and faith. Baseball, the farm, and Eden itself represent both a yearning for an idealized Golden Age and an assertion that what is yearned for can still be” (31)—are those which Vivecca Gretton and others criticize: the film’s insistence “on the recreation of a mythical past, on the (re)writing of history, and on reinstating the position of the Father” (Gretton 70–71). According to Quart and Auster, Gretton, and other critics influenced by Britton, one finds in the warm feelings created by Field of Dreams a desire to return, via baseball and the nostalgia that it evokes, to a simpler, more conservative time, a desire which reflects the conservative agenda espoused by Reagan and communicated in the majority of eighties Hollywood films.2 While I agree with those who read Field of Dreams as reflecting historically particular social and political concerns, and believe its seemingly apolitical message is in fact representative of a conservative ideology, my reading of this film will focus on situating it within a narrower historical context. Although Britton and...