Field of Dreams
Constructing a Daydream

(from Double Feature: Discovering our Hidden Fantasies in Film by Herbert H. Stein, M.D. available through amazon.com or as an ebook through ereads.com)

Field of Dreams is based on the novel, Shoeless Joe, by W. P. Kinsella. It follows the book closely in most respects, although paring down the cast of characters. On the face of it, the plot seems childish. A man plows under his Iowa cornfield to build a baseball field that will call back Shoeless Joe Jackson and other major league baseball players of bygone eras. Nevertheless, a number of adults, not all unsophisticated, were absorbed by the film and moved to tears by its finale.

Field of Dreams opens much like a patient coming to a therapist for a consultation, with a short history and a symptom. The opening scene is narrated by the film's central character, Ray Kinsella. He briefly describes his father's life and then his own. He finishes the narrative telling us, "I'm 36 years old, I love my family, I love baseball, and I'm about to become a farmer; but, until I heard the voice, I'd never done a crazy thing in my whole life." We then see Ray working in his cornfield where he hears a voice telling him, "If you build it, he will come." The "voice" is like a symptom in a patient, and like many a symptom, it reveals an attempt to resolve an underlying conflict.

The opening "history" focuses on Ray Kinsella's relationship to his dead father, John Kinsella. There are obvious problems in the relationship. Ray was brought up by an aging father after his mother's death when he was three. "Instead of Mother Goose, I was put to bed with stories of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and the great Shoeless Joe Jackson." They quarreled when Ray was an adolescent and never resolved the dispute. John Kinsella never saw his daughter-in-law or granddaughter before he died. The nature of the dispute is somewhat vague. It becomes clearer in a later scene in which Ray explains that his father, who had had an unsuccessful baseball career, pushed his son to become a ballplayer. At fourteen, Ray rebelled. At 17, he told his father, "I can't admire a man whose hero was a criminal," and left forever. His father's hero was Shoeless Joe Jackson, a Chicago White Sox ballplayer who was thrown out of baseball for participating in a scheme, paid for by gamblers, to "throw" the 1919 World Series. The first conflict the film presents has to do with a son's regrets over an unresolved dispute with his father.

The second conflict involves Ray's self-image and aspirations. Ray explains to his wife that he wants to listen to the voice and build a baseball field in his corn because he does not want to be like his father, unsmiling and unable to act on his dreams. He says that he feels that this is his last chance to pursue a dream and be different from his father. Ray is 36, a husband and a father, and he fears that the responsibilities of adulthood, along with the aging process, will drain him of passion. His conflict is one with which many film viewers can identify: facing adult responsibilities and complex realities, including the ultimate prospect of death, and wishing to maintain the excitement, whimsy, and idealism of youth. We have learned more about the dispute between father and son. The son saw the father as joyless. In fact, we can begin to piece together evidence that Ray's father was depressed.

A third conflict is on a societal level. It has to do with the 1960's vs. the 1980's. The film repeatedly contrasts the more excited and expressive 60's with the sober, materialistic, reality oriented 80's. In the opening history, Ray describes himself as having majored in "the sixties" at Berkeley. Later, his wife Annie, opposing the banning of books in the local school, accuses her opponent of never having experienced the sixties. Having won her victory by enlisting support for free speech and the bill of rights from the crowd, she tells Ray, "It was just like the 60's". Later, Ray encounters the disillusioned writer from the sixties, Terence Mann, who sprays him with insecticide, yelling, "Go back to the sixties! There's no place for you in the future." The conflict between the idealism and freedom of adolescence and the responsibilities of adulthood is presented on a societal level, perhaps with "baby boomers" in mind, in the contrast between the 1960's and 1980's.

A final conflict has to do with the boundary between fantasy and reality. This is presented as a continuing tension in the structure of the film, between characters, and within characters. It adds another perspective to the conflicts between father and son, adolescence and adulthood, and sixties and eighties, with flexible boundaries and a blending of fantasy and reality associated with the son, adolescence, and the sixties.

The film does not resolve these conflicts. Instead, it attempts to solve them through the creation of a fantasy. The body of the film can be divided, roughly, into three sections, with a repeating pattern. Each section begins with a voice. Each focuses around a man who has died, either literally or figuratively, and has failed or fallen from grace. In each segment, there is first a verbal "re-idealization" of this man. This is followed by a moment of near hopelessness in the face of a grim reality (usually the mortgage). At this point, the film's fantasy is expanded in its perceptual content and the number of people sharing the fantasy. The "dead" man is brought back to life, the boundary between fantasy and reality becomes blurrier, and the audience is drawn further into the film's fantasy.

The first voice is, "If you build it, he will come." The central figure of this segment is Shoeless Joe Jackson. Ray comes to believe that the voice means that if he builds a baseball field, Shoeless Joe will return to play on it. Despite his doubts, he starts to build the field. As he does so, he tells his wife and daughter about Shoeless Joe in what amounts to a "re-idealization". First he describes Shoeless Joe's grace and baseball skills, then debunks the argument that Jackson helped throw the 1919 World Series. He has also begun to reconstruct a positive image of his father. As Ray talks about his father describing Shoeless Joe, Annie says, "That's the first time you've ever smiled talking about your father."

At this point, in the context of film convention, the audience does not know if Ray's voice is in his mind as a psychotic event. Only Ray hears the voice. He doubts his sanity. He even asks some farmers if they hear voices in the field. He tells his daughter that Jimmy Stewart talking about Harvey, the invisible rabbit, is "a sick man." The film's music goes from a song about being crazy to "What a day for a daydream".

At the point at which Ray and Annie realize that they cannot afford the field and think about plowing it under, the fantasy expands. Ray's daughter Karen says, "Daddy, there's a man on your lawn." Two things happen. Shoeless Joe Jackson appears on the field, playing and talking with Ray. He is also seen and heard by Annie and Karen. When Karen asks, "Are you a ghost?" Shoeless Joe says, "What do you think?" She replies, "You look real to me." "Well, then I must be real." Seeing is believing. Joe runs off, disappearing into the corn, with Ray's promise that he can return with other banned team members. Although boundaries do exist (Shoeless Joe cannot step beyond the baseball field), there has been a partial breakdown in the film of the boundary between reality and fantasy.

The second voice tells Ray, "Ease his pain." This time the man involved is a fictional author of the 60's, Terence Mann (played by James Earl Jones), who has given up writing and working for causes. (In the book, Shoeless Joe, this character is J.D. Salinger, but Salinger would not let his name be used for the film.) We see a school board book censorship meeting at which Annie begins the eulogy for Terence Mann, calling him "... a gentle voice of reason in a time of great trouble. He coined the phrase, 'Make love, not war'." Ray researches Mann, and continues his verbal resurrection, describing his accomplishments.

He realizes that his mission is to take Terence Mann to a ball game. Annie questions it, arguing that they can't afford to have Ray leave the farm to go on this adventure. At the crucial point, fantasy overwhelms reality in the form of a dream that is shared by Ray and Annie in which Ray is at Fenway Park with Terence Mann.

Ray finds Mann, who is originally bitter and cynical. Mann explains, eventually, that he lost hope when "They killed Robert, they killed Martin, and elected Tricky Dick twice." His full resurrection through the regaining of passion occurs throughout the film. Mann goes with Ray to the game. On the way back, when he is about to leave Ray and Ray is about to give up his quest, fantasy overwhelms reality again as Terence Mann shares Ray's vision and acknowledges that he has heard the third voice.

The third voice comes to Ray at the ball game, accompanied with graphics on the stadium scoreboard. The voice says, "Go the distance." The man involved is Archibald (Moonlight, Doc) Graham. He played one inning for the New York Giants in 1922 and never came to bat. (There is an Archibald "Moonlight" Graham listed with those statistics in the baseball encyclopedia. The real Graham played in 1905 and died in 1965 in Chisholm, Minnesota.) Ray and "Terry" go to Minnesota to find Moonlight Graham. They find out that he was a doctor who died in 1972. As they research him, he, too, is idealized in written and verbal accounts of his exploits as the town physician. Ray and Terry don't know what to do with the information and are ready to give up when the boundaries between fantasy and reality break down further. Ray steps out of his motel room in 1988 into a street in 1972. He meets Doc Graham and talks with him. Graham describes his one inning. Ray asks him, "If you had one wish . . ." Doc Graham would like to bat against a major league pitcher. Ray offers to take him to Iowa and his field, but Graham cannot leave his town and his wife. Ray pleads that to give up a dream would be a tragedy for some men. Graham replies, "If I were a doctor for only five minutes, that would have been a tragedy."

Ray leaves, and he and Terry head back to Iowa. The boundaries between fantasy and reality have been further intertwined with Ray's little time travel. They become hopelessly blurred with the next sequences. Ray picks up a young hitch-hiker who says he is a ballplayer and introduces himself as Archie Graham. At this point, the audience will be overwhelmed with confusion if it attempts to unravel reality from fantasy. The only choice is to accept the fantasy as real or leave the theater.

There is one further twist in the pretzel. The field is now the site of ball games between heroes of bygone days. Archie gets his at bat against a major league pitcher, knocking in a run with a fly ball to right. Then, Ray's brother-in-law comes over to convince Ray he must sell the farm or lose it to foreclosure by him and his partners. He still cannot see the ballplayers. He is a hold-out for the 80's, materialism, and tight boundaries. Ray refuses, and in a little scuffle, his daughter Karen falls off the stand and lies unconscious. Annie is going to call for help, but Ray tells her to wait as he watches Archie Graham drop his mitt and step out over the boundary of the field. As he does so, he is transformed into the elderly "Doc" Graham. He confidently knocks a piece of hot dog out of Karen's mouth, reviving her. With this, fantasy and reality are inextricably bound (Karen would have died if not for the intervention of a doctor who had died sixteen years earlier.) and even Ray's brother-in-law can see the players.

Doc Graham, as a creation of the film's fantasy, provides a perfect fatherfigure. Unlike Ray's father, Doc does not have to give up his idealism or his belief in dreams to enter into the world of adulthood and responsibility. Played by Burt Lancaster, he maintains a sparkle in his eye and a wonderment and gullibility about the possibilities around him. Nevertheless, he is able to forego his dreams, not masochistically or with depression, but with an eager desire to meet his responsibilities to his wife and his town. He recognizes that the tragedy would have been if he had missed being a doctor, missed the adult part of his life. Similarly, having saved Karen, he willingly accepts leaving the field forever. He reassures Ray that it's all right. He is not afraid of death.

But the film does not resolve conflict in this way, by taking Doc Graham as an ideal and coming to terms with reality and death. The fantasy that has been created moves on to blur the differences between father and son, to present a message that fantasy and idealism will automatically win out, to blend the idealism of the sixties with the pursuit of pleasure of the eighties, and to deny death.

Death plays an important part in this film. Terence Mann lost hope after they killed Bobby and then Martin. Death separated Ray from hopes of reconciliation with his father. Most importantly, it probably accounts for the father's depression. We learn that John Kinsella was beaten by life. The opening segment stresses his disillusionment with the "Black Sox scandal". "He lived and died with the White Sox: died a little when they lost the 1919 world series, died a lot the next year when eight members of the team were accused of throwing that series." In those opening scenes, we also see the wrecking ball destroying Ebbetts Field (a tragedy, indeed). However, the real tragedy is deliberately glossed over. "Mom died when I was three, and I suppose Dad did the best he could." With this passing comment, the film tells us that Ray's life began with a tragic loss.

In the final scenes, death is overcome. Terence Mann nervously disappears into the cornfield with the ballplayers, with the intention of returning to write about what's out there. Finally, Ray's father appears as the team's catcher, a young man without the weight of his later years. Ray gets to meet his father and to play catch with him.

The conflicts have not been resolved, they have been blurred or overcome through the fantasy. Father and son are reconciled. There is no competition and no aggression. Death is only a matter of location. The mortgage is covered by a steady stream of visitors who pay $20 to see the heroes of their youth. It is of interest that one of the prices paid for indulging in idealizing fantasies is that eventually the daydreamer becomes a passive observer. After all is said and done, the answer to our problems is to watch ball games.

At the end of the film, we see Annie turn on the lights while Ray plays catch with his father. She looks on like an indulgent mother. Ray asks his father, "Is there a heaven?" and is told, "Oh yeah, it's the place where dreams come true." Ray looks at Annie and Karen and says, "Well, maybe this is heaven." At the end of the film, the camera pans skyward as if to ponder the question.

I cannot help thinking that a little boy would be told that Mommy went to heaven. In Annie's constant support and final motherly gesture and in Ray's finding heaven, we have the final piece, the mending of all wounds. Through the field of dreams and its conquest of death Ray experiences closeness with the mother he barely knew. The film would appear to say that only through fantasy can such tragedy be overcome.