Page 213 - Sport Culture and the Media

194 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

sporting values in the USA is a constantly recurring theme in films about the
quintessential American sport – baseball. Field of Dreams, with Bull Durham
(1988) a key text in the sub-genre of the baseball film in what Sobchack (1997)
calls ‘Post-American Cinema’ (by which she means a nation that has frag-
mented and lost any sense of common cultural identity), is preoccupied with
the problems of (in this case rural) capitalism and the erosion of authentic
feeling and cohesive, self-sustaining community. In the film, a struggling mid-
West farmer, Ray Kinsella (played by Kevin Costner, who also appears in
Bull Durham, presumably on account of his all-American boy image), hears a
mysterious heavenly voice whispering ‘If you build it, he will come’. The ‘it’
is a new baseball field on his farmland and the ‘he’ is a long dead and
much-wronged player ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson. Field of Dreams invests sport
with the magical power not only of bringing back the dead, but also of reviving
collective memory and the values of a society which had sold its precious
cultural assets – like sport – to the highest bidder. Kinsella, reluctantly at first,
takes up the challenge, and sustains his faith despite objections from his bank
and family, recruiting an unlikely ally in Terence Mann (James Earl Jones), a
reclusive elderly black writer and former activist who shares his belief in the
redemptive power of baseball. Finally, the field is built, the ghostly players
return to earth, the family farm is saved by charging tourists and baseball
nostalgia ‘buffs’ to visit this ethereal sports theme park, the wrongs done to
‘Shoeless’ Jackson are righted, Kinsella’s family stays together, an old man is
made happy, the racial divide is bridged – and the golden age of America
restored in Iowa. The allegorical role of sports film – so strong in the baseball
sub-genre given its reputation as the USA’s national pastime (McGimpsey 2000)
– is clearly demonstrated in Field of Dreams, with the condition of sport being
presented as both symptom and solution to the dilemmas of social and personal
life.
If this is an overtly mystical vision lacking in irony and scepticism, then Fever
Pitch (1997), a film of a bestselling autobiographical book by the British writer
Nick Hornby (1992), provides a much more down-to-earth and self-critical
take on sports culture that is no less aware of the power of its romance. In the
book and film (for which Hornby wrote the screenplay), a middle-aged man
Paul (Colin Firth) recalls how soccer helped salvage an unhappy childhood by
giving him something to do with his father during ‘weekend visits’, initiating
him into masculine culture, and providing him with something to be truly
committed to – Arsenal Football Club. This was no childhood fad, however, as
support for Arsenal became an all-encompassing, adult obsession. The film sets
up an antagonism between the immature world of football supporting and
another, more ‘grown-up’ world symbolized by his girlfriend, Sarah (Ruth
Gemmell). In a watershed moment in Fever Pitch, the male protagonist breaks