Field of Dreams (1989) is an Imperfect Allegory for the Creative Process

Today’s issue of Dust On The VCR is a subscriber request! This fabled film was chosen by Alec Harvey, my very first writing mentor. Back when I was a 20-year-old kid with just a few student newspaper clips and a couple of writing classes under my belt, he was kind enough to give me a steady freelance gig covering cool things like live music and local theatre at the biggest newspaper in Alabama. He let me stick around even when I moved away for graduate school, and he was my editor for many years until he left to teach at Auburn University. (Alec is still covering Alabama theatre news and you should read all about it!) The experience I gained through him paved the way to every writing job I’ve had since. But the best part is that Alec and I have been good friends ever since that first assignment; we even regularly contribute facts to the same trivia team. (He knows a lot more than I do.) Anyway. Want to request a film for a future issue? Subscribe to the paid version!

Reader, if you’ll grant me a bit of metatextuality in today’s newsletter: I knew what I wanted to say about Field of Dreams within the first three minutes of the film.

I must admit that I’d never seen Field of Dreams before this month, despite both enjoying baseball and having a father.* On this maiden voyage, a particular bit from Costner’s opening PowerPoint presentation caught my ear: “Officially my major was English, but really it was the 60s.” An English major myself, I was instantly determined to focus today’s piece on this throwaway factoid even if it meant reverse-engineering the rest of the narrative to fit my predetermined framework. (Which is a very English major thing to do.)

Thankfully, I didn’t have to do any scholarly bullshitting. Because it quickly became apparent to me that Field of Dreams is an allegory for the creative process.**

Despite his chosen area of study, Costner’s character (Ray Kinsella) abandons the humanities to do something completely different. (Which is also a very English major thing to do.) He becomes a farmer in Iowa after marrying into the Midwest lifestyle. And he seems to be a pretty good farmer—aside from cutting down a large portion of his crops and using all of his family’s savings to build a baseball field because a strange voice told him to.

In other words, an unseen muse told him to spend all of his time and money creating a thing without any clue as to what he’d do with it. Sounds a lot like art to me.

Before I go any further, I have to give props to Annie, Ray’s wife (played by the delightful Amy Madigan). A supportive partner is a godsend for a creative soul, and Annie is just that. As he’s reflecting upon his work early on, Ray says “I have created something totally illogical,” to which Annie has the perfect response: “That’s what I like about it.”

While we’re on Annie, they must have met in English classes at Berkeley, right? Because she’s the anchor of what I found to be the most unexpected scene in the film. After getting fired up about the local school system banning “really subversive books” (“again!”), she shows up to a PTA meeting and rips some small-minded woman a new asshole. She vehemently defends freedom of speech and the value of complex literature, so of course she’d bolster her husband’s dreams.***

Anyway, back to Ray. The crux of the allegory here isn’t the building of the baseball field. It’s the fact that only certain people can see the magical things that take place on it. The ghostly ballplayers of yore that walk out from the cornstalks and play pick-up games under the lights because it’s what they were made to do.

Annie and their daughter Karin can see it from the get go, because they love Ray and believe in his wild dream. Reclusive novelist turned co-conspirator Terence Mann (played by James Earl Jones) can see it too; even though he only met Ray a few days ago, he’s compelled by his erratic ambition.**** Annie’s brother Mark serves as a kind of proxy for the rest of the world, or at least their local community, by perpetually doubting Ray’s decisions. “It’s time to put away your little fantasies and come down to Earth” he says to Ray, which sounds a lot like the sort of “real-world advice” that often undermines creative aspirations.

I mentioned in the title that the allegory is an imperfect one, though. And not just because the story logic in Field of Dreams is…a bit suspect. It’s this silly line that Ray drops when the pressure to save his farm intensifies: “I am the least crazy person I have ever known.” A laughable statement that isn’t at all intended as comedy.

On that note, I’ll end with an anecdote: one of my favorite pieces of creative wisdom that I’ve ever stumbled upon.*****

I’ve been writing screenplays for going on 15 years now. When I was just starting out, I was buying paperback copies of scripts for films that I like, and one of those scripts was Little Miss Sunshine. Screenwriter and native Southerner Michael Arndt begins the printed edition of his screenplay with a tongue-in-cheek introduction wherein he explains how to win an Oscar for your first produced feature in a handful of easy steps.

It’s the first step that stuck with me. Arndt tells us from the jump that anyone who sits down and writes a screenplay thinking that it’ll someday be an actual movie is out of their damn mind. The odds are vastly against you from the moment you fill in the title page; the likelihood of your dream coming true is so slight that any rational person would call it nonsensical.

But that’s the nature of creating, Arndt explains, especially in such a financially dependent medium. And he drives the point home expertly by quoting the 1710 text Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai: “Common sense will not accomplish great things. Simply become insane and desperate.” Yes, anyone who ever hopes to reach great heights from their art has lost their marbles. But if we all kept our marbles, how much great art would the world be deprived of?

He may not have fully accepted it yet. But Ray Kinsella is insane and desperate. And that’s what we like about him.

*Before you give John Mulaney’s (very funny) Oscars bit more credit than it deserves, Alec requested this film back in January. I just saved it for (the day after) Opening Day!

**This is surely a theory that has been surmised before. But I will not be doing any research to see what else has been said on this topic. My lawyer tells me this is plausible deniability.

***I may or may not have a huge crush on Annie Kinsella.

****Terence is the only other person in the film who can hear the strange voice and see the same visions that Ray does. It would be easy to chalk this up as further evidence for my thesis, since Terence is an author. But I feel like this is disrespectful to Annie, a kindred creative spirit who puts her entire reputation on the line at that PTA meeting to defend “controversial” books. Part of me thinks Annie should hear the voice too, but I also like that she puts deaf faith in Ray.

*****I got to dig up and pass along this advice just a couple weeks ago when a friend asked me how hard it would be to write and sell a screenplay.

Field of Dreams is now streaming on Amazon Prime and Starz, and it is available to rent elsewhere.