Movie poster from here.
Another one of these movies is The Natural, the self-consciously mythological baseball movie by one of my favorite directors, Barry Levinson, with one of the best performances Robert Redford has ever given. It tells the story of the ultimate underdog, Roy Hobbs, a 35-year old rookie who once had the chance to be "the best there ever was" but now just wants to get a piece of his dream 16 years after a near-fatal moral error.
Back when I had ambitions of publishing a scholarly book on Greek mythology and American cinema, I wrote a 6000-word chapter comparing the movie with Pindar's Fourth Pythian Ode, which is an extended telling of the myth of Jason and the quest for the Golden Fleece.
I liked the idea of Roy Hobbs as Jason, his teammates as the Argonauts, and the Golden Fleece as the championship of the league, which is symbolized by a "bit of cloth," the pennant.
Over the weekend I popped this one into my VCR because there were no decent sports on television, and did a little pleasure research with it. Apparently Barry Levinson used Arthurian legend as a template for the story, which he adapted from the much darker-- and brilliant-- Bernard Malamud novel. But now I read that on a DVD extra feature someone is comparing the movie to the Odyssey.
The movie is Arthurian because the team Roy Hobbs plays for is the New York "Knights." And it is Odyssean because of the character of Iris Gaines (Glenn Close, a smashing cast), Roy's long-lost faithful Penelope who hasn't seen him for 16 years.
But I shouldn't go on with these pedestrian insights. My 6000-word chapter is absolutely the last word.
<grin>
Well. It's been nine years since I wrote that chapter. Let me excerpt something from it, the poor thing:
There is nothing more entertaining than a good sports story.
An exciting finish, unlikely turns of momentum, all of these get our blood
racing. But to be good, that kind of story must also have a moral dimension. We
must be able to root honestly for an individual or a team. It seems that we
consider victory satisfying only when the worthy person or team achieves it.
And in the stories we've just considered, it seems that the worthy person must
be someone tied intimately to the family, to the things of civilization. If all
these ingredients are present, it almost obligates the storyteller to cast his
tale in a positive light.
It was a first draft.
Nine years later, I think of The Natural in a more postmodern light, as a story told by a certain author in a certain time. The mythological elements-- which include lightning bolts, special bats (swords, to bring back Arthur for a sec), the death of the father, the unknown son who comes to light, the good woman and the bad woman, good and evil generally, the quest, the moral error, the death and three-day wait for the resurrection moment, the fireworks, the redemption (just to name a few things)-- are put in there on purpose, partly as a way of telling a good story, but mostly as an affectionate tribute to those elements and to the sweetness of American mythology overall.
American cinematic mythology is what I really mean, and that post-Depression, I think. We got addicted to stories with happy endings during that prolonged economic tragedy, and we never got off of them. Barry Levinson is acknowledging that in The Natural.
I finally realized that The Natural wasn't going to be mythology for others as it is for me when one recent academic year I showed the clip of the climactic scene to a bunch of teenage heroes. It is, for me, a baseball and mythology fan, one of the greatest moments in cinematic history. To them, it was a random bit of celluloid without context or interest.
No one in the class had seen the movie, and not very many were interested in baseball. I think if they were to see the entire movie, it might move some of them. But there is something antique about it now that I don't think would translate.
It has been, after all, 25 years since the movie was made. Few things last that long in today's Internet daze.
I wonder if you saw it, and what you thought of it. If you weren't alive in 1984, did you see it on VHS or DVD? Did you know it even existed before this blog post? These are the questions that old scholars need to answer.
I've been meaning for years to read the book, but haven't - - that confession does little for my status as a baseball fan, I admit. But if the book is any darker than the movie, I'm not sure I want to now. The movie is as close to noir as one can come and still be in color.
Posted by: Bob Mustin | September 09, 2009 at 10:20 PM
Bob, the book was a great read. I highly recommend it.
Posted by: baseball notes | December 02, 2009 at 03:37 PM