SOURCE: Kirtz, Mary K. “Canadian Book, American Film: Shoeless Joe Transfigured on a Field of Dreams.” Literature Film Review 23 (1995): 26-31.

In the opening and shutting of heaven's gate,
Are you able to play the feminine part?

Lao Tzu Tao Teh Ching

Canadian poet Germaine Warkentin once observed that when Americans and Canadians look at each other, it is as if they are looking through a one-way mirror: Canadians look and see Americans, but Americans look and see only themselves. Warkentin's inspired observation of this one-sided relationship resulting from the imbalance of power between the United States and its decidedly weaker neighbor is also a commonly used metaphor in feminist literary and film theory.¹ The zeitgeist of a country's popular culture reflects its dominant ideology and, in the case of the United States, this ideology remains both ethno- and androcentric, assigning everyone else to the margins of the privileged white patriarch's egocentricity. While some breakdown of this structure has been attempted during various periods in American history, it has largely survived intact: bloodied, perhaps, but unbowed.

One may examine the validity of these assertions by comparing an American adaptation of a Canadian book, the popular film Field of Dreams, and its literary counterpart, W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe. Assessing the impact of the various omissions made, or shifts in emphasis found, between the Canadian novel and the American film reveals the filmmakers' manipulation of the novel's content to establish the story's primacy as a “man's story,” a primacy not found in the novel. On the contrary, the novel presents its story within a framework that suggests the importance of both genders in creating a harmonious universe.

Because both film and book use the essentially masculine preserve of baseball to drive the plot, Shoeless Joe and Field of Dreams exhibit similar surface texts. My purpose here is to examine the differences between the subtexts in order to reveal how the makers of the film promote a patriarchally based political message by subverting the novel's more liberal one and eliminating from the film an actively feminine moral presence.

Six characters have been omitted, elided, or changed in the story's transformation from print to film. Omitted are Eddie Scissons, “the oldest living Chicago Cub,” who holds the mortgage note on Ray's farm; Ray's identical twin brother, Richard, who runs away at sixteen and returns during Ray's absence; Richard's wife, Gypsy, who bears a startling resemblance to Annie, Ray's wife; and Ray's mother who, while not a major character in the book's plot, is very important to its theme. At the same time, Annie's brother, Mark, takes over Richard's function in the novel as the unbeliever who is converted to the field's vision at the end. And finally, J. D. Salinger is changed into an influential (but fictional) African-American writer of the 1960s, Terrence Mann.

Although the major plot elements of the novel remain virtually intact in the film, there are some significant differences. First, the period of the story has been moved forward about ten years, so that Ray comes of age in the 1960s in the film rather than in the 1950s as he does in the novel. There is a strong shift in emphasis foregrounding Ray's relationship with his father; in particular, Ray's regret that the two never reconciled their differences before his father's death runs like a leitmotif throughout the film as it decidedly does not in the novel. There is also a scene added to the film which is not in the book, a school board meeting held to discuss banning Terrence Mann's books. These differences say a great deal about Field of Dreams as a promulgator of the conservative agenda of the 1980s, and I will examine them in detail for that reason.

Before I do, however, I want to discuss the various representations—both symbolic and actual—of birds that structure the novel only and emphasize the maternal function of giving life, and that function's impact upon Ray and hence upon the moral underpinnings of the story. Immediately after reminiscing about his father's memories of Shoeless Joe Jackson at the book's opening, Ray notes that on “a spring evening, when the sky was a robin's-egg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick” (3, emphasis mine) he receives a directive to build a ballpark. The images suggest both gestation and birth, the two prerequisites to life itself.

Later, after Ray buys a gun in order to kidnap Salinger, he recalls an incident that happened when he was ten: he takes his father's shotgun, kills a sparrow, and proudly brings the corpse to his mother, expecting praise. Instead, his mother insists, not once but twice, that Ray “bring it back to life” (31). When he sadly admits that he can't, she suggests that until he can, he should not shoot anything unless he needs it for food. The juxtaposition here between the male imperative to conquer embodied in the phallic act of shooting the bird and the female imperative to nurture contained in the order to give, not take, life needs no further elucidation. It is important to point out, however, that the resolution between these polarities forms the central thematic structure of the novel and is continually brought to the reader's attention through the use of bird imagery.

Describing the impact of Salinger's interview upon him, for example, Ray tells the author that the words:

flew off the printed page, hovered in the air, assumed the shape of a gray bird, and landed on my shoulder. I reached up and picked off the bird and held it in my hand, tiny and pulsing, pressed it hard against my chest, and it disappeared like mist. If I were to open my shirt, and you looked closely, you could see its faint outline in my skin.

(82)

As Salinger continues to be wary of his claims to have brought the baseball players to “life,” Ray feels himself becoming “desperate for someone else to see my creation. My mother. I would like to show her. Let her see what I have brought to life. Have her to be there when my catcher gets to play with the White Sox, as I know he will. What I've brought to life is much, much more than one tiny bird” (83-84). When Salinger and Ray go to Chisholm, Minnesota, to find Doc Graham, they acquire a “flock of followers,” one of whom tells Ray that by their asking about the Doc, “It's almost like you brought Doc back to life” (110). Again, when Ray convinces Richard to meet their father, the latter exclaims, “You mean you've brought him back to life like you brought Shoeless Joe Jackson back to life?” (210). The import of this imperative to bring something back to life is emphatically foregrounded when Ray, seeing his daughter fall, tells us he feels “as if I have a steel egg stuck in my chest” (206). As she lies choking to death, Doc Graham, brought back to life by Ray, brings Karin back to life. By serving as the instrument bringing Karin and her savior together, Ray finally fulfills his mother's directive and atones for having taken the sparrow's life.

The novel closes as it opens, with the image of a bird, this time a silver bird-beak latch which is locked by “pushing the bird-beak through the silver circle” (219). This latch opens the door to the cornfield where the phantom baseball players reside. On the final page, Ray and Annie lock this “heaven's gate” together: “We make our way first to the gate, which Annie and I lock by forcing the silver point through the silver ring, and then on toward the house. On the porch … Annie holds the door open for me” (224). Thus, the female and male forces are symbolically united at the end of the novel through this joint effort performed by the female and male principles: in a harmonious world, the novel suggests, both are necessary.

The sparrow's death also introduces a vision of humanity not found in the film. When Ray phones his mother to tell her of Richard's return, he notes that he feels closer to her than he has in years and suddenly asks her:

“Remember the sparrow?” … I don't give her a chance to reply, but rush on. I retell the story. “Mom, you've got to come and see what I have here. What I've brought to life.” And I charge on. … When I stop for breath, though, she says, “I'm almost sure it was Richard with the gun that day. In fact I'm certain of it. You must be mistaken, dear.”

(171)

Ray's enigmatic twin is part of the dark side of this novel's vision, a side which is studiously ignored in the film adaptation. In fact, Ray's effort to eradicate divisiveness and embrace wholeness through his partnerships with both his wife and his brother is central to the development of the novel's plot and theme.

Ray informs us that except “for my twin brother, I am an only child” (33) and that, except for a four-inch scar that Richard has, “every part of us is interchangeable” (63). While Ray is with Salinger at Fenway Park, he bumps into a pole and acquires a scar exactly like Richard's. Meanwhile, unknown to Ray, Richard has returned to Iowa during the former's absence. Upon Ray's own return, his daughter is uncertain about his identity, asking, “It is really you, isn't it” (151)? At the end, Richard and Ray, “side-by-side like the figures representing the Gemini astrological sign” (214), meet their father together and use exactly the same words to greet him: “admire the way you catch a game of baseball” (214-15). The killing of the sparrow had obviously led Ray to deny his predatory, masculine side, embodied in his brother, Richard (whose possible nickname “Dick” emphasizes his maleness even further). The imperative to “bring something back to life” that drives Ray marks him as the expression of the feminine, nurturing side of their Gemini-like nature. As Ray continues with this quest, his reconciliation with Richard, the eradication of their differences, the subsummation of one into the other as they heal the split between them is inevitable. Whether or not they are actually twins or two halves of the same psyche is not as important as the fact that in the end they are reconciled to each other, become part of the same wholeness of vision, a wholeness comprising both the masculine and the feminine.²

Nor is Ray the only character with a double; not surprisingly, Richard's wife, Gypsy, bears an uncanny resemblance to Ray's wife, Annie, and her name suggests a gypsy rover, the opposite of the faithful wife, and generally a masculine role. Although Annie's hair is red and curly and Gypsy's is black and straight, they both wear blue jeans and black T-shirts on their tiny, wiry bodies; Ray notes that they “are virtually the same size and might have been cut from the same cloth, though on opposite sides of the earth” (201). Gypsy's real name, however, turns out to be Annie as well (176), thus, as with Ray/Richard, alluding to the possibility that the women are two sides of the same person. Furthermore, the novel emphasizes the importance of both men and women contributing equally to a true partnership. Richard shows little interest in participating in Ray's ghostly visions until he realizes that, unlike him, Gypsy can see the players on the field; he then asks Ray to “teach me how to see” (201)—a point which again emphasizes Ray's ability to nurture. Clearly, he wants to participate fully and equally in this experience with his wife. In the end, all four work together to save the farm and the baseball field's special dimension. The doubling thus takes place on two levels: first, within each of the two principal male and female characters, and second, between the two people within each couple.

The ambiguity behind these doubled singularities suggests not only the difficulty of accepting one's opposite side—both internally and externally—but also the necessity of doing so if one is to be fully human. Like the forces of death and life, or the principles of male and female, the impulses toward evil and good reside within each person's totality in equal measure. Similarly, to be able to move beyond the centrality of one's own exclusive vision means seeing that center from other perspectives. The doubled visions which fuse into a single focus, merging margin (Richard/Gypsy) with center (Ray/Annie), underscores the importance of inclusivity: We can't see beyond ourselves if we can't see all of ourselves; we can't see the complexity of others (and therefore, the validity of other positions) if we can't acknowledge our own multiplicity.

This point is brought out most clearly in the character of Eddie Scissons, the liar in the novel who betrays Ray (he sells Ray's mortgage to brother-in-law Mark) yet becomes in the end the truth-telling prophet delivering the novel's central “sermon on the mound” declaiming the Word of Baseball. His own experience on the baseball field enables him to become the mediating instrument for the meeting of both brothers with their father: Eddie is the one who dispels Ray's fear of meeting their father and suggests the words they say. Eddie's transformation from marginal curiosity to central seer occurs after Eddie has seen his fantasy of playing with the Cubs turn into a nightmare on the “field of dreams”: Rather than being the star player he had always fantasized himself to be, Eddie watches this younger self, Kid Scissons, ignominiously turn his team's lead into a loss (again, we have the suggestion of a double, here taking the form of the older self confronting the younger). After accepting the devastating truth that he never could have been a major leaguer, Eddie, far from being bitter at having his fantasy exposed, becomes a promulgator of the belief that people must not fear the truth about themselves. Aware that Ray is afraid to talk to his father, he asks Ray to consider what Eddie himself has learned, pointing out that “you saw what happened to me. I got what I wanted, but it wasn't what I needed to make me happy” (193). He still believes in the power of pursuing one's dreams, but now understands that the pursuit may end in acknowledging a bitter truth rather than in perpetuating a happy fantasy.

This point also underscores the differences between the novel and film in their presentation of the baseball field itself. In the film, the field is a place where only one's nicest dreams come true; in the novel, it is a far more complex place, as shown by Kid Scissons's experience of failure on its pitcher's mound. This episode emphasizes that truth is not always to be equated with a happy ending, but is its own reason for being.

While no film preserves all of a novel's complexities, this novel's emphasis on the need to include equally masculine and feminine principles in a quest for human and spiritual wholeness³ is consistently and relentlessly undermined and replaced by a strong reinforcement of the patriarchal model so dear to those holding the dominant political power during the last decade. During the 1980s, films extolling patriarchal values and male virtues were ascendant, reinforcing the main political message being sent by Reagan's Washington.⁴ In his discussion of the films of Steven Spielberg, for example, Robert Philip Kolker notes that the “hero takes on the role of paternal savior, that major figure of the’80s (embodied in the presidential persona of Ronald Reagan). The father must prevail” (287). In Field of Dreams, as I have said, we have a prime example of the filmic representation of the 1980s' conservative agenda privileging the patriarchy and undermining all liberal tendencies toward destabilizing it. A comparison of the images framing the film to those framing the novel makes the first of these two items obvious.

The film begins with a photographic biography of John Kinsella, Ray's father. A voice-over (Ray's) tells us that his mother died when Ray was three; in the novel, as I noted, she is very much alive. Thus the mother's nurturing function has been almost immediately appropriated by the father, an appropriation that is consistently evidenced in American films upholding a patriarchal ideology.⁵ Likewise, Richard, and thus the masculine/feminine, light/dark, good/evil polarity which fuses the brothers into a multidimensional singularity, is missing, leaving only an idealized version of the American male in its place. With mother and brother gone, the focus narrows to Ray's relationship with his father. He tells Annie of walking out on his father after telling him that he “could never respect a man whose hero (Shoeless Joe) was a criminal.” He exclaims with disbelief, “Imagine an American boy refusing to play catch with his father!” Full of regret that he never had a chance to apologize, he admits “I can't bring my father back.” But of course, he does just that; one of Ray's last statements in the film is “It's my father!” and the two finally have their game of catch, one patriarch “passing the ball” to the other, as the credits begin to roll. Annie has conveniently disappeared into the house, just as Ray's mother conveniently died long ago. Likewise, Karin's near death is turned into the occasion for converting brother Mark rather than signalling the final link in the circle of death and life begun in the novel's plot with the sparrow's shooting and ending with Annie and Ray closing (heaven's) gate.

The book's focus on gestation, birth, rebirth, and matriarchal prerogatives has been usurped in the film by the patriarchal imperative. Fathers are evoked throughout the film: Doc Graham, we are told, followed in his father's footsteps when he studied medicine; Mann's father reports him missing (and surely the choice of Mann's patronymic is not accidental); and ostensibly to let the audience know it is 1972 in Chisholm, “the Godfather” is emblazoned on a marquee, but subliminally, another message entirely is being sent by that sign—God as father, the father as God. No Goddesses need apply. Except for Annie, who dresses and behaves like a tomboy rather than like a woman, there are no intelligent female adults in this film; at most, Annie seems to be everyone's favorite sister, a female role with little consequence.

Although the presence of Terrence Mann seems to suggest that some obeisance is being made in the direction of the liberal culture which came into its most recent ascendancy in the 1960s, a careful examination of this decade's representation throughout the film shows the opposite to be true. The scorn in which the 1960s is held within the political ideology of the film is set immediately: Ray tells us that he majored in “the sixties” at college, further implying that his embrace of the sixties ethos was somehow responsible for his estrangement from his father. Thus the epoch of the 1960s (and therefore its liberalism) is set in direct opposition to the most important directive of the film: honor thy father.

The most telling evidence for the film's indictment of this epoch's liberalism is the scene whose surface text appears most to support it: the school board meeting at which one woman denounces Terrence Mann's books and another—Annie—defends them. No men are directly involved in what ultimately turns into a cat fight between two females calling each other names; male responses seen by the viewers are limited to the look of exasperation on the face of a male school board member (who introduces the topic on the agenda in the only rational moment in this scene) and the distant gaze of Ray who is deciphering the intent of his last message from God the Father. Clearly, this argument is not worthy of engaging the male mind. Annie evokes the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, peace, and love in defense of free speech, but emotion (female) rather than logic (male) fuels her arguments. Ray ushers Annie out unceremoniously once he's figured out his directive and she continues to bounce gleefully off the various walls of the high school, delighted at having won—the sixties live, wow, all ri-i-ight! In case the audience has somehow assumed that approbation of the liberal ethos is being invoked here, the film includes one more episode which emphatically revokes that facile assumption.

When Ray finally arrives at Mann's apartment, he recalls a “quotation” from one of Mann's books. In fact, the statement appears in Shoeless Joe as well: Ray says to Salinger as they drive to Minnesota that there is a time when all the cosmic tumblers have clicked into place and the universe opens up for a few seconds, or hours, and shows you “what is possible” (84). In the book, the words are taken seriously by Salinger, who continues to question Ray about what he sees and feels.⁶ In the film, however, these words are used for comic, not serious, effect. They are literally saturated with ridicule as Mann, upon hearing them, screams, “Oh my God! You're from the sixties!” and sprays Ray with insecticide. Thus, “the cosmic tumblers,” so poetically evoked by the silver bird-beak lock clicking into place on “what is possible,” become just another opening for a slap at the novel's ideas.

Annie's defense of Mann's work through her invocation of peace and love is also ridiculed when Mann, shoving Ray out the door, yells that he too remembers the sixties, man; his face filled with scorn, he shouts, “peace, love, DOPE,” leaving for last the word which most evokes the conservative view of the era and subtly blames it (rather than the social policies of the 1980s) for today's need to have a “war” on drugs.

Even some of Salinger's last words in the novel, a repetition of Bobby Kennedy's statement of liberal expectations, “I dream of things that never were” (213), are turned into Mann's conservatively inspired exhortation to “Take care of this family!” before he heads for the cornfield to join the ghosts.

What would have happened to the story if the film had begun not with the father's biography but with Ray's memory of his mother telling him to bring the sparrow back to life? This would obviously lead to the construction of a film reality built along entirely different lines and expose the persistently patriarchal nature of the filmmakers' choices. Asking such questions—What would happen if the dichotomous relationships of Ray/Richard and Annie/Gypsy were foregrounded? If Eddie's acceptance of the truth behind his lies were central?—changes not only the main point of the story, but also shifts the center of the theme and therefore resituates what have become marginal or non-existent issues in the actual film to a new locus within its center. Through such de- and re-centering, one exposes the arbitrary nature of determining the loci of centers and margins, the relationship of subjects to objects, and the social construction of value systems, particularly through popular cultural artifacts such as films.

Notes

1. Susan Kappeler, for example, in The Pornography of Representation draws a parallel between imperial powers' subjugation of colonists and male domination of women, suggesting that “the root of the problem behind the reality of men's relations with women is the way men see women, is Seeing” (61). She also notes that, in films, the “so-called female point of view is a male construction [of that view] in his own scenario” (90). Teresa de Lauretis makes a similar point about how men see women, noting that in film, “‘a woman’ is constituted as the ground of representation and its stability, the looking-glass held up to men (188).

2. For further reading on the alter ego in twin stories, see Keppler 14-26.

3. For further reading on the double as part of a hero's evolution toward spiritual wholeness, see Van Nortwick ix-x, 3-7.

4. As film theorist Marc Ferro, among many others, has suggested, “Film has played an essential role in the social and cultural history of [the United States]. … The great visions reflected in film transfigure (but with variable modifications) those representations which has successively dominated American life (146).

5. The enormous success of “action-adventure” films emphasizing stereotypically masculine heroics and starring musclebound men such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarznegger during this period, for example, reflected American concern with its image as a “weakling” after the end of the Vietnam War.

6. This conversation, too, is replete with the images of gestation and birth. When Salinger asks Ray what he sees and feels at such moments, Ray replies that “you not only see, but hear, and smell, and taste, and touch whatever is closest to your heart's desire. Your secret dreams grow over the years like apple seeds sown in your belly, grow up through you in leafy wonder and finally sprout through your skin, gentle and soft and wondrous, and they breathe and have a life of their own” (84).

Works Cited

Ferro, Marc. Cinema and History. Trans. Naomi Greene. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988.

Field of Dreams. Dir. Philip Alden Robinson. Universal City Studios Inc., 1989.

Kappeler, Susan. The Pornography of Representation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Keppler, Carl. The Literature of the Second Self. Tucson: University of Arizona, 1972.

Kinsella, W. P. Shoeless Joe. 1986 ed. New York: Ballantine, 1982.

Kolker, Robert Philip. A Cinema of Loneliness. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

de Lauretis, Teresa. “Through the Looking-Glass.” The Cinematic Apparatus. Eds. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath. New York: St. Martin's, 1980.

Van Nortwick, Thomas. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero's Journey in Ancient Epic. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.