The document discusses the nostalgic and symbolic appeal of baseball in American culture through examining the 1989 film Field of Dreams. It explores how the film transforms a cornfield in Iowa into a "sacred space" that evokes nostalgia for rural Americana and a simpler time. The theories of Mircea Eliade about sacred versus profane spaces are used to analyze how the baseball diamond in the film comes to represent an "ordered cosmos." In reality, the farm depicted in the film has been transformed into a popular tourist site that attracts 70,000 visitors annually, fueling the local economy but also presenting issues of commodifying culture.

1. “How can you not be romantic about baseball?”
~ Moneyball

2. “The one constant through all the years . . .”
• Wrigley Field: Then and Now (view gallery)
• Fenway Park
• Clip from Field of Dreams

3. Wrigley Field, Chicago
“A nice little place on the North Side.”

4. A pastoral game
• In rural or urban spaces, the baseball field
remains constant, marking a small area – home
plate, the pitcher’s mound, the diamond - where
American dreams seem possible
• It is a pastoral game – the field is always a lush
green even in a desert city like Phoenix
• Ballplayers and fans can immerse themselves in
this space even as a city bustles close by
• “Let us go forth awhile and get better air in our
lungs. Let us leave our close rooms – the game of
ball is glorious” Walt Whitman

5. Where the American Dream can come
true
Hard work and talent pay off rather than
privilege and social rank:
• Babe Ruth, the barkeeper’s son
• Joe DiMaggio, son of immigrant fishermen
• Jackie Robinson, grandson of a slave and the
son of a sharecropper

6. Escape
• For fans, baseball has provided an escape from daily
pressures (through the Great Depression and World
War, the World Series in NY after 9-11)
• Nostalgia for a simpler way of living perhaps when the
American Dream seemed more accessible, is conveyed
in baseball
“Born to an age where horror has become commonplace
. . . We need to fence of a few places where humans try
to be fir, where skill has some hope of reward, where
absurdity has a harder time than usual getting a ticket.”
(Thomas Boswell)

7. Hollywood and Baseball
• Field of Dreams based on W.P. Kinsella’s
Shoeless Joe
• Iowa cornfield transformed into a mythical
‘field of dreams’
• Listen to Terence Mann’s speech about
baseball as “the one constant through all the
years”

8. Field of Dreams
Released in 1989, the movie is based on Kinsella’s
book Shoeless Joe and tells the story of an Iowa
farmer who is compelled to build a baseball
diamond in the middle of his cornfield after hearing
a mysterious voice tell him, “If you build it, he will
come.” The ghosts of baseball’s past begin
appearing on the field and movie viewers are
treated to a nostalgic tale of redemption for the
Iowa corn farmer and also the disgraced Shoeless
Joe and the ghosts of the Chicago White Sox team,
banned for throwing the 1919 World Series.

9. A ‘sacred’ space?

10. Why baseball endures
• Baseball endures in spite of the money, the
scandal, national expansion, steroids etc
• It is one of the myths of American culture – it
provides a link to our past, to tradition, an
escape from the daily urban grind
• Connection to our childhood innocence –
perhaps our idealism

11. CONSIDERING THE SACRED AND
THE PROFANE

12. Our need to give order to our worlds
• We have a need to organize our world (our homes,
communities) so that certain signs or values are
commonly understood.
• We all know that “red” means stop and “green” means
go. Think about what would happen if one of us
changed the rule.
• Man-made laws, customs, and consensus help us arrive
at an organized or ordered world
• “Primitives” and religious communities see order
coming from God(s)
• Ordered world is a cosmos; a world without order is
chaos

13. Cosmogynic myths
• According to Mircea Eiliade in The Sacred and the
Profane primitive people believe that the God(s) they
worship created this cosmos
• Cosmogynic myths help explain the creation of a
universe or a people
• What is a myth?
“a dream-like symbol that evokes and directs
psychological energy, vehicles of communication between
the conscious and the unconscious, stories that convey
the deepest Truths people know, the ultimate meaning of
reality for a particular society or culture.” (Kelly and
McGinn)

14. • Myths convey a culture’s collective attitudes
about life and death, the creation of the world,
how we came to be etc
• For example, in Christianity, the Creation story
explains that the world (a cosmos) was created by
God in six days – he brought order.
• He made humans “in his image”
• How do we create spaces “in our image” – think
about the ways we organize or give order to our
homes

15. What does this have to do with you?
• Consider your first apartment or your dorm
room. It begins as a vacant space. What do
you do with it to make it your place?
• How will it reflect your values?
• Why do you choose one piece of furniture
over another?
• You will create it “in your image” – in the same
way those primitive peoples create a cosmos
to reflect what they believe/value.

16. Sacred places
• Refer back to Week 2 (symbolic, ordinary, and
derelict landscapes)
• Cities – the Holy Land, Mecca etc
• Churches, temples, synagogues
• People in a sacred place behave differently
than in ordinary or profane places
• A sacred place is a threshold where we can
cross over from the ordinary into the sublime
or the divine

17. In everyday life
• The way we act/interact in a lecture hall is
different than the way we behave in the
hallway outside it. Opening the classroom
door, we cross a threshold, and different
values are in place.

18. WHICH BRINGS US BACK TO
BASEBALL . . .

20. Field of Dreams Scene 1
• Inside the house (profane space) – the
conversations are about impending
bankruptcy, the cornfield etc
• Outside in the corn field/baseball field (sacred
space)
• FIeld of Dreams

21. Is this heaven?
• We have a cornfield in Iowa which has been plowed up
by Ray Kinsella to create an ordered cosmos
• Ray meets the dead Shoeless Joe Jackson who was
banned from baseball as one of the Black Sox in 1919
who were accused of fixing World Series game.
• When Ray and Annie say they will not sell the field, is it
because they have ‘crossed over” to see it as a sacred
space?
• What does this say about Iowa?
• As he plays ball with Ray, Shoeless Joe shows “sacred”
the game of baseball was to him. “The sacred” is not just
a place – it is a way of being “in place,” in the world.

22. The center of the world: “Axis mundi”
• Cultures often consider their homeland as "the
center of the world" because it represents the
center of their known universe.
• China—"Middle Kingdom”—suggests that the
county holds a significance, at the center of the
world
• At the center of the center is a point known as
the “axis mundi,” where earth and sky almost
meet. It is common to find shrines at these holy
places. For example, for the Sioux tribe it is the
Black Hills, in Japan, it is Mt. Fuji

23. • When Ray stands on the pitcher’s mound, he is elevated at the center of the
field – is this the axis mundi?
• Ray has created “the imago mundi” what Eliade describes as an important
tenet of religion – the building of a miniature sacred cosmos.

24. Dwelling on the threshold: a ‘liminal space’
“…a unique spiritual position where human beings hate to be but
where the biblical God is always leading them. It is when you
have left the tried and true, but have not yet been able to
replace it with anything else. It is when you are finally out of the
way. It is when you are between your old comfort zone and any
possible new answer. If you are not trained in how to hold
anxiety, how to live with ambiguity, how to entrust and wait, you
will run…anything to flee this terrible cloud of unknowing. “ -
Richard Rohr

25. “The waiting place . . . “
• These thresholds are inevitable, and we all
experience them – milestone moments like
graduation, getting a new job, marrying, buying a
house, being diagnosed with an illness, having
children.
• In these spaces, we are disoriented for a while,
“in-between” and wondering what’s next.
• We all learn how to navigate a way through these
transitions – some better than others.
• Sometimes a guide or mentor helps us find the
way

26. Shoeless Joe can easily cross over the edge of the cornfield, but he
cannot cross the boundary between the sacred and the profane
ordinary world. He cannot accept a cup of coffee.
“Are you a ghost?” Karen
“What do you think?”
“You look real to me.”
“Then I guess I’m real.”

27. Moonlight Graham
Stepping across the line

28. SENSE OF PLACE IN IOWA

29. Farming in Iowa – the reality
• In the 1980s a popular theme in movies and pop music was the
plight of the famer struggling against all odds. This gave rise to Farm
Aid movement.
• Corporate farming was on the rise with the disappearance of the
family farm destroying small towns and their economies
• In 2002, Fred Kirsehenemann, Director of the Aldo Leopold Center
at Iowa State University warned that only 140 farms would remain
in Iowa by the middle of the 21st century if current trends in
corporate farming continued.
• The public, however, often perceives the agricultrual industry as not
much different from how it is represented in a movie like Field of
Dreams – pastoral and unchanging.
• Nostalgia for the past overshadows the economic reality which is
that the small family farm is dying

30. Heritage Tourism
• The Hollywood version of an Iowa field transformed the
shooting location into a tourist site, fulfilling baseball
fantasies for 70,000 visitors each year
• “Heritage” tourism is growing in the travel industry, its sites
evoking nostalgia for simpler times and places. This is
powerful for people who seek connections to the places
associated with the values embodied by certain
representations (books, movies etc)
• If people outside Iowa view it only through a nostalgic and
romanticized lens, then they may not see serious
contemporary problems. For example, rural poverty,
immigration issues related to a large migrant worker
population

31. Our impressions of other countries
How is your view of another country or state
shaped by the way it is represented in film?
The Quiet Man (Ireland)
Harry Potter (England)
Braveheart (Scotland)
Fargo (Dakota)
The Sopranos (New Jersey)
Breaking Bad (Albuquerque)
Sons of Anarchy (Fictional Charming set in “real” San
Joaquin county) -

32. Commoditization
Erik Cohen, tourism scholar warns:
“Commoditization is said to destroy the authenticity of
local cultural products and human relations; instead a
surrogate, covert staged authenticity emerges. As cultural
products lose their meaning for locals, and as the need to
present the tourst with ever more spectacular, exotic, and
titillating attractions grows, contrived cultural products
are increasingly ‘staged’ for tourists and dedicated to look
authentic.”
(Consider theme parks, Las Vegas, cities that host the
Superbowl)

33. The “real” field of dreams

34. “You can feel the magic here.”
• Dyersville Iowa, population 4,000
• The farm was purchased for $3.4 million in 2012 No professional ball game
has ever been played on the field
• Globally, the field immortalized by Hollywood is one of the top sports
tourist with up to 70,000 visitors each year
• The Dyersville field has been the site of family reunions, weddings, first
games of catch with a child, final wishes.
• Sunday afternoons host games with aging amateurs – “ghost players” -
who dress in old-school baseball uniforms and walk out from the corn
Source: Plaschke, LA Times)

35. 25 years after the movie was made, people still come to Iowa.
Photo: Putney for the LA Times

36. For Discussion
Has Dyersville, Iowa, developed an opportunity
for sustainability OR is it at risk of exploiting its
representation in a movie and not its reality?
How is Dyersville and its residents impacted
when they reap the economic benefits from
heritage tourism?

37. Now what?
• You may begin to see evidence of Eliade’s ideas
everywhere - the sacred and the profane, the
imago mundi, the axis mundi, liminal spaces.
What are some examples? Think about your
choice of seat in class today.
• Consider the differences between Eliade’s ideas
and a Hollywood director’s view of a “sacred
space” and how this shapes your view of these
places.
• Are you in a ‘liminal space” at this point in your
life?

38. References and for Further Reading
Clinging to the myth of doubleday and baseball’s origins - NYTimes.com. (n.d.).
Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/ 2010/11/13/sports/ baseball/
13doubleday.html?_r=0
Costner, K., Madigan, A., Jones, J. E., Brown, D., Whaley, F., Liotta, R., Lancaster,
B., ... Universal City Studios. (1999). Field of dreams. Universal City, CA:
Universal.
Donaldson, M. E. (1988). Teaching field of dreams as cosmogonic myth. Journal
of Religion and Film, 2(3).
Eliade -- Sacred Space. (n.d.). Retrieved from http:// webserv.jcu.edu/
bible/101/Readings/Ritual/ EliadeSacredSpace.htm
McGinn,Ph.D, S. (n.d.). The basic ideas of Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the
Profane (J. Kelly, Ph.D, Ed.). Journal of Religion and Film.
Daniel, P. (2014, August 2). They built it for a movie, and people keep coming to
the field of dreams. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved May 13, 2015, from http://
www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-field-of-dreams-plaschke-20140803-
column.html#page=2