This is the deal: I own around 350 movies on DVD and Blu-ray. Through June 10, 2015, I will be watching and writing about them all, in the order they are arranged on my shelf (i.e., alphabetically, with certain exceptions). No movie will be left unwatched . I welcome your comments, your words of encouragement and your declarations of my insanity.
Movie #42: Bull Durham
One of the reasons I love sports movies so much is they’re often such good metaphors for life, and Bull Durham is a perfect example. It is a movie about baseball, and it is a movie about relationships, and it is a movie about believing in yourself, and it is a movie about knowing yourself, and it is a movie about knowing your limits, and it is a movie about finding your place. It is a movie about successes and failures and not getting too worked up in your head about any one thing. It’s a movie about expanding the mind and stretching yourself. In short, it is a movie about living a better life.
Susan Sarandon, as Annie Savoy, opens the film with a voice over about her belief in the Church of Baseball. She finds more happiness, more catharsis, and more spiritual enlightenment in the sport than she ever has in any other religion she has ever tried (basically all of them, real and imagined). I turned 13 in 1988, the year Bull Durham was released, and it was at this same time that I both found, and subsequently lost, religion. Having been unhappy most of my formative years, I was desperately looking for somewhere I fit in, somewhere I felt accepted. I sought solace in the Bible — and embraced it for a time, trying to make it fit — but ultimately found none. I had to build my own solace from within, and I did. I found my own enlightenment; I brought about my own catharsis. I related to Annie, and I felt that she had a lot of wisdom, because while some people can find that spiritual connection in various religions, others find it in themselves, or in a sport, or in a novel.
Bull Durham is full of wisdom, both practical and philosophical. Sage catcher for the Durham Bulls, Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), is sent to expand the mind and teach the world to rookie pitcher Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh (Tim Robbins). He tells him not to think, not to sing the wrong words to songs, never to mess with a winning streak, and not to punch with his pitching hand when he gets into a fight with a drunk. He helps him master his interview clichés and he lets him know that, when wearing garters, the rose goes in the front. And in these silly lessons are the more sincere ones to trust your talents, don’t advertise (but work to improve) your weaknesses, use your common sense and to, so to speak, dress for the job you want. Nuke goes from an immature minor leaguer to someone who looks at ease in the majors. It’s like his coming of age.
Hopeless romantic that I am, I have a tendency to ship characters who have crackling chemistry, and there aren’t too many couples in the entire history of film whose chemistry crackles more than Crash and Annie’s. Even though Crash initially rejects Annie, because he’s too self-possessed to be her “project” for the season, and even though Annie starts up a thing with Nuke and always remains monogamous within the frame of the baseball season, both of them want the other desperately. The entire movie is tantalizing foreplay, tempting and teasing the promise of Crash and Annie’s inevitable passion. I longed for that kind of relationship myself. I wanted to be as knowledgeable and sexually free and sure of myself as Annie, and I wanted a man as confident and intelligent and loving as Crash. It actually bummed me out at first that it was Robbins who Sarandon paired up with in real life, though of course I didn’t understand then that Sarandon has always been too quirky, too wild, and too witty to fall for Costner, a legendarily straight-laced conservative guy. That feels like a life lesson too, both the movie story and the real one: be with someone who understands you, who shares common interests with you, who excites and challenges you. Don’t sell yourself short, don’t settle for someone unfulfilling.
Life, like baseball, is “a simple game. You throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball.” There may be lots of complexities and minutiae, but don’t get too bogged down in them. Follow your instincts. Trust your talents. Expand your mind.
There’s a spirituality in those words that is hard to deny, and easy to see the wisdom of.
Viable Option 