Posted this on Letterboxd some time ago. Decided to re-post here.
I recently watched BULL DURHAM because over the years a number of critics – some of whom I admire and agree with on most things – have said that it is a classic. Therefore, I was surprised by just how relentlessly awful this movie actually was.
In the film, Susan Sarandon plays Annie, Kevin Costner plays somebody named “Crash,” and Tim Robbins plays somebody who calls himself “Nuke.” Briefly, Annie has parlayed her love of baseball into a full-blown sex cult, the primary observance of which involves having sex with minor league baseball players. Nor is this some incidental or quirky detail. Rather it is the main plot point round which the whole edifice of this film is built. Early on, Annie is unsure of whether to have sex with Nuke, the brash young pitcher, or Crash, the seasoned veteran catcher who was hired to instill discipline or whatever into Nuke. She plans to make her decision by setting these two specimens in a sort of competition with each other. Crash demurs from the competition, refusing to endure the indignity involved therein. Not too soon after this, however, Crash decides that he no longer wants to have integrity and so attempts to convince Annie to have sex with him, from which attempts she demurs on the grounds that Crash has missed his chance, and that she is currently together with Nuke.
And so anyways Annie and Nuke have some sex with each other and the team plays a bunch of games. At first, the team is mostly losing. After a while, though, they start to get better as Nuke’s skills improve under the tutelage of Crash. At one point, during a period in which Nuke and Annie are abstaining from sex, the team goes on a winning streak. This puts Annie in a bind. She’s happy the team is winning, but she also wants to have sex, but she can’t have sex because Nuke doesn’t want to do anything that will ruin the winning streak. Eventually the team loses again and Nuke is all happy that he’ll now be able to have sex again.
The film’s final act is as pointless as everything that came before. Nuke makes it to “the show,” which is apparently baseball lingo for the MLB. Crash has sex with Annie. Crash goes and plays for another minor league team and hits a homerun, at which point he retires from baseball and goes back to have further sex with Annie.
The film I have just described is a sex comedy, every bit as vapid and unedifying as PORKY’S or AMERICAN PIE or SEX DRIVE or what have you, but with the sole and rather pathetic difference that it takes itself seriously. There is a pretense of artistic seriousness to this movie that is never justified by anything in the movie. But the pretense is there. It is there in the Susan Sontag references, in Annie’s demented gibberish about new age spirituality, in the supposedly really wry and snappy banter between Crash and Nuke. How could such a feculent piece of rubbish be so widely hailed as a classic? The answer to this question may never be fully known, but I think I can proffer a theory.
There is a type of man, you see, who really likes this sort of thing. This type of man consumes vast amounts of media, and he is also very well-represented among the ranks of our professional film critics. Because of these two facts, this type of man plays an outsized role in building our general consensus of which films are classics. As far as I know, there isn’t a set term to describe this type of man. For lack of a better term, I will describe this type of man as Horny and Middle Aged.
The Horny Middle Aged Man is the most solipsistic type of person there is. His yearnings must be satisfied lest he write a ponderous novel or make a shitty movie about them. His anxieties are the only anxieties anyone is allowed to have. Anxious young people need to “grow up” or “walk with their shoulders back” or whatever the fuck young people are being lectured to do nowadays. The Horny Middle Aged Man, on the other hand, is perfectly free to marinate in his own neuroses for as long and as deeply as he likes. His misfortunes are the worst that could ever befall anyone, and the stuff of high tragedy indeed.
Point is: Bull Durham is a film that was finely tuned to appeal to the HMAM. After all, the HMAM is morbidly focused on all those little losses that mark his state in life – the passing of youth, the decrease in vitality, the waning libido, and others. What better way for a man in such a state to feel better than to be able to live vicariously through the character of Crash, who really is the archetypal HMAM. He himself mourns a lost glory, he himself is very horny, and therefore he himself does undoubtedly have all the HMAMs of the world standing and cheering when he gets have sex with a woman at the end.
So, yea, I kind of hated this movie. And that makes me sad because the movie didn’t have to be as dreadful as it turned out to be. It had some good actors. It was about baseball. Those two facts alone might have augured well for the film’s quality, but regardless the film turned out to be a piece of shit. Why is that? There is no clear answer. I suppose we’ll just have to accept the mystery on this one.