Last night, while you were all watching the Super Bowl (congrats to the Saints), I posted part of an essay I wrote as a college junior about the Homeric tradition in regards to baseball. This is the last part of that essay, which focuses directly on the film “The Natural”, which I’m sure you’ve all seen, and the character of Roy Hobbes.
The basic premise of this portion of the essay: Hobbes makes the transition from an Achilles-like character, one seeking fame and fourtune, to an Odysseus-like character, who is searching for his home and a place in the world. For the record, “mythos” means mythology in a much broader sense; think of it as mythology as a way of life and a way of thinking. Anyway, I hope you enjoy:
It is through his characters and story structure that Barry Levinson relays a Homeric message in his 1984 film “The Natural” which stars Robert Redford, Glenn Close, and Wilford Brimley, among others. Redford plays the main character of the film, Roy Hobbes.
Through Hobbes, the most Homeric elements show themselves. In the beginning of the film, he is an Achilles figure searching for fame, fortune, dominance, and immortality. By the end of the film, though, he has, through the events of the film, transformed, rather evolved, into an Odyssean character who is not searching for glory bur rather home, whatever that may be.
First, though, I will discuss the story structure and elements of the film before going into the characters and their Homeric tendencies. Overall as a film, it attempts to create a new American adaptation of Homer and “a vital American mythos that penetrates a people’s hearts and minds” (Curtin, 225). Curtin’s article stresses the importance of “mythos” in his paper and how it fits with “The Natural.” He quotes from Laszlo Versenyi’s essay “Man’s Measure: A study of the Greek Image of Man from Homer to Sophocles:” “Mythos, in Homer’s time, did not mean fable in our sense of the word; the tale was not something mythical, fabulous, fictional, and therefore untrue. Myth meant simply word of mouth” (Curtin, 226). This is important to “The Natural” for a variety of reasons.
Though the story is creating a type of new American myth, it much more fits into the ancient definition of the word, rather than the modern one. This is because of the visual nature of the film, and the fact that it is written and shot rather than told. Because it is on film, there is no way for anyone to dispute what happens in the story. People could speculate about off screen events, but that is useless when discussing film. “Like the Greek epics, in medias res” (Curtin 229) is how “The Natural” begins. Like The Iliad beginning with a fight between Agamemnon and Achilles, “The Natural” begins in the middle of things. All we see is a shot of Redford sitting at a desolate train station. Like the reader of The Iliad, the viewer of “The Natural” has no idea what is really going on until a little later. Because they start in the middle of things both stories must take careful time to explain things later on. Though it comes a little sooner with the film, both mediums do have a good deal of exposition.
Then, there are the similar plot points that occur in both Homer’s works and Levinson’s. First is the fact that Roy Hobbes leaves his home in the farmland to go to far off Chicago—read: Troy—to try out for the team there, read: fight in the Trojan War. At the onset, he is Achilles. Though he claims he will write Iris, the Glenn Close character and his romantic interest, so she can come out to Chicago and they can be married, his main goal is to impress the scouts and make the Majors, with the eventual goal to be a baseball immortal. He tells Harriet Bird, the woman who eventually shoots him and becomes his downfall, that when he walks down the street, he wants people to say “There goes Roy Hobbes…the best there ever was.” Though at this point, the film seems quite Illiadic, it will soon take a turn towards being Odyssean.
Bird soon shoots Hobbes and this sets him on a path that he never intended to take. Quite frankly, he embarks on an odyssey of his own to get back to the game he loves. Later on, we learn that he has been away from the game for sixteen years, close to the twenty years that Odysseus spends getting back to Ithaca. That overarching plot is very Homeric in and of itself, but there are also various episodes through the film that carry with them Homeric tinges. One such thing is during one of Hobbes’s first games with the Knights. Having been relegated to being a benchwarmer, he can only watch as the team’s star, Bump Bailey played by Michael Madsen, does not hustle for a ball, much to the chagrin of Brimley’s character, Pop Fisher, the team’s manager. When Bailey comes to the dugout after the inning is over, he and Pop have a confrontation. It is an interaction that is “comically paralleling the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles at the very start of The Iliad” (Curtin, 234). Though this scene is not intended to mock The Iliad in any way, it is a fun play on the scene from Book One. An earlier point of similarity is while Hobbes is on the train to Chicago. There he encounters “the Whammer” who is a Babe Ruth like figure (Curtin, 230)—he not only bears a striking resemblance to the Sultan of Swat but is also regarded by many to be the best in the game, as Ruth was and still is.
The two eventually confront each other, with Hobbes’s “agent” claiming that the young lefthander can strike Whammer out with three pitches. Hobbes eventually does and this episode is reminiscent of Odysseus’s homecoming when he is the only one to be able to shoot his own bow. What this means to say is that in a feat of strength, Hobbes is the rightful winner, just like Odysseus was in his story when finally shooting his bow and revealing himself as the rightful king. Curtin describes this as “a new hero” and king arriving and deposing the old one (Curtin, 230). Even though Odysseus is technically the old king, I feel the comparison works well here because of the singularity of the event. Odysseus is the only one who can use his bow and, as far as we can tell, Roy Hobbes is the only one who can get the best of the Whammer.
There are two times when we see the New York Knights (the Achaians) are struggling as a ball club. Both times occur when Roy (Achilles) is absent from the team. When Roy first gets called up from the minor leagues to play with the Knights, the team is floundering and at the bottom of the standings. The second time is when Memo Paris, played by Kim Basinger, seduces Roy and gets him to focus on her more so than baseball. Both times, “Achilles” is absent. Though they are absent for different reasons—Achilles is upset about a fight with Agamemnon, Roy is first not there to begin with and second, focusing on something rather than what he should be—what is important is that their respective sides suffer in their absences.
The character studies of “The Natural” also help move along the Homeric theme of “The Natural.” The most appropriate comparison is that of Roy Hobbes to Achilles first and eventually Odysseus. One important Achillean feature to Roy Hobbes is the fact that he, like Achilles, has a special “tool” which helps identify him. “Achilles has his wondrous armor” and “Roy has his bat” (Curtin, 230). Roy’s bat, which he calls “Wonderboy,” like Achilles’ shield is singular to him and sets him apart from his teammates—at least for a time. While each Achaian does not have a special shield or piece of armor like Achilles gets, the Knights eventually adopt the lightning bolt that is on the barrel of Roy’s bat by turning it into a shoulder patch, helping propel them towards victory. Also like the shield of Achilles, this bat is a gift to Roy: a gift, his second, his talent is the first one, (Curtin, 230) from the gods. Roy forges the bat from the tree under which his father died. The night his father died “a thunderbolt is hurled down out of the sky, splitting the…tree” (Curtin, 229). When the audience gets the first bit of exposition in the story—when Roy is on his way to Chicago, that is—we see him as a young man with the dream of becoming a baseball player. As his father has reminded him, he has all the “talent” and has worked hard. His goal is to not only become a baseball player but to be the best baseball player there ever was—an immortal in a sense. While he may one day die, if he achieves this status, his name will live on forever. This is the path Achilles also takes; he forgoes a life of literal immortality with lack of fame for a life of mortality that brings with it glory. While Roy’s objectives in the film will eventually change due to outside circumstances, he and Achilles share the common base of searching fame and glory. Roy’s “only desire,” like that of Achilles, “is to loose those extraordinary powers, expressing his talent, so that he might win fame among men, might become a baseball ‘immortal’” (Curtin, 231). However, the aforementioned events derail Roy Hobbes’s plans and he must re-think his role in the world.
No longer can he seek the fame and glory he once sought after being shot by Harriet Bird in her hotel room. It is because of this that he must make the shift from being an “Illiadic to an Odyssean character” (Curtin, 229). The most Odyssean quality to Roy is the fact that he has had to spend a great deal of time getting back to where he belongs. For Odysseus, it is twenty years sailing around the ancient Mediterranean trying to get back to Ithaca. For Roy, it is sixteen years of kicking around in either obscurity or the minor leagues to get back to “the show.” There is, however, a main difference to their stories and that is the fact that we do not see, like we do with Odysseus, the journey Roy takes to get back. We see the before “exile” as Curtin describes Hobbes’s absence on page 232 and 233 and the after—when he makes it to the Knights—but we never see what happens in between. Regardless of whether or not that journey is seen, it is paramount to the character development of Roy. Before he is lured and shot by Harriet, Roy has the “glory-and-fame-seeking consciousness of the Illiadic characters.” After his horrific ordeal and subsequent exile from and journey back to baseball, read: Ithaca and home, that consciousness “gives way to [a] long, arduous shedding of that…false consciousness” (Curtin, 232).
Like Odysseus, Roy knows that glory and fame must now come after merely finding a place to fit in and a place to coming home. But those similarities Roy shares with the King of Ithaca, while important, are not the most crucial thing when looking at Roy as a Homeric character and as comparable to Odysseus. The most important thing for both of them is that “neither becomes a comic-book hero, without flaws or weaknesses, but rather a hero of the classic-Greek mold: fully human in capacity to surrender to appetite and ego, but more than normally human in capacity to rise, in crucial moments, to heights that most men never attain” (Curtin, 232).
Both Roy and Odysseus are prideful men who fall victim to various trappings along the way. It seems that the main thing that traps Roy and Odysseus are women. Roy is lured and injured by Harriet and seduced into playing poorly by Memo while Odysseus is lured and tempted by Circe and the Sirens. The fact that Roy and Odysseus are men who can be lured by the physical, women, and the abstract, their egos, creates the most important link to Homer and the classic Greek myths from “The Natural.” Roy fits the bill of two of Ancient Greece’s most famous heroes and in him, Barry Levinson has molded Achilles and Odysseus into a single, new, American character who represents the heroic mythos that was essentially missing in American culture.
In the Spring Semester of 2008 at the University of Connecticut, I took what is called a “capstone” course. Basically, it’s a seminar course and my entire grade was based on one research paper that I wrote. The course dealt with the Homeric tradition (that is, The Iliad and The Odyssey). For my paper topic, I chose comparing those classics to two “contemporary” American films: Barry Levinson’s The Natural and John Ford’s The Searchers.
Both films are excellent examples of their respective genres (baseball and the western). They also have things in common with the plot and character structure of Homer’s work from thousands of years ago. What follows is the portions from my paper (I got a B) that deal with using baseball as the sort of “Americanized” version of Homer’s settings.
Notes: pay no attention to the page numbers; those were obviously for citations from articles/books that you guys most likely won’t have.
That takes care of the West but what about baseball? What makes the American pastime right for the Homeric tradition? Perhaps it is because in the American culture, it is referred to as the “National Pastime” and is a game that is more or less central to America only. Though it is growing in popularity in Asia, the Caribbean, and surprisingly enough Australia, baseball is generally a game that revolves around the American sphere of influence and the American homeland.
Because of that, many feel that it is incredibly important to know baseball to know America. In his essay about “The Natural,” Kevin Thomas Curtin quotes Jacques Barzun who remarked: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball” (227). Clearly, there is some link between the game and the American condition. That is why director Barry Levinson used a baseball backdrop for his rendition of “The Natural.” Though the film is based upon Bernard Malmud’s novel, to compare the two “would be a complete distraction” because “the film makers clearly set out something very different” (Curtin, 225).
That something different is the inclusion of a Homeric structure and Homeric characters that appears in the film. But again, why baseball for Homer? That is because with baseball, there is a sort of mythology that does not seem to be there with most sports. That could be because people focus on that mythology more but regardless of that notion, it is worth examining. In an interview with Joshua Siegel included in The National Baseball Hall of Fame’s “coffee table book” entitled Baseball As America: Seeing Ourselves Through Our National Game, Levinson says that “[he’s] always loved the mythology of baseball” (228). On the next page of the interview, Siegel comments that the film’s “villianess,” Harriet Bird, says to the hero, Roy Hobbes, “if Homer were alive today, his heroes would be baseball players” (229).
Why, though? That is because we live in a time and an age in which warriors are relatively disconnected from popular view. In Homer’s time, the warriors were blended into every day society and it was about them that people spoke. Now we “support the troops” but we generally do not sit around recounting their actions and making mythic stories out of their endeavors. Instead, it is our heroes on the diamond that we discuss. Curtin remarks “In his time, Homer’s audience was as intimate with the fates and feats of Achilles and Odysseus as most are today with those of Babe Ruth and Ted Williams” (Curtin, 228).
Baseball works in telling a Homeric hero’s story because, simply, people will know it. Though it may seem odd to see men who hit, throw balls, and play a game for a living as heroes, it is nonetheless true. They are more than just our topics of discussion. Baseball players have become to some—mostly males—cultural “landmarks” of sorts and have assumed the roles of thereof; they have become our legendary heroes.
The other part of baseball’s inclusion of the Homeric is also the fact that for the beginnings of the 20th century, baseball was a game that was broadcast on the radio. It was an oral game rather than the visual game it became with the advent of television. “The Natural” touches on this by using a radio voiceover for various portions of the film. This is the ultimate in the Homeric. In their time, The Iliad and The Odyssey would be told to people via word of mouth, they would be sung and spoken rather than written down or acted out. The classic age of baseball is one that revolved around the radio and an oral tradition. “As Earl Wasserman remarked…baseball constitutes an historical pageant made present and alive each time one person talks to another about the game; thus the history of baseball…forms a special mythos…directly expressive of the American grain” (Curtin, 227).
That is quintessentially Homeric. Baseball and its portrayal are perfect grounds in which to sow a Homeric story.
