MJ's VIEW. FIELD OF DREAMS: IN CONCERT Goes the Distance With the Romance of Baseball and Life.

NOTE: This blog post is not a review of 1989's classic film, Field of Dreams or of the musical quality of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It is a personal reflection of my experience watching a treasured film in the presence of a live orchestra playing the score.

The past few weeks have been a time of professional transition and personal assessment for me. As I wrap up a very satisfying experience at a Chicago-area University, I couldn't help but take the opportunity to think about where I am at this point in life, what's brought me here, and what's next.

That time has been marked by the usual packing and readjusting to a new schedule, but it has also been lifted up by the unexpected: a few reminders of who I am and what kind of impact I have made as an historian, a professor, a colleague and administrator. We rarely see ourselves as others do, even if/when we have a healthy sense of ourselves and maybe even our self-worth. I did not grow up or come of age during the current climate's emphasis on "self-esteem" or celebrating every time I have a passing thought or observation. I have a greater tendency toward self-criticism, sometimes to the point of being annoying and overly intellectual, but always with the sense that such exercises of self-analysis can yield positive results.

A few weeks ago, the University where I've been working threw a lovely farewell gathering, one that was filled with well wishes and lots of hugs. Later that day, one of my colleagues posted an unexpected and beautiful tribute on Linked-In, for which she wrote, "[MaryAnn] uplifted voices, encouraged dialogue, and led with warmth and purpose. As we gathered today to express our gratitude, it was clear just how deeply she will be missed—not only for her leadership, but for the way she made so many of us feel seen, heard, and supported."

Thanks, Gail. It was particularly heartwarming to know that people felt "seen, heard, and supported," as those are words I would want to be associated with me and how I collaborate with others. Those few words helped me solidify and summarize time well spent among good people.

Then, in response to my recent review of the latest installment of Mission Impossible: Final Reckoning, a former student sent this message:

I've been going to the movies in the theater since I was a little kid. I loved movies

from the start. Films shown on a huge wall in a darkened room. Then, at Lake Erie

College in the late 1990s, you found a way to educate and deepen that passion.

I can tell you that when I go to the movies (which is still frequent), I think of you every

time. Every time. I look forward to your review columns. And I just wanted to say, thanks.

Thanks to you, Dan, for reminding me that, at the heart of all I do, is a deep love of teaching, or being able to, as a former colleague told me, "encourage and inspire." Your words are proof that perhaps I have been effective in the classroom, something I hold most dear.

And then, a few days ago, Facebook sent me a memory from a few years ago, notification that one of my monographs had been included in the Film and Religion journal's archival collection of "best" articles:

US Catholic Historian; "Madonnas in Our Midst: Representations of Women Religious in Hollywood Film," by MaryAnn Janosik

Of all the entries in this category, Janosik's article leaped to the forefront for its evident

scholarship, its insight, its readability, its fine and detailed use of illustrations from the

films and its sense of hope that Hollywood was at last maturing in its approach to the

representation of religious in cinema. A beautifully handled piece of research and writing.

To know that something I have written was deemed valuable enough to be included in an archival "best" collection is high praise for an academic, especially someone like me who opted to find a balance between publication and teaching, and later, between administration and scholarship. I've often had the nagging feeling that I've never done enough in terms of research and publication, so knowing something I've published merits archival recognition suggests I may have made a contribution to the ongoing dialogue about cinema and culture.

To say, then, that these past few weeks have been emotional, meditative, and challenging would be an understatement, given my proclivity toward introspection and soul-searching. Raised Catholic, I continue to consider the inherent contradiction that lies between hope and existential realities. Why am I here sometimes seems less certain and more transactional that the Church would attest.

My Google Wallet's reminder that I had tickets to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's live performance for a special showing of Field of Dreams on June 1 added yet another layer of thought and contemplation to my already overloaded period of self-absorption. It also gave me the chance to put recent events into a kind of life-affirming context that I hope comes through in the following paragraphs, at least in terms of movies, baseball, my dad, and life.

Here goes:

During the Silent Movie Era (roughly the late 1890s through 1927, when The Jazz Singer introduced sound with movies), orchestras sometimes provided music to the flickering images on screen. More often, theaters equipped with pipe organs offered a different, more immediate kind of scoring to the activities depicted on screen.

When I was an organ student in the 1970s, one of my music teachers used to bring old silent movies and play them while I composed an impromptu score. Though at first intimidating, the activity became an interesting exercise exploring the many ways that the sound of music impacted the drama (or comedy) on screen.

In the 1980s, I attended a special showing of Fritz Lang's classic silent film Metropolis, complete with a live orchestral performance of the score which had been written for it. Pretty cool.

Later, when I was teaching film history, I often emphasized the important, though typically unnoticed, role that music plays in the overall cinematic experience. I once played the opening sequence from Woody Allen's 1979 masterpiece Manhattan on mute and then asked the students how long they thought the opening montage of all things New York lasted. Twenty minutes, was the typical response, and I noticed students started figeting to the soundless sequence about thirty seconds in.

Shot in brilliant 1940s black and white, showcasing some of the city's iconic landmarks, and set to George Gershwin's classic Rhapsody in Blue, the sequence actually lasts less than four minutes. When I replayed it with sound, students were attentive an engaged, with some insisting that I was showing an entirely different clip. Go figure. Music and film. They go together like hot dogs and mustard, like gin and tonic, like Romeo and Juliet. Or something.

Scoring movies is thus an art, whether it's cinema stalwart John Williams, Nine Inch Nails industrial rockers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, or Prince providing the musical foundation that drives a film's narrative. Ditto James Horner, a lesser known, but equally evocative artist, perhaps the antithesis of John Williams in terms of unassuming grandeur, who received ten Oscar nominations (and won two, most famously for 1997's Titanic), for his typically understated euphonious efforts, who provided the unexpectedly evocative score for what would become one of the most beloved baseball movies of all time.

Writer-director Phil Alden Robinson's Field of Dreams was released April 21, 1989, exactly nine days after I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation. I'd previously read the novel the movie was based on, W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe, so I was curious what Hollywood would do with Kinsella's unusual combination of mysticism and baseball. I'll get back to my initial reaction and what the movie has come to mean in a bit, but first some thoughts on the score and today's concert with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO).

I learned that composer Horner wasn't the first choice to provide the movie's score. Robinson had a particular vision of the story and how it should play out, and his first choice to compose the score was Leonard Bernstein. But Bernstein, later in his career and (as it would turn out), late in life (he died in 1990), was unavailble, and so Robinson approached Horner, who was initially not interested a writing music for a baseball movie, which he expected would require big, grandiose musicality. But that turned out not to be the case.

Robinson wanted a quieter, more subdued score, one that captured Kinsella's ethereal mysticism about baseball lore. Once Horner saw the movie's rough cuts, he immediately envisioned a softer, more hushed foundation to the story's essential core. The result: a diverse, complex and unique series of compositions, featuring everything from airy synethesizers to more traditional horns and strings, a minimalist compilation of sounds that evokes a sense of wonder and mystery essential to expressing Kinsella's tale of unrequited redemption.

So the opportunity to hear this now archetypal score played live with a favorite movie seemed too good to pass up, and it did not disappoint. Under the expert oversight of conductor Nicholas Buc, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra provided a memorable Sunday afternoon at the movies, highlighting the brilliance of Kinsella's poignant story and Horner's evocative score.

Those who read this blog regularly know of my affinity for seeing movies on the big screen and, though it's been decades since first I saw Field of Dreams in a theater, I immediately recalled how movies can emphasize even little themes with clever, precise dialogue and well-crafted scenes and cinematography and, more importantly, how they elicit memories of times past. As soon as I heard the first few plaintive notes of the movie's signature theme, I was transported back to 1989, relieved that my doctoral work was complete and remembering how much my dad had been my most vocal champion when it came to getting an education.

Kevin Costner's awkward cool, juxtaposed with his unfinished paternal relationship felt relevant and renewed here, with James Earl Jones's reassuring vocal resonance providing a kind of emotional grounding to the story's implausible premise. Can we really believe that our unrealized dreams and unfinished personal business can manifest in ghosts from times gone by? Is it possible to reconcile our regrets, the things we didn't say, with wishful messages that guide us to a kind of spiritual reckoning and resolution?

As one of the movie's signature lines asks, "Is this heaven?" And the response, "No, it's Iowa."

Okay, maybe that's a euphomism for something else, but here it becomes a kind of metaphor for the stuff hopes and dreams are made of, and how far we are willing to suspend disbelief in order to achieve them. Field of Dreams could have been a laughable disaster had writer-director Robinson not understood the message implicit in Kinsella's novel and had Horner not been able to ennoble that narrative with music.

Watching the musicians perform live to bring the movie's story to life in real time was really something to experience. Sitting in the fourth row center, I had access to conductor Buc's small screen where he calculated the precise moment to infuse Horner's score, adding an indescrible energy to the activities on screen, highlighting scenes with quiet, unassuming strings or stronger, more pronounced horns.

After thirty-six years, Field of Dreams holds up as a beautiful love letter to baseball and its place in American culture. As characters from the once disgraced Shoeless Joe Jackson to the revered fictional author Terrance Mann (substituting in the move for J.D. Salinger who was Kinsella's model in the book), wax rhapsodic about the game - from the smells of the ballpark to the way that memories of going to a game remain deeply embedded in our childhood memories - the movie is a genuine treatise on the beauty of baseball, not only as a symbol of American culture, but as an integral part of our individual stories.

For me, the movie's original release date did more than overlap with the completion of my doctorate. It was a reminder of my dad's love of baseball and, like Ray Kinsella's father John, the dreams he had as a young man. My dad played baseball and semi-professional football when he was in his 20s. The football team, then known as the Lorain Buckeyes, was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1966, due in part, to my dad's persistence with the HOF about recognizing pre-NFL sports.

As my parents' only child, my dad played catch with me, taught me how to keep score, told me that I could do anything if I had an education. Fittingly, on that momentous occasion of my completing a PhD, the one person I would have wanted there was my dad (he died in 1983). In that way, was feeling a range of emotions the week after my dissertation defense when I ventured into the theater to see Field of Dreams, the movie version of a novel with which I was very familiar. When Coster's Ray Kinsella asks his father (is he a ghost or is he real?) to play catch, I was a puddle, all those memories of L'il Me throwing the ball with Dad in our backyard washed over me.

This time, the movie transported me to a new place of remembrance, one that was clearly enhanced by James Horner's moving score and Phil Alden Robinson's smart script and restrained direction. I've seen the movie many times since that post-doctoral defense matinee, but this experience with CSO's live orchestral performance brought back a rush of emotions that made me embrace again the memory of my dad, the power of film, and the larger-than-life affirmations that only cinema can deliver.

I wish I could have seen Field of Dreams with my dad, who would have loved the tale of Shoeless Joe Jackson's search for redemption, now even more significant as MLB recently exonerated him, making him eligible for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Soon, I hope. The last movie I watched together with my was 1982's On Golden Pond. In one especially relevant scene, Jane Fonda, long estranged from her father (played by her real-life dad Henry), dives off a dock near their summer home, showing him (finally) she is capable of completing a challenge he once offered her as a child. My dad took my hand, tears in his eyes, and whispered that he knew I could face any challenge. He said he saw something in me - a combination of determination and desire - that would serve me well.

I've come back to that moment many times since then, along with countless other small things that remind me now how profound was my father's impact on me. Wherever his spirit is - in an Iowa cornfield or a on a fishing boat in Lake Erie (he loved the water) - I still feel his presence at the most unexpected times, and the influence of his wisdom, his life experiences, his joie de vivre fill my heart.

That's the thing about movies, the sensory embrace that surrounds you in the theater can envelope you with a feeling of hope, despair, love, and sadness. Movies can fill you head with joy, of possibilities you might never have otherwise imagined. Watching the movie as the musicians played the score added another dimension to my Field of Dreams encore. Every note, every singular sound timed precisely with an important scene on screen heightened and elevated the usual movie theater experience, giving greater momentum to Kinsella's story, solidifying its life-affirming message about the enduring power of love...and the romance of baseball.

Think of all the sights and smells and feels at a ballpart: the hot dogs, the popcorn, the aroma of grass, the feel of the baseball and the leather glove. What is no longer "America's pastime" (but should be), baseball gives us time to engage, reflect, and ponder the beauty of athletic agility, the love of the game, and exhileration of life. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Field of Dreams brought all of these together in a heartfelt, lyrical and dramatic tribute to baseball, to our parents, and to life.

An exaggeration?

Maybe.

But sometimes a movie can work miracles bringing lots of life's little things together, providing opportunities for reflection, refocus and renewal. Field of Dreams: In Concert did just that.

Because, you know, If you build it.....