Brandon wrote:
The movie isn't centered on a single player, it bounces around from clumps of teammates delivering mini-vignettes with one-liners for days, the game/field serving as seemingly the only connective tissue that brings these grumpy fellas to the table. There are at least a couple scenes where the players seek a bond outside of the game itself, but life (kids, being old and tired, etc.) gets in the way.
Is it that these guys only share the game as a raison d'etre, and if so is that enough? I can relate to this lack of connection outside of the thing itself. I can't tell you how many times I've had the dreaded "we should hang out sometime" conversation with someone at a show. What truly makes us "friends" if we can't even break bread outside of the venue itself? I've been feeling this isolation more in the last five years than ever in my life (though my years in Vermont were as lonely as it gets), and I'm not sure if it's ageing, the post-COVID hellscape, phones, or something else. The communal experience in general seems to be fading. I should also point out that the majority of my lifelong friends were people I met within this construct, so I'm not so cynical yet as to swear off the bonds beyond the THING itself, I'm just saying that some of the people I've known the longest have been relegated to the pit and the pit alone.
I ran into Brandon on Wednesday while I was killing time walking at the mall waiting for the library's boiler to do its job before we opened. We talked about at least a few things... blogging, Armond White, David Lynch, Eephus, MUBI.
Either later that day or the next day, I saw a MUBI link on a Youtube video offering their 3 months for a $1 sale, which is something that I did last year (and I think I watched a pathetic 3 movies in 3 months) and something I signed up for again this year now using a different email address. I feel a little guilty using MUBI like this, but not too much. I'm considering continuing on for a year's subscription this time. I've had a MUBI subscription at various times in the past. I'm mostly a fan of what they're doing, I just don't know if I care enough about contemporary cinema to make it "worth it" to me anymore. Then again, along comes Brandon poking me towards the Good New Stuff and a lot of that stuff is on MUBI.
Eephus.
Brandon already wrote a great post about the film, which happily includes some CR5FC history that I enjoyed reading.
I've acknowledged in the past that I like masculine movies, books, etc. I like stories about men making hard choices, doing hard things. In general, I prefer the company of men. I value male camaraderie and friendship.
I think it's important to notice that Eephus is a very male-dominated film. The shared behavior, the shared love, is shared among men. The few times that women show up in the film, they are there as supportive of the relationship they have with their man, not as persons who share in the love of the game. (Of course there are women who love baseball and men who don't care and all sorts of exceptions and nuances. I'm talking about the text of Eephus itself and what I see there, which is primarily concerned with the way that men relate to each other).
I once heard someone say that men are more task-oriented and women are more relationship-oriented. It's a general stereotype, of course, but I've found it to be a generally valid description of at least my own inclinations. When I'm with others, I need to have a shared project/activity, a separate thing from the relationship itself. I don't like small talk. I don't ask how your mother is doing or about your dog. I don't like talking about recent events, whether personal or political or whatever. It's not that I find it all boring (I do), but more that I don't think about those things at all unless they're forced on me.
But there are things that I like, that I do think about, probably too much.
Games. Books. Movies. For whatever reasons, nature, nurture, I love artifice. I love shaped stories, exaggerated stories, beautiful images, lovely turns of phrase. I also love smoking. If you love smoking, I could be happy to just sit and smoke with you.
I was on my school's baseball team in Junior High. My distaste for watching professional sports does not mean that I have a distaste for the game itself. I love baseball. And I love the little pockets of amateur (those who love) players who have kept the game alive at a local level, played by local people against other local people.
C.S. Lewis has his haters and has his fanboys/fangirls (who often haven't read much more than the Greatest Hits). I visited Narnia as a youth, but I never became a Narnia re-reader (though I have been considering finally re-reading them all this year). I do re-read Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism fairly often, at least every couple of years, and it's my minority opinion that that is his best work. I love Lewis as an essayist the most probably and there are some great essays in some collected volumes. But what matters for this post about Eephus (about Eephus? Eephus has barely been mentioned) is Lewis' writing on friendship from Four Loves.
Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends side by side, absorbed in some common interest.
The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer…The Companionship was between people who were doing something together- hunting, studying, painting or what you will. The Friends will still be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared, and less easily defined; still hunters, but of some immaterial quarry…still traveling together but on a different kind of journey. Hence we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead.
That is why those pathetic people who simply ‘want friends’ can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? would be ‘I see nothing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a Friend,’ no friendship can arise- though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow travelers.
The common quest or vision which unites Friends does not absorb them in such a way that they remain ignorant or oblivious of one another. On the contrary it is the very medium in which their mutual love and knowledge exist. One knows nobody so well as his ‘fellow.’ Every step of the common journey tests his metal; and the tests are tests we fully understand because we are undergoing them ourselves. Hence, as he rings true time after time, our reliance, our respect and our admiration blossom into an Appreciative love of a singularly robust and well informed kind. If, at the outset, we had attended more to him and less to the thing our Friendship is ‘about,’ we should not have come to know or love him so well
To a certain extent, all of this is what Eephus is about. The "friendships" in this film, to whatever degree they exist and are expressed are centered around a mutual love. Friendship cannot exist in any other way. One can have a shared love without deep bonds of affection, but one cannot have deep bonds of affection without shared love.
The shared love in Eephus is of course baseball, but it is also, and maybe more importantly, a shared love of place, of a specific place that matters to them all. The beautiful melancholy of the film is the omnipresent awareness that this place that they love is scheduled to change in a way that will exclude them.
Another great essayist, Wendell Berry, wrote in his essay "The Loss of the Future" (what a great title related to Eephus):
A community is not merely a condition of physical proximity, no matter how admirable the layout of the shopping center and the streets, no matter if we demolish the horizontal slums and replace them with vertical ones. A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.
Eephus is an elegy for what we all already know. Community changes when shared space changes.
Brandon and I had a mutual friend, Edwin (RIP), who loved baseball, who kept game records of every Yankees game he watched like Franny keeps records at the live games in his community in the film. Ed grew up in Johnson City and he loved the baseball field in Johnson City. You know what that baseball field was destroyed for? A highway. Economic development. It's the same highway that has split JC into different economic districts. If you've got a car and can live north of Harry L, you're well-to-do and chances are that you walk nowhere. If you live south of Main on Grand Ave, there's a better chance that I've seen you walking on Main Street. I hate car culture and I hate highways, but it's also clear that given the assumptions of car culture that are widely shared by almost everyone in our country, the highway does what it was supposed to do, speeding up the connection between distant places.
The field in the film is being developed for the building of an elementary school. In establishing this fact through the radio news item, it's made clear that this is very popular in the broader community, that this specific community's children will now have their own space instead of being bussed long distances to other spaces outside of their local area. This little extra fact complicates the situation. There is no clear villain here. It's just change. Things change. Spaces change. Communities decide on changes together that may be good for most, but not for all.
I've been sitting and writing this for a bit too long now, but I can't stop until I've mentioned what a great job this film does in not only representing male friendship and the importance of physical shared space, but also in how it treats time. Tarkovsky famously called cinema "sculpting in time" and the director Lund here proves himself to be a young master sculptor. I love the focus on one afternoon/evening. The film is a compact 90-ish minutes, but it captures the rhythms of this day so perfectly.
I talked with Brandon on Wednesday about SMEM, the "same movie every month" club idea. I've got some ideas on how I'm going to implement something personally, but I just thought that I should mention here that Eephus is a great candidate for such a project. I think that I could effortlessly watch it every month for the rest of the year, writing posts breaking apart its dialogue, the subtle character interactions, its lighting, its shot composition, editing, etc.
The year is still young, but Eephus is a home run and sure to be in my 2026 year-end Favorite New-to-Me list. I hate most of the few films I've seen from 2024. If I made a 2024 list right now, I think it would look like this:
- Eephus
- Cloud
So, I'm not without hope. As always, I know that there are good films being made in the world. It's just not always easy to find them. I no longer have much tolerance for wading through the trash of new releases. So, thanks again, Brandon, for pointing me in the right direction. I wouldn't have discovered Eephus without you, my friend, and now I'm happy to discover in this film another shared love.
That's extremely insightful that friends need to have shared love of something. Baseball at the park is a really wholesome shared love. You would think it would bring out the best from these guys, but they're still assholes for the most part. Yet assholes have camaraderie.
When I was growing up, 90% of boys loved baseball. Now with the internet, we are scattered all over the map as to the things we love so it is difficult sometimes to find friends because you need something you both love.
It's interesting that the ages of the men in the film probably went from 25 to 60.
There was actually some wholesome mentoring going on between assholes. There was definitely good Community because they knew one another well enough to say the thing that would most throw the other one off his game.
It's interesting that the two younger guys who are taunting the guy in the outfield are like thieves and robbers trying to come into the fold by some other way.
They should have come around to the gate and watched the game.
The dynamic of getting dark so that there's endurance and commitment tested at the end was brilliant. I remember the last day I carried mail as a mailman. I definitely wanted to finish my route to the end.
It was sad that the father whose wife and kids were watching got thrown out because that would be the last time they remember him at baseball. But somehow you knew he would be all right.
Anyway, it is a really great learning that having something shared between men enables friendship between men who would otherwise be very much foreigners. John your take on everything here was really interesting and I'm going to read it again. Thanks.