Eephus (2024)
Directed by Carson Lund
I should be writing my vows. But I currently have too many competing thoughts going on inside my head, and would hope that this extracurricular writing exercise might get me out of my tailspin.
With fascism on the rise and a global economy on the brink of collapse, we’re very much through the looking glass of an empire in decline. And so I was greeted yesterday morning by Ross Douthat’s opinion piece in the NYT, “An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive,” a siren of an op-ed, designed to advocate for the rituals of the not-so-distant past. Much of the piece may have registered as purely alarmist if I examined it a decade ago, but now it seems radically prescient (am I getting old?). The fetishization of our American past is nothing new; each decade longs to return to the generations before it. But what’s happening now is a rejection of history and the capital T Truth itself, wherein a past is cherry-picked and free of anything unsavory. This sort of white nationalist propaganda, compounded with the practical elimination of the Department of Education, and the ramifications of a general public struggling to read, is inherently fascism in practice.
Is it any different from what we do with ourselves? We revise or outright erase the inconvenient realities of our past to mentally forge ahead. Yet to see it done on a national scale, with its fabrications and outright lies, while I’ve had to confront my, shall we say checkered past, has left me with some complicated feelings. In times when I’m feeling the pressure and need to disengage, I’ve defaulted into reflecting on my past, traversing the memory museum of my mind, and picking at cerebral scabs. It’s a default setting that requires conscious effort to disengage from, and it’s what brought me to Carson Lund’s Eephus; I was tired of the bombardment of the news and I didn’t need to reflect on an inalterable past. I just wanted to hang out with some interesting characters for an hour or so. What I got was a conversation; a film that takes this fetishization of the American past and observes it at its most mundane yet serene.
Set in the 1990s, the film follows two competing amateur baseball teams. In red, there’s Adler’s Paint and in blue are the Riverdogs. Who comprises these teams really doesn’t matter, as they’re merely a collection of eccentricities, summoning the memory of a not-too-distant (to me) bygone era. Lund, who wrote for one of my favorite online publications of the 2010s, Slant Magazine, co-wrote and directed Eephus, with their cinephilia and appreciation of form evident from the get-go. From the immaculate credits sequence to relying on documentary-filmmaking legend Frederick Wiseman to narrate, the film is an astonishing collection of notable faces. No one on the cast is particularly familiar, but they all represent types that, if not in the films, I’ve seen in-person.
Akin to Wiseman’s fly-on-the-wall, largely observational approach, Lund’s preoccupations center on how this coterie of men from Massachusetts, men who seemingly have nowhere else to be but on this baseball field, cling on to the vestiges of their past. Men listen to baseball games of their youth as they reminisce about the present moment they inhabit, knowing that it’s the last game they’ll play on this field. Lund will cut to sequences observing the autumnal trees, in various states of foliage, or onlookers discussing their lives to enliven the proceedings. The day gives way to night, yet the game continues. None of it is especially revelatory in a vacuum, but the cadence Eephus develops, eventually, lends itself to something tranquil and hypnotic.
As with most good -but not quite great - films, I filled in the spaces that Lund provides, where I was reminded of what baseball and group sports have meant to me in the past. There were the elementary school trips to Wrigley Field, during Sammy Sosa’s home run competition with Mark McGwire, where a home run occurred near the bleachers where we sat. I lifted my scrawny, 5th-grade arm up to reach for the ball, only to feel the pulsating wind brush by my fingertips. Or the various softball games I played with Karina and her friends, with some of the only existing photos of my long hair. I couldn’t hold a baseball bat, and I was awkward and clumsy in my growing teenage frame. Some things truly never change. Or more recently, my walks with Aislinn to Comiskey U.S. Cellular Guaranteed Rate Field, moving seats every inning or so, sunbathing while sipping on a Summer Shandy and enjoying a hot dog or two. The White Sox probably lost, but that’s ok.
Even in my attempts to escape my past, it informs everything about my present, and that includes the exciting, the embarrassing, and the comforting. Like with the characters of Eephus, I too can spend too much time on the field, examining the ground beneath me in the dark. As we enter an age of extinction, it will require a lot of rituals, ideas, and worldviews that need to be maintained and cultivated for the next few weeks, months, years, and decades. Thankfully, with a little unrequested help from outside forces, the past five years have been an act of culling and reformation. The field may be paved over, and with it the memories of the past, but erected atop is my monument.