The past couple of nights I have been watching Bull Durham. This
is the movie from 1988 with Kevin Costner playing an aging catcher in the minor
leagues. This is a movie that appears to be about baseball life with its
travails and hopes and the desperate desires of men who want to play ball for a
living. It is seemingly a men’s movie with all the swearing and ass slapping and
drinking and real life baseball lore. But no, this really is THE all time best chick
flick.
Yes, we love Kevin Costner from the first moment he arrives
in the locker room wearing his navy blazer, rumpled white shirt and the khakis
that are the perfect shade of tan with a hint of olive. He’s a manly man who in
the first 20 minutes gives the fabulous, if too artful, monologue about his
beliefs which includes, “I believe in the cock, the pussy, the small of a
woman’s back…that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap”,
and which ends with his belief in “long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last
three days”.
Yes! You had us at “long, slow and deep”—and yes, at the
Susan Sontag critique too.
But there is a later scene that truly outs women for what
they really want.“Do you want to dance?” Sarandon asks Costner, sitting in
the kitchen late at night. He says yes, but surprises her by not dancing but
instead by sweeping all the food and dishes off the kitchen table onto the
floor. He spins Sarandon onto that now empty table and they go at it rolling
and clutching.
Oh, that’s part of it. We want a man to want us that much;
we want a man who wants to make love a second time so much that he goes for it on
the kitchen table. We do want that kind of passion in our lives. But, there is
something else in this scene that truly makes this a women’s dream come true. What most women truly desire is not what
Costner does, but what Sarandon does NOT do. As all of her dishes and the leftover
food crash onto the floor Sarandon allows herself
to be swept onto that table instead of diving for a broom, or a dish cloth or saying
to her lover, “Hold on just a second, I’ll clean this up and then meet you in
the bedroom.”
No, she is in the moment and desires this man and this sex more
than she desires a clean floor or neat kitchen. She wants the rapture of this
man and his body even with cereal and milk oozing under the fridge. And she is not
saying, “Oh God that was my mother’s china bowl.” Nope, she’s on that table fucking
her brains out.
Oh, to be that kind of woman. We assume the power is in the
man, that to be taken that way would free us. But what we see in Bull Durham is
a woman who CAN be taken. She is not a woman thinking, “When did we last wash
these sheets?” while a man is going down on her.
Oh, we do wish for a partner to love us with such sweet
abandon, but Sarandon, in Bull Durham, shows us a woman who can abandon
herself.
