Twenty-five years! It seems like yesterday that we saw Susan
Sarandon tie Nuke to the bed and force feed him Walt Whitman. But it was twenty-five years ago this week that the romance began.
Bull Durham is the movie with Kevin Costner playing an aging
catcher in the minor leagues. It’s a movie that appears to be about baseball life
with the hopes and desperate desires of men who want to play ball for a living.
And while it is seemingly a men’s movie with all the swearing, ass slapping and
drinking and real life baseball lore, it is in fact 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 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 part too.
But it is a later scene that grabs every woman because we
see something we 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 by 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.
Yes, what he does in that scene is part of it; we want a man
to want us that much; we want a man who wants to make love a second time and on
the kitchen table. We want that kind of passion. But, there is something bigger
in that scene that is a woman’s dream come true. What most women 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 and saying
to her lover, “Hold on a second, I’ll clean up this mess and then meet you in
the bedroom.”
No, she is in the moment and desiring this man and this sex more
than she desires a clean floor and a neat kitchen. She wants the rapture of
this man’s body even with cereal and milk oozing under the fridge. And she is not
saying, “Oh dear God that was my mother’s china bowl.” Nope, she’s on that
table having a ball.
Oh, to be that kind of woman. We assume the power is in the
man, that to be taken so passionately would free us. But what we see in Bull
Durham is a woman who CAN be taken. She is not thinking, “When did we last wash
these sheets?” while a man is dutifully going at it.
Oh, we may wish for a partner to love us with such sweet
abandon, but Susan Sarandon, in Bull Durham, shows us a woman who can abandon
herself to pleasure
