'The Tenth Inning': Just a Beautiful Thing

Baseball has an ugly face, that’s the business part.
—Pedro Martinez

'The Tenth Inning': Just a Beautiful Thing
By Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters Film and TV Editor

“There’s something that happens on the field that’s like poetry, like ballet,” says Gerald Early. “The remarkable thing about the game,” he goes on, “is how beautiful it is, despite all the ugliness that might be around it at times. It’s just a beautiful thing.”

Speaking near the beginning of The Tenth Inning‘s second half, premiering on PBS 29 September, Early describes his love for baseball is deeply personal, based on his childhood experiences and particular plays etched into memory, a concept illustrated as he speaks by still photos of bodies in mid-air, strained and contorted, and for that instant of a play, perfect. For Early, who so appreciates such individual acts of grace, the “ugliness” is around the game, as opposed to inherent in it. It’s a view that helps him to love the game still, even knowing about the Steroid Era, recurrent labor disputes, costly stadiums, underpaid facility crews, and exploitative farm systems.

Early’s dilemma is at the center of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s four-hour follow-up to 1994’s Baseball. And it remains unresolved, in part because baseball is, as Keith Olbermann noted at the start of the first part of The Tenth Inning, a game immersed in its own history. This makes for at least two sorts of fans, those who remember and can rhapsodize over plays, like Early, and those who know stats. The documentary makes use of fans who are also players, reporters, and historians, an assembly of men—and Selena Roberts and Doris Kearns Goodwin (note to Burns: girls like baseball too)—who set about here pondering their devotion to a sport that has disappointed them repeatedly.

Recent disappointments loom large in The Tenth Inning, which means to look at what’s happened in baseball since Baseball. By turns treacly and rapturous, pedestrian and insightful, the documentary submits that, as Howard Bryant observes, “Most people have found a way to make their peace with the sport they love.” Still, the history rankles. And here, too much of it is noted only briefly.

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Cynthia Fuchs is director of Film & Media Studies and Associate Professor of English, African American Studies, Sport & American Culture, and Film & Video Studies, at George Mason University.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child

Review
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
by Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters Film and TV Editor

I Just Was

“I usually put a lot down, then I take a lot away, then I put some more down and I take some more away, so it’s like a constant editing process, usually.” As he describes his painting process for an interviewer in 1983, Jean-Michel Basquiat shifts in his chair. He doesn’t look ill at ease, exactly, maybe vaguely impatient. The answer suggests that he’s been asked this question before, and that his simplified response serves a purpose, namely, a celebrity’s usual self-promotion.

A few minutes later, the documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child offers a little more of this same interview. This time, Marc H. Miller wonders about a rumor he’s heard, that when he was younger, the artist was locked in a basement in order to paint. Now Basquiat is less accommodating. “I was never locked anywhere,” he says. “If I was white, they’d just say I was an artist in residence.”

With these two moments, Tamra Davis’ film, a loving and respectful meditation on its subject, lays out its limits, the stories it can repeat and the truths it can only guess at. Some of these stories are well known: he was a genius child, ahead of his time, and also “too fragile for this world,” as Madonna described him. He loved women or misread them. He challenged or was foiled by barriers in the art world, he was intuitive and authentic, or he was acclaimed too fast and too easily. In all versions he died too young, at 27, of a heroin overdose, alone, undone by his father’s disapproval or by Andy Warhol’s death, or maybe by his endless frustrations with the “art world.”

The other stories, less familiar but increasingly visible in his work and life, have to do with his blackness. The gallery scene and fine art industry, the judgments by curators and collectors, during the 1980s was overwhelmingly white, even more than today. And even when he was embraced, he was different and observed, unknown and desired. If he used his status as “outsider,” he was self-aware, too, a kid who grew up in New York and made art based on his experience.

Davis conducted her own interview with Basquiat, a longtime friend, in 1986, and has only now brought out the film, 22 years after he died of a heroin overdose. The interview itself is relaxed, a series of questions and answers that suggests both his frankness and perspicacity, his attention to the behaviors and expectations of those who admired, advocated, and exploited him. While Davis films, their mutual friend Becky Johnston asks Basquiat, about responses to his work. He smiles a little and shakes his head, noting that most reviews of his work were “about my ‘personality.’” Johnston repeats the word from offscreen, as he explains: “They’re just racist, most of these people. They have this image of me, wild man, wild monkey man…”

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