If you build it...
BBC Bitesize is supposedly a learning portal. Which makes it even more egregious when the droid gets it wrong. Even equivocally.
As in this case, which concerns the mysterious voice urging Kevin Costner's farmer, Ray Kinsella, to convert an Iowan cornfield into a baseball diamond, in Field of Dreams.
The line, usually quoted as “if you build it they will come”, has come to be used as encouragement to begin a big task. But in fact that’s not what the ghostly voice says in the film. It actually says: “If you build it he will come” referring, apparently, to famous baseball player ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson, whose ghost does indeed later appear, along with a host of other, dead, baseball stars.
Actually, Ray Kinsella assumes that it refers to Jackson.
- Ray Kinsella:
I think I know what
If you build it, he will come
means. - Annie Kinsella:
Ooh, why do I not think this is such a good thing?
- Ray Kinsella:
I think it means that if I build a baseball field out there that Shoeless Joe Jackson will get to come back and play ball again.
But it doesn't refer to Jackson at all. Instead, it refers to Ray's father, who died while the two were estranged. Admittedly, the Bitesize droid appears to qualify the statement with apparently
, because that's how the audience would be thinking at that point. But, by the film's end, the voice's meaning is clear.
- Ray Kinsella:
What are you grinning at, you ghost?
- Shoeless Joe Jackson:
If you build it…[looks toward John Kinsella]…he will come.
Sentimental, certainly. But bloody marvellous, nonetheless! (thumbup)