A Metaphor for Life in the Real World

Rating: 8/10 (1 June 2010)

Bernard Malamud may or may not have "known" baseball; I dunno. But what I =do= know is that he knew people. Read his other work and one can see that Bernie was Kafka's and Dostoyevsky's not-so-fair-haired boy. Which is to say that he also knew "darkness and light" and the perils of getting in too deep with the Powers that Be.
Most of the scenes in "The Natural" are "dark" or "light." Barry Levinson lights all the baseball scenes =up=. And most of the interpersonal action =down=. Levinson had surely read not only "The Natural" but "The Fixer," as well. Malamud was an obsessive moralist, ya know. He saw the "bad guys" and like the muckrakers of the turn of the century he had to turn the light on =them=.
"They have to know what they world is really like... that it's not that fairy tale the 'big boys' want you to think it is." Even baseball.
A good women. Two bad women. A good man. Some bad men.
"Life didn't turn out the way I expected it," he tells the good woman. Another confused man in a confusing world, regardless of how =competent= he is at his chosen endeavor.
A metaphor for the way things are and not the way they are not?