James Earl Jones, 1931–2024
The voice of America.
JAMES EARL JONES—THE ACTOR WHOSE SONOROUS BASS was instantly recognizable to multiple generations of movie fans thanks to his vocal work as George Lucas’s black-clad vision of imperial fury, Darth Vader—died on Monday at his home in New York at the age of 93.
Vader’s status as the greatest villain in cinematic history is owed in part to the costume design (Lucas cobbled together bits and pieces from the movies and TV shows rattling around in his brain before applying a terrifyingly shiny black paint job to the entire affair) and the lumbering menace in the guise of weightlifter Dave Prowse who was stuffed into that costume. But it was the heavy vocal terror imparted by Jones that made it iconic.
Jones was given a nearly impossible task—make a man whose eyes and lips we cannot see feel like the most terrifying presence in a galaxy far, far away—and absolutely crushed it. Indeed, Jones choosing to lend his voice to an AI company so he can voice Vader from the beyond is one of the few uses of this tool that feels acceptable; you simply cannot recast that part.
Much more could be said, and will be said, about Jones’s work as Vader and his gifts as an actor—not just that immense voice but that immense presence. And I’ll leave it to others to talk about Jones’s long career on the stage, which earned him three Tonys and the extraordinary honor of having one of Broadway’s major theaters renamed in his honor. Instead, I’d like to highlight his work on two films about the most American of subjects: baseball.
FIELD OF DREAMS IS, INHERENTLY, a goofy movie. A guy is hearing voices in his cornfield and they’re telling him to build a baseball stadium and then go on a cross-country tour and then watch a bunch of ghosts dressed up in 1920s-era uniforms? It’s hard not to empathize with Timothy Busfield’s yuppie businessman Mark when he explains to Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) that he and his family are going to lose their farm and their home because Ray has plowed under some of the most valuable farmland in the world to stare at an empty ballpark. And even if it weren’t empty—even if people were playing on it, even if ghosts were playing on it—well, so what? It’s just a game.
It’s the damnedest thing, my eyes are getting watery just thinking about what comes next. The moment when James Earl Jones’s Terence Mann explains precisely what will happen in this cornfield, why it will rejuvenate not just the Kinsellas’ finances, but maybe America’s soul along with it.
“People will come, Ray,” Jones intones, explaining that they’ll drive up, hand over money, and sit in the bleachers without even thinking about it. “They’ll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they’ll watch the game, and it’ll be as if they’d dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick, they’ll have to brush them away from their faces.”
And here Jones waves a massive paw by his own face, as if waving away a mist of molasses, something heavier than air.
And, after some back and forth with Mark, we get to the crux of it:
America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: It’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again. Oh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.
Again, there’s a version of this speech that’s ridiculous, absurd, that you walk out of the theater laughing at. (Maybe some of the baseball haters out there still do; I wouldn’t want to know any of that sort.) But I can’t imagine a version of the speech delivered by James Earl Jones that would inspire such a reaction. His voice is simply too powerful, too commanding; it booms in a way that renders whatever he says True. He is speaking in nearly divine terms of a nation with a purpose, and the holiness of its pastime, something that unites the country and its people not just with each other but across space and time. The record books that stretch back and tie together Shohei Ohtani and Albert Pujols and Cal Ripken and Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth and Shoeless Joe Jackson and Old Hoss Radbourn, a nation ever-evolving and yet one that can focus on this one thing and trace it back. Only James Earl Jones could narrate that.
I’D BE REMISS IF I DIDN’T MENTION a followup of sorts to Field of Dreams, Jones’s cameo toward the end of The Sandlot. In that 1993 kids’ classic, he’s Mr. Mertle, the owner of a massive dog, the Beast, who has captured a ball signed by Babe Ruth. After a series of shenanigans, the ball is recovered by a group of youths; when Mr. Mertle, an ex-Negro Leagues player who went blind after being hit in the head by a fastball, returns their ball to Smalls (Tom Guiry), the boy who foolishly stole it in the first place. He also gives him a baseball signed by the famed Yankees “Murderers’ Row.” All he asks is that the kids come by and talk ball with him once a week.
Again, there’s that voice, the commanding presence: Only someone who sounds like that could command the Beast. But there’s a plaintiveness to it as well, a desire for contact and community that baseball can help provide. And, really, that’s what the whole film is about, finding friendship and community in America’s pastime.
Because people will come. People will most definitely come.