Notes on Eephus (2024) and Friendship (2024)

I look at two recent releases and talk about modern loneliness, male friendships, baseball, and other things.

If you have spent your time frying your brain and making your life considerably worse on the internet, then you probably have come across a think-piece take on “male loneliness.” There was a fairly popular article a few years ago, published by The New York Times, positing that the epidemic could be cured by “pickleball,” which subsequently became a frequently shared and edited screenshot. Now, I cannot abide by this as a solid tennis partisan, but in all seriousness; I think there is something here. We do live in lonely times, ones in which it feels like every major institution is, in some way, not functioning, and where every techno-ghoul is fighting to keep us sedated in the attention economy. I’m speaking empirically, but most people can agree: it is easier to feel alone.

I think, however, where I begin to diverge from the “male loneliness epidemic” concept is that it is exclusive to men. It’s not a stretch to say just about everyone is feeling the cultural malaise right now. And something about this concept, to me, feels…off? At least some of these sentiments strike me as veering into the usual incel/manosphere talking points. My whole fight-or-flight nervous system starts to worry that once I hear “male loneliness”, I will then be cornered at the party by someone and attempt to be converted to the church of Rogan/Tate/Peterson/WhatHaveYou. And then following this encounter, I have to come up with some escape plan excuse: “oh yeah my friend is over there I gotta bounce,” or “I have to piss real bad.” Something like that.

However, while I do not think this concept is exclusive to men and that fixating on the male side is a potential slippery slope, there is no denying: just like everyone else, the dudes struggle to hang out. Beyond the tech-haunted lives we lead now, there are other causes (disappearing third spaces and amenities, for one). As a whole, it certainly feels harder in some ways to make a human connection, but this is, unfortunately, also an integral crossroads in life. As people become busier with work, family, partners, routines, having to make dinner every night, etc., friendships tend to fade away in the face of these commitments. It sucks, but such is life!

So what is my point? What is my thesis? This isn’t a composition class, I am getting to that. All of this preamble to say: this discourse point and facet of life have been on my mind through the lens of two recent films– Eephus and Friendship.

Eeephus, directed by Carson Lund and released late last year, is a “one long day movie” about the final beer league baseball game played at a small baseball field immediately preceding its destruction for a brand new school. A shaggy dog ensemble film of mostly unknowns with extremely low stakes, the film primarily serves as a vehicle to portray an offbeat cast of characters. You have all of your beer league archetypes on display here: the hotheads, the tubby guys, the boozers, the analytics/strategy nerds, the guys who are actually kind of good at baseball. Each character interaction suggests a sort of shared history; some guys razz each other to jokingly grind each other’s gears, some genuinely seem to despise each other, some vaguely enjoy each other’s company.

This league, like most recreational leagues, has very little rhyme or reason to who is playing or for what reason. Characters, like Ed (played by Uncut Gems alum Keith William Richards), are former players who are in denial about losing their stuff. Some players seemingly have zero tangible athletic ability, while other players seem to play the game on a high-amateur level (like community college baseball). It can be easy to lose track of who is who, since there are 20+ players between the two teams, but each character has some depth, quirk, or sense of humanity to latch onto.

While very funny, albeit in a deadpan way, there is a strong overcurrent of melancholy suffused throughout Eeephus. The two films I was reminded of most were: Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some, largely for the baseball hangout movie pretenses, but particularly Eagle Pennell’s underrated 80s independent picture Last Night at the Alamo. Alamo covers the final night of a small honky tonk dive bar in Houston, where locals share memories and drinks before the titular Alamo is torn down to make way for commercial real estate. Both movies share a similar central conceit, bottle setting, unveil subtle character dynamics in real time, and give a wounded humanity to their casts of outcasts and losers. What sticks out to me with both of these movies, however, is how much they deal with the theme of inevitability. Our ensemble casts are unable to do anything about the impending destruction of their preferred hangout spot, so they decide to have one more good time.

The Riverdogs, one of Eeephus’ two recreational teams.

Much of Eeephus’s emotional core is drawn from this sense of inevitability, the feeling that one era has passed and another is coming, bringing uncertain times. None of these characters seem particularly great at baseball, many onlookers laugh at their ritual, but there is undeniably a kind of magic to it, in all of its unglory. The movie's title and leading motif come from the “eephus” pitch, a type of breaking/curveball that is thrown extremely high to throw off the batter’s sense of timing. The most famous MLB player to regularly use the eephus, hippie extraordinaire Bill “Spaceman” Lee, even makes a brief cameo in the film. The eephus is representative of the strange mysticism of baseball, one character, played by Nate Fisher (the film’s co-writer and co-host of the excellent narrative comedy podcast, A Closer Look), says that the Eephus is an archaic, unorthodox pitch that could conceivably “go on forever” and never come down and reach the batter’s box.

This is baseball’s beauty; the game could conceivably go on forever. There are no ties, there is no clock to burn. You throw the ball over the plate until it’s over. Eephus’ game goes deep into the Massachusetts autumn night despite injuries, desertions for baptisms, extra innings, and even the umpire “calling it” right before sundown, leaving the players to call the game themselves. Throughout the movie, a scorekeeper has been keeping the score not just for this game, but for every game this crew has played. Every ball, every strike, every out between these two teams has been cataloged for years. And just like that, it’s over. It technically could never end, but unfortunately, it did. An entire era of shared, personal camaraderie is left to the history books, to scorecards and statsheets that will just collect dust. All of our players depart in the pitch-black twilight, some emptily extend offers to grab a beer sometime, and just when you think it can’t get any more wistful: they break out a needle drop of “‘Ol 55” by Tom Waits and then cut to the credits.

It wasn’t until looking up Eephus that I realized it is supposed to take place in the 1990s, which is a smart choice. Not just because I think cellphones are uncinematic (they are), but it looks back to the past to understand the present and examine how small community-driven activities have fallen by the wayside. As someone who grew up in a town that constantly wipes out amenities to make concessions for tourism and real estate, this is a point that hits particularly hard. An example: my favorite movie theater in my adolescence was torn down for some very ugly-looking townhouses. I think what makes Eeuphus truly brilliant, however, is that it does not approach its subject with sanctimony, however. The film implies baseball comes across as a confusing dinosaur to an outsider, but is written with the passion and understanding of a true baseball sicko. Which is why this movie vied for my heart, and it won it handily. After all, how can you not be romantic about baseball? Keep an eye on this Carson Lund guy, folks.

Friendship, released earlier this year, is much more outright silly of a movie than Eeephus’s more melancholic approach. The film’s main vehicle is comedian Tim Robinson, who is best known for his brief tenure on SNL and his own sketch comedy program, I Think You Should Leave, which has exploded in popularity over the past few years. If you are in your 20s, you probably have friends or acquaintances who overquote this show to hell (there was another thinkpiece about this semi-recently, actually, too!), but it is still one of the funnier shows on TV right now. And reader, I am not absolved from this epidemic. Many of these sketches have entered my vernacular, too.

Each sketch usually plays out pretty similarly. Robinson, or another comedian of choice— like Tim Heidecker, Patti Harrison, John Early, Conner O’Malley— plays a strange guy or gal who constantly misreads uncomfortable situations, who is usually doomed to social embarrassment due to their tendencies to continually double down on “being right”. The sketches frequently turn surreal and, as alluded to before, feature plenty of quotable one-liners. Friendship is like a feature-length version of one of those sketches, but channels and streches out into something much more uncomfortable.

The plot concerns Craig Waterman, a typical Tim Robinson character. He is immature, prone to outrage, and seems to misread every situation. He constantly disappoints his wife (Kate Mara as a great “straight man” to Robinson’s antics) and son, seemingly never demanding their respect or the respect of his colleagues. Craig is also hilariously boring (one of the film's more underrated running jokes, his white collar job consults with apps to keep users’ screentime on their services higher). It is clear from the outset: you would not want to hang out with this guy. He becomes enamored with his “cool” new neighbor, Austin (Paul Rudd), an anti-authoritarian weatherman who loves to play punk rock. The two hit it off initially, but following a major faux pas at one of Austin’s parties, Austin tries to distance himself from Craig, leading to Craig’s hilarious and pathetic spiral into doom as he tries to win Austin’s approval.

Craig and Austin, from friends to enemies.

It’s difficult to talk about outright comedies like this, since the broad majority of its appeal is in its bits. But this is definitely one of the funniest movies of the past few years. I had a friend describe Robinson as sort of a modern-day answer to Jim Carrey upon leaving the theater, which I don’t think is a bad comparison because this plays like a better remix of The Cable Guy at times, but Robinson taps into something a lot more primal about people, much like Danny McBride does. Everyone knows someone like Craig. The early parts of this movie remind me of the saga I dealt with late last year, where a local NEET wouldn’t stop bothering me at work to hang out with him because I offered to teach him how to play tennis. I speak from experience: it’s not fun to think you are a Craig, but it isn’t fun to be on Austin’s side either!

However, any similarity to this unfortunate situation of mine quickly escalated to the extremely absurd and surreal, with its end destination culminating in something much meaner and miserable than an ITYSL sketch. In Friendship, you essentially watch a man ruin his life because he wants to be friends with one random dude. The movie is hilarious enough to pull this concept off, but you’ll be watching parts of it with your hands in your head. I would recommend seeing it with a crowd or some friends, because you will all be trapped in there for the ride. It’s a riot, but you feel every single one of those 100 minutes of the runtime.

Ultimately, Eephus and Friendship represent different sides of the “male interaction” coin. Eephus is concerned with the things that aren’t said between men and the rituals they engage in to facilitate some semblance of social interaction. In the 1990s, it was rec baseball, and now it's migrated to digital spaces: fantasy football or video games. Friendship exploits the fears that men have in trying to make acquaintanceships, the things that are overstated or said in the name of self-preservation and the desire to belong. Just as everyone knows someone as pitiable as Craig Waterman, everyone worries they’ve come across as him to someone cooler than them.

Movies are not monolithic, but you can pick up on certain sentiments in the culture by examining them. When I look at these two films, I think: maybe we are losing some of humanity, feeling worse about ourselves, and feeding into our worst impulses as social spaces become increasingly digitized and interactions more transactional. But maybe it is a normal facet of life, and the older we get, the less bonds we are likely to forge outside of family. If it is the former’s case, I wonder if some film historians will one day look back on Eephus and Friendship as capturing the current moment, the zeitgeist, in the same way Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, and Seven Days in May captured the fears of annihilation in 1964, or The Parallax View and The Conversation tapped into Watergate anxieties. 2023- 25ish has also seen Red Rooms, The Substance, I Saw the TV Glow, and Dream Scenario, all of which deal more prominently with digitized/media anxieties, so maybe the footprint is already there. It could be an interesting thread to chase if you give it 20 years of time to marinate. Maybe neither of these movies will be worth the intellectual merit in the future, but if they are, then I have at least tried to throw my hat in the ring.