Adrift and up in the air

Repacking my bags. (click for original)

Is Up in the Air (or, as it is called in France, In the Air) a complicated movie? Or is it simply a sloppy one? Bryan called the movie too long, but then he also called it depressing. But I felt uplifted at the end, largely since I was very excited to finally see a movie that treats seriously (or, well, that at least pretended to treat seriously) an adult lifestyle not built around family-building.

Bingham has it all together, and the viewer, I would suspect, admires his savoir-faire in the opening of the movie. But the block starts getting chipped first with the business about being a dinosaur, and next about not treating Alex seriously.

Yet it bewilders me that Bingham allows Keener to bully him into thinking he has feelings for Alex. Does he, really? It’s the buildup (photos) for the wedding of his second sibling that finally puts him in a family way? Remember that, up until this point, we’ve been told to consider Alex as identical to Bingham, plus a vagina (in an interesting twist on negativity). There’s no “you complete me” here. It’s “you are me,” which is not, from what I understand, a good point on which to build a relationship.

Furthermore, the trip back in time he takes with Alex feels absolutely out of character as well. And then when he falls for her, he shows himself to be absolutely terrible at precisely what it is that he’s supposed to be good at: reading people and anticipating their responses (which is basically the case he makes for continuing the in-person terminations). The failure to read is reasserted in his failure to anticipate the suicide, but I’m not convinced that Bingham has lost his touch–we don’t actually know if it has never happened before, as Bingham explained that he “never checks up,” in what could be a complete lie for Keener’s benefit.

Then there is Bingham’s glowing endorsement for Keener. Is it because she shook him out of his shell, allowing him to make some kind of connection to someone? Or is it because, rattled by her relationship’s demise (and the suicide), she decides to “marry her job” and become just like Bingham, who is, we have no reason to doubt, an exemplary employee?

Finally, there’s the whole sickening pro-family montage at the end along with Bingham’s final monologue. Does he regret that his wingtip remains in the air, shining down as a star? Is that sad? Or is it a suggestion that Bingham has realized who he is (don’t forget that the closing credits open with Graham Nash singing “Be Yourself”), and considered the mess with Alex a temporary aberration, a parenthesis of its own that he could suppress without changing the meaning of his life?

This last version is the strong reading of the film that suggests its challenge to the usual pro-family fare that makes up mainstream narratives in the US. It’s the reading I’m most in favor of, but the movie is messy enough that I see the reading as shaky–or too much fueled by own agenda. Yet any other reading makes the movie trite. Bill Simmons interviewed Jason Reitman recently, and Reitman talked about how he thought George Clooney would never get married. He’s surrounded himself with people he loves, he explained, and that is enough. And I read Bingham in much the same way. It’s possible for him to gift the miles to his sister and still be basically not in the family picture, after all. It’s possible for him to have relationships that have underlying meaning without repeated, mandatory interaction.

I’m not sure if Bingham is ever called selfish for wanting to reach his miles total. But the way Reitman wrote and filmed the ceremony, it certainly makes the goal seem selfish. But consider that Bingham could run up credit cards buying stuff for other people in order to boost his miles total. Is that selfish? Don’t we do that all the time ourselves? Is it more selfish for me to use my AA card to buy a sibling a gift than to use my regular credit card?

Similarly, how does “reach 10,000,000 miles” as a goal differ from, say, “write a book”? (And this is where it becomes very personal for me.) Writing a “book,” that is to say, at this point, a dissertation, must be the apex of selfishness, then, since, unlike flying a bunch, I have no choice but to do it alone. Dissertations don’t have +1s. I have to spend the hours, alone, reading, thinking, and writing. Sure, the work benefits from having people read it, comment on it, and the like, but the bulk of it… the 9,800,000 miles of it… is pretty much done alone. And as to the question, “where do you find the time?,” that’s precisely the point. Finding the time requires aligning your life in such a way that the time demands seem reasonable. And that means that it’s not for everyone–yet at the same time, finding the time and desiring to make time for it is, precisely, fine for some people and, in fact, what they feel they are designed to do.

Bingham left the stage in Vegas perhaps in part to see Alex, but also, then, in part because his backpack philosophy is a niche philosophy that doesn’t have mass market appeal (not having kids, for example, is not exactly a philosophy that should be accepted globally. Though it wouldn’t be the end of the world (figuratively) if it were accepted globally (literally)). But the movie seems structured, save for the closing minute and start of the closing credits, to do the old bait-and-switch on us. We think Bingham is cool, but then we see him as totally alone, and the movie invites us to, I don’t know, feel sorry for him or something. Hug our companion in the theater tightly (“Chocolate Mousse, I’ll never forget you!”). Go home to our kids and say, “thank heavens I’m not a loser like Bingham.”

But if you’ve chosen a life like his, or you actually see his approach to life as having lots of merit, it feels like he sells out and abandons his core principles. And then the movie starts to grate with its pro-family snobbishness. Because even if I give the most positive reading possible to the movie–Bingham accepts that he is like he is, and that he will stay up in the air–the movie, through the use of empty mileage celebration, the “my family keeps me going montage,” and even Bingham’s letting go of his bag at the airport (is that a sublime release of ecstacy at all the possibilities available on the flight information board, or is it rather a pathetic release of sadness, as Bingham submits to his solitary fate?), tells the viewer that Bingham’s life should not be followed. It should not serve as a model.

If I don’t model my life on it to some extent, though, I’ll never finish my dissertation. So which is it?

The movie is rather clearly about the solitary nature of work, more than it is about family. Work in general is often solitary. In that sense, Up in the Air can be read in a similar vein as L’Emploi du temps or even Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle. In the former, Vincent is strapped to his family, and his unemployment is problematized by them. I get the sense that he’d be completely fine on his long drives alone, detached from them. In the latter, we see how a job like even playing on a team sport can be solitary and repetitive.

So I guess the final question is, do you, the viewer, feel sorry for Ryan Bingham? And if you say yes, is it because he’s “alone” at the end of the movie, or is it because he allowed himself to be “compromised”?

Tags: alienation, bill simmons, breeders, cinema, George Clooney, Jason Reitman, labor, writing, Zinedine Zidane