What makes Up in the Air (based on the book by Walter Kirn but considerably altered) resonant in our recessionary times are the real-person interviews, fitting right into the story but made up of recently laid-off workers who were given the chance by director Jason Reitman to say what they wish they had said at their own point of termination. (In the management-capitalism-speak of the movie, they are told that they job "is no longer available," as if the losing worker was expecting to purchase it, like an airline ticket or an a/v receiver.) And while the dialogue and scene changes are filled with wit that plays so well with Clooney in the lead -- his best performance since Syriana and much more of a play on his iconic charm -- the romance and the comedy are leavened with the pain that's happening on our nation's Main Streets (or Main Corporate Parks), and tinged with loneliness that follows you out of the theater.
The big theme of Up in the Air is actually proximity, an exploration of the choices we make as to how close we want to be with family, friends, lovers, as well as the ways in which both globalism and technology are collapsing distances which leaves us with a surfeit of proximity and a deficit of human warmth.
On one hand, Clooney is the perfect expression of his firm, which brings life-changing (often ruining) decisions made in the corner office by your cubicle to you from halfway across the country. The movie sides with Clooney's in-person approach against Kendrick's T-1 firings plan, but a step back and there's a cost anyway, to society and, in a certain way, to Clooney himself. He's inured himself to rich human emotion, distanced from his sister and her family, tripped up by his own inexperience when he actually tries to reach for real emotional closeness, a man who thinks his home is the network of modern airports and airplanes since his own home is barely a shoebox.
This is a modern movie where critical decisions are revealed by Blackberry Messenger and no one looks back. Where clothes are kept on open steel kitchen shelves for easy packing and survival skills include knowing which line to choose at TSA. Where major corporate moves are abstracted into the ether by contract and boarding pass.
While the movie leaves it up to us to come up with our own solutions, there is one moment where Clooney asks a firee to question why he dropped his dream career to pursue a corporate one, and proffers that he should return to that vocational path in order to earn back his own self-respect and that of his kids. Is that a glib feint on the part of the movie, the Hollywood idea that if you follow your dream, you'll be better for it in the end?
I have no idea the number of Americans who lost their job or their business in this recession that were indeed following that dream -- the bakery or graphics company or auto dealership that went out of business as the result of this year's round of nightmarish cutbacks, but I can't help wondering if there's not a new/old community-based economy on the way, or if that might not be the only solution. Cut the cable but keep the Web service, remove the main house phone line but keep the family cellphone plan, give the quick-service restaurants a run for their money.
Is there some way our new connectivity and recession-honed consciousness can lead to a new (Middle) American societal rebirth? Are the ruralpolitans signaling hope for the future?
Or are we just waiting for the next wave of the baton from our corporate overlords?
4 comments:
The overwhelming electoral victory of Obama combined with the impending defeat of the issue he ran on -- the very basic and universally accepted (in civilized countries, I mean) idea that healthcare should be available at prices which don't bankrupt the patient -- should finally help people understand that Corporate America has won, finally and completely. "Following your dream," or the idea of a "community-based economy," or in fact "community" at all, are just fanciful notions which have no meaning here any more.
If you're reading this, you should understand: you don't mean shit in this country. You are only valuable to the people who own this country as a provider of two things: your consumption dollars, which buy the crap corporate America makes and then browbeats you into buying, and your tax dollars, which are taken in ever-increasing percentages to fund the things that corporate America wants funded. If you can't provide these things, they'd just as soon you were dead.
Bleak, Anony-dude!
I'm renewing my passport as we speak.
Walter KIRN, Baby, not Kim. But great post. Gotta see the flick.
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