“You’re an escape from real life… a parentheses.”
-Alex Goran, “Up in the Air”
I finally saw “Up in the Air” last night, a movie that I previously endorsed, pre-release, as a film that would resonate strongly with my generation. Having now seen the entire movie, I can only reiterate my previous sentiments. “Up in the Air” is a poignant story that succeeds in striking up questions of what gives us meaning, what encapsulates excitement, and how we ought to approach a life filled with ambiguity and risk.
At several few key points in the film, the main characters grapple with whether the specific things we pursue with life with commitment– relationships, job, rootedness in a place– constrain or enable personal meaning and happiness.
In one especially relevant scene, Ryan (George Clooney) and Alex (Vera Farminga) comfort the younger Natalie (Anna Kendrick) after she is hearbroken from a text-message dumping by a long-term boyfriend. Over drinks, and in response to the question of whether he was “the one,” Natalie begins to chronicle what it is that would make her feel as though her life was fulfilled– corner office, children, and a husband who likes the outdoors, works a great finance job, and drives an SUV. When asked what her criterion were in a man, the older Alex responds by saying she is looking for someone who wants to have children, who has a great smile, who listens and cares for her– someone who is not an ‘asshole,’ to use her exact words. Natalie retorts that this feels a bit sad, and too much like settling.
In this moment, we find one of the most personally uncomfortable points of both the movie, and I would argue, of our own lives. Like Natalie, we often think we will find meaning in life through some glorified version of ourselves in it… the living out of a Garrison Keiler’s Lake Wobbigonian world “where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and the children are above average.” More to Natalie’s sentiment, a world where “I am strong, my spouse is good-looking, and my children are above-average.” It is THIS life that will give us meaning, and it it from such a place that we will finally find the holy grail of personal fulfillment. It is the hope of this potential world that keeps us pushing through the mundane, so long as we can convince ourselves that these are but stops along the way to greatness. Consider the following poem by David Slavitt (2006):
Each morning, as I confront my closet’s array,
I have to admit again that the life I lead
is hardly good enough: I have not been named
ambassador to Malta; I am not on the boardof any college or large corporation; I shall not
receive a major prize today and pose
for photographers. Those suits, the shirts, the ties
are ready, but I am not, and the shoes are shinedas they wait for different occasions than I imagined
on the tailor’s block, when I shopped for a dandified
future brighter than what I expect or deserve.
Even for weddings and funerals that require
a suit, I choose from the second best, reserving
that one for the dream into which I yet hope to awake.
On the other hand, Alex’s ‘settling’ story seems to suggest the potential of something a bit more modest, where life is not defined by the perfection of various dimension, but rather by finding some beauty in the ordinary (in wanting imperfect kids who are loved, a job one finds meaningful in some fashion or another, and in loving someone who likes to listen and finds us interesting).
<NOTE: Spoiler Alert>
But can we really take Alex’s articulated life philosophy at face value without wrestling with the fact that the story feels too tight, perhaps too idealized, and maybe more livable on paper than in reality. In one of the latter scenes of the film, we find out that Alex does have all those things– the ‘important job,’ a kind husband, the cute Chicago brownstown filled with laughing children– and yet, still pursues the escape of this life in her jet-setting relationship with Ryan. He was to her, a ‘parentheses’ in life, which provided a (route towards meaning and excitement) amidst the mundane of her husband, her kids and the life she lived at home. As an audience, we are left with the uncomfortable realization that what Alex outlines as meaningful to Natalie did not seem to provide her with enough meaning in reality.
And so, are Alex and Natalie really that different when we get down to it? One (Natalie) yearns for something to give her life meaning– a crafted dream ripped from the page of Restoration Hardware. Another (Alex) has what might seem meaningful from the outside, and yet she yearns for some escape, some parentheses to interject (meaning) into the everyday.
In his magisterial text “A Secular Age,” Charles Taylor begins to articulate and explore what it is that these characters might be missing. Drawing from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, Taylor articulates how the best poetry often captures the ‘inscape’ of a particulate thing– the deeper ‘oneness’ of an object or a life, the way in which it is located within some larger framework of meaning. As Taylor writes, such poetic approaches are needed because, ” our language has lost the power to Name things in their embedding in this deeper/ higher reality” (761). The film, in my eyes, is a profound articulation of our inability to ‘see’ the inscape of things, the inner beauty of the ugly, the preciousness of the mundane, and our failure to name such things as part of a ‘higher’ space/ framework of values.
While it is easy to love the beautiful— be that Natalie’s dreamed or Alex’s realized life of idealized job, model spouse, and perfectly individualized lifestyle– beauty alone is not inscape, as Hopkins outlines. In fact, identifying beauty alone as value might be a poor excuse for learning to find beauty in the everyday and thus engaging people and things in their broken reality. Ryan Bingham pursued shallow relationship because they were fun, because these people were beautiful. In his work, he could give an engaging motivational speech and still dash out the door before the motivation halts in the face of the inertia of the everyday. Alex Goran pursued Ryan Bingham because he provided an escape from what had become mundane about her family. Ryan made her feel desired, and provided her with comfort on the road away from her family and self-declared ‘real life.’And Natalie Keener could only see her life as having meaning once she found the right job/ husband/ kid/ fill in the blank. But were any of these characters really able to ‘name things in their embedding in a deeper/higher space”? At the very best, these moments were fleeting, and peripheral dimensions of their character. Maybe that is why, while partly turned off by these characters, in the end we cannot turn away. Their struggles are fundamentally our struggles, and we are not so far from the sentiments that prevented them from capturing and/or creating fragile meaning in life.
The canned-line used by Ryan and Natalie’s firm when firing an employee is that, “anyone who has ever built empires or changed the world has sat where you are sitting today.” Delivered well by the charming George Clooney, this line does make the fired feel better, if even for but a moment. It quells our troubled souls to think that we might yet be the ones to build up worlds which will be remembered far after we are gone. And yet, I can’t shake off the feeling that such advice is like throwing salt to the thirsty. Maybe what Ryan, Natalie, and Alex all needed to hear in their own sort of way, is that all of us already stand on something worth naming as an empire, even if formed by the dust of the earth and wrapped in the reality of imperfection.
