If you have not seen the movie, Up In the Air, you can stop reading now. I would not want to ruin that experience for you. Fair warning, I'm going to give away at least one crucial surprise in a movie which contains significant surprises, which does not offer up any of the typical Hollywood solutions or Hollywood moments and which is certainly the best I've seen in years.
But this is not about the movie so much as about what it says about the choices we make. Like many rich acts of fiction, this story reveals more truth than a documentary, with all the constraints imposed by efforts to document "facts" and truth impose.
Ryan Bingham leads the perfect life, a dream life, in a sense an Ayn Rand life, lived for himself, divorced from any responsibility for others, from the burden of having to do things for others, including, as he lists those burdens, the burdens of obligations to blood relatives, a spouse, children. He is free like a bird, freer actually than most birds, who do after all tend to fly in flocks, or at least to raise young.
The ecstatic thrills of this life are gradually introduced as the initial credits and titles roll, and you are among those heavenly clouds, looking down on vast landscapes of the gorgeous North American continent, with its fascinating plowed fields, wild streams, lakes, coastlines and rivers. Who has not fantasized about being able to take wing and see all this, and to swoop down whenever you see something really attractive?
This is Ryan's life, and the only catch is when he swoops down it is to kill. He is a bird of prey, doing the killing, relentlessly, remorselessly, although not without sensitivity and inclination to make the best of a terrible act. He actually works harder than he has to--in one case he reads the file on a man who always wanted to be a gourmet cook and is now being fired from a job which really never inspired him, and despite his desperate fall, Ryan extends to him a branch from the crevasse, which may or may not support his weight, but it helps both of them get past the moment.
Ryan is as ruthless as any hired gunslinger, executing his quarry without any hesitation. He reminds me of the hired killers in McCabe in Mrs. Miller who arrive to execute McCabe and McCabe wants to negotiate and the killer says, "I'm not here to negotiate. I'm here to kill you." How different is this attitude from what Lieutenant Spiers says in Band of Brothers, "You have to killl without pity, without remorse. All war depends on it" ?
Ryan is not completely amoral. He recoils from the even more heartless but more efficient and less expensive alternative to firing people in person. When a young comer suggests you can fire people over the internet, using a video, and save on the cost of flying the hit men out to personally deliver the news. In Dylan's words, "The executioner's face is always well hidden." But not in Ryan's world, where he offers precisely the opposite: What his company sells is the face. The act of firing an employee can be so wrenching and emotionally draining managers shrink from the task and being cowards and gutless, they hire Ryan to do the dirty work. Ryan has nothing but contempt for these spineless bosses, but he has some sympathy for his quarry. How different is his ritual from that of Chingachgook in the wonderful Daniel Day Lewis version of Last of the Mohicans who, just before delivering the coup de grace to the deer he has brought to the ground, "I am sorry to have to kill you. You have run well through the woods and you are strong and worthy. But I have to eat"?
But, as Ryan observes during one of his paid inspirational talks, human beings are more like sharks than nesting birds, they have to keep moving or they die. So Ryan keeps moving and like most extremists, he has taken his philosophy to its logical conclusion. He owns no car, no home, no condo. He lives in a rented room without pictures on the walls, without much of anything. The twenty odd days he spends at "home" in Omaha in this barren place are the worst of his year. He is happy only at airports, in airplanes, hotels, rented cars.
He has dispensed with "stuff." His wonderful canned speech with it's knapsack prop, presents his philosphy better than we at first understand. He really means it. All that stuff, the physical and the familial and the emotional weighs one down. It is, ultimately a burden. I could not help but think of George Carlin's bitter routine about "stuff." Carlin developed this particular rant during his grumpy old man period, toward the end of his life. He was railing against the soul damaging consumer economy, the whole life of shopping to acquire things we already have, more shoes, more shirts, more gizmos and then to acquire a place to keep them. But Ryan has gone beyond anything Carlin imagined.
Ryan wants no people, beyond the temporary connection of a fling in the hotel room with an attractive woman. He wants no dogs (and Carlin loved dogs) because dogs are a huge burden. For him burdens are suffocating. He is the ultimate in Live Free or Die. He lives truly "Off the Grid," far more than those non taxpayers who want to generate their own electricity and do their own plumbing so as not to have to be connected to the rest of humanity, to a country which might tax them for providing an infrastructure. The off the grid types in Idaho have a home base, and own stuff and have families. They just don't want to be connected to a larger world. Ryan doesn't want connection even to the smallest unit, to a family.
What makes him so appealing is he is not heartless. He tries to be kind when it costs him nothing. He tries to save his sister's marriage. Ironically, of course, his pitch is every man is happier if he has a co pilot. Not that he believes this, of course, at least not as he is saying it. But his little talk to the hesitant bridegroom is one of those delightful suprises, when he asks, "Think of the happiest moments of your life? Were they what happened when you were alone?" Coming from Ryan, that's quite a question. Here is a man who has absented himself from his only living relatives. Who lives in an apartment so alone he knows only one neighbor, a woman he obviously bedded and then left the next day on a flight.
Ryan does not hate people, he simply does not want the burden of people.
But things begin to change for Ryan and that change is brought to him by two women. The younger woman makes him face the fact he is getting older and some day he's not going to be able to count on the warm body in the hotel bed because he won't be attractive enough. He deflates her callow idea of what life should include in terms of marriage, committment and others. But she gets off a volley of her own, calling him an eternal adolescent who cannot grow up because he cannot commit to anyone but himself.
At that moment I thought of Terry Rodgers, the artist. Go google Terry Rodgers and look at those gorgeous, erotic, dreamlike paintings of young, hard bodied, rich, revelers. The scenes are riveting, mesmerizing visions of a completely erotic life, and the people although physically wrapped up in one another are emotionally remote, untouched. The effect, at first is sexually arousing, but after a few minutes of looking at one of his paintings one gets more and more depressed. Entering a Terry Rodgers painting is a very bleak and depressing experience. My first response was a little buzz running through my brain, "These are the hollow men." I don't know where that came from. Is that T.S. Eliot? Auden? I don't know, but I knew that line just welled up, looking at those paintings.
I don't know whether or not Terry Rodgers lived that life and got past it, or is still living the life of a Ryan Bingham. But his paintings are the world of Ryan Bingham on the wall.
Another one of the wonderful surprises in Up In the Air occurs when the young Cornell grad pries out of him his great goal in life: To achieve the exalted status of a 10 million mile flyer status. What connects Ryan to his older paramour, initially, is a shared love for the empty perks of frequent flyers and travelers, the Admiral lounge memberships, where they can sit in plush leather chairs, the upgrades to bigger rental cards, the better hotel rooms and all the toys and bright shiney things airlines, rental car companies tangle as if they were something really desirable when in fact most people would rather be home in their own chairs, driving their own cars, surrounded by people in whom they actually have an abiding interest.
Ryan is someone I know. As Pogo once said, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Or words to that effect. I did not want kids. I did not want a dog. I was free and happy to be free and shuttered whenever one of my friends got married and I felt very sorry for both of the people who had been suckered into all that. But kids, now there is the ultimate burden.
Funny thing happened, though. Kids were a burden, but they were the best thing that ever happened to me.
My British secretary put it as perfectly as it could be put, in her perfect Oxford vowels, "Children? Oh, yes you must do children. They enrich life." She also had a dog. The burdens are burdens, but without them, life is impoverished. She learned something at Oxford.
Eventually, this is what Ryan learns. He gets his fabulous metal card, presented by the captain of the ship and he cannot remember what it was that was so important about it. By the time he gets the card, he has already learned from the one woman who really captivated him that he was simply what she told him all along he was, an escape, an escape for her from the routine of family life, a life she actually felt enriched by and would protect and certainly prefer to romps in hotel rooms with him. He was a parenthesis, not a main clause. He thought he was special to her. And he was, as any splash of color is to an otherwise muted painting. But it's all the muted shades that gives the bright color its effect.
And while this woman was scrupulously honest with Ryan, she lied about one thing. She tells him she is simply Ryan with a vagina, but she was far from this. Ryan lives a life which for all its emptiness is scrupulously honest. He has made no commitments and he has broken no promises. He accepts the loss of paintings on the wall, and he says he can do without that sort of pleasure and enrichment to keep his backpack light. The woman has not. She leads a double life. Ryan leads a fanatically single life.
If this woman commits a foul, it is when she accepts Ryan's invitation to go to his sister's wedding. She tacitly accepts the proposition Ryan may be more than a hotel room sensation. She provides him with reason to believe he might find a different life with her. If she is simply a female Ryan, he has every right to expect she might come to the same enlightenment he has, and he can bring her to a different place in life.
But she is already in a different place and that she has not shared with him. That is her lie.
She has a wonderful scene, which was probably not written by a woman, unfortunately, in which she tells the younger woman what a woman can hope for in a man. Someone who makes more money than you do, the most important thing. Other non essentials, but nice upgrades: a nice smile, scalp hair. So she tells Ryan, who is listening, she is just Ryan with a vagina. But she has another life she's not talking about which, in a sense makes her the villain in a film without villains. She is not mean spirited or intentionally venal or even willfully wrong; she simply commits a sin of omission.
And once Ryan learns this, his world starts to disentegrate. All along, I was looking for the typical Hollywood comeupance--Ryan would one day get the same thing he gave others. He would learn how terrible being fired is. They were setting that up with the heartless video firing scheme.
But no, the film makers were going after a more devastating blow for Ryan. He can keep his job, and his flying and his 10 million mile card and all the things he has come to value, but he will find them worthless. Like King Midas, he will find the gold is not the point.
Now what does this have to do with 9/11?
Those maniacs used airplanes.
You may say, yes and they would have used an atomic bomb if they could get their hairy hands on one. Airplanes were just what was available. But, in some existential sense, which those twisted terrorists may or may not have understood, the six thousand airplanes in the air over American skies daily are what really makes this country what it is.
You don't see those airplanes, are only rarely even conscious of them. They are just forms in the sky. If you have a life which does not require travel, they may seem irrelevant to every day life. But they are what make us different from the vast seething underdeveloped populations on the planet and they are what makes our generation different from our parents. It's the energy in the airplane which drives this country, its economy, its psyche, its connectedness.
Your kid can go to school on the West Coast, in Nashville or in Boston, if you live in Washington, DC, it's all the same. It's a plane ride away. Once you get beyond a three hour car trip, you are going to get on an airplane and so California is as close to Washington,DC as Atlanta, Boston, or Chicago.
And you have to admire or at least be impressed by the energy. Go to the Seattle Airport at 4:30 AM and look around. The place is whirring. People are awake, dressed, pulling suitcases. Flight crews are assembled, getting of buses headed to their aircraft.
And the majesty of those great aluminum birds. They are commonplace, but they are what gets our juices flowing.
The British Empire was sustained by their ships. The American Empire, and the global empire of Western "advanced" economies are sustained, connected, driven and juiced by airplanes. If you were going to bring down the British empire, you needed to attack it's shipping. Bring down the modern global economy, bring down the airplane network.
Of course, the other target was the financial nerve center. But hitting the financial icon, the World Trade Center with airplanes, how obvious.
If you want to return to the fourteenth century, if you want to rekindle the crusades and bring east and west into mortal conflict, fly airplanes into Wall Street, or given how small a target the New York Stock Exchange is physically, go get the World Trade Center.
One reason it may be difficult to get people interested in reoccupying a couple of big towers is they would present such an easy target. The whole idea of the internet, as I understand its conception, was to scatter the targets so no one hit could disrupt communications. Spread those eggs out of a single basket into many.
I cannot imagine anyone has had the fortitude or interest to have read this far, but if you have, you know there is some value in watching movies. Once in a great while, people show the capacity to amaze.
For me, it has been Up In the Air. The economy of it's delivery is astonishing. The Wire delivers a different sort of enlightenment, but to really soak that message up, you need five seasons of shows and hours and hours of time. Up In the Air does its task in under two hours. It brings you from the greater economy down to the personal. It takes you from the skies and the eagle's eye view to the worm's eye view.
It shows us a glimpse of an answer to the question Jim Lehrer asked a number of pundits, none of whom had a clue. After 9/11, Lehrer kept asking, "Why do they hate us?" Watch Up in the Air and you'll see how "they" see us. Of course, you won't be able to see us exactly as they see us, because you are not warped by their peculiar psychopathology. But you'll see something different.
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