Up in the Air

I am a huge movie fan, yet I’ll freely admit that there are few movies that have truly changed my life. For instance, I grew up in a somewhat conservative household, and I thought of gays as bad people. I remember that I took piano lessons when I was a kid from a man who my parents mentioned in passing was gay, which really shook me up. I quit piano lessons shortly thereafter, in part due to my fear that I was in danger of being molested sitting on a bench alone in a room with a gay man. Then when I was a freshman in high school, a friend and I went to see Philadelphia, which really humanized homosexuals for me. Tom Hanks made me see a gay man as a person deserving of respect and fair treatment, an ordinary human being rather than a monster. But that movie is one of the rare instances of a film that challenged my views on the world and really shook me up.

One of the few recent films to do help change my thinking like that is Up in the Air. I saw it originally in the theater, and though I loved it immediately and felt it was the standout film of that year (and it’s still one of my favorite movies of the past several years), it also really depressed me and left me feeling down for a couple weeks. The reason this movie shook me up so much is because I related strongly to the main character, Ryan Bingham (played by George Clooney in a phenomenal performance), a man who has virtually no ties to the world around him, who lives distanced from other people, who is alone in any crowd, and who likes his existence exactly as it is. Or at least he likes it when the film begins. As with many great stories, Up in the Air is about a character in the process of changing, and during the story, Ryan realizes how much is lacking in his life. He comes to appreciate that relationships are what truly give life meaning.

I imagine this simple message is one that most people will find obvious, and of course it is. The movie unfolds in many ways as one might expect. This solitary man starts to fall for a woman he meets on the road. He is challenged in his philosophy of isolationism by a young colleague, and reconnects with his distanced family through a wedding in which the groom has cold feet. Yet despite those basic, somewhat predictable plot turns, the movie holds surprises. It feels fresh and real in its humor. The specific setup—a man whose job is to travel the country firing people—is one I’ve never seen in another story. The performances are strong across the board. And the ending manages to avoid the obvious. In fact, what struck me the most when I first watched the movie was how perfect the ending is. As it got closer, I worried that there would be a pat ending that would feel forced, and then the movie stunned me by ducking away at the last moment from what would have been a clichéd, trite, romantic-comedy ending, and instead had Ryan’s story unfold in what struck me as the most truthful way possible. It was beautiful and resonant in the way that great art is, but it was also enough to send me into a blue mood for days.

Again, the message of the film might seem fairly obvious, but it was a message that hit me hard. I spent much of my young adulthood cultivating connections about as well as Ryan Bingham did. I didn’t have a career like his that sent me traveling a majority of the time, from the time I finished college, I moved about every two years, and not just to a new apartment or to a city across the state. I moved from one corner of the country to another. Of course, when one only lives in a place for a couple years at a time, one does not develop strong relationships. But by the time I reached my thirties, I was beginning to reevaluate where I stood in life. I looked at those around me who seemed the happiest, and I saw strong connections and love that I lacked.

I think the desire to connect with other people is natural and inborn in most people, but somehow it was something that I struggled with and only came to understand much later. So when I saw Up in the Air, I saw myself: a man with no deep connections and, therefore, no sustenance for life. At one point in the film, a character asks about what the point of everything is, what it all means. And the only answer is simply that the happiest moments in life are those moments that are shared with others. As I mentioned before, that may seem obvious to most people, but it was a conclusion I had been coming to slowly over a period of years.

Now, there are certainly differences between me and Ryan Bingham. I’m not nearly as handsome and successful, for one thing. And I’m younger. And I have a far better relationship with my family. Truly, I am probably closer with my family than most people are with theirs, and they are what have sustained me emotionally throughout my life. But in key ways, I resonated with Clooney’s character.

After the film, I continued to think about what really matters in life and reached a conclusion I had been approaching for a long time, and it’s the same conclusion that Ryan Bingham reaches. Within months of seeing Up in the Air, I began trying to cultivate a relationship for myself in the hope that I might be able to achieve the kind of happiness I see in those who have deep connections. And I even began dating more seriously than I ever had before. Up to that point in my life, my longest dating relationship had lasted about two months. But now, my new longest relationship was close to a year. That relationship didn’t ultimately work out because we were very different people and not a great fit for each other in some key ways, but it did give me a taste for the connection that I long for and increased my desire to experience the love that I see in others.

Although it seems a bit strange to say it, the movie Up in the Air really may have changed my life. I’m not sure whether the nearly year-long relationship I recently had would have happened had I not seen this movie. I’m not sure that I would believe that maybe I will find connection someday had I not seen it. In the short term, it made me depressed, but in the long term, it acted as a catalyst for me to begin changing some of the ways I approach my life. And to have such power makes it a rare work of art, indeed.

The Social Network

I recently watched two films with plots centered on Facebook: The Social Network and Catfish. These two movies are certainly of our current time. They tell about the world as it is today. I was planning on writing one post about both films, but once I started, I realized I had too many thoughts bouncing around my head about The Social Network, so Catfish will have to wait. And even as I finish this post, I realize I have only scratched the surface of what I could say about The Social Network. I guess this is why I love movies so much. The great ones get my mind spinning.

It is interesting to think about how a movie that is so much about the present will hold up in the future. The Social Network was a frontrunner for the best picture Oscar this past year, which isn’t necessarily an indicator of a film’s lasting artistic merit, but I think The Social Network will still be recognized as a great film years from now.

When I saw it in the theater last fall, I thought it was gripping, which isn’t the adjective you might expect about a movie that is made up of scenes of deposition rooms and scenes of guys sitting at computers. But this movie absolutely holds up as entertainment. The script is tight, the dialogue buzzes with energy, the performances are successful, the direction and cinematography never left me bored. Just across the board, this was first rate. But when I watched it a second time a couple days ago and stopped to think more about the film as an artifact of our age and how it fits with other films and stories of other times, that is when the movie really stands out to me as a major achievement of the art form.

The movie that The Social Network most reminds me of is Citizen Kane. Both are stories about a man’s rise to wealth and prominence as the head of a major media outlet told through the testimony of those who knew him. In the case of Citizen Kane, the testimony comes from interviews conducted after Kane’s death while in The Social Network, the interviews are legal depositions of those who are suing Mark Zuckerberg. One of the big differences, of course, is that Kane dies at the beginning of the film and Zuckerberg is alive throughout. Furthermore, Kane lives a whole life, which we see from childhood through death, but we only see a period of a few years in Zuckerberg’s young life. The other major difference is certainly the medium that these two men work in. Kane was a newspaper tycoon; Zuckerberg is the founder of Facebook. When I sift through all of these differences, I come to a conclusion: with the change in technology, the pace of life has altered.

Back when newspapers were a major influence on the world, the traditional story of a “great man” was the story of years, decades, an entire life. Now that newspapers are out of date as soon as they are printed and we rely on instant information constantly uploading on screens in front of us, the “great man” story takes place within the period of a few years. The pace of our lives has accelerated.

There is a term, which I have heard attributed to Hitchcock: the MacGuffin. This is the thing that sets a plot in motion. It’s the Maltese Falcon that everybody wants to possess, the bomb that the hero and villain both want to control. Citizen Kane has Rosebud at its center. The Social Network has Facebook itself and the billions of dollars generated from Facebook, but another possible view The Social Network’s MacGuffin is the girl who dumps Zuckerberg in the opening scene. She represents his hopes and dreams. At the heart of his story is a lonely guy who wants to get a girl to notice him. He wants friends, acceptance. He wants to be important and recognized. He wants comfort. In these ways, he is very much like Kane.

But here’s where the aspect of life moving at an accelerated pace becomes very interesting. Kane was about an entire life from birth to death. The Social Network is about a young man in his early twenties. Kane was on his deathbed full of regret, whispering “Rosebud.” The Social Network ends with Zuckerberg reflecting back on what he has lost. It was too late for Kane to change, but Mark Zuckerberg is not yet thirty. In this way, I see The Social Network as a much more hopeful film. Zuckerberg doesn’t have to die with regret. He still has the possibility open of truly becoming a great man.