Up in the Air

Up in the air and down to earth

The irony of watching ‘Up in the Air’ not long after I had set myself free of full-time employment was not lost on me. Having gone in the hope of watching anodyne rom-com (Oh, the promises of George Clooney!!) as a way of finding more suitable distraction for the mind than some obvious ones staring in the face, it was almost inevitable that the experience was likely to be more disappointing than distracting, analysis-provoking than anodyne. And so it was - if only because I had probably watched the film chasing the red herring and as opposed to the pink elephant in the storyline.
Up in the Air a supermodern film – to borrow French anthropologist Marc Auge’s term to describe those spaces and conditions the film is set in. The George Clooney character is a star employee of a company that gets hired by other companies to fire/downsize their personnel. His firm (and he by extension) are not responsible for the decision or indeed the scale of the downsizing, but for advising those who have been fired of the news and ‘make limbo comfortable’, as he puts it. Thus, the horror or the thrill of his job is not his to experience as his own. After all, he (or his colleagues) is there merely to convey the bad news someone else’s decision has brought into being, to someone whom he will never ever see again. His is a world of little or no responsibility, where decisions and consequences are always deferred, if not denied, making his life entirely derivative of the world of capital around him.
To borrow from Auge’s book its eponymous term, the film’s protagonist is entrenched in ‘non-place’, spending most of his waking and sleeping hours in spaces like airport lounges, aeroplanes, hotels, lobbies, bars, etc. Even the theatre of his work is not conducted in his own office but in a transitory space that is someone else’s, and with which he will only bear a momentary ephemeral relation. Leisure too is atomic and in fact, he is shown to party at an event neither he (nor the others with him) is invited to. Love, work and leisure are all experienced and partaken in at a remove, making attachment and its consequences the spine of the film.
The film begins by presenting us with the contradictory pulls of attachment for Clooney. He is not in a relationship (but perhaps has meaningless flings or affairs, the narrative seems to suggest). Yet, at the same time, he is completely devoted to the concept of fidelity – expressed through his obsessive relationship with airmiles, hotel cards, and other loyalty points. The graphite card status with American Airlines is what he states as his ultimate goal, and which he is very close to achieving as the film begins. Fidelity to work and its extensions, and non-relation to human beings then become the perfect pretext for the type of female characters the film then introduces.
The two women characters in the film are there to disrupt his bubble of non-place. Neither of them do so by taking up oppositional or confrontational positions. In fact, both in their own different ways are consonant, successful and at ease with this same life themselves. The Vera Farmiga character is presented as the romantic interest and as Clooney’s mirror image (‘Just think of me as someone who’s just like you, but with a vagina’), and whom he meets from time to time in these transitory and non-spaces. It is a meeting in a familial context (his sister’s wedding, with whom his relationship is at best thin) that occasions the moment of slippage for him – of sliding into a desire for transforming the connection to an attachment.
The other female character is the new kid on the block at work, and who is extremely competent and ambitious, if a neophyte. Whilst Farmiga provides a foil for his unmooring from non-place as a result of human attachment and the cycle of expectations it sets into play, the Anna Kendrick character exposes the chinks in his professional armour, when her proposal at work, if successful, could threaten the viability of Clooney’s own job. Thus for Clooney, the quandary Kendrick’s character brings implies that she is not only to be won over, but also tamed and reformed. It is no surprise therefore that the only successful human relationship that emerges in the film’s narrative is between Clooney and Kendrick.
The film proceeds to its denouement whereby Clooney finds himself in pursuit of the goods of attachment, only to find that human relationships are unattainable or a chimera. But this does not seem to be the central concern of the fim in some ways, having spent a greater part of its narrative landscape on how the threat to the existence of work is fought, negotiated and ultimately won over. In the film, human relations are fragile, duplicitous, or impossible, whereas work is the ultimate meaning-making, meaningful and precious relationship.
This then is Clooney’s real romance in the film. So, while he does not get the girl (much to thwart the rom-com hopefuls), he does win in romance. His failures in all other areas – family and romantic relationships, for example – provide a backdrop against which his non-embedded life is brought into an ever sharper relief. And like the proverbial hero, in the context of rampant job cuts and retrenchment, he alone is successful in staying true to his. In succeeding to keep his job, he does win his love interest in the end.
Up in the Air is a paean to work, to disembedded life, a celebration of deep alienation from the content of one’s work, all of which are incredibly zeitgeist. The subplots exist to strengthen this. Farmiga is exactly like him, but can only do so as a result of effecting a split – i.e. she is revealed to have a husband and children, something that comes as a shock to Clooney. This shock is as much about the unattainability of human relationships in this supermodern dystopia, as it is about the horror of knowing what he had come very close to doing (i.e. in stepping into such a split himself). He retreats swiftly and finds himself comforted by the innumerable possibilities and potentialities of an airport departure lounge, in the end. He is reunited with his disembedding. He is whole again.
So, I now must stop, and attend to my pile of unfinished work, in the hope that I too will feel a bit more complete, and a lot less bereft.