Back just before the turn of the millennium we were given, with Fight Club, an example of the disorientating and debilitating effects of air travel, for Edward Norton’s character it was the medium that took him further into his isolation. Then with the 9/11 attacks air travel tucked terror under its wings and we were presented with the plane as potential coffin, see Snakes on a Plane and United 93.Verily the care free days of air travel are a faded contrail in Hollywood’s skies and Frank Sinatra does really sound dated when he crops up on the iPod play list.
So, no surprise that Jason Reitman’s latest Up in the Air a film about a travelling ‘axe-man’ deals with the isolation and alienation of frequent flyers. Up in the Air starts of upbeat enough with the opening credits taking in super crisp aerial shots of the American city and landscape and this is coupled with a cover of Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land is Your Land’. Yes from a distance all looks fine and dandy. But the credits end with a plane touching down. Upon arrival in the film proper we meet Ryan Bingham, played by the ever suave George Clooney and as per usual on face value everything couldn’t be better in the world of a Cooney character. It’s by getting to know these characters that we learn of their emotional delicacies that is lie behind that winning smile with perfectly formed white teeth. Yet Reitman and Clooney, with the help of some swift editing that captures a poetic flow of calculated movements, introduce us to a character who seems to have their life so organised and controlled that they can moonwalk through it.
Bingham is a T-Rex of his chosen profession, he flies around the country arriving at some company or another in one location or another that’s outsourced the wielding axe of downsizing to his Omaha based company. Job done and off to the next company in the next city and so on. This is how Bingham lives: an itinerant staying in traveller hotels, clocking up air miles and of course with the present economic depression its boom time for those that make a living out of firing people. But flying is a huge overhead and a new age seems to be dawning in Bingham’s world where web cams and Skype enable the wielding of the redundancy axe from one fixed location. Bingham’s chosen lifestyle is in danger of extinction and that spells the demise of the personal touch that Bingham has mastered of ‘easing’ a person into the dark waters of redundancy. Not to mention that Bingham would be fixed to one location and with one foal swoop the lightness in his life would be gone: grounded.
But this sudden prospect of job transformation and the coincidental on the road romance that appears to be bearing fruit of deeper attraction and a yearning for loyalty brings about a self reappraisal of Bingham’s life. And this, it would seem is the real object of the film in highlighting a latent desire in a physically removed individual for companionship and some place to call home.
Mid-way through the film Bingham propositions that we are not ‘monogamous swans’ – meaning that we are destined to live and die alone. Too which we may ask ourselves, have we as western individuals evolved to a hyper state of individualisation and its downstream effects of isolation and lack of permanent emotional relationships? Guru Bingham believes this detached and visceral assessment of existence, but one gets the impression that his heart isn’t in this proposition.
The flight path of the second part of the film courses Bingham’s existential dilemma, how does one remain physically up in the air yet able to be emotionally grounded with a home that one looks forward to returning to. And the film answers this by suggesting that the choices are ours to make and formulate.
