Up In The Air

You never know what you have until you lose it, especially your job. Perhaps that’s the underlying message of a film I recently saw.

“Up In The Air,” starring George Clooney, is a well-crafted, thought-provoking story of a man whose profession it is to be the bearer of bad news, delivering those bland words that carry such weight and meaning to the recipient: “We’re going to have to let you go.”

Spoiler Alert: If you haven't seen this film and intend to, you may not want to keep reading.
 
Ryan Bingham (Clooney) is the hired gun that casually goes about his business as the star executioner from “CTC” (Career Transition Counseling), always in transit to the site of the next lay-offs.

Having borne the task myself of letting people go, I can attest to its unpleasantness. It’s understandable, then, that a company might want to hire an outside firm to do its dirty work. I cannot say whether such firms actually exist. And I’m not sure where you would go to find such a service. But for the sake of the story line, let’s assume they’re out there, thriving in today’s environment of 9.9 percent unemployment.

Indeed, Craig Gregory, president of the fictitious CTC is excited. “The economic downturn has created a wonderful opportunity for the firm,” he announces at a staff meeting.

The film offers unsurprising glimpses into the pain and loss that people feel when their livelihoods are taken from them. Their experiences are made much worse because they happen in face-to-face meetings with this hard-hearted man who isn’t their boss, who they’d never laid eyes on before, and will likely never see again.

It’s only later that we come to realize that Bingham in fact has a humane side; that he truly does understand and empathize with his victims, even if his prepared patter betrays a hard-shelled, unfeeling approach to his job. His new partner, Natalie, a self-assured young college graduate, doesn’t sense his empathy through his apparently canned spiel.

It’s only later when an employee is laid off and threatens suicide that the young assistant is taken off her stride. And when they learn the suicide threat has been acted on, she quits, unable to bear the real life pain that her work has come to represent.

Bingham, too, is affected by the suicide, but more so by his gradual realization of the larger picture of his chosen field. The film’s title has both literal and figurative meanings. The newly unemployed find themselves up in the air, untethered to the reality of the jobs that had defined their lives.

Also, “up in the air” quite literally describes Bingham’s life of being always on the road, living in the fast lane, flying between assignments, racking up frequent flyer miles toward his nirvana of 10 million miles. Bingham blandly observes, “Last year I spent 322 days on the road, which meant I spent 43 miserable days at home” in Omaha.

It’s toward the end that we begin to understand that the haughty, self-confident central character is himself very much up in the air about everything: his life, his career, his estranged family, and his torrid, cynical affair with Alex, another road warrior.

Bingham comes to see the hollowness of his quest for the supreme 10 million mile club when he finally achieves it. He knows it’s a metaphor for his life. As they celebrate mid-flight, the pilot asks where he’s from. “Here,” he sadly replies, nodding to the airplane.

In the course of the story, we also get a realistic look at the normal human reactions to the news of losing one’s job. Tears, anger, disbelief, and argumentativeness: It’s all there. As Bingham says, “We’re here to make limbo tolerable.”

This is an allegorical tale of the conflict between the romantic fantasy of air travel and fancy hotels, versus the reality of delays and lost luggage, set in parallel to the conflict between the ideal of a fulfilling career and the very real possibility of job loss.

Bingham’s words seek to console the jobless clients, to assure them that this might be the break they were looking for, that they were stuck in a rut. He tells one older man unconvincingly that it might be his chance to become a chef, to fulfill that dream he once had.

In the end, it’s a depressing tale, especially in the context of today’s uncertainties around employment and job securities. People today are happy to be able to take home a paycheck. Few can afford to bemoan their philosophical misgivings at the stress and drudgery.

Many fantasize about what they’d rather be doing. We look enviously on those who had the youthful forethought, wisdom, courage and drive to aim for and stick to a long-term career goal. They are the ones now comfortably ensconced in early retirement – no doubt traveling at leisure on the same planes as the road warriors like Bingham that continue their Sisyphean haunting of the skies.