ESSAYS

UP IN THE AIR

by Sven Goyvaerts on Jason Reitman's Up In The Air (2009)

___________________________________________________________________

About one year ago I remember sitting inside the tiny cinema theatre of Plymouth Arts Centre, in the southwest of the UK. The ending credits of a film began to roll across the screen. Other members of the audience got up from their seats and made their way for the exit. All of a sudden, loneliness struck me like a ton of bricks. Not just any kind of loneliness, but one I seemed to have never experienced before. More than frightening, it felt strangely comforting as well. Above all, it felt real. The film I had seen was Up In The Air, directed by Jason Reitman, starring George Clooney.

Upon repeated viewing, I have begun to notice several themes in this film that resonate with elements in my own artistic practice. It is for this reason that I depart from this particular film in the first installment of what will become a series of essays tied to my research Documenting Durational Live Performance Art Using Social Media.

Moving is living

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) fires people for a living. And he is very good at it. The company he works for is hired by bosses “who don't have the balls to sack their own employees”. Ryan's job requires a delicate kind of sensitivity. As he describes it:

“We are here to make limbo tolerable. To ferry wounded souls across the river of dread to a point where hope is dimly visible. And then to stop the boat, shove them into the water and make them swim.”

On flights from one city to the other, Ryan scribbles away at his lecture presentation What's In Your Backpack?, “motivational type stuff” aimed at worn-out business travelers, organized in anonymous conference rooms across the country. “How much does your life weigh?” Ryan asks. Our heap of material possessions is what concerns him. Everything from the smallest souvenir we have stowed away in some shoebox to the actual apartment we inhabit packs together to form a massive anchor, restraining our options in daily life. But “make no mistake, moving is living,” he argues.

The traveling life of Ryan Bingham is formatted almost every step of the way. His meticulous corporate persona is a fine selection of company brands. When Ryan notices that car rental agency Hertz has provided him with a Dodge Stratus for the road, his personal assistant needs to assure him that they were all out of full-sized Sedans. Ryan knows he should get better treatment, with his #1 Gold Club status. Companies deserve Ryan's loyalty. More than anything, Ryan is looking forward to meet the chief pilot of American Airlines – a perk which is granted to him the moment he will hit his 10 million frequent flyer miles.

Ryan's lifestyle reflects the artistic research I have been embarking on ever since 2009. Somewhat like a virtual counterpart to Bingham's regional flights across the United States, I too have been skipping from one corporation to the other and loving it. As a thinking model for my research Documenting Durational Live Performance Art Using Social Media I developed what I began calling the 'social media vortex':

From June 2009 until June 2010 I conducted the One Year Life Performance 2.0 project, eager to find out what the limits were to documenting my life and sharing it over the web. Through a series of durational online performative actions, I sought to ask myself: who am I? I felt compelled to discover my identity through these social media, as I tweeted every conscious action I performed over a period of months, uploaded a picture of everything I ate and drank onto Flickr, shared pictures of everyone I talked with face to face during the day over Facebook, etc.

In his introduction to Understanding Media, editor W. Terrence Gordon writes: “The metaphor for McLuhan's life and work is the sailor / fisherman in Edgar Allan Poe's A Descent into the Maelstrom. Beginning in 1946, McLuhan referred repeatedly to the story of the man who survived the maelstrom by learning from everything around him.”Flying from one medium to the next on this map of our virtual world has given me a clear purpose amidst the unrelenting information flow of online social media.

At the risk of stating the obvious, I propose to regard Ryan Bingham's plane traveling as a metaphor as well; for a man's desperate attempt at learning to appreciate the ever-changing living condition he finds himself in. Though not showing any signs of despair in the beginning of the film, clouds gather at the horizon in the next chapter.

Glocal

Company chief Craig Gregory (Jason Bateman) brings in his staff of road warriors back to headquarters for what he describes as a “real game-changer”. At a general meeting in the main office, Gregory introduces Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) to the team, a new employee with big plans for the company's future and a vision that can be summed up in one word: glocal. “Our global must become local,” as Keener puts it.With 23 people on the road for at least 250 days a year, travel expenses take an enormous bite out of the company's budget. Keener proposes an alternative: to fire people over the internet. “You can start the morning in Boston, stop in Dallas over lunch and finish the day in San Francisco, all for the price of a T1-line.”

Up In The Air unfolds itself as a parable for modern day technology. Now with the rest of the world at the edge of our fingertips, our sense of respectful human connection comes under threat. Why would we need to force people out of their jobs in a face-to-face conversation, while we might as well take care of business over longer distance?

Ryan is taken aback by Keener's proposal. For one thing, he won't be able to travel around anymore. Next to that, Ryan feels there is a dignity to how he performs his job, which is something he finds lacking in this new approach put forth by Keener. He barks at her: “You can set up an iChat, but you don't know how people think.”

Convinced by Ryan's arguments, chief Gregory orders him to take Keener on a travel across the country, to learn her the tricks of the trade, much against Ryan's will. A trip from one city to the next ensues, guided by Ryan and followed by Keener, leaving a trace of unemployed workers behind them.

Close to the halfway mark of the movie, morality strikes back at Keener, as she gets dumped by her boyfriend in the form of an SMS message. In a way, this may as well have been a voice-mail message, an email or a Facebook status update. Mediated notes of rejection have become a part of our vocabulary nowadays, or in the words of Henry Jenkins: “Our lives, relationships, memories, fantasies, desires also flow across media channels. Being a lover or a mommy or a teacher occurs on multiple platforms.”

Technology liberates us from that drama of having to witness or deal with a person collapsing straight in front of us, for better of worse. Michael Wesch, self-proclaimed digital ethnographer and professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, presents a mathematical equation in his 2009 lecture The Machine is (Changing) Us:

anonymity+physical distance+rare & ephemeral dialogue=hatred as public performance AND freedom to experience humanity

/ OR without fear or social anxiety

There are two sides to the coin here. Wesch argues that in today's society we still desire connection, but also feel that there is a constraint there. Online social media offer us this feeling of being able to connect without there being any constraint. But with this kind of freedom also comes great responsibility, or instead an agreed-upon negation thereof. For this we can return to Ryan's motto: What's in your backpack?

What's in your backpack?

Ryan's presentation, centered around the item of the backpack, starts off with a joke on how much personal property we carry around with us (or at least in the back of our minds) on an everyday basis. In the second part of his talk however, Ryan homes in on our interpersonal relationships. “Make no mistake,” Ryan says, “your relationships are the heaviest components in your life.”

“All those negotiations and arguments and secrets and compromises. You don't need to carry all that weight.”

Appalled by this philosophy, Keener confronts Ryan with his view on life, only to find out that Ryan has indeed no wish to marry or have kids, EVER.

As a surprise gift for his sister's marriage, Ryan is asked by his other sister to carry a cardboard cut-out of the engaged couple with him and snap pictures of the couple in front of landmarks across the United States, “kind of like that gnome in the French movie.” Ironically, the cardboard figure doesn't fit Ryan's hand luggage, leaving the loving faces of soon-to-be husband and wife peeping outside the edged of his bag.

Getting back to my own practice and research, the backpack has always been an important accessory to me. At one point, I began to make an inventory of all the itemsI had with me in the bag, but quickly gave up on it. In the next section of this essay, I will make another attempt at doing so.

Everybody needs a co-pilot

You are a parenthesis

Lounging in a bar in Dallas Fort Worth, Ryan spots Alex, a kindred spirit. Texting a message on her smartphone in one hand, she dangles a set of Maestro car keys from the other. A debate ensues between the both of them on the pros and cons of their respective car rental agencies and before they know it they are sitting side by side showing off their membership cards.

Up In The Air