In Up in The Air, Ryan Bingham tells us that humans are like sharks–we must keep moving. The question raised by the film is, over what and through whom?
The film patiently prompts this question through topography, both as metaphor and metonym for social dislocations. Bingham is above everything, spatially and emotionally, and so is the majority of the film–detached, airy, nonchalant, humorous. For the most part it’s a romantic comedy portraying, if quirkily, those patterns that allow us to cope with the contradictions society requires. Even when Bingham is ‘on the ground’ literally, he’s still up in the air for most of the film, and so are the viewers. Except that there are moments that radically disrupt this equilibrium. When Bingham fires people, we’re jolted at the callousness of his actions—moreso because his care isn’t completely manufactured. Bingham isn’t inhuman, but is only partially aware of his job’s gravity. Its real significance is necessarily repressed. Strangely these moments aren’t as shocking as the moment Bingham finds out the truth about his lover, Alex. Here, the brutality of the Real inserts itself, the film’s veneer of fantasy is ruptured, our narrative expectations are obliterated. Notions of ‘reality’ and common-sense notions of being ‘grown-up’ are shown to be disturbing. Bingham, a man who gives people the send-off for a living, becomes a naif, a willing dupe.
Epiphanies don’t set in. Neither of the ‘planes’ on which characters function are desirable. Neither being ‘Up in The Air’ or returning one’s attention to ‘what really matters’ in life is satisfactory. No one in the film embraces this, but the audience is pressed to recognize it. The film is a little bit Brechtian that way. It’s no masterpiece, but Up in The Air functions as an insidious depiction of a society with irreconcilable contradictions.
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