Global Cooling

11:18pm Monday, 25th January 2010

MOVIES Mark A Hadley

Up in the Air RATING: M
The world is suffering from global cooling. It’s not as high profile as global warming – in fact, some people might deny its significance altogether. However the new film Up In The Air is certain to make viewers rethink its power to ruin their lives.
Up In The Air is a travel story about the distances developing between people, the global cooling of relationships. George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a corporate hatchet man, a professional ‘firer’. The firm he works for specializes in providing ‘down-sizing solutions’ for companies that need to lay off staff. Bingham’s job keeps him airborne so often that he has made an art form out of navigating terminals and accruing benefits. As a consequence his real life has become as distant to him as the ground beneath his Boeing.
Bingham’s apartment is less comfortable than his hotel rooms, his family less significant than his colleagues. More importantly, though, he has become a past master at communicating with vulnerable people without allowing it to affect him personally. He explains the sum total of their work to his young apprentice, played by Anna Kendrick:
“This is what we do. We take people at their most fragile and we set them adrift.”
A recent graduate from the School of Redundancy, I could appreciate Up In The Air’s acid critique of the vacuous self-help statements offered to people who have had their feet swept out from under them. In his spare time Bingham works as a motivational speaker, attempting to get other people to adopt his complication-free philosophy. He asks people to imagine their lives as a backpack crammed full of an assortment of possessions that are ultimately weighing them down. In earnest, Anthony-Robbins style Bingham then suggests that the people we know can be evaluated in the same way:
“Your relationships are the heaviest components of your life. You don’t need to carry that weight. The slower we move, the faster we die. We are not swans. We are sharks.”
However Bingham’s world of sharks bites back. Clooney’s character faces his own crisis when his company discovers that a woman who he had begun to care about was only playing by his rules. In the process of saving the wedding of a sister he barely knows, he delivers the following advice to her doubting groom:
“We all end up in the same place—there is no point. But if you think about it, your favourite memories of your life, were you alone? Life is better with company. Everyone needs a co-pilot.”
Hollywood is guilty of many sins, but one thing to its credit is that it often reminds us of a truth writ large in the Bible: “It is not good for man to be alone”. Bingham, whose lifetime goal is to achieve 10 million frequent flyer miles, is something of an unreal figure. But he exists to make a point: he demonstrates where detachment, at a personal, professional and global level, will take us. The title Up In The Air alludes to Bingham’s uncertain commitment to anything but his own immediate comfort. It’s exactly at this point that global cooling meets global warming.
The fundamental cause of soaring global temperatures is not scientific but relational. Since the Garden of Eden we have been cooling off towards God and each other, and the less we care about our neighbour, the less likely we are to be concerned about how our behaviour effects the present world
and the future generations who will live in it. Global warming, and many of the social and ecological disasters, owe their very existence to countries, communities and individuals
valuing their own rights above the rest of humanity, and the responsibilities God has given us. Recent crises like the Victorian bushfires have led to a limited recovery of what it means to belong to a community, but our fractured marriages, inward-facing architecture, record personal debt and arms-length communication argue that self-centred thinking is alive and well.
Up in the Air however keeps its focus on the damage selfishness does at ground level. The realisation that detachment ultimately leads to isolation comes too late to save Bingham, and the viewer is left with a profound understanding of what it means to be successful but alone. It is a bitter-sweet story that rejects the zeitgeist that society’s most important unit is the individual. Up In The Air reminds us we are relational beings and to be deliberately, comfortably detached is to be somewhat less than what God created us to be.

Picture: George Clooney in Up in the Air

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Global Cooling