Up in the Air

For those of you who haven’t seen, “Up in the Air”, skip this entry because I mention parts that might ruin the story for you. I normally wouldn’t update my blog about a movie, but this one had quite a lasting impression on me.

The protagonist of the story, Ryan Bigham, makes a living off of firing employees for large corporations across America. His existentialist life “Up in the air” has caused him to lose grasp of all relationships and any remote concept of home.

He uses an ongoing metaphor of a backpack that figuratively holds all of the possessions and people in your life. He alludes to the emotional burden of relationships as weight tugging on the backpack harder than anything else. In a way this is true, the closer a person is to you, the more burden they will impose on your life. Possessions have a set value and are often replaceable. Relationships, on the other hand, cannot be bought or replaced; only substituted. All of our relationships, the emotional ties, the memories, negotiations, commitments, the love, they’re all directed towards an irreplaceable person, and that is why we devote so much energy towards preserving the ones we have. I never really thought about life in that context, but it makes sense - the pain of true heartbreak will always outweigh the loss of a possession. Maybe relationships do weigh you down. I mean at times they’re obviously beneficial, but the more you open yourself up to someone, the harder it will be when you lose them.

Moreover, as the movie progresses, you are tricked into thinking its a love story between Ryan and a business women he meets while traveling, Anna. Upon the realization that he wants to start a life with her, he flies to Anna’s home in Chicago, and is greeted with the harsh reality that Anna's life already included a husband and kids. It scares me how honesty and trust can be so easily misattributed to people. One of the reasons why this movie affected me so much is because it touches upon the agonies of everyday happenings. It successfully portrays the inevitability of emotional turbulence in life. Regardless of how hard I work, or how much I think I know someone, I will never be able to escape the element of surprise. In a sense, Ryan’s philosophy was crudely correct, there’s just no one that you can truly trust in this world except for yourself, everyone and everything else collaboratively serve to weigh you down.

HIS SPEECH:

How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you're carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life... you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV... the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home... I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office... and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.