UP IN THE AIR has been aired for a little while now, and journalists and bloggers have been airing opinions about it ever since. The film is as airy as the title suggests. So it can’t take too long to deal with it.
Its exploitative character was astutely analyzed by Dennis Lim a couple of weeks ago in the light of the filmmaker’s record of ambiguous aesthetic-moral-political embedding of preferences, of “the long history of evasion and denial in American cinema when it comes to matters of work and the workplace”, and of mainstream critiques’ complacency about the film’s alleged depth.
The icky, insistent, indecent proposition that family should be workers’ unique preserve against the hardships inflicted on them by late capitalism does not deserve much more attention than has been granted already. What about the singles who lose their jobs? Should they blame themselves for having nothing at all? Since the stress on family values probably comes from the interview material gathered by the filmmaker and edited into the movie, it could of course be interesting to reflect on the difference between acknowledging that someone may legitimately find comfort in the thought of her family and her dog after loosing her job, and using this same person’s testimony in a Hollywood piece such as this one. (By the way, does Ross Douthat of the NYTimes actually propose that the true societal problem represented in the film is the choice made by some powerful women of juggling family and extra-marital affairs in a strategic manner that turns both into pleasures, in good masculine fashion, or do I misread this?)
But enough.
There’s one light touch of a wing in Bingham’s sky that somewhat strikes a chord, and may deserve a short note of a completely different sort. It is the last long panning of the camera above the clouds in the epilogue-like sequence. It is the final touch, and really, somehow, this is nicely done. It is a precise and perfect moment of closure where the film comes together at once and almost becomes something else. A few seconds that transform the wing of Bingham’s plane into the wing of an angel of death, and Bingham himself into the dark angel of capitalism, fallen and unrepentant. People will be visited, and touched, and killed again. With or without an angel, the spirit of the times hovers over and embodies itself in business professionals, flight attendants, planes. Money. Goodies. Casualties. No matter how revolting its incarnations, the Spirit continues its route, building and destroying, sparing and erasing, in and out of America. Would the film be lifted out of its repulsive commercial demagoguery, and the Bingham character be raised from distasteful embodiment of upper-class misery to the status of an allegory of capitalism, by the grace of these few redeeming seconds?
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