I just saw the movie, Up in the Air, with George Clooney, directed by Jason Reitman, a Canadian. It is an extremely well crafted movie, and very enjoyable, with some very clever and funny lines. My only problem with it, was a sign of its flawless execution, for it was a cold movie, with a bit of a documentary feel – as befits its story-line and main character.
I suspect that it won’t be a movie (like Michael Clayton) that I will watch over and over… I think MC has one of the best screenplays ever. I love Tom Wilkinson’s ‘bread’ speech.
Yet, I also suspect that Reitman’s Up in the Air will go down in cinematic history as a classic because it captures the moment perfectly, and that it not easy to do in a time of rapid change.
Due to the new technologies we live very different lives from people 100, 50, even 20 years ago.
People in The Tighsolas Era (1908-1913)were also experiencing a paradigm shift, as they say.
Flo and Edie, who loved to watch the TV show Gunsmoke in their later years, saw more change in their lifetime than any who came before.
In 1908, when our Tighsolas story unfolds, airplanes, or aeroplanes were just getting off the ground and the auto was becoming a desired item among average middle class men.
Motion pictures were just becoming popular and the theatre industry was worrried about its survival. The ‘cheap’ seats were going unfilled.
Talking Machines (victrolas) were bringing music into the home (which worried some mothers).
Home movies, in the form of various machines that projected images, were being pushed big time. But they never really took off, did they? At least until VCR’s were invented.
Marconi was just experimenting with his wireless signals. He felt that his invention would change the world order by empowering ‘the little guy’, just like what people hope for with the Internet.
But technology changes us in ways we can’t predict.
As my Tighsolas story reveals, in 1910 people were still very social. Your connections in 1910 were your lifeline: family, friends, camarades at the Masons, at church, were everything to you. A person without family and connections was a lost soul, unable to marry or find any work (hence, the ‘social evil’ of prostitution). As the family became more and more privatized over the decades, a person became less reliant on family and friends. Jobs and networking became what’s important.
The social safety net and good union contracts took up the slack.
But what happens in a ‘super-privatized’ environment like today, when jobs become scarce and work-security non-existant?
After all, we’ve given up, over the century, what we all used as back-up in time of trouble. Connections. We are, indeed, all up in the air….We do, in fact, rely on ONE PERSON, our mate, for security, support and help. Wow, scary. And if you don’t have a mate, what do you have?
As I was discussing Up in the Air with my 23 year old son, who ‘wants to be free’ as they say, to do what he wants and go where he wants… I was reminded of something I heard on BBC Radio Four.
An interviewee was defending those obscenely overpaid Wall Street and Bond Street brokers (during ‘the downturn’) saying that ‘they give up everything to do their job. They never see their wives or their children.’ I found this line of thought rather lame: so being a lousy husband and father, a robot of a kind, is justification for making huge amounts of money -even when you’ve failed miserably at this job.
Up in the Air is about just this kind of person, I think, except Clooney’s character is One Up on the Wall Street types, for whom money is the be all and end all. He actually has some human contact, although only with human beings he is firing, people he never sees or hears about again. I guess that is the central irony of the cautionary tale.
I should think about this and write a better essay.
