Christian Ethics and the Movies
Business Ethics
Up in the Air (2009)
Reviewed by David A. Thomas, Prof. of Rhetoric, Emeritus, University of Richmond[i]
“We Appreciate Your Loyalty”—American Airlines Slogan.
Up in the Air is a profound tone poem on misplaced loyalties in the corporate world, and in marriage and grown-up sexual relationships as well. Disguised as a kind of midlife romantic comedy, starring one of America’s busiest, coolest, suavest, and cleverest leading men, George Clooney, Up in the Air neatly slices open the corrosion of the whole concept of loyalty as the term is used today. To mix a metaphor, the title of this story is about flying, but we are all surrounded by sharks.
The Story. Ryan Bingham is employed by an outsourcing company that sends him around the country as the hired “termination specialist” who fires people for big corporations during this period of widespread layoffs. He is good at what he does: he can “take people at their most vulnerable, and set them adrift,” preferring not to follow up on them afterwards because “nothing good can come of that.” He is fanatically loyal to American Airlines, whose motto stands as the epigraph above. He has amassed millions of frequent flyer miles in his job, looking forward to an almost impossible goal, a “number I have in mind but have not reached yet.”
The basic conflict arises when his employer makes a move towards grounding him, by streamlining the firing process through a teleconferencing innovation to be headed up by a fresh young Cornell University wunderkind straight out of grad school. In other words, he is about to be axed himself. Pointing out the legal pitfalls in firing loyal employees by impersonal call center contacts, Bingham manages to goad his boss into sending the young whippersnapper on the road with him to learn what the job actually consists of before she attempts to radically transform the process.
Plot Conflicts. Ryan Bingham lives an airborne nomad’s existence out of a suitcase, or rather, a backpack. He has no home, no wife or children, and no loyalty or commitment to his own family of origin. As a lucrative sideline, at convenient airport hotel conference rooms, he also conducts training seminars to teach company managers how to get rid of everything in their backpacks that weigh them down, like all of their possessions and their anchoring relationships with others.
Then he meets a traveling businesswoman, Alex, (Vera Farmiga) in an airport lounge, who apparently shares his love who you’re with philosophy: He says, “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.” Ryan and Alex’s lives become interlaced with giggling hotel meetings in cities whenever their busy itineraries overlap. So far, so good, for the sharks.
Juxtaposed against Bingham’s nihilism is the idealistic loyalty of Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick—previously seen as one of the young girls in the popular Twilight ‘tween vampire romance movies) This dewy eyed young executive, traveling with him to learn the ropes of their business of firing people, misses no chance to confront him about his juvenile approach to women. Her dialog stands as a running Greek chorus of shock and disgust towards Bingham’s subversion of personal commitment and superficial casualness towards Alex. Natalie is a living example of her values, having taken this job in the first place only because she followed her boyfriend from college to Omaha, where he had also taken his first job. Otherwise, she would have taken a much better offer in San Francisco.
Bingham’s Character Arc: Two things happen to crack Bingham’s façade of suave, Cary Grant-like charming heel persona. First, he begins to fall hard for Alex. For her part, Alex remains interested in him only as her on-the-road playmate. She keeps him at arm’s length regarding her personal life, whatever it may be. When they first met, she encouraged him to think of her as a person exactly like himself, only with a [female organ]. But she is more than that. She, like him, is nothing but a predatory shark.
The second thing that happens to Bingham is that he is called home to help out with his kid sister’s Julie’s wedding to a guy named Jim. Bingham’s family of origin, understandably, has not been close. But it’s an emergency. His older sister needs his help desperately because, well, her husband and she have chosen this very moment to begin their own trial separation, just as their younger sister is about to be married in their hometown Lutheran Church. More than that, when Ryan and Alex (who attends as Ryan’s “date”) show up, wouldn’t you just know that Jim suddenly gets cold feet the morning of the wedding. So Ryan, for lack of any other alternative, is delegated to be the one to go talk to Jim and see whether he might find his way clear to go through with this wedding and not break Julie’s heart. If you were to look up irony in the dictionary, it would show this scene. Ryan admits that he is a poor choice for the job, but he uses his persuasive talent to convince Jim that happiness in life never happens when you are alone; you need a co-pilot.
The final plot twist comes when Ryan decides to change his life by quitting his motivational talk circuit and go all in on his new love relationship with Alex. On a romantic whim, he hops a flight to Alex’s hometown of Chicago and shows up on her doorstep as a romantic surprise, only to be greeted by the fact that she is living there with her husband and kids. Ryan is left in the end with just his job, soaring high overhead in an airliner, up in the air.
Real Life Loyalties. One of the truly affecting elements of this excellent satire on loyalties is the use of real people in numerous firing vignettes. These non-actors are people who were actually fired from their jobs, and their lines are transcribed from their actual spontaneous reactions. They are heartbreaking, with searingly authentic outcries in their depths of pain and anger over their companies’ lack of loyalty to them after so many years of faithful service. To a person, as they were debriefed later, they all stated that the only thing that kept them going was wife, husband, children, homes—that is the purpose of it all.
In this movie, each and every marriage and every relationship is fractured and fraught with problems: separation, lost trust, cold feet, alienation. Yet even in this risky climate, the shark’s life is indelibly posed as the worst of all choices.
The movie also makes clear just how hollow the word “loyalty” rings in the ad copy of corporate propaganda. Nothing against American Airlines per se, but all corporate loyalty boils down to the bottom line. Sure, you get an executive credit card as your reward for ten million miles, but it is made clear—you pay for it.
