Travelling light

Warning: This article contains some plot spoilers.

What do our lives amount to? What do they weigh and what are they worth? Ryan Bingham is determined to travel light in life. Businessmen all around the United States hire him to downsize their companies. He cherishes elite status and discards relationships. On paper he is an egotistical snob, but on screen he is George Clooney, inscrutable but charming. Ryan is completely content with his life – especially now that it involves fellow frequent flyer Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) – until his boss announces that he is grounded indefinitely.

This adaptation of Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel has received much critical praise. It has won a Golden Globe for Best Adapted Screenplay (it was nominated in five categories), received six Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, six Bafta nominations including Best Picture and Best Actor, and three Screen Actors Guild nominations. Rotten Tomatoes reports 209 ‘fresh’ reviews and only 22 ‘rotten’ ones.

Ryan spends his life on the road and feels completely at home in airports. His raison d’être is to become the seventh person ever to reach 10,000,000 frequent flyer miles. He avoids any entanglements that might curb his freedom to fly and describes his philosophy on life like this:

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 . . . Your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. Your husband, your wife, your home. We weigh ourselves down until we can’t even move. Make no mistake, moving is living.

Ryan’s life is devoid of clutter; he keeps his home bare, his suitcase neat and his love life light. He has systematically isolated himself so that he isn’t troubled by responsibilities, commitments or emotional baggage. He is free to go wherever he wants. The autonomy of his life is certainly appealing, particularly when contrasted with those he lays off, many of whom have limited options, families to support and mortgages to pay. Nevertheless, Ryan’s life is limited in scope by his goal and his determination to keep an ‘empty backpack’. He has stored up millions of frequent flyer miles, but he doesn’t allow himself to enjoy them. They have the potential to be a romantic getaway, a retreat, a trip to see family or a generous gift. Left as they are, they’re just a number. He insists that ‘moving is living’, but he neglects the importance of the destination and the quality of the journey.

Ryan’s boss Craig Gregory (Jason Bateman) puts an abrupt stop to his employee’s jet-setting when he takes up an innovative idea posed by twenty-something entrepreneur Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick). The plan is to begin firing people remotely. Natalie calls it ‘Glocal, our global must become local.’ Craig asks Ryan to mentor Natalie, but she is a threat to Ryan’s whole way of life. Faced with the thought of being grounded, all his insecurities rise up. He tries to conceal them by arguing about the shaky morality of firing someone via a webcam. He tells Craig, ‘What we do here is brutal . . . but there’s a dignity in it.’ The idea of hiring not only an outsider to fire your staff, but an outsider who only communicates with them via the internet is evidently disrespectful and heartless. Surely it is a common decency to meet with people and to share in their struggles face-to-face. And yet this phenomenon has crept into our society. In many ways we have become a fractured community, not least in the way that we communicate. Director Jason Reitman explains one of the negative effects of networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter:

You have a thousand friends [on Facebook] but you don’t see any of them. And now it’s gone from Facebook to Twitter. We don’t have friends, we have followers! And the airline business is kind of the perfect metaphor for that, where you’re everywhere but you’re nowhere.[1]

We try to pack so much into our lives that we lose sight of individuals. In trying to relate on a global scale, we often weaken the relationships we have in our locality. Ironically, as Ryan teaches Natalie to travel around firing people, they develop a friendship. She is the one who persuades Ryan to let people into his life. In spite of her idea, she believes that people need loving relationships in order to find meaning and purpose. She challenges his miles ‘hobby’, his emotional indifference and his aversion to marriage. As for his philosophy, Natalie tells him, ‘It’s a cocoon of self-banishment. You have set up a way of life that basically makes it impossible for you to have any kind of human connection.’ It’s a challenge to many of us. How are our lives set up? Have we lost sight of what it means to connect with people?

One of the elements in Ryan’s life that Natalie specifically objects to is his casual relationship with Alex. Alex is a passionate frequent flyer who exudes confidence and evades commitment – basically she is Ryan in female form. She appears to be the perfect addition to Ryan’s ‘empty backpack’ life; they meet between flights, text occasionally and are free to live separate lives in the meantime. Ryan finds himself growing increasingly attached to Alex. Being with her makes him realise that he has been lonely, that he wants a ‘plus one’ in his life. Reitman explains the process behind Ryan’s change in attitude:

As I was writing, my own life changed. I met my wife, fell in love and had a child. And in that process, Ryan Bingham also started to mature and look for more in life. The script grew into being about how imperative connections are in our daily lives.[2]

This new relationship makes Ryan question the other relationships in his life. What does he mean to his family, friends, colleagues and clients? How has he impacted their lives? American Airlines posters gush, ‘We appreciate your loyalty,’ but the people in Ryan’s life cannot tell the same story. He is the bringer of bad news to employees all over the USA. He makes promises about guiding them through the next step of their career and then leaves them to face it alone. Ryan’s sisters, Kara (Amy Morton) and Julie (Melanie Lynskey), persevere in a one-sided, long-distance relationship with him, but in a moment of honesty Kara says, ‘Basically you don’t exist to us.’ One would think that at least with Alex, Ryan has the chance to be someone’s significant other, but sadly this is not the case. It takes a female version of himself to reveal the shortcomings of his theories. The backpack philosophy doesn’t value people. Although his feelings for Alex deepen, hers do not. To her, he is merely ‘an escape, a parenthesis’. She treats him much like he treats the people he makes redundant; in Ryan’s words, ‘We take people at their most fragile and we set them adrift.’

What is the point of life? How is it best enjoyed? One of the greatest strengths of the film is its insistence on leaving issues up in the air; the viewer is given the chance to question these things for themselves. The film ends with a series of real life testimonies from people who had been made unemployed. Many of them said that their families were the purpose and support that kept them going. Do relationships weigh us down or help us carry the load? Perhaps a life without human connections is less like an empty backpack and more like a backpack without any straps – pointless, tiresome and generally a pain to carry.

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