Of George Clooney, Ravenclaw introversion, relationship avoidance, and corporate rage
Note: Up in the Air spoilers, offensive generalizations about all four Hogwarts houses, and much rank self-justification below.
For over a month I've been struggling to get into postable condition my thoughts about Up in the Air, which I saw twice over the holidays. Coming at the end of a year marked by deep anger at my own employer and sharp ambivalence about my co-workers, and seen on a theoretical vacation during which I continued to think about work constantly, this film could not have been more perfectly suited to my mood. I see a fair number of movies, but this story about a guy who fires people for a living, travels 95% of his days, and avoids all intimate connections is the only non-fandom theatrical release that has really spoken to me all year. It hit so many nerves that at times I had to restrain myself from talking back to the screen.
I kinda didn't buy that a go-getter like Anna Kendrick wouldn't already have a proper rolling suitcase, but people are unpredictable that way sometimes.
First, there was anger of several kinds. The rage of the people George Clooney's character fires, the montages of his victims verbally abusing him, were thoroughly satisfying to behold at first; as the movie progressed, however, what I felt toward them grew more complicated. I wondered where some of them, the ones who claimed to be surprised to be getting the ax, had been for the past fifteen years. Were they really unaware that employment paradigms have shifted, that it is no longer typical or expected to be working for one company for ten years, let alone 30? Had they not picked up a newspaper since the first Bush administration? Had no one of their acquaintance ever been forcibly downsized? Did it really seem impossible that it would happen to them?
Soon I was mad both for these people and at them. They had made the mistake of entering into an emotionally committed relationship with a partner that is by definition incapable of returning such commitment: the modern corporation, the ultimate toxic bachelor. And honestly, at this point in history, they should have known better. Yeah, I know - blaming the victim isn't nice. One's real anger should fall on the heads of employers, not their helpless pawns. But where work is concerned, my negativity has sometimes been so free-floating lately that it can't help but cover everyone in sight.
Speaking of negative emotion, let's also discuss the acute discomfort of being placed in a close working relationship with someone whose methodology and philosophy of life is strongly at odds with your own; then add to the mix the fact that said person is fifteen years younger than you and can therefore conveniently attribute any friction that arises between the two of you to your resentment of his or her youth and your fear of your own impending obsolescence.
Clooney gets paired with such a co-worker in the movie, and watching the scenes between him and Anna Kendrick was at times like seeing my own life on screen, with the regrettable difference that I am not nearly as well suited to my job as Clooney, nor as good at it. As in the movie, the Natalie Keener figure in my life, “Tracy,” is a recent Ivy League grad who, despite lacking an actual MBA, exudes a pragmatism, drive and eagerness to impose innovation on others that are pure B-school. Though she is sharper than a very sharp tack (intelligence-wise; she’s not personally abrasive), she does sometimes display the tendency common to high achievers under 25 of dividing the world into My Generation: World Future and Everyone Older Than Me, and of conflating everyone who lives on the wrong side of that divide. The hilariously condescending moment in Up in the Air when Anna Kendrick tells Vera Farmiga (the movie’s female equivalent of Clooney, from vaguely the same age bracket) in re: feminism, “I really appreciate everything your generation did for me,” as if Farmiga were a peer of Germaine Greer (age 70) or Gloria Steinem (age 75), perfectly echoed the tone of certain office conversations I’ve been privy to in recent months.
I can't find a still from it, but the scene where these two discuss life and relationships is one of the best in the movie.
So what's this got to do with the houses of Hogwarts? Nothing, except that ever since reading the Harry Potter series, I’ve been explaining work conflicts to myself in terms of the four houses and their corresponding personalities. My new boss, for instance, is a prototypical Ravenclaw in a position that has traditionally demanded a Gryffindor; everyone around her is aware of the mismatch and forecasts damage to our area of the company as a result. Her second-in-command is also a Ravenclaw (or perhaps she’s one of those Hufflepuffs who earned a PhD largely by dint of sheer perseverance; I don’t know her well enough to tell) in a Gryffindor’s job, which is no accident: my boss chose her, and has said as much, partly for the lack of threat she presents. That lack, after all, is often what those of us from the two Afterthought Houses are really valued for: We Ravenclaws, so quiet, so lost in thought, will not try to bumrush anyone else’s spotlight. Those faithful, diligent Hufflepuffs won’t mind doing grunt work behind the scenes; unflashy, salt-of-the-earth types that they are, they’ll even enjoy it!
My co-worker “Tracy,” you’ll be unsurprised to hear, is a straight-up Gryffindor, and I’ve often thought she’d be fairly comfortable working at the Ministry of Magic. Mind you, she’s an idealist who would strongly prefer to work for a Shacklebolt-style administration, and would quit outright if she found herself underling to a Scrimgeour or Thicknesse, but she could probably tolerate a Cornelius Fudge, and, more tellingly still, she would have no real objection to the nature or purpose of Ministry work itself. Our employer is sort of a cross between the Ministry and St. Mungo's, and "Tracy" is thus in a position to thrive, but as the lone Gryffindor in a nest of Ravenclaws, she feels stymied, restless and completely underwhelmed by the rest of us. As she sits at her desk with her Gmail open, venting electronically to her young-achiever friends, I can practically hear her thinking, "These people aren't leaders, and I am. They really need to stop pretending they're my superiors and get the hell out of my way."
Speaking of Scrimgeour, Bill Nighy's casting means that at least one thing about the Deathly Hallows movies is pretty certain not to suck!
I feel for her, in a way; the power dynamic in our corner of the company can't be comfortable for her. But it's sure as fuck not comfortable for me either; the single most exhausting thing about my job is the constant uncertainty about where I stand in relation to my coworkers, and the questioning myself as to whether I actually am as vulnerable as I feel myself to be. Although I too am a Ravenclaw, and increasingly militant about that fact, this hardly constitutes a bond between myself and my boss or her number two. Nor do my boss and her number two seem to be close to one another. Ravenclaws not only tend not to reach out to others, we often have walls up that are high, thick, and protected by complex and expensive security systems.
My boss complains about how exhausting she finds the social, relationship-building aspect of her job (i.e., the Gryffindor part), and I feel her pain, because I share it: I need to start ramping myself up for scheduled work-related social events days in advance, and few things are as likely to throw me into turmoil as the spur-of-the-moment, "optional" social gathering with co-workers that snatches away my coveted alone time with no warning. I share, too, my boss' quintessentially Ravenclaw resentment at being underestimated, written off and taken advantage of by the Gryffindors and Slytherins who tend to run things and who have defined leadership and success, for everyone, in their own terms. But none of this makes us friends.
And this leads me back to the other aspect of Up in the Air that really resonated with me: the relationship avoidance of the Clooney character. We Ravenclaws often know something about relationship avoidance, and about self-protection. These are lessons that for many of us date back to childhood, when we first made the unpleasant discovery that those who indulge in thinking at the expense of acting will probably be acted upon by others, and often not benevolently; also that those who indulge in thinking at the expense of speaking will tend to be perceived by their peers as boring and passive, never a formula that makes for social success. In order to get on in the world, many of us have learned to work against our natural personalities and train ourselves into more socially acceptable behaviors, though ironically the extra psychic effort that this involves often renders social situations even less appealing to us than they would have otherwise been. We can all too easily come to the conclusion that it's not only easier but more honest for us to remain alone.
However, Clooney in this movie is a Gryffindor, not a Ravenclaw, which makes his distancing of himself from others all the more intriguing. And it’s not every day that we self-isolating types get this kind of elegant, eloquent, completely nonmarginal spokesperson. (Unlike Hugh Grant’s character in About a Boy - to whom I also strongly related, in spite of his deficiencies - he can’t be accused of slackerdom on the career front or dishonesty in his sexual tactics, thus upping his overall credibility.)
Mad props to About a Boy, for suggesting a plausibly modest scenario whereby self-isolating types might bring other people meaningfully into their lives without making anybody vomit.
When Anna Kendrick’s character took Clooney's to task, at length, for his chronic intimacy avoidance, I was on the edge of my seat, waiting for him to get shot down. Instead, to my delight, he had an intelligent comeback for every single accusation. American movies almost always celebrate social connection and committed romantic relationships, and usually the characters who champion these things are held up as the true voices of wisdom and allowed to have the last word. Not here. Clooney is never made to look deeply ridiculous or pathetic for his life choices; maybe mildly so, when we’re shown how bare and hotel-like his condo is, but the guy just doesn’t seem terribly sad or lonely.
Even as the movie comes closest to endorsing romantic and family commitment, it throws up further warnings against them: Clooney’s jaundiced older sister (though not played by Bonnie Hunt, she is the Bonnie Hunt character in this movie) shepherds the wedding arrangements for their younger sister with protective approval and views Clooney’s distance from all such matters witheringly, but she herself is having marital problems. Meanwhile, the younger sister’s decent, regular-guy fiancé gets cold feet, and the person who succeeds in talking him back into his wedding tux after the other decent, regular characters have failed is...Clooney; and Anna Kendrick’s faith in the importance of intimacy is rewarded by a dumping via text message by her own boyfriend while she and Clooney are on the road. The movie never pretends such outcomes aren’t at least as likely as not, so when it asks you to still for a rebuttal, and makes the case that in spite of it all, human connections are worth having, you don’t feel insulted.
Amy Morton = Bonnie Hunt, kind of. But Up in the Air > Jerry Maguire.
Then, just when Clooney is making tentative moves toward maybe, possibly, getting a little bit serious with Vera Farmiga and the movie is threatening to turn correspondingly conventional and sentimental, a brilliant gotcha! involving Farmiga’s character completely pulls the rug out from under him. (Even though I started this off with a spoiler warning, the twist is too good to give away here for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie.). In a more conventional film, this turn of events might have played as punishment for Clooney’s previous behavior: See, you cad, you waited too long to do the right thing. It’s your own fault if the ship you wanted had already sailed. Here, it comes off more as a confirmation of Clooney’s former wisdom in staying uninvolved: Reach out even once, even to someone who seems to live outside the committed-relationship paradigm herself, and see how fast you get burned.
As if all this wasn’t strange and wonderful and subversive enough, there’s the way the movie ends. Having seen the devastation that Clooney wreaks on those he fires, you subconsciously expect him to get his comeuppance and be fired himself later in the movie. It doesn’t happen. Not only that, Clooney is fully restored by movie’s end to his former happy equilibrium: after being grounded at company headquarters for a while by Anna Kendrick’s new business model, in which the firing process is done over the Internet and employers thereby become even less human and accountable, Clooney is returned to the skies and the life he savors when Kendrick quits and the implementation of her remote-firing method is put on hold.
And really, why not? People will keep on getting fired; they might as well be fired by someone who shows them his face and a modicum of humaneness. Clooney will continue to act as a corporate Grim Reaper, but is that really so much more morally compromised than whatever those fired people did for their own paychecks, or what you and I are doing for ours? Why shouldn’t he keep flying 320 days out of the year? He thrives on this life; it suits him and he’s good at it. If one day he wakes up and finds that that’s no longer true, his perspective has been sufficiently enlarged by the movie’s events that he’ll have some idea how to go about changing it.
Thus, you might say, did one fictional Gryffindor succeed in forcing the world to accept what might be thought of as his antisocial Ravenclaw streak.* Antisocial Ravenclaw that I am, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing this scenario play out in art, but life, as always, is another matter. Whether Ravenclaws - and Hufflepuffs, a fair number of whom are also introverts - can really be accepted as they are by the world at large has become an obsessive question with me lately. Must we change for the world to reward us? Can't the world change instead, for once? Lacking as we do the self-aggrandizing confrontational Gryffindor sort of bravery, are our efforts to force the world to change for us doomed? Do we even want the rewards of such a world? But what other world is there? These questions and others will be pondered on an ongoing basis in this space.
*I realize I've been using "Ravenclaw" in this post as a synonym for "socially maladjusted introvert", which it is not. Nevertheless, I'd lay odds that in practice, that description often holds true.
For over a month I've been struggling to get into postable condition my thoughts about Up in the Air, which I saw twice over the holidays. Coming at the end of a year marked by deep anger at my own employer and sharp ambivalence about my co-workers, and seen on a theoretical vacation during which I continued to think about work constantly, this film could not have been more perfectly suited to my mood. I see a fair number of movies, but this story about a guy who fires people for a living, travels 95% of his days, and avoids all intimate connections is the only non-fandom theatrical release that has really spoken to me all year. It hit so many nerves that at times I had to restrain myself from talking back to the screen.
I kinda didn't buy that a go-getter like Anna Kendrick wouldn't already have a proper rolling suitcase, but people are unpredictable that way sometimes.
First, there was anger of several kinds. The rage of the people George Clooney's character fires, the montages of his victims verbally abusing him, were thoroughly satisfying to behold at first; as the movie progressed, however, what I felt toward them grew more complicated. I wondered where some of them, the ones who claimed to be surprised to be getting the ax, had been for the past fifteen years. Were they really unaware that employment paradigms have shifted, that it is no longer typical or expected to be working for one company for ten years, let alone 30? Had they not picked up a newspaper since the first Bush administration? Had no one of their acquaintance ever been forcibly downsized? Did it really seem impossible that it would happen to them?
Soon I was mad both for these people and at them. They had made the mistake of entering into an emotionally committed relationship with a partner that is by definition incapable of returning such commitment: the modern corporation, the ultimate toxic bachelor. And honestly, at this point in history, they should have known better. Yeah, I know - blaming the victim isn't nice. One's real anger should fall on the heads of employers, not their helpless pawns. But where work is concerned, my negativity has sometimes been so free-floating lately that it can't help but cover everyone in sight.
Speaking of negative emotion, let's also discuss the acute discomfort of being placed in a close working relationship with someone whose methodology and philosophy of life is strongly at odds with your own; then add to the mix the fact that said person is fifteen years younger than you and can therefore conveniently attribute any friction that arises between the two of you to your resentment of his or her youth and your fear of your own impending obsolescence.
Clooney gets paired with such a co-worker in the movie, and watching the scenes between him and Anna Kendrick was at times like seeing my own life on screen, with the regrettable difference that I am not nearly as well suited to my job as Clooney, nor as good at it. As in the movie, the Natalie Keener figure in my life, “Tracy,” is a recent Ivy League grad who, despite lacking an actual MBA, exudes a pragmatism, drive and eagerness to impose innovation on others that are pure B-school. Though she is sharper than a very sharp tack (intelligence-wise; she’s not personally abrasive), she does sometimes display the tendency common to high achievers under 25 of dividing the world into My Generation: World Future and Everyone Older Than Me, and of conflating everyone who lives on the wrong side of that divide. The hilariously condescending moment in Up in the Air when Anna Kendrick tells Vera Farmiga (the movie’s female equivalent of Clooney, from vaguely the same age bracket) in re: feminism, “I really appreciate everything your generation did for me,” as if Farmiga were a peer of Germaine Greer (age 70) or Gloria Steinem (age 75), perfectly echoed the tone of certain office conversations I’ve been privy to in recent months.
I can't find a still from it, but the scene where these two discuss life and relationships is one of the best in the movie.
So what's this got to do with the houses of Hogwarts? Nothing, except that ever since reading the Harry Potter series, I’ve been explaining work conflicts to myself in terms of the four houses and their corresponding personalities. My new boss, for instance, is a prototypical Ravenclaw in a position that has traditionally demanded a Gryffindor; everyone around her is aware of the mismatch and forecasts damage to our area of the company as a result. Her second-in-command is also a Ravenclaw (or perhaps she’s one of those Hufflepuffs who earned a PhD largely by dint of sheer perseverance; I don’t know her well enough to tell) in a Gryffindor’s job, which is no accident: my boss chose her, and has said as much, partly for the lack of threat she presents. That lack, after all, is often what those of us from the two Afterthought Houses are really valued for: We Ravenclaws, so quiet, so lost in thought, will not try to bumrush anyone else’s spotlight. Those faithful, diligent Hufflepuffs won’t mind doing grunt work behind the scenes; unflashy, salt-of-the-earth types that they are, they’ll even enjoy it!
My co-worker “Tracy,” you’ll be unsurprised to hear, is a straight-up Gryffindor, and I’ve often thought she’d be fairly comfortable working at the Ministry of Magic. Mind you, she’s an idealist who would strongly prefer to work for a Shacklebolt-style administration, and would quit outright if she found herself underling to a Scrimgeour or Thicknesse, but she could probably tolerate a Cornelius Fudge, and, more tellingly still, she would have no real objection to the nature or purpose of Ministry work itself. Our employer is sort of a cross between the Ministry and St. Mungo's, and "Tracy" is thus in a position to thrive, but as the lone Gryffindor in a nest of Ravenclaws, she feels stymied, restless and completely underwhelmed by the rest of us. As she sits at her desk with her Gmail open, venting electronically to her young-achiever friends, I can practically hear her thinking, "These people aren't leaders, and I am. They really need to stop pretending they're my superiors and get the hell out of my way."
Speaking of Scrimgeour, Bill Nighy's casting means that at least one thing about the Deathly Hallows movies is pretty certain not to suck!
I feel for her, in a way; the power dynamic in our corner of the company can't be comfortable for her. But it's sure as fuck not comfortable for me either; the single most exhausting thing about my job is the constant uncertainty about where I stand in relation to my coworkers, and the questioning myself as to whether I actually am as vulnerable as I feel myself to be. Although I too am a Ravenclaw, and increasingly militant about that fact, this hardly constitutes a bond between myself and my boss or her number two. Nor do my boss and her number two seem to be close to one another. Ravenclaws not only tend not to reach out to others, we often have walls up that are high, thick, and protected by complex and expensive security systems.
My boss complains about how exhausting she finds the social, relationship-building aspect of her job (i.e., the Gryffindor part), and I feel her pain, because I share it: I need to start ramping myself up for scheduled work-related social events days in advance, and few things are as likely to throw me into turmoil as the spur-of-the-moment, "optional" social gathering with co-workers that snatches away my coveted alone time with no warning. I share, too, my boss' quintessentially Ravenclaw resentment at being underestimated, written off and taken advantage of by the Gryffindors and Slytherins who tend to run things and who have defined leadership and success, for everyone, in their own terms. But none of this makes us friends.
And this leads me back to the other aspect of Up in the Air that really resonated with me: the relationship avoidance of the Clooney character. We Ravenclaws often know something about relationship avoidance, and about self-protection. These are lessons that for many of us date back to childhood, when we first made the unpleasant discovery that those who indulge in thinking at the expense of acting will probably be acted upon by others, and often not benevolently; also that those who indulge in thinking at the expense of speaking will tend to be perceived by their peers as boring and passive, never a formula that makes for social success. In order to get on in the world, many of us have learned to work against our natural personalities and train ourselves into more socially acceptable behaviors, though ironically the extra psychic effort that this involves often renders social situations even less appealing to us than they would have otherwise been. We can all too easily come to the conclusion that it's not only easier but more honest for us to remain alone.
However, Clooney in this movie is a Gryffindor, not a Ravenclaw, which makes his distancing of himself from others all the more intriguing. And it’s not every day that we self-isolating types get this kind of elegant, eloquent, completely nonmarginal spokesperson. (Unlike Hugh Grant’s character in About a Boy - to whom I also strongly related, in spite of his deficiencies - he can’t be accused of slackerdom on the career front or dishonesty in his sexual tactics, thus upping his overall credibility.)
Mad props to About a Boy, for suggesting a plausibly modest scenario whereby self-isolating types might bring other people meaningfully into their lives without making anybody vomit.
When Anna Kendrick’s character took Clooney's to task, at length, for his chronic intimacy avoidance, I was on the edge of my seat, waiting for him to get shot down. Instead, to my delight, he had an intelligent comeback for every single accusation. American movies almost always celebrate social connection and committed romantic relationships, and usually the characters who champion these things are held up as the true voices of wisdom and allowed to have the last word. Not here. Clooney is never made to look deeply ridiculous or pathetic for his life choices; maybe mildly so, when we’re shown how bare and hotel-like his condo is, but the guy just doesn’t seem terribly sad or lonely.
Even as the movie comes closest to endorsing romantic and family commitment, it throws up further warnings against them: Clooney’s jaundiced older sister (though not played by Bonnie Hunt, she is the Bonnie Hunt character in this movie) shepherds the wedding arrangements for their younger sister with protective approval and views Clooney’s distance from all such matters witheringly, but she herself is having marital problems. Meanwhile, the younger sister’s decent, regular-guy fiancé gets cold feet, and the person who succeeds in talking him back into his wedding tux after the other decent, regular characters have failed is...Clooney; and Anna Kendrick’s faith in the importance of intimacy is rewarded by a dumping via text message by her own boyfriend while she and Clooney are on the road. The movie never pretends such outcomes aren’t at least as likely as not, so when it asks you to still for a rebuttal, and makes the case that in spite of it all, human connections are worth having, you don’t feel insulted.
Amy Morton = Bonnie Hunt, kind of. But Up in the Air > Jerry Maguire.
Then, just when Clooney is making tentative moves toward maybe, possibly, getting a little bit serious with Vera Farmiga and the movie is threatening to turn correspondingly conventional and sentimental, a brilliant gotcha! involving Farmiga’s character completely pulls the rug out from under him. (Even though I started this off with a spoiler warning, the twist is too good to give away here for anyone who hasn’t seen the movie.). In a more conventional film, this turn of events might have played as punishment for Clooney’s previous behavior: See, you cad, you waited too long to do the right thing. It’s your own fault if the ship you wanted had already sailed. Here, it comes off more as a confirmation of Clooney’s former wisdom in staying uninvolved: Reach out even once, even to someone who seems to live outside the committed-relationship paradigm herself, and see how fast you get burned.
As if all this wasn’t strange and wonderful and subversive enough, there’s the way the movie ends. Having seen the devastation that Clooney wreaks on those he fires, you subconsciously expect him to get his comeuppance and be fired himself later in the movie. It doesn’t happen. Not only that, Clooney is fully restored by movie’s end to his former happy equilibrium: after being grounded at company headquarters for a while by Anna Kendrick’s new business model, in which the firing process is done over the Internet and employers thereby become even less human and accountable, Clooney is returned to the skies and the life he savors when Kendrick quits and the implementation of her remote-firing method is put on hold.
And really, why not? People will keep on getting fired; they might as well be fired by someone who shows them his face and a modicum of humaneness. Clooney will continue to act as a corporate Grim Reaper, but is that really so much more morally compromised than whatever those fired people did for their own paychecks, or what you and I are doing for ours? Why shouldn’t he keep flying 320 days out of the year? He thrives on this life; it suits him and he’s good at it. If one day he wakes up and finds that that’s no longer true, his perspective has been sufficiently enlarged by the movie’s events that he’ll have some idea how to go about changing it.
Thus, you might say, did one fictional Gryffindor succeed in forcing the world to accept what might be thought of as his antisocial Ravenclaw streak.* Antisocial Ravenclaw that I am, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing this scenario play out in art, but life, as always, is another matter. Whether Ravenclaws - and Hufflepuffs, a fair number of whom are also introverts - can really be accepted as they are by the world at large has become an obsessive question with me lately. Must we change for the world to reward us? Can't the world change instead, for once? Lacking as we do the self-aggrandizing confrontational Gryffindor sort of bravery, are our efforts to force the world to change for us doomed? Do we even want the rewards of such a world? But what other world is there? These questions and others will be pondered on an ongoing basis in this space.
*I realize I've been using "Ravenclaw" in this post as a synonym for "socially maladjusted introvert", which it is not. Nevertheless, I'd lay odds that in practice, that description often holds true.