Inhuman Resources: The real lesson of "Up in the Air"

[marmar]

from In These Times:



Inhuman Resources
The real lesson of Up in the Air.

By Emily Bauman


Ryan Bingham, the character played with debonair finish by George Clooney in Up in the Air, is a perfect mirror of modern business and social trends: an airport nomad who travels all over the country firing people for a living. Bingham has no desire for a wife, kids, or permanent address. Instead he embraces a devil-may-care ethics of personal freedom. This earns him the disdain of his siblings as well as his newly assigned apprentice, Natalie. Chastising him for his “cocoon of self-banishment” and “ridiculous life choices,” she pulls the maturity card with a high-pitched flounce: “I need to grow up? You’re a twelve year old!”

In Bingham we find a fascination with a cultural role America has tried to avoid, that of the specialist doom-giver. Defending his face-to-face firing tactics against a proposed Skype-based system, he tells Natalie: “We are here to make limbo tolerable, to ferry wounded souls across the river of dread and to a point where hope is dimly visible.” She doesn’t get it.

Bingham is good at playing corporate grim reaper because his lifestyle allows him to avoid the question anyone confronts when fired: What is the value of my life? He is a new breed, a member of an elite world that writer Pico Iyer has called the Transit Lounge: a world of constant movement and travel deliciously suspended above the limitations of home, duty, and citizenship—a world of almost perfect freedom.

As a Transit Lounger, Bingham practices a superficially Buddhist asceticism: Throw out your valuables, be emotionally independent, travel light. He believes in memories, not photographs. The primary thing Bingham wants to own are frequent-flier miles. He values them for their own sake, not as a form of wealth or experience but as an initiation into a secret society. Only six people have hit the 10 million air miles mark so far—fewer people than have walked on the moon, Bingham claims. They are a badge of weightlessness that he must have if he is to deliver weightlessness to others, swiftly and implacably, out of the blue. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/5570/inhuman_resources

[Chief]

1. Changes

By the end of the movie, Clooney's character had broken out of his shell, and begun to see that there was more to the world around him.

Have you ever been fired or laid off by your local management? Companies don't run internal training for managers like they did 20-30 years ago. As a result, managers have no idea how to let someone go from the company with dignity (been there, seen that). That's what Ryan Bingham's company provided, and Ryan was able to envision how much worse it would have been with people being let go using a remote video connection. Ryan had a tough job to do, but he did his job well, and treated the people that were being let go with dignity, and pointed them on a forward path.