Kathy Newman

By Kathy M. Newman
Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University

No one was surprised to see Avatar and Up in the Air nominated for Oscars.    What is surprising, perhaps, is that these two films offer unusually direct commentaries on the current political economy.

Avatar, at first glance, is a classic tale of colonial invasion.  A white hero, a Marine named Jake Sully (one-time bricklayer, the Australian actor Sam Worthington) who lost the use of his legs in combat, agrees to be part of a “Blackwater” type military operation on the planet Pandora.  Pandora, a place of fantastical, tropical beauty, is peopled by a race of gorgeous ten foot blue human-like aliens with long braids, called the Na’vi.  A rapacious military operation is destroying their planet in pursuit of a priceless rock called “unobtainium.”

Sully joins the science mission on Pandora, which allows him to inhabit an avatar body and live among the Na’vi people.  A beautiful young princess, Neytiri (African American actress, Zoey Saldana), teaches Sully to hunt, speak, and ride giant dragons.  They fall in love, and the film climaxes in an epic battle between the literally tree-hugging Na’vi people and the metal-bound, corporate thugs who want to destroy them for profit.

Is Avatar a bizarro mashup of all things politically correct? Avatar has riled up conservatives across the globe.  The  Chinese government recently halted the showing of the 2D version of Avatar, where popular Chinese bloggers pointed out the connection between the displacement of the Na’vi by humans and the displacement of the Chinese people by the Chinese government and real estate developers.

The Weekly Standard attacked the film for “its mindless worship of a nature-loving tribe ….its hatred of the military….and the notion that to be human is just way uncool.”  The Vatican slammed the film for promoting the worship of nature (as opposed to God).

But beneath the colonial exploitation and the eco-worship, however, lies Cameron’s critique of the American government’s failure to provide adequate healthcare for veterans.  Jake Sully, who is paralyzed from the waist down after a military tour of duty in Venezuela, joins the Pandora mission in large part because he wants a new pair of legs.  Back on earth doctors have the technology to make him walk again, but Sully can’t afford the procedure.  Sully’s mission commander promises him that if he betrays the Na’vi people and helps the mission get the unobtainium that he finally get his legs.

At the end of the day Avatar is not particularly radical, but it is surprisingly political for a blockbuster of such magnitude. Cameron makes a broad  plea for economic as well as ecological justice.  In addition, with the crudely drawn but still sympathetic Jake Sully, Cameron hints that our recent wars in the Middle East are class wars, in which working-class soldiers trade their limbs, and, sometimes, their lives, for financial security.  It hardly seems fair—not in 2026, and not now.

Up in the Air is Jason Reitman’s recessionary romantic comedy about a people who spend a lot of time breathing in the recycled air on jumbo jets. Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is more at home in first class at 30,000 feet than he is in his barren apartment in Oklahoma.  Bingham works for a company that fires people for a living.  He spends a good portion of the film sitting across from nicely dressed, white-collar workers, telling them to see their layoff as a chance to finally pursue their dreams.  It’s a hollow message, but Bingham insists that if people have to be fired, he might as well do it with dignity.

Bingham also flirts with dignity, as he pursues Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), a woman who similarly spends her life on the road.  Bingham also develops a mentor relationship with a young co-worker, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick).  A know-it-all fresh out of Cornell’s business school, Keener wants to turn Bingham’s job into a virtual one.  She thinks that people can be fired just as easily with a video conferencing system.  Bingham sees his air born freedom under attack, and he takes her up in the air to show her the importance of firing people face to face.

And here’s where the movie made me cry—for real.  When Bingham and Keener sit across the table from about-to-be-laid-off workers, the human suffering of the recessionary economy comes to the surface.  Reitman used real-life laid-off workers to play these roles; he put classified ads in newspapers in St. Louis and Detroit and invited recently laid off workers to participate in a documentary.  He asked them to “re-enact” their firings, and he selected some of them to act in the film.  Their reward?  About $800 (the daily minimum for an actor set by the Screen Actors Guild) and the privilege of getting fired by George Clooney.

Cozy Bailey, a laid-off Styrofoam technician from Missouri, said that it “sucks to get fired, it doesn’t matter by who.”  But she also confessed that the whole experience was “cathartic.”  Another laid-off worker in the film, Kevin Pilla, was pleased that he was able to say the sorts of things on camera that he hadn’t thought to say in the moment because he was in “such shock.”

For Reitman, talking to these workers was an education. “The astonishing thing is,” Reitman said, “if you had asked me before I made this film, ‘What’s the hardest part about being fired?’ I would have probably said the loss of income…. But what I came to realize, at least when it came to the people, and I talked to a lot of people, it was the loss of purpose. The reason to get out of bed in the morning. The thing they would say that scared me the most was ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go.’”
Reitman has come under fire for what some see as cynical choice to use real laid-off workers.  Dana Stevens at Slate magazine complains that “there’s something instrumentalizing about the way these interviews are shoehorned in for dramatic effect, especially when Reitman seamlessly cuts from the faces of out-of-work Americans to the familiar comic mugs of J.K. Simmons or Zach Galifianakis, playing out-of-work fictional characters.” Rob Humanick at The Projection Booth makes a similar charge, arguing that these “sequences never accrue a sense of purpose beyond mere lip service to social trends.”

Reitman can fairly be accused of mixing high and low, reality with slick unreality, and economic heartbreak with romantic fairy tale.  But the film ultimately sides with the laid-off workers and not with the company that has made a business out of routinizing termination. Up in the Air is about the value of human connection and the ways in which our closest relationships give us purpose.  The simple truth that the workplace can become a legitimate source for those relationships is not lost on the people losing their jobs, or on the audience.

We’ve been hearing a lot of numbers talk about the recession, but relatively little narrative.  The nightly news might focus on an individual family here or there or show some footage of foreclosed homes with yellow tape around them, but where do we go for the real stories?  We certainly wouldn’t expect to find some of the most moving and persuasive tales about the recession in Hollywood, but anyone who can afford to plunk down $10.00 to see Avatar or Up in the Air might, indeed, get more of an economic education that they were bargaining for.  Neither of these movies will encourage anyone to organize a rally or go on strike, but if it is becoming a “social trend” in Hollywood to put a human face on this devastating economy, I’m all for it.  And it seems that Oscar is, too.

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Kathy M. Newman was involved in the effort to unionize Teaching Assistants at Yale University in the 1990s. She is finishing a book, Blacklisted and Bluecollared: How Americans Saw Class in the 1950s” and is the author of a book published in 2004, Radio-Active: Advertising and Activism 1935-1947. Professor Newman also writes a bi-weekly media column for The Pittsburgh City Paper.

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This piece was first published on the Working-Class Perspectives blog site.