up in the air

Jacob Sanchez
4/20/2012
Laura Cline
English 102

Up in the Air

Any time that a book is adapted to film, there are many obstacles preventing effective transposition of the plot. The internal conflict and monologue that makes up so much of a book is very difficult to show on a television screen. In addition, the audience for a film is generally a different demographic than the book would be. The time factor is another consideration. No one will watch a sixteen hour plus film. Also, the cost of filming is always a consideration. Too many sets, too many locations, and too much money gets spent.The screenwriter and director have to make the difficult decisions, deciding what elements to change, what to leave out, and what to dispense with altogether. The Walter Kirn book, Up in the Air, and the movie by the same title, make up one such adaptation.

The book, authored by Walter Kirn, was published in 2001,  the year that Wikipedia opened the floodgates of crowd sourced knowledge(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001). In this pre-9/11 environment, Ryan Bingham, of Integrated Strategic Management, or ISM, is a mid-thirties career transition counselor. His career consists of flying hither, yon, and beyond, counseling those unfortunates whose jobs have recently left the building(Kirn, 5). The job itself recedes into the background, acting as an enabler for his personal goals, and the occasional element of external friction. Much of the story is a monologue, one man telling a story to another inveterate traveler.

Ryan lives in a different world. He calls it, “Airworld,” and it is a place where he is never alone(Kirn, 8). He is about to leave it, though, due to several factors. Bingham has a life goal. He aspires to be the tenth person to reach one million frequent flier miles on the fictional airline, “Great West.” He has a time limit, however. His boss is on vacation, and Ryan has left his resignation letter on his boss’s desk. He has six days and 8 cities to go before his supervisor returns from a fishing trip, finds it, and cancels his company credit card. The reason why Ryan is leaving is simple. He had an accident in his childhood that resulted in periodic memory loss and loss of consciousness. His symptoms have been worsening, and it is time for him to get treatment for it.

The movie, which was released in 2009, is quite a bit different. The story arc has a much greater emphasis on his work, with it beginning with him acting as a headhunter, firing a group of people. He is employed by Career Transitions Corporation, traveling to workplaces around the country, firing people. His goal in the movie is much loftier than in the book, with ten million miles being his goal. He meets a woman who becomes a casual love interest, before being called back to the main office. A new hire from the internet generation, Natalie Keener, is promoting a plan to cut costs by doing all of the firing via an interface similar to Skype. Ryan opposes her plan based on several grounds, starting with a moral objection, and ending with her inexperience in the field. His boss agrees, and sends her with him to get her sea legs, before they begin the transition. Natalie, during the field training, is very much disturbed by the whole process. During their time together, Natalie spends an inordinate amount of time questioning Bingham’s life goals, ambitions and philosophy, eventually resulting in a lasting change in his viewpoint. Eventually, he finds himself unable to deliver the motivational speech that on dropping attachments, and flies to his love interest’s house in Illinois, where he discovers that she is married and has children. once he realizes this, he leaves, and breaks his mileage goal on the way home to start training on the remote firing system. When he returns to his office, he finds out that one of the women whom Natalie had fired had jumped off of a bridge, and killed herself. His boss informed him that Natalie had quit, and that he was going to be back in the air.

The film and the book are vastly different, and nearly unrecognizable as being the same story. As Kirn stated in an interview for cinemablend.com, “...the book is to the movie, what a piece of paper is to a paper airplane.”(cinemablend.com, NP) He stated that his creative spark was evident, but that the director had taken it in a fresh direction. Of the many elements that were different from book to film, the one that stands out the most is the time, and the story being tailored to the modern audience. By adapting the film to a modern technology versus human dignity prime conflict, the movie’s director/ screenwriter made it more palatable and saleable to today’s moviegoers.

In the movie, Natalie has the brilliant idea to do all of the firing via videoconferencing. This isn’t that original, as any coder or remote salesperson can attest. Much work is done over the web, with many companies becoming decentralized, and doing more and more work from the home office(www.readwriteweb.com). With this under consideration, it makes sense to a modern audience to push the technology over the face to face.