When I first started watching the film, I was shocked that there were jobs that required you to fire people. When the main character started firing people, I wasn’t sure if he was good at his job because he was simply following a procedure or if his success came from his apathy, as he lived a relatively simple life devoid of relationships with his only joy coming from traveling the country to acquire ‘air miles’. As the movie progressed we came to understand that the character was in fact living a life devoid of happiness as his desire to reach a certain amount of air miles, served as an excuse from developing loving relationships with his family, significant others, and friends. The character’s growth in the movie served to illustrate the importance in maintaining relationships with those you care about in life, and not completely focusing on work. This is a relatable life lesson since as a student, my priority is to learn from my classes so that I am able to graduate, however I need to also have time to have relax and have fun with friends.

Prior to this Flora Friday Film, I had not even heard of this movie but by the end, this film had quickly skyrocketed to one of my favorites to date. The movie follows a man, Ryan, that is constantly on the move because of his job; as a result, he doesn’t really have a home, doesn’t have strong familial connections and lives a life with seemingly no baggage. This all changes when he meets Alex, who he has a strong romantic connection with and who leads a similar lifestyle to him (seemingly) and also when he meets his new hire that he is supposed to be training. Throughout this movie, I feel like Ryan learns so much about how to live your life with no regrets, spontaneity and so much joy through Alex and Natalie, the new hire. Unfortunately, this movie doesn’t have the happiest of endings because Ryan finds out that Alex has a husband and kids at home and that he was merely an escape for her. Even though this unfortunate situation happened, this movie made me realize that it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all because of how much being in love changed him (for the better).

Up in the air is a film about a man having fun firing people. At first, actually being entertaining and somewhat comedic watching how indifferent he gets in firing people, it actually is a depressing film in the end.  He lives to destroy lives at first but it is quickly shown that he cares somewhat. He cares enough to have the respect of at least appearing regretful and appears to dislike firing people. Even when his new coworker gets proven wrong and people are becoming suicidal, he questions himself rather than others on what is going wrong in his life. In the end he finally regrets it all and finally decides to change his life, which is an amazing end to the film.

The most interesting idea for me is that the main character, Ryan, has a job that requires him to fire people. For him to do so, he had to travel around the world, meet the employees and then fire them. Only later in the film a different technique of firing is introduced, which is done through the internet video system. One thing that can be said for sure is that the film can cheer you up even when you are in a bad mood.

The movie “Up in the Air” really gave me an interesting perspective of how people have to deal with getting fired. In my own life whenever say I apply to join a club I always have to face the fear of getting rejected and rejection do give my emotional pain though only for a week or so. But in this movie I got to see how getting fired which is much more striking can vastly affect people. In the film we clearly see that the actors were dedicated to their job before being fired, however, after being fired instead of having to face depression its interesting to see the idea of how getting fired gave them liberation to pursue their passion which is something that really stood out to me.

I really enjoyed this movie because in one of my classes we examined how losing your job skews your social identity. In order to mitigate the damage done by losing a social position, you have to form a new identity. It was very interesting to see the point of view from the person doing the firing than looking at it from the fired person’s perspective, like we did in class. social positions, like a job, have a significant impact on how we define ourselves in relation to others. It’s kind of sad to think about how all those people fired in the movie had to recalibrate themselves. It was especially sad when the one woman committed suicide.

However, it was a really cute rom-com, and I’m glad that the George Clooney and Vera Farmiga ended up together; George Clooney’s character was so full of hubris that it was nice to see it balanced out with Vera Farmiga’s character. And Anna Kendrick saw a good character transformation, too.

As someone who loves watching movies, I always jump at the weekly opportunities to watch a new film every Friday night as part of the Rose Scholar event.  Up until the event, I had never heard of the movie “Up in the Air”, which caught my interest.  While I expected the movie to be entertaining as I often like the work of the star of the movie, George Clooney, I was not prepared for the life lesson that was woven in a the film’s central theme.  This lesson was the importance of family connections and relationships, a seemly simple principle that in reality is often overlooked.  Clooney’s character, Ryan, is employed for the sole task of firing people with the intent of minimizing legal blowback, requiring him to constantly travel all over the country.  As the movie progresses, Ryan slowly realizes the flaw of his lifestyle which is that he cannot maintain a long term relationship with family or friends.

This lesson could be applied to almost everybody’s life, including my own, who prioritize work, school, and other often isolating activates.  While these things are important, maintaining bonds and relationships with those close to ourselves is vital aspect of being human.  In my own life, I delegate arguably too much time for schoolwork and not cultivating and maintaining critical relationships, leading to feeling isolated.  Its important to find a comfortable balance between both aspects of life as the movie suggests.

I enjoyed watching the movie Up in the Air this past Friday, and I think it had some interesting commentary on social relationships. In the movie the main character Ryan Bingham (played by the astonishingly handsome George Clooney) flies around most of the year, spending very little time at home. He meets a woman named Alex (Vera Farmiga) and strikes up a casual sexual relationship, not wanting to get tied down. Even though SPOILER:

she ends up having a secret family, for most of the movie there’s a tension between not wanting to get tied down and wanting to have a meaningful relationship. One lesson that the viewer can get from the movie is to think deeply about the social modality that works best for you: do you need strong relationships, casual relationships, many relationships, few relationships, platonic relationships? etc. Once you’ve figured out these facts optimize your life around them. Humans are deeply social animals and tailoring your relationships to be congruent to your preferred modality is a substantial but extremely profitable investment in your overall happiness. In particular, this is an area of life where it’s worth it to optimize for selfishness, in defiance of social norms if necessary. Although the content of the movie is cliche and obvious (the aloof, partying man realizes that all along he wanted to settle down and be a “good” brother/son/etc.) the message can be interpreted orthogonally to cliche.

Choosing social relationships like this can be difficult for a variety of reasons but one positive is that, especially at a place like Cornell, there’s something for everyone. Whatever kinds of platonic/non-platonic relationships you’re into, there’s almost certainly a group of people here who are into this.

This week for Rose Scholar’s I watched the film “Up in the Air”. In it, Ryan Bingham, a man who, for a living, fires people for businesses and corporations, is faced with the consequences of his own socially isolated life, and through interactions with Natalie Keener, gains, if only a little, a small perspective on life.

There is a Marxist concept known as “alienation from labor” that I wish to apply to this film. In the Marxist sense, roughly, what is meant is that as automation drives people towards cities, and more and more and more you work in a factory, the theory goes that you become “alienated” from the product of your labor. Because you don’t control the means of production, you lack agency over your life and output, and so, you work in a limbo, feeding a system rather than your own life. I think this applies to the movie in two ways. The first is to Bingham himself. In a lot of ways, his dedication to corporatism, both that of his own that hired him, and that of those that he is outsourced to, deprives him of what are generally considered to be social groundings. His “motivational” speeches about discarding social ties demonstrate not only that he is alienated from the output of his labor (ironically, social motivation for the recently unemployed) but from his own social circle itself. The former alienation is fully demonstrated when Keener threatens the nature of his job – despite constantly outputting advice for the unemployed, when faced with it himself, he cannot recognize it.

The second way “alienation from labor” applies is more obvious, and that’s the workers who are fired throughout the movie. We see that they are dedicated to their jobs – this is understandable and justified, as they depend on them to provide for their families, a recurring theme. But being fired more than once is framed as a liberation to pursue something of passion – A career in cuisine, more time with family, and so on. Bingham may not believe his own advice here, but the freedom he suggests could be available is genuine.

With this in mine I want to judge the ethical nature of Bingham’s job. It’s existence betrays layers of alienation in our culture – the bosses of these businesses are so separated from their workers they hire outside people to inform the workers that their jobs no longer exist. The workers are in a vacuum – not only separated from their labor, but even their employer. Perhaps the emotional support, how callously given, is a net positive. But we should question why Bingham’s job is necessary or even desired. Is a society that supports or even demands such a task worth supporting?

I think what struck me most about this movie was the in-depth, character development that the director and scriptwriters gave Ryan Bingham, the main character in “Up in the Air.” At the beginning of the movie, I was inclined toward disliking him. He seemed like a very superficial character who did not seem to care for anything other than the fancy things in life and had a blatant disregard for other people’s feelings. Not to mention, he didn’t even have a close enough relationship with his sister to meet her fiancé prior to the wedding, while most people find family to be one of their priorities.

Things change for Ryan when he finds out that he may no longer be able to live his life primarily going from airport to airport and hotel room to hotel room. This seemingly drastic change in Ryan’s life gave us a window into a different dimension of his character. In his quest to prove that his job could not be done through digital means, we also start seeing the human aspect of him as it applies to his job and his feelings towards other people. I expected a character with such superficial life goals to be disrespectful when faced with conflicting ideas and emotions. Yet, in my opinion, his interactions with Natalie — the new hire for his company that is behind his impending change in lifestyle — are nothing but supportive and compassionate, even if not in the kindest of ways.

Even as the movie came to a close, and he realized that earning flight miles would not fill the void he was now finding in his life, we see that Ryan is a character with a code. He is confronted with a situation where he could interject in a marriage and do less mature things than walking away respectfully. We even see growth as he concedes, through means of a recommendation letter, that Natalie’s statements about human emotion are entirely valid. He learned that he could be wrong about the outcomes of various situations, such as people threatening suicides or his disregard for emotional affection. Better yet, we see that he accepts this all very gracefully.

Despite it being a sad movie, some aspects of it were pretty wholesome.