Read this (but only after watching the movie); this isn’t a review but a reflection:
Daydream-like thoughts of B. Stiller’s recent adaptation of the Secret Life of Walter still visit me at unexpected moments of the day. While thinking about my previous trip to New York, I recall my excitement at seeing a familiar train station in one of the first scenes on film.
But I also appreciate the candor of the film, its unpretentious mundaneness and the way it displays for all to see the reality of the dreams and hopes and disappointments of our lives. Notably, the film also reflects the shame involved in being unseen or that which compels us to maintain our invisibility, and how we try to engage with and challenge it in minute and grand ways in our daily lives.
The film also makes palatable forms of human relations that have emerged relatively recently and still carry the sting of opprobrium that follow what was previously ‘unseen’ and felt to be irremediably deviant. Which is not to say that deviance is merely a function of common practice but is to say that the growing popularity of an object or practice can challenge the taboos it has long felt.
Walter Mitty, by trade, is a ‘negative asset manager,’ and so it is his lot in life to live in the shadows of others who curry recognition and take responsibility for the work of so many unseen, unfelt, unheard. Typically leaving his office only to interact with superiors and deliver anticipated media, he otherwise resides and labors in a dungeon-like archive of photographic negatives with his squeamish but resolute and dependable partner Fernando. In some ways, he is a modern Quixote, imaging himself caught up in grand stories made from the stuff of normal life.
But we only find him as his occupation – along with those of many others – finds jeopardy at the whims of bearded strangers who appear on the corporate Life scene to rearrange, downsize and ‘transition.’ Specializing in corporate transformations that involve moving companies from dated formats to new ones (in this context and ours, we’re speaking of an analog or print being updated to a digital or online one), these antagonists poke and prod the longtime employees and treat them with far less than what they deserve for their sustained and enduring commitment to the project of making Life happen.
But the experience of these employees under the overseership of the Bearded Ones is far from uncommon, and their immediate presence on film only covers up the reality that they are intervening because the governing boards charged them to, which remains peculiar throughout the film, for it clearly takes little radical stance against the onerous and capricious decision-making involved in organizations that remain governed by a few.
This organizational and occupational transition operates as an appropriate background for his own personal realizations (and revisitations of memories) that he had for so long repressed or expended great effort to ignore. Life has hired others to implement global alterations to its format, while he too feels compelled to alter the format of his life, perhaps even with the stresses involved in the Life transition, but as he implies later, he actually harbors little spite for the Bearded Ones and their charge; he just bitingly challenges them to avoid being such “dicks,” suggesting he doesn’t take issue with their work but how they carry it out.
In this way, again, Mitty remains reserved and hesitant, even subservient but always mindful of what is most important to him and unwilling to expend too much of himself needlessly pillorying the inevitably bleak or discouraging circumstances in which he seems to regularly find himself.
Walter Mitty’s own hesitation, disembodied as it is, stands as yet another antagonistic element in the film, germinated so early in his own development. His own hesitation, as the film suggests, derives from real conditions, however; in his late adolescence following high school, he toiled and planned to realize his ambition to travel Europe, displaying his early interest in adventure and the world, having been so close to doing so (having purchased all of the necessary objects).
But often we lack the favorable conditions for realizing our aspirations, whatever they may be, and Mitty offers us consolation for this decision, comfort that the world does not end even if we must delay and suppress our desires for some time. As his father passed, he concluded the irresponsibility of leaving a family that had no means to support itself, nor savings nor luck. Instead, he worked these ambitions into oblivion, supporting his sister and mother, maintaining his familial commitments and obligations while stomaching the fatefully certain consequences that he would not be leaving their side for a very long time (something he may not have appreciated at the time).
Eventually, he is inspired to act but not until he finds another who gives him reason to do so, but I dispute that this series of events has little to do with impressing a girl, which is the tried explanation that might describe it. Instead, their relationship helps him realize something about himself, that he must do for himself, as with so many human realizations: we are social animals who best know ourselves around others. And so, in doing so, this narrative turn actually frames the female as very much a part of this human community that endorses and proliferates personal realization, not just passive, supportive bystanders, but real individuals who act and mutually-produce our shared world.
Cheryl’s presence and words motivate him, and although this movie does remain admittedly male-centered for who so many of the main characters are (and noticeably white, save extremely minor characters, for that matter), distinguishing between ‘acting-to-impress’ and ‘acting-as-inspired-and-motivated-by’ wholly changes the relationship of the male to the female (assuming loosely bounded identities here). The feminine is no longer an object to eventually be obtained by the impressor but another agent and actor in the world, like Mitty, like the Bearded Ones, like Sean.
The movie is nevertheless obsessed with what it literally and figuratively means to be unseen and unheard and who is considered worthy of depiction and reproduction and visibility and audibility. It does suggest some tentative conclusions: that relative few, talented, established and renown people might use their connections and social positions to continue to orchestrate the coordinates of what Ranciere called the “Distribution of the Sensible,” which really, to me, seems like a modified Ideology, meaning that they still influence and control, in large part, what is seen, thought, heard and comprehended, consciously or no.
This bare fact is best illustrated through two crucial characters and by contrast in one. Sean O’Connell, for example, monopolizes the attention and photo-space in the print edition of the Life magazine. His artistic decisions virtually determine what is or is not included, based, it is implied, on a long-standing relationship between the publication and his contributions. Seniority, then, can be decisive for what is considered worthy of illumination, publication, foregrounding and distribution. But not always.
The main Bearded one, the manager handling the transition (known ignobly as ‘Ted’), displays an irrefutable influence over the structure of the organization in which so many people labor but does so with little demonstrable ‘seniority;’ instead, he derives his authority from decisions by the board to undergo the transition, induced and motivated by a changing market climate, with new institutional and technical requirements for competitiveness. He is a foil to Sean, in this way, but his position feel relatively unearned and undeserved, and he spares little time in establishing himself as an object of contempt, hatred and fear by many.
While the reviews frame him differently, emphasizing his own authoritative qualities and existence as a ‘publishing executive,’ this isn’t what he is called in their film, and so reviews like this one unjustifiably downplay the narrative potential and impact of his performance as a ‘transition manager.’ While he is certainly qualified, based on his appointment, and tasked with an important charge, he nevertheless carries out these duties with capricious condescension, treating employees like discardable cogs. But this, too, the review failed to note, because it’s not about whether the character is believeable but about whether people can sympathize with Mitty in his trials to appease him, and many can, I think.
While we’re on the topic, this review is additionally frustrating for how the reviewer seeks to drawn on his experience traveling in Iceland to debunk filmic narrative elements and take pot shots at the film. In doing so, this review discloses his privileged position (removed from the audience again) and his inability to fixate on necessary elements rather than those that are inessential to focusing on the crucial or key aspects of the film as it relates its audience and some sense of how its musing on the prevailing social and aesthetic relations in our world.
Really, we cannot finally decide the matter without a fuller and more personal engagement, as evaluations and judgments are tied up with interpretation as much observations and other invocations, but many of the reviews I’ve read have obsessed over details or aspects peripheral to the central interest in the lives of those who are unseen, unheard, unthought and unarticulated. Although there always remain some group that has yet to experience this kind of iteration, movies such as this inspire others that contemplate the significance of desiring that sense of being heard, though, and seen, while consoling those along the way with stories, images and words that shine light towards new avenues for negotiating everyday situations and finding ways to better cope with existent conditions and relations.
But, as Sean O’Connell’s subtly remarks on the ephemeral nature of beautiful objects left uncaptured, this film is about all of the “Ghost Cats,” those who will not be seen because not thought deserving of center stage. In reality, however, we are all Ghost Cats, and we deserve that kind of treatment and consideration.
Bearer of Pity 