Walter Mitty: Why it shouldn't work and why it does

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

This is not a movie that should have worked, and looking at Rotten Tomatoes, many of the critics did not think it did (though 3/4 of the viewers liked it).  It's not a great film.  12 Years a Slave was a great film...which I nonetheless hated, coming away from it from feeling empty and manipulated.  In contrast, I was deeply moved by Walter Mitty, profoundly more so than that other, Important Film. I came out of Walter Mitty feeling a genuine sense of uplift and wellness, which, though it didn't really track with the content, was actually there.

The film is loosely based on a wisp of a story by James Thurber (which, despite being an undergrad English Major, and despite "Walter Mitty" being a cultural shorthand for a big-dreaming little-man, I never read until today).  The movie begins with Walter Mitty, a "negatives assets" worker (there are two in his department) at LIFE Magazine, on the day it has been acquired and is being turned into an online-only product.  The usual corporate white-collared goons come in from the head office to execute the unfit (they all, inexplicably, have beards), with the lead, Ted Hendricks, being played by Adam Scott (who I loved in Tell Me You Love Me). That's happening as Mitty has been smitten by Cheryl Melhoff (Kristin Wiig), who is a recent divorcee, and newly employed at LIFE.  As the film opens, Mitty is trying to "wink" her through eHarmony, and is being shut down by the site for not having done enough with his life.  Whence he meets Todd, the helpful customer service rep who befriends Walter and acts as an appreciative fan through the film.

The plot pivots around the missing "negative 25", sent to Walter for the last cover of LIFE by the famous and maverick photographer, Sean O'Connell.  Cheryl plants the seed to go seek out O'Connell (played by a beautifully scruffy Sean Penn), which he does, with a trip to Iceland and then Afghanistan.  He returns, settles scores with Hendricks, and gets the girl.

It shouldn't work, at all.

So how does it work?  Well, let me lay out the ways I don't think it works.

Number one:  Ben Stiller is not the right actor to play Thurber's Walter.  You look in his face and it's not that of a beaten down everyman.  The vacuity of Derek Zoolander insouciant mug is gone. There's depth, history, strength, and self-awareness.  He's not broken and he knows what is going on in the world around him, and what people are, and (essentially) how to engage them.  He daydreams, true, but they are not the pathetic compensations of a man who is at heart a coward. That's not Walter's heart, which is clear from very early on in the film.  He's not looking out at the world through a fog of failure and weakness.  There's already a strength and perceptiveness in him from the beginning.  Therefore he's not a believable Walter Mitty, as Thurber portrayed him.

Secondly, the setup:  Small man discovers his Bigness by facing and overcoming trials of strength and courage, and winning the girl.  Well, in a sense that's the Hero's Journey, so that's OK, as a structure, but dangerously trite.  If it was done more straight, with earnestness on the part of the film, it would have been treacly awfulness.

Third, the Other Places and Other People as Route to Awakening.  That could have also been painfully done.  Really painfully.  I tend to avoid these film premises, so nothing comes to mind immediately as an example.  But the thought of the Wise Native makes me start gagging like a cat with a hair ball.  (Please don't go all Avatar, either.  In that film, it's the half-breed that saves the natives.)

But with all that, why does it work and how does it work?

I think Stiller's goal is essentially to present the feeling of the state of self-integration as a tone. It's that state which Mitty solidifies through facing himself, via following through with his quest. Stiller doesn't seem to care to present a map of the way there, in its details.  Unlike, perhaps, some 60's story of travel to India to find enlightenment, Stiller is not saying, "Here's how you have to do it."  He doesn't care about presenting a "credible" portrait of the journey that Mitty is on.  He's not bound to Mitty as the Thurber or the quest structure would seem to define the character.  Mitty, once moving (which, I'd argue, is from the moment he pushes Cheryl's "wink" button), is real, engaged, with depth, and with a power of his choices.  He doesn't waffle when he chooses.  Even in the bar, in Iceland, deciding not to go with the drunken helicopter pilot is not a craven choice.  It's actually quite rational and understandable not to go over a frozen body of water with a man you just met, who will likely pass out at the control of a several ton machine suspended off a whirligig.  That scene does not match with a character who is supposed to be a weak, ineffectual, daydreamy man.  His choice to go is not, then, overcoming cowardice, but rather, embracing audaciousness and chance.  That's very different.

Mitty's journey is not so much a depiction of transformation, as of coming out of pause mode (begun as a kind of shock reaction to his father dying when he was young).

So, if Stiller is not presenting a real depiction of transformation, or a map to courage and change, then why has he not failed?  If he uses cliched structures and plot devices, why does the movie not feel hackneyed and unearned?

Because, again, I don't think that's his intention.  The secondary characters--Cheryl, the helicopter pilot, Hernando the other negative assets guy, Todd at eHarmony, even Bearded Corporate Lackey--are too full and have too many moments that point to (even if not fleshed out) inner lives, which are not pre-programmed by the film's overt conventions.  There's too much interiority to these characters, who should, if the external structures (of quest, transformation, seeking-the-girl) be shells or ciphers, organized around Mitty.  But they're not.

Instead, the film gives a series of events, characters, and locations which are all tonally consistent. The beautiful mountains of Afghanistan, the starkly sumptuous Iceland and the rugged space of Greenland;  the quirky foreigners and sailors;  the fighting of a shark without totally freaking out; skate boarding down a scary-steep road;  outrunning a volcano.  They are all underlay by a tone, like a subliminal musical drone that colors all the overt notes, which, although those notes may adhere to a certain "melodic" structure, are fundamentally changed by the foundational harmonic, being the integration of the self with itself.

The encounter with Sean O'Connell is the keystone of this.  O'Connell should be the Wise Man on the Mountain.  He's a man of the Old Ways (he still shoots on film, is geographically enigmatic, and is unconcerned with money), who Mitty, literally stumbles over on top of a mountain, laying in wait to photograph the rare snow leopard (referencing Peter Mathiasson's book, The Snow Leopard, about a quest for enlightenment symbolized by the leopard).  The potential for rank kitsch is breathtaking.  Yet O'Connell is played, and directed, as an actual man, with his own particular interior that is not beholden to the external trappings of the character, but who is real, spontaneous, and wise in his way, without being a cloying prick about it.  He does not represent what should be striven for.  Rather, he's another of the film's elaborations on the felt quality of a state.

So, that's all why The Secret Life of Walter Mitty works, because it's not about what it looks like it's about.  Rather, it's a series and collection of "carrier melodies," that allow for that underlying drone to be communicated, the tone of the state of self-integration, of an interior self that matches an exterior self.  The trappings are not the point.  The beautiful scenery and the foreigners in foreign lands are not the point.  The point is to have two hours of exposure to a state, which is your state, which is what the felt-sense of that integration is.  That's why it works.

"What's wrong with Norman?"--Star Trek Into Darkness, and the deep shadow of the Fan Boi

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

There is something seriously wrong with J.J.Abrams. I don't know him personally. He probably does not have bodies buried under his swimming pool, presumably.

But judging from his films, something didn't really work when his DNA sequencing was going on. Perhaps then his mother broke down and had just that one cigarette at a delicate RNA transcription moment. Or perhaps the damage came later, maybe that “little” head bump on the coffee table wasn't as simple as it seemed. Or, perhaps the early grade school teasing affected him like that one ray of light that strikes the skin at just the right moment and angle to start the process of a skin cancer. Whatever it was, there's something deeply wrong with J.J.

"Human emotions.  Hmm.  Interesting."

This what what Heather and I concluded as we turned to each other, the credits rolling on “Star Trek: Into Darkness,” his second Star Trek film, which we saw on its opening day. It's certainly not that it's a technically flawed film, as far as filmmaking goes. You can see that there was fabulously talented technicians behind this production; as an “film object,” it's about as good as it gets for a genre popcorn film. The CG work is top notch, flawless. The acting is not Olivier's Lear, but it's clean and you can feel for the characters. They seem to care about stuff, and have defined characters and role specificity. You know why they do what they do, because they are drawn consistently and with bold outlines.

So that's not the problem.

The problem is that Abrams makes films and TV which are soulless. (The exception is Mission Impossible 3, which seemed less under his control than Tom Cruise's, so that doesn't count.) There's something broken about his understanding of humanness. It seems like what emotion is in Star Trek--Into Darkness is the product of hiring actors who can actually evoke emotion, rather than Abrams' understanding and direction of emotion. Perhaps that's to his credit, that he hires decent actors. But I imagine a directing scene going, “Kirk is upset here. Go.” And then Chris Pine goes through a complex translation process in order to create a decent approximation of what Kirk is feeling, drawn from his own life and understanding of the series, and of a broader appreciation of human life. But not from Abrams' direction. I wonder if there's an “emotional augmentation committee” that the actors form to support each other, while publicly they nod and um and pretend that Abrams is actually communicating what to feel.

Abrams shows the shadowy underbelly of the fanboi, the devotee of (in this case) genre films. When one spends so much time in one sub-universe, I suppose that could arrive at profound, focused insights. But that requires reflection. What Abrams seems to exhibit it the other side, where one loses track of the larger universe, and starts to confuse the one for the other.

For instance, how desire for specific narrative, neurological, and visual impact overrules the integrity of the characters: Kahn (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is supposed to be a super soldier, genetically bred to be “superior,” and certainly a kick-ass fighter. Taking that he's a Nazi at heart, out for genetic purification, he actually is a poor tactician. He gets a Starfleet officer to blow himself up (I'll get to that fuckwit in a second) in order to convene a meeting of all the upperlings in Starfleet, and then attacks them with what's essentially a machine gun mounted to a helicopter. It makes for pretty breaking glass and light effects, and drama around Kirk's surrogate father dying, but is almost willfully aggressive in ignoring the actual rules of the world that Abrams is working in. Kahn, if he were the Kahn depicted, would either have hunted down the main perpetrator directly, or, having gotten them together in the same room, nuked it (or some equivalent). It's a stupidly plotted assassination attempt for one who the movie puts up as a super-warrior. Jesus, I'm a Buddhist therapist and I could graph out a better attack strategy then that.

Point one in how Abrams seems to be autistic in relation to real humans. Second point: the officer whose daughter is dying in a London hospital (why is she dying in that day and age? They've got super medicine, etc., so what could she possibly be dying of?), who is approached by Khan to blow himself and his co-workers up, in order to save his daughter with a vial of Khan's blood.

I'm not saying people don't do this sort of thing. I just find it wildly evil every time I see it depicted in film, this warped conception of family. In itself it's bad. Very bad. But when it's not contextualized by the film, as, essentially, insanity, then there's an awful and sinister overtone left hanging, in which such behavior is somehow, at some emotional level, viewed as justifiable. “I mean, it's family! Of course people would sacrifice anything for family!”

Bullshit. Heather and I have had this conversation and been straight that given one of these scenarios, where it's kill innocents to save each other, that we let the other die. How could there be any other ethical choice? How does this fellow, who seems pretty conventional, loves his family, decide that his daughter's life is worth dozens of his co-workers (with their families and children, and dogs)? Or that his daughter's life is going to be richer and better when she has a traitorous, emotionally unstable, murderous, and ultimately, abandoning man for a father.

The problem is with the cavalier presentation, which gets the emotional life of humans terribly wrong, all surface and no depth.

The last major example is at the end, where the Dark Enterprise is crashed into Starfleet HQ by Khan. This gazillion ton ship, loaded with weapons—it's a war ship, after all—crashes and slides along San Francisco, obliterating skyscrapers and plowing through human-filled streets, snuffing thousands of lives in a few seconds. (Why it doesn't do more than slide to a stop and spark itself is pretty silly. Are the munitions covered in Super Spongy Foam?)

This is essentially a smaller version of what Abrams did in the first Star Trek movie, when he ate the whole planet of Vulcan. There's a beautifully rendered depiction of mass carnage that does not have the effects it should have on the film's characters, and by virtue of that, is asserting that we also should not have a reaction. “It's just a movie! It's all make believe,” I imagine him and his writers saying.

The wrongness here is not that it's not fiction, but the lack of responsibility Abrams takes for how his fiction plays in the very real human nervous system and its memory of trauma and vulnerability to, say, empathy. Abrams both gets to express and manipulate the trauma, without taking responsibility for the effects. He's making films in the context of a brutal last 100 years, with actual real fascists running around spouting, and killing on the basis of, ethnic cleansing philosophies. There really have been buildings demolished in a flick of a switch, in the arcing of a plane, and thousands have died. This really all is in the nervous systems of his audience, and to implicitly assert that it's just fiction, not real, is something dark and twisted, if not borderline abusive.

Which is not to make the case for the “sensitive self,” that mind which claims the right to guard against pain by insisting everyone else move really carefully. It's saying that one has a responsibility to playing by the rules, both the ones one sets up in their fictional world (why doesn't either the Klingon world or Earth have fucking planetary defenses, or at least monitoring satellites?!), and the rules of the human psyche and body. If you push a button, you can't then deny that you pushed that button, or that the other should not have the proscribed reaction. To use the iconography of recent human trauma and then deny the effect is a big problem, which all the gee-wiz fan boi geekdom cannot, and should not be allowed to, cover over.