Up in the Air

Every couple of years, there’s a movie - a romantic comedy, really - which tells us that being alone is pretty great. There’s money, and there’s prestige, and there’s a touch of class that makes the reek of baby vomit incomprehensible. “I like my life, and I’m happy,” says George Clooney, to the obnoxious, brown-nosing girl, wearing glasses, who seems to lack any social grace.

“Aren’t you lonely?” She asks, and a cliche is born.

George Clooney discovers, slowly, quietly, that this girl might be correct. He is lonely. He is alone. And he longs for something more.

“Sell me marriage,” the former, contented George Clooney asks of his bright-eyed, bushy-tailed companion. “How many functional marriages do you know?” Flustered, the girl mentions love and, when that fails, she mentions not dying alone.

“We all die alone.” ...Yes, George Clooney, we do.


This movie provides some nuance, and doesn’t give our charming George the happy ending we expect and he deserves - there is no promise of family bliss and little feet and consumerist joy that is the American Dream. Instead, he is released into an abyss of uncertainty that is every life, void of momentum. (This is a cliche, too.) George spent the first half of the movie firing people, winning them over, and letting them know it would all be okay - a fresh start, a new dawn, a chance to go back and rethink and recover. When you take away the office, the title, the routine, you have to ask...what really matters? What makes me happy?

Is it achievement? Is it family? Is it someone to keep you warm at night? Is it writing “George Clooney was here” upon a plane, and letting something outside of you live on, when you inevitably die, alone? Is it marriage, a cure for loneliness, or is marriage little more than a status symbol - something to check off a life-list of things you expect yourself to do?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being - a Russian novel expositing the fact that we really don’t matter and will be forgotten, and how that sucks - seems strongly evoked in this feeling I’m left with.

Damn it, George Clooney, you’ve never before left me with such ennui. Life, it seems, is very lonely. Come sit with me, let's be lonely together.