Tapping into the cultural zeitgeist of the noughties, director Jason Reitman (Juno) is bringing Up in the Air to kick off the new decade. A movie starring George Clooney about a chap who lives to board planes: “to know me, is to fly with me” and offers a rather romantic picture of the CO2 plopping metal birds. Obviously accused of being employed by the slowly suffocating air travel industry, Reitman maintains that he’s grabbing onto the current attention the media is placing on the skies, and he’s not the only one. Record company Capitol has just reissued Frank Sinatra’s ‘Come Fly With Me’ on vinyl, another desperate move from British Airways perhaps? Whatever the reason for the continued influx of pro-plane-propaganda the 50 years between the song and the film hold in them the expansion and the degradation of a dream and whilst Reitman with his anti-abortion/smoking flicks can’t understand it, the powerhouse combo of revisionist novelist Cormac McCarthy (No Country For Old Men) and uncompromising director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) certainly can with the more humbly named piece The Road. Luckily, this one comes out a full week before Reitman’s.
It’s up to the emerging generation to sort out this one and to get back on the road where we can see each other.
Unlike other doomsday novels, The Road rips apart the skin of civilisation and then challenges the humanity behind the façade to heal the wounds. It’s a deeply apt and important apocalyptical tale of our times, dubbed by activist and journalist George Monbiot as “the most important environmental book ever written.” Set in the aftermath of an unnamed disaster, the collapse of the ecosystem has left a withering, bleached landscape. People are the only living thing forced into cannibalism for survival while the last can of Coke lingers in the background, a grim echo of the corporate regimes our current selves are trapped in. Trudging along the desolate road to the south where the ‘good guys’ reside are the archetypal Man (Viggo Mortensen) and Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) embarking on the final journey of humanity. Of course there’s plenty of political allegory at work, parallels to the bombed out desert of Iraq and the collapse of corporations in the wake of the credit crunch, but it’s the symbol of the road and the feeling of manifest destiny that calls to our bare feet loud and clear.
Since the first voyages of humankind out of East Africa to the economy defining routes of The Old Silk Road and the Trans-Siberian railway, roads have been the veins of our civilisation. Now, it’s the fleeting trails in the sky that momentarily hint at our domination over the globe. These invisible roads claim to make us more interconnected as a planet than ever. They make the world smaller. An epic voyage of discovery has become a cocktail of microwave foods, recycled air, buzzing headphones and is over in less than a day. No wonder we think flying to Ethiopia to teach kids English is a good idea.
Whilst we pay attention to the road network of our hometowns, our increasing frolics to developing countries seldom get to the heart of the land. Instead, now we can fly over Sudan, Chad or Niger to get to a cushioned safari park in Kenya and revel in the pretty the view. Like Man and Boy, if we were forced to walk through places of depravity and despair, we too would begin to question what went wrong. But then that wouldn’t be in line with the needs of our economy.
The continued exploitation of the East by the West is fantastically visible in microcosm on the tiny island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania. If you were to look at a map, you’d see that all the tarmac roads led to and from beaches with little to no development in the unsightly centre. It is here where Westerners board planes from Dar Es Salaam to the island rather than embarking on a three-hour ferry ride across the turquoise Indian Ocean. You can take a hot shower or wash your swimsuit with running water then dine on oversized portions whilst reclining in a hammock and never set foot off the coast. All this in a part of the world where in 2009 over 23 million people faced death by starvation and dehydration as a result of the ever increasing drought. Like Bombay for Sinatra, the East for the West is nothing but an exotic bar with locals who’ll toot their flute for you. But if we can’t see it, how can we help it?
As Jack Kerouac realised in On the Road the American Dream is the road itself, the freedom to move, travel and discover. What lies at the end is never as powerful as the journey itself. Whether for the Hunter .S. Thompson’s or the Mahatma Gandhi’s of the world, the road and its nomadic promise appeals to our Western selves and promises a journey of self discovery. Like the father and son duo in The Road or the brothers in The Darjeeling Limited, it’s a symbol for the return to the organic self, it tears us away from technology and isolation and puts us into a deeper philosophical sphere. But the beatniks are gone and the image of suave jetsetter Clooney is filling the void.
Like the years between Sinatra’s song and Reitman’s movie contain the creation and decay of the dream of aviation for all, the centuries between the first steps of humanity out of East Africa and McCarthy’s envisioned final ones, hold in them the entire creation and destruction of civilisation as we know it. The hostile, unknown black lava desert of Ethiopia our ancestors faced is now a network of cracked concrete highways peppered with ash and snow that our protagonists must walk through. The degradation of the road is the symbol of the irreversible damage inflicted on humanity, by humanity. But as long as flying from Addis Ababa to Nairobi is deemed necessary for the central business district, or socially acceptable for the time-restricted traveller, the more likely it is that the inhabitants of countries who barely step foot on planes are going to be kept in the dark.
For McCarthy, this darkness is only lifted by the humanity beneath the tale, the relationship between Man and Boy which remains hypnotic and terrifyingly real in both novel and film form. The light is in the glimmer of hope Boy represents as the baton is passed on and that is something every human on this planet needs to understand, it’s up to the emerging generation to sort out this one and to get back on the road where we can see each other.