Movies and shows, old and new, have helped us to live vicariously through them. They have allowed us to travel far and wide at a time borders are shut and people are restricted to homes. In our new column What's In A Setting, we explore the inseparable association of a story with its setting, how the location complements the narrative, and how these cultural windows to the world have helped broaden our imagination.
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In March 2020, I spent 10 days in Jeddah, the second largest city of Saudi Arabia. I dipped my toes in the Red Sea, drove to Mecca, walked the streets, and clicked photos of the merchant houses of the Old City, and marvelled at its UNESCO World Heritage status. It was my first alcohol-free foreign trip.
In May 2020, I landed in Belgrade. I met a travel buddy there, we ate our way into Sarajevo, then cycled into Podgorica, took a bus into Tirana, hopped onto a train to Skopje, before circling back to Belgrade. (I even bumped into Novak Djokovic’s distant relative in a public restroom). In September, I flew to Melbourne, did a road trip across the Gold Coast, and watched the semis and finals of the World T20 Championship. In December 2020 and February 2021, I watched movies in Macau and snowboarded across Central Park respectively.
Or at least that was the plan. None of this really happened. In March 2020, the world went into lockdown while a global pandemic raged. “Wanderlust” was put on the backburner. For months on end, the only flights I took were ones of fantasy.
I thought of Ben Stiller’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Back in 2013, when I first watched the film on the big screen, I consumed the story at face value. I saw this painfully shy male protagonist who breaks the shackles of his introversion, embarks on a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, wins the affection of his crush, and saves the day. The human mind works in mysterious ways. I saw what I needed to see, using a blue-eyed Walter Mitty’s journey as an inspiration to escape the rut I was stuck in. It worked. I made impulsive bookings. I threw darts on a map. I backpacked in Paris, hitchhiked in Vienna, and skated in Rome. It was only a matter of time before I would spot a snow leopard. Or better yet, get cell coverage at the summit of a mountain.
But only in 2020 – while daydreaming of the adventures I never took – did I entertain the possibility that the “Secret Life” in the title was not literal but figurative. That the film might have merely been about a painfully shy man with a fertile imagination who loses his job during the downsizing of his company. That his desperate dashes to Greenland, Iceland, and the Himalayas never actually happen. That he creates airy castles in his head to get through a tough phase. That he visualises what he must to rationalise a dark week in his career.
Over the last 15 months, sitting at home and worrying about survival has resulted in cabin fever dreams at night. In these vivid dreams, familiar lands merge with unfamiliar ones, and I do impossible things – like walking out my childhood room onto a street in Porto, or sprinting across Juhu beach in Mexico City – that feel agonizingly real in the moment. There are times when the experience feels so authentic that, like an unskilled Inception clone, I break character within the dream and pinch myself to wake up. It is in these moments I realise that the “setting” of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty – from the cold dismantling of the Life magazine office to each of the exotic locations Mitty taps – is not random.
It is what an isolated mind perceives ‘travelling’ to be. He has after all been in a lifelong mental lockdown. The unfrequented places represent the inventiveness of an uninitiated tourist.
His job – which involves him willing monochromatic shades of foreign lands into high-resolution clarity in a dark room – only fuels his over-the-top perception. As a negative assets manager who, among many things, is responsible for translating celebrated photojournalist Sean O’Connell’s vision into the permanence of print, Walter Mitty’s reality is taunted by the daredevilry of fiction. He has spent years seeing – and therefore picturing – the world through the lens of an artist. His impression of a crisis is then heightened: leaping onto a helicopter piloted by a drunk man, diving into shark-infested waters, scaling an active volcano, watching his crush sing ‘Space Oddity’ in an obscure Scandanavian bar, skateboarding down an Icelandic highway, and doing battle with a villainous boss while pinging off Manhattan skyscrapers. When he misplaces O’Connell’s latest negative – meant to be the cover of the final print edition of Life magazine – the film is the lofty story he tells himself to solve this problem. The negative was in a wallet all along, but his fervid brain takes the scenic route to dissipate his oversight. The globe-trotting ‘investigation’ is essentially his personal cabin-fever dream.
In a pre-COVID world, I used to replace people with places. My social anxiety drove me to discover new environments, because the few friends I had were always busy discovering new people. I travelled to corners where nobody knew me, where loneliness was a default setting, and where I would not feel the pressure of having to confront the brutal truth of my seclusion. The lockdown, at least psychologically, was comforting to me. Suddenly, everyone was forced to operate at my level of interaction. I did not feel like I was missing out anymore. I did not feel the burning need to make something of my weekends. Being unable to travel did not bother me because, for once, I had nothing to escape. Once the lockdown started to lift after the first wave in India, I feared the return of that familiar feeling. My loneliness was going to be exposed again. Yet, out of the four mini-trips I made in the months between the two COVID-19 waves, three of them were exclusively rooted in the renewal of old friendships. The remaining one yielded new human connections.
Somewhere along the way, the places I visited morphed into the people I missed. I could afford to be reclusive earlier because time felt like a linear construct. But here I was, making up for lost hours and missed plans, because the pandemic was making people – and not places – perish. I was not running out of time anymore, I was running out of life itself.
The ending of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty reveals the elusive cover of the magazine. The missing negative was in fact a black-and-white photograph of Mitty himself, scanning a call sheet outside the building: the briefcase-carrying 9-to-5 man tirelessly guiding art to its rightful space. This picture, known as the ‘Quintessence of Life,’ soothed me to no end in 2013. I felt seen, of course. But it also suggested that while those like myself are preoccupied with fantasising about what we lack, artists can paint portraits about what we do not. Mitty is simply seated alone, doing his work, while the city is reduced to a blur around him. The location is incidental. But the human in him is not.
Last week, I finally stepped out of my pin code, and took an Uber to a friend’s apartment for lunch – we then went for an evening walk in Jeddah’s bustling marketplace. A few days later, my partner and I jogged at a nearby track in East Europe. Yesterday, I woke up in bed at the onset of yet another Mumbai monsoon and admired the cool Melbourne skyline. Today, I plan to admire the light-and-sound show at the Ruins of St Paul’s, before ending the night at Washington Park drinking with an intrepid New Yorker named Walter Mitty. He tested positive in April, but he continued to process the negatives of life.
source https://www.firstpost.com/entertainment/the-secret-life-of-walter-mitty-desperate-dashes-to-greenland-and-himalayas-and-inventiveness-of-an-uninitiated-tourist-9695961.html
