Happy Thanksgiving, and Isn't It All Just So Monstrously Unfair?: "Planes, Trains and Automobiles"
There's a line I’ve always loved from Planes, Trains and Automobiles without ever really understanding. It's delivered by a minor character and sweeps by in the flow of the film, but sometimes these are the ones that stick with us. About six minutes in, the children of Steve Martin's character Neal Page are talking about the affection they get from their grandfather. Page's daughter asks if he's going to give her a noogie when he sees her. "Of course he's going to give you a noogie," her mom replies, "that's how he tells you he loves you." Page's son then asks why their grandfather doesn't give him noogies. "Because you get Indian burns," replies his mom.
"But I would prefer noogies," says the kid.
He would prefer noogies. Wouldn't we all? An affectionate scrub on the head instead of a painful twisting of the skin of the arm? Yes we would. But he doesn't get noogies. And the reason? There is no reason. The world is unfair.
It's an elegant statement of one of the deepest quandaries of the film.
Made by John Hughes in 1987, Planes, Trains and Automobiles is a combination buddy film, road trip film, and descent into dismay film about the seemingly simple and yet fundamentally complicated act of going home for the holidays.
Neal Page is an ad man on a business trip to New York City two days before Thanksgiving who's trying to get home to Chicago. Del Griffith (John Candy) is a traveling salesman of shower curtain rings who ends up on the same flight as Page. When the flight is re-routed to Wichita because of a storm the two fall in together; more accurately, the uptight Page is forced into the company of the annoying Griffith because the latter – through a shower curtain ring connection – has managed to get a room in one of the otherwise full motels in the area.
In the morning – it's now the day before Thanksgiving, all the flights are delayed, and Page's desperation to get home is growing – the two board a train to Chicago. It breaks down. Stranded, they also realize that all their cash was stolen by a burglar the night before, and so Griffith has to raise some money by passing off his shower curtain rings as earrings and selling them to credulous customers. This gets them on a bus to the Saint Louis airport, where they split up again. But when Page rents a car he finds that it has vanished from the rental company parking lot.
Griffith shows up in his own rental car and Page reluctantly accepts a ride; this starts out fine but turns hellish when Griffith first manages to nearly kill them by driving the wrong way on the interstate, and then burns up the car by flicking a cigarette out the window and not noticing that it has blown into the rear seat. Barely on speaking terms, the two pilot the decrepit and smoking automobile to a motel, where Page trades his expensive watch for a room. Warm and reasonably comfortable, he looks out the window to see Griffith going to sleep in the now-convertible car and suffers a moment of compassion. He asks Griffith if he'd like to share the room and they bond over potato chips and miniature bottles of liquor.
In the morning, when the car is impounded for being undrivable the odd couple hitches a ride in the back of a refrigerated truck to Chicago, where they separate for good...except that Page realizes that Griffith has no home to go to: his wife, whom he's madly in love with, has been dead for eight years, and Griffith simply lives on the road. Page invites him home for the holiday, and we close with a scene of Griffith being welcomed into a setting of perfect domestic tranquility.
Beneath the shenanigans and unforgettable dialogue, one way to think about the film is that, like so much comedy, it's about the caprice of the universe. In the space of two days, Page descends step by step from luxurious contentment to an outer circle of hell. This starts on the day he's trying to get out of New York City when his client cannot make up his mind about which ad pitch he prefers, delaying Page; the gag continues when Page spots an empty cab stuck in traffic and races a stranger (played by Kevin Bacon) for it, only to be tripped up by a steamer trunk carelessly placed in the street. The trunk belongs to Griffith – although the two don't realize this until later on – and the stranger gets the cab.
The cosmos, that is, in all its wisdom has decided to make Page's life agonizing...for no reason at all. This whimsical destruction continues into Page's time with Griffith. The salesman is so big he squashes Page when they sit next to each other on the plane, he insists on talking too much and taking his shoes off to air out his feet, and then he makes such a mess out of the bathroom in the hotel room the two share that Page ends up drying his face with a pair of probably not too clean skivvies.
The indignities continue to mount, one after another, until we're tempted to compare Page to Job, struggling forward through calamity with only the promise of some treasured thing out there in front of him. For Job, this is salvation through faith; for Neal Page it's the promise that somewhere at the end of this journey lies the hallowed land of his domesticity: his wife, kids, and extended family all gathered to enjoy each other's company.
This is a fine way to understand the film, but an incomplete one, I think. Because for Hughes – and this is what makes him such an unparalleled chronicler of teenage life as well – the world is not capricious, but actively unfair. Capriciousness – the feeling of things going along great at one moment, and then taking a sudden turn into inexplicable disaster, seemingly at the cruel whim of some larger force – is what Page experiences, and it's the feeling that lies at the heart of so many descent into dismay films, from Lost in America to The Hangover.
But Hughes has a more sensitive faculty: one of the central reasons for his success in writing and directing comedy is that he's attuned to pain. Which is to say that it's Griffith's film also. And for Griffith, the world is not simply a place in which random things happen, it's a place that's fundamentally unfair.
Del Griffith is one of those people who just doesn't fit in to the world Neal Page occupies. He's blundering instead of suave, his body isn't shaped right, and he knows the wrong kinds of people. Most of all he talks too much, imposing himself uncomfortably into Page's haughty solitude. In the film's most bracing scene, Page loses his temper and points this out. "Didn't you notice on the plane when you started talking," he sneers in Griffith's face, "eventually I started reading the vomit bag? Didn't that give you some sort of clue, like, hey, maybe this guy's not enjoying it? You know, everything is not an anecdote. You have to discriminate. You choose things that are funny or mildly amusing or interesting. You're a miracle! Your stories have none of that. They're not even amusing accidentally!"
In other words, Griffith is one of them. The kind of person that Page doesn't want to hang out with, much less encounter. The movie concretizes this idea by casting Page down into what's now known as Red State America. A suit-wearing ad exec, he's plunged into the world of the hoi polloi, traveling on a bus where no one knows "Three Coins in a Fountain" but everyone knows the theme song to The Flintstones, sleeping in down at the heel motels, hitching rides in the back of pickup trucks driven by paranasaly afflicted farmers.
Lest one think that this is some sort of society-level critique, however, Hughes reminds us that the lives of these folks are riven with iniquity as well. There's a woman whose husband forces her to load heavy luggage: "She don't mind – she's short and skinny, but she's strong," he notes. "Her first baby come out sideways. She didn't scream or nothing." – and teenagers who buy shower curtain rings thinking that they're haute couture. Not to mention the hotel burglar who will never be caught or punished.
For Griffith and these people – the view from lower down on the ladder, we might say – the world is not one of caprice but basic inequality. Some have, and others don't. But this goes both ways, for it’s not simply a matter of possessing money – it's also a matter of possessing human decency. When Page unloads on Griffith, the latter has a reply: "You wanna hurt me? Go right ahead if it makes you feel any better. I'm an easy target. Yeah, you're right, I talk too much. I also listen too much. I could be a cold-hearted cynic like you, but I don't like to hurt people's feelings. You think what you want about me. I'm not changing. I like me. My wife likes me. My customers like me. 'Cause I'm the real article. What you see is what you get."
The implication of this is if that Page is not these things. He may be well off, with fine clothes and an expensive watch, but at base he's an unhappy snob, lacking the ability to connect to regular people because he looks down on them. The universe has been unfair to him as well, casting him as a man who lacks certain basic qualities: inner calm, the feeling that life is okay, a sense of connection with his fellow human beings. Griffith’s immense fortune is that he carries these things with him; Page can only find them in the circumscribed domain of his holiday home.
The unfairness of the world is perhaps Hughes' most profound insight. A world of caprice at least affects all people equally. If the universe doesn't care about you, it doesn't care about me. A world that is actively unjust – granting some people wealth and elegance but cursing them with heartlessness; granting some people basic decency but killing their wives; granting some people bliss and others agony; granting some people gentle pats on the head and others rough twisting hands to abrade their skin – this world is harder to stomach. We would all prefer noogies.
But this is the world we live in. It is, from pilings to weathervane, monstrously unfair. In this regard, Hughes' is as true a point as can be made in storytelling. If you doubt this, put down your reading device and go out to the street and converse with a homeless person, or kidnap a child from the poorest neighborhood near you and take them to the richest, walk with them and marvel at all the things they don't have and most likely never will; get LeBron James on record about how his athletic career might have turned out had he been born with cerebral palsy, or spend some time meditating on John Rawls' thought experiment involving the veil of ignorance, which asks what kind of redistributive world we might construct if we had no idea whether we would be born to a wealthy family in Manhattan or to an impoverished one in Indianola, Mississippi, reputed to be the most underprivileged town in our great nation. Fairness plays a role in none of it.
Despite this, Planes, Trains and Automobiles is not a bitter film. It's a joyous one. Like Del Griffith, it has an answer for the iniquity. Given that the world is not, and never will be, a fair place, the choices you have – and the choices on which you should be judged – are about how you face that world and act toward the people in it. What you should fight against is the situation Neal Page finds himself in at the beginning of the movie, in which his decency is contained only in his family life, so that his journey home for Thanksgiving is a desperate attempt to return to the only realm in which he loves other people and is loved by them. What you should struggle to find, according to John Hughes, is the place in which Del Griffith resides all the time, a place where the rebuttal to life's continual and unending assaults consists in how you treat anyone you meet, whether they’re less fortunate or more fortunate than you: as your fellow human being.
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