The Meaning of Up
The movie Up centers on Mr. Fredrickson, and his desire to move his house to Paradise Falls, where he and his late wife had always envisioned living. After years of fantasizing about Paradise Falls; after years of planning, saving money, and dreaming about it with his wife (MINOR SPOILER), Mr. Fredrickson attaches thousands of balloons to his home, and they lift it to the mythical mountaintop.
He plops into his favorite, cozy armchair. He exhales and closes his eyes. At long last, he can rest. He’s there. He made it.
That’s where it gets interesting.
Half a second later, he startles and opens his eyes. Something just … isn’t right. Suddenly restless, he picks up the scrapbook he and his wife had compiled. He flips through its smile-filled snapshots. If the message weren’t clear already, the filmmakers show us an inscription his wife wrote in the corner of one of the pages: “Thanks for the adventure — now go have a new one!”
Earlier, Russell, a boy scout who needed an “assisting the elderly” badge to complete his training, had knocked on Mr. Fredrickson’s door and joined the story. When Russell earns his badge, Mr. Fredrickson is there to bestow it. But the film hammers home its message once more: Mr. Fredrickson does not fasten the badge that Russell wanted so badly. He instead fastens to Russell’s sash a bottle cap that his wife gave him on the day they met.
That “assisting the elderly” badge was, in fact, meaningless. So was Paradise Falls. They were each a MacGuffin — in movie and literature lingo, a token object or desire that motivates characters to act. Usually, a MacGuffin is introduced early on. Writers don’t want to waste time explaining it, so its alleged value is self-evident. It might be love — Don Quixote tries to win Dulcinea’s heart for 900 pages, though she herself doesn’t appear once. It might be emotional — how many characters have vowed to take revenge for some injustice in Chapter 1? It might be physical — the stolen briefcase full of money; the “Heart of the Ocean” necklace in Titanic; the Sorcerer’s Stone.
But MacGuffins are not just plot devices in movies and books. Writers are illuminating a truth: that when we’re writing our own life stories, every carrot we dangle in front of our eyes, no matter how important it seems, is a MacGuffin. The goals we set for ourselves matter only insofar as they inspire adventure, and the fulfillment of — or at least the attempt to fulfill — our potential.
The sprinter with his abdomen flexed, his arms pumping, his leg muscles firing, and his eyes locked on the finish line is doing what he was put on this earth to do. He has reached the pinnacle of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: self-actualization. When he hits the tape and stumbles to a halt, as his arms flail and his legs noodle, something changes. He might have won the race, but he is no longer the great embodiment of the human form.
Why does an athlete break a world record and soon thereafter strive to set a new one? Why do we want to graduate and study our asses off — but then want to go to grad school, get a job, get a better job? Why do our “bucket lists” contain more than we could achieve in twenty lifetimes? We toil and sweat in pursuit of our goals. Why do we move on so quickly?
In the part of ourselves that we don’t talk about at parties, we know we are more fulfilled when we are struggling for something. We know that “fulfilled” is deeper, stronger, and better than “happy.” We understand that the story is what matters. The pursuit of the MacGuffin, not the MacGuffin itself.
The credits roll when Morgan Freeman gets to that beach in The Shawshank Redemption. And in some way, we all understand that even a “happily ever after” ending is still an ending: the worst and saddest part of the story. The part of the story when we must bid farewell to the characters we’ve come to love, and the lights in the theater come on and snap us back into the real, cold world. The end, no matter how pleasant, is the part of the story when we must stand, collect ourselves from the head rush, and collect our coats.
The credits could roll when Mr. Fredrickson sits down in that armchair. But there he is, squirming, as his wife tells him from the grave to have another adventure. She doesn’t want the story to end.
Nobody wants a good story to end.
If you liked this post, you might enjoy my book, Ticketless: How Sneaking Into The Super Bowl And Everything Else (Almost) Held My Life Together.
