I ended my last post, “The Wind in the Willows and the Importance of Home,” by suggesting that many of us are living in two worlds: the life of media where we can escape into a vivid realm of fantasy and wish-fulfilment, vs. our domestic family life that may seem prosaic and humdrum by comparison.
This dual identity was portrayed dramatically in the 2013 movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Ben Stiller plays Walter Mitty, a man who works as a negative asset manager in the basement of Life Magazine, but whose mind inhabits numerous imaginative simulacrum that feed his hunger for authentic meaning. Whether escaping into daydreams in which he is the superhero, or working on his online dating profile, Walter remains largely disengaged from the reality of his everyday experience and the people around him.
Paradoxically, Walter works for Life Magazine, that has the motto “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.” Yet through his escapism, Walter buffers himself from actual life. He is a divided person, living an imaginary life full of authenticity, connection, and possibility, while is actual life is characterized by emptiness, disconnection, and alienation from the people he loves.
Walter’s own inner tension is paralleled by developments in the magazine, which has been handed over to corporate team who embody values antithetical to everything the company stands for. They have been tasked with moving the magazine online, essentially turning the company into a simulation of itself.
Walter embarks on an ascetic journey, a type of pilgrimage. The journey is to find negative #25 that will be the cover photo for the final physical issue of Life magazine. But on a deeper level, Walter’s pilgrimage is a journey to become himself. Rather than passively hiding in the safety of his dreams and imagining himself as the hero, he has to embrace actual danger and risk, in addition to coming to terms with the demons of his past.
The photographic negative he is trying to locate was taken by the photographer Sean O’Connell, played by Sean Penn. No one knows what this picture is of; Sean has only given one clue, it symbolizes the quintessence of life. Somehow, the photo will contain the secret that incapsulates the essence of the magazine, and thus of life itself.
At first, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty seems to be merely another movie feeding a sense of restlessness. Many men will no doubt watch the movie and receive vicarious thrills from projecting themselves onto Walter, a socially awkward, under-appreciated, self-doubting middle aged man who averts a midlife crisis through a transformation into a confident hero who discovers authenticity, connection, and love. But that would be to miss the point of the film. This isn’t just one more you-can-be-anything-you-want-to-be film. Crucially, Walter has to come to realize that the secret he had been seeking—the quintessence of life—was at home all along, both physically and symbolically.
Literally, negative #25 had been in a wallet given to him as a gift by the photographer Sean O’Connell. Yet as long as Walter had been approaching himself as a victim and disconnecting from his family, he missed the opportunities. He missed crucial clues from his mother when day-dreaming about another life. Viewing himself as a victim, he threw away the wallet containing the secret because he thinks “what’s the point?” His victim mentality also means he missed opportunities with the lady he loves because he assumed she didn’t want him.
During his periodic trips to search for Sean, Walter develops the virtues that enable him to return home to be the man he is called to be. If we were to pinpoint an exact moment when Walter becomes a real man, it might be the scene when he jumps into a helicopter to the music of David Bowie’s “Ground Control to Major Tom.” This is the pivot point in Walter’s hero’s journey where he moves from victim to a true man, and enters a series of trials that will test this.
After Walter recovers negative #25 and hands it to the production team, we still don’t know what it’s a picture of, and neither does Walter. We only know that, according to the photographer Sean O’Connell, it is “the quintessence of life.”
In the movie’s closing scene, when Walter and Cheryl walk by a news stand and see the final issue, the cover picture is of Walter – not Walter the superhero, not Walter in his recent real-life adventures jumping out of helicopters, evading sharks, and wilderness mountain climbing: just Walter going about his work as a faithful negative asset manager.
Sean’s final cover emphasized that Walter had been valuable all along, right where he was, though he didn’t have the eyes to see it before. Meanwhile, the lady Walter is pining for, Cheryl, loved him not because he finally has material for an attractive dating profile, nor because of his Nordic heroics, but simply because Walter returned and made himself present.
The Home At the End of the Road
In The Wind in the Willows (discussed in my previous blog post) I explored how Toad had to go on a journey through imprisonment, humiliation and battle before he realized that his most valuable possession is not the latest, loudest and fastest innovation, but his own friends and hearth. The end of Toad’s journey is home, not simply as a destination, but as his telos.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty also teaches us that sometimes we have to take a long journey to realize that what we need and love has been right next to us all along, if only we had eyes to see. Walter couldn’t understand that at the beginning of the film. In the ancient tradition of the pilgrimage, he needed to experience faraway places in order to come back home with increased faithfulness and presence. Sometimes we really do need to journey to the end of the earth to realize that the solution is right at home all along.
The paradigmatic example of the home at the end of the road is, of course, The Lord of the Rings. What motivates Sam and Frodo during their darkest hour traveling through Mordor is not that they are fighting a cosmic battle, but that they are fighting to save the shire, their beloved home.
It is fitting that The Lord of the Rings trilogy ends, not with the destruction of the ring of power, but with the restoration of order in the shire. This is the classic arc of the hero’s journey that culminates with return.
In secular salvation stories, the hero’s journey is often inverted, and the hero goes on a journey, not in order to return to hearth and home, but to abandon it, to remake himself in the ongoing quest for self-actualization. Think of the genre of modern travelogues that are becoming so common, where a person will leave a stable career, or even family, to travel the world in order to reinvent herself.
Consider, Elizabeth Gilbert’s journey in Eat, Pray, Love. Gilbert describes feeling trapped by the expectations of adulthood that made her feel like the spark of life had gone, that her identity was eroding. After breaking up with her first husband, Elizabeth embarked on the year-long journey of self-discovery, beginning with a search for good food in Italy (the book’s eat theme) and spiritual enlightenment in India (the book’s pray theme). Her travels culminated in a new marriage to José Nune (the book’s love theme), which itself later dissolved after the book was published.
The secular pilgrim doesn’t return the person to hearth and home, but underscores the sense that we are infinitely plastic, able to endlessly remake ourselves. This romanticizes the status of the vagabond, so that travel becomes its own end rather than—as with the pilgrimage or classic hero’s journey—a means. Frodo left his home in order to save it, not to achieve self-actualization; but in the process, he became a better version of himself. By contrast, Elizabeth Gilbert left home to find herself, and in the process she became perpetually lost, moving from one partner to another (though one wouldn’t know that from simply reading her book or watching the film). In the modern therapeutic journey, home is often something to escape from, while fulfillment comes through reinvention and liberation from domestic obligations.
In contrast to Eat, Pray, Love, Walter Mitty follows the traditional hero’s journey: during his travels, he is reborn, and thus able to return home to use his new gifts, abilities, and insights. This enables him to be a better man, a better friend, no longer needing to escape into fantasy. And that is what makes Walter Mitty such a great story. The best stories make us love home more, not less. We experience the extraordinary so we can come back and live within the mundane. (This is also what G.K. Chesterton’s extraordinary story Manalive is about, but I hesitate to say anything for fear for giving spoilers.)
The Poetry of Everyday Life: How Longing for Fairyland Elevates the Ordinary
I’ve suggested that a good journey is one that renews our love for the ordinary world, while the bad journey teaches us to despise our domestic duties. If this is true for actual journeys we take, it is also true for our travels through story and images. Stories and images—whether novels, film, or social media—can feed a sense of restlessness so we want to retreat from the ordinary. But a good journey, whether experienced directly or vicariously through art, can make us want to get back to the pocket handkerchief we left behind—the home at the end of the road.
This challenges us to take stock of the art, music, literature, and images, with which we are feeding our hearts. Are you looking at media, or listening to music, that draws you into greater stability, or feeds a sense of restlessness? Are you feeding your imagination on a diet of literature and art which shows how order, stability, and the commonalities of daily life are worth fighting and dying for, or are you filling your mind with images and ideas that make you pine for another type of life?
Paradoxically, it is often fairy tales and myths—narratives that might at first appear escapist—that can be the most effective in sending us back home with renewed commitment to the mundane. In George MacDonald’s Lilith, a character says “if you understood any world besides your own, you would understand your own much better.” By taking us into worlds besides our own, fairy tales and myths enable us to better delight in the romance of the ordinary, and the glory of our common life. Longing for fairyland elevates the ordinary, as C.S. Lewis so articulately described:
The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which had been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity’. The child enjoys his cold meat (otherwise dull to him) by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savoury for having been dipped in a story; you might say that only then is it the real meat. . . . By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves.
Further Reading