The Terminal

I finally saw The Terminal--what a great film. It's one of those rare movies that weaves an interesting story from the simplest of circumstances. It had only a few characters and took place in a single building and didn't have much of a plot, but I didn't want it to end. It was great to see the workings of this mini-society that we are all familiar with just in passing through, and the film shows that surviving the day-to-day drudgery has a lot to do with your temperament. And, best of all, I finally began to understand what all the fuss over Catherine Zeta-Jones was all about.

I'm tempted to say that Frank Dixon, the customs official portrayed by Stanley Tucci, suffers from Snidely Whiplash Syndrome, but I think his story is really a lesson in organizational behavior. I've been in organizations in which the management loses its people, and The Terminal reminded me a lot of those times. Dixon begins by trying to quickly get rid of Viktor Navorski, the Eastern European who doesn't have a home. His dismissiveness turns to curiosity, which turns to contempt. How people deal with the rules of a bureaucracy is a major theme of the film. In Viktor, Dixon sees his opposite, a man who finds joy in the hand he has been dealt rather than being hamstrung by the rules. Viktor's approach to life earns the appreciation of the terminal's hourly workers, giving him a power that sometimes conflicts with Dixon's positional power. By the end of the film, Dixon is trying to undercut Viktor to preserve the hierarchy and, presumably, the rule of law.

Many times, people who have risen to a position of power tend to take a fixed sum view of the amount of power, or love, or whatever, within an organization. They think that their position affords them x units, while the level of the organization below them is entitled to x-1, the level below that to x-2, and so on. When an underling gets some attention or does things in a new way, one reaction is to restore the "natural" order by leveling that person off. After all, more for them means less for you. But a good manager sees things differently. Think back to another Tom Hanks film, Big, in which an employee who is with the company for a week unexpectedly rises to a VP position. His unsympathetic rivals are jealous, while the CEO is portrayed as intelligent in a very practical and unpretentious way.

I've worked in the terminal before. Not an actual terminal, but a place where the smartest people were all at the bottom. I had a summer job at a book warehouse in which college students (and some graduate students) worked hourly jobs and had fun, supervised by high school grads and career book warehouse employees who were convinced they had a monopoly on the right way to do things. This is an extreme example, because the management had both less education and a worse attitude, but you can probably guess the result. We formed our own little society that had its own dynamics that were separate from those of the larger organization. Any time upper management came down to squash us, it just made the subculture that much stronger.

The only critique I have of The Terminal is that I didn't really buy Tom Hanks as a Krakozian refugee. To me, Mr. Hanks will always be a castaway, an astronaut, a computer-generated cowboy doll, a guy with AIDS, a kid in an adult's body, a retarded Alabama ping pong virtuoso, or a guy who cross dresses to get a good deal on an apartment. Or a mermaid.