Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People [1st ed.] 9783030526504, 9783030526511

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STUDIES IN MOBILITIES, LITERATURE, AND CULTURE

Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People Erica Durante Foreword by Rodrigo Fresán

Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture

Series Editors Marian Aguiar Department of English Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA, USA Charlotte Mathieson University of Surrey Guildford, UK Lynne Pearce English Literature & Creative Writing Lancaster University Lancaster, UK

This series represents an exciting new publishing opportunity for scholars working at the intersection of literary, cultural, and mobilities research. The editors welcome proposals that engage with movement of all kinds – ranging from the global and transnational to the local and the everyday. The series is particularly concerned with examining the material means and structures of movement, as well as the infrastructures that surround such movement, with a focus on transport, travel, postcolonialism, and/or embodiment. While we expect many titles from literary scholars who draw upon research originating in cultural geography and/or sociology in order to gain valuable new insights into literary and cultural texts, proposals are equally welcome from scholars working in the social sciences who make use of literary and cultural texts in their theorizing. The series invites monographs that engage with textual materials of all kinds – i.e., film, photography, digital media, and the visual arts, as well as fiction, poetry, and other literary forms – and projects engaging with non-western literatures and cultures are especially welcome.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15385

Erica Durante

Air Travel Fiction and Film Cloud People

Erica Durante Brown University Providence, RI, USA

Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-52650-4 ISBN 978-3-030-52651-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52651-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: MediaProduction/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Étienne, my angel, may he always fly higher. For my father, Matteo, already an angel, in memoriam; may he see this book from heights that no airplane can reach. For my mother, Maria, whose strong wings carry us all.

Foreword

Being in the Clouds Flying is like being a little dead, and more alive than ever. It is an outof-body experience that allows us to see everything we have left behind from thousands of feet in the air.1 It offers such a different perspective (more vertical than horizontal) for the few, but always too many hours during which we are rewarded/punished with the gift/stigma of such a paradisiacal and infernal opportunity to be able to fly, once we have passed through the purgatory that is every airport. Indeed, flying is a privilege. But it is also a sentence, a reward that can turn into punishment in a matter of seconds. I always recall (I remember being on a plane reading it) that paragraph in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King in which the protagonist rejoiced over belonging to the first generation to see both sides of the clouds, the top and bottom. He celebrated being able to experience the understanding that people had only dreamt of “moving skyward” while now they dream rising and falling, and that this new capacity would help his contemporaries to accept the idea of death with greater ease and less conflict. 1 (Im)pertinent confession: every time I am unsure what to do with a character in one

of my books, I just put him on a plane hoping that something will come to me and happen, and that he will end up either sitting on cloud nine or heading straight into stormy weather.

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The other side of this—the nightmare to that dream—is best evoked in that “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” anthology episode from the The Twilight Zone TV series. In the third episode of the fifth season, the 1963 adaptation of Richard Matheson’s already classic tale,2 passenger Robert Wilson, who is more panicked about than afraid of flying,3 is the only one who can see a destructive gremlin crawling up the wing of the plane. He ends up saving everyone who thinks he is crazy from certain catastrophe. Between these two extremes—marvel and terror—flies Erica Durante’s Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People, a book that is as prudent as it is adventurous and as delightful as it is academic.4 Its menu is, for once, irreproachable; its confident research does not fall into the trap of excess baggage, and you will never have that uncomfortable feeling that you have been given the worst possible seatmate. You will also be absolutely certain that it will reach the most precise conclusions. This is the most perfect airplane reading, and Durante is the perfect pilot. Her intriguing departures will always lead to the safest of arrivals with her feet firmly on the ground. There is no risk of turbulence beyond the bumps and jostling that occur one after the other when we find ourselves thinking at a depth that we do not dare engage with on the surface of the superficial. In this book, instead of being amidst the distracted and nevertheless creative clouds, the reader can inhabit that computer cloud to which we entrust (or abandon) our increasingly amnesiac memory at sea level.

2 This episode was recently included in the very amusing and scary anthology of flight terrors, Flight or Fright (Stephen King and Bev Vincent, eds.). 3 Ironically, and paradoxically, the actor who plays the character is none other than William Shatner, who just a few years later would be the intrepid Captain James T. Kirk at the helm of the USS Enterprise in the Star Trek series. 4 And I allow myself to note here that—although I resist the temptation to consider it a coincidence—the author’s last name can be translated into the English words ‘during’ or ‘meanwhile’: a key/decisive temporal state/condition when one flies wondering how much time is left before we land, and if we will. Good news: Durante always gets there.

FOREWORD

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There where—statistically—it is easier to crash. For now, and until then, sit back, relax and fasten your seatbelts. Bon voyage.

Barcelona, Spain

Rodrigo Fresán [trans. from Spanish by Kate Goldman]

Foreword [Original Spanish Version]

Estar en las nubes Volar es como estar un poco muerto, pero también más vivo que nunca. Una out-of-body experience que permite ver todo lo que ha quedado a miles de metros desde las alturas1 ; con una perspectiva tan diferente (vertical más que horizontal) por las pocas pero siempre demasiadas horas en las que se nos premia/castiga con el don/estigma del tan paradisíaco como infernal poder volar previo paso por ese purgatorio que es todo aeropuerto. Volar es, sí, un privilegio pero también una condena, un premio que siempre puede mutar a castigo en cuestión de segundos. Y siempre recuerdo (me recuerdo en un avión leyéndolo) ese párrafo en Henderson the Rain King de Saul Bellow en el que el protagonista se regocijaba por pertenecer a la primera generación que había visto ambos lados de las nubes: la parte de arriba y la parte de abajo; y de poder experimentar la comprensión de que antes la gente sólo soñaba “hacia lo alto” mientras que ahora se soñaba subiendo y bajando; y que esta nueva capacidad ayudaría a sus contemporáneos a aceptar la idea de la muerte con mayor facilidad y menor conflicto.

1 Confesión (im)pertinente: cada vez que en mis libros no sé muy bien qué hacer con un personaje no tengo más que subirlo a un avión para que algo se me ocurra y ocurra y que éste se sienta on cloud nine o adentrándose en stormy wheater.

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FOREWORD [ORIGINAL SPANISH VERSION ]

La contracara del asunto—la pesadilla a ese sueño—está mejor que nunca representada en ese episodio de antología de la serie de televisión The Twilight Zone: “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.” Allí—tercer episodio de la quinta temporada, año 1963 adaptación de Richard Matheson de su propio y ya clásico relato2 —el pasajero Robert Wilson con más pánico que miedo a volar3 es el único que puede ver por su ventanilla al destructor gremlin paseándose por el ala del avión y quien acaba salvando a todos aquellos que lo creen loco de una catástrofe segura. Entre ambos extremos—la maravilla y el espanto—vuela este tan confortable como arriesgado y tan ameno como académico Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People de Erica Durante.4 Su menú es—por una vez—irreprochable, su segura investigación no cae nunca en el exceso de equipaje y, al leerlo, uno jamás tiene esa incómoda sensación de que le ha tocado el asiento junto a las más equivocada de las personas a la vez que tiene la más absoluta de las certezas en cuanto a que llegará puntual a las más puntuales de las conclusiones. He aquí la más perfecta de las airplane readings —Durante es la perfecta piloto y sus intrigantes departures siempre van a dar a los más seguros arrivals —pero con sus pies bien firmes en la tierra y sin pronóstico de turbulencias más allá de aquellas que se suceden cuando nos descubrimos pensando en todo lo profundo que no nos atrevemos en la superficie de lo superficial. Donde apenas se puede estar ya no en las distraídas pero tan creativas nubes sino en esa cloud informática a la que hemos confiado el (des)cuidado de nuestra cada vez más amnésica memoria a nivel del mar.

2 Recientemente recuperado por la muy divertida y temblorosa antología de terrores aéreos Flight or Fright (Stephen King y Bev Vincent, eds.). 3 Irónica y paradójicamente, el actor quien lo interpreta no es otro que William Shatner quien pocos años después sería el intrépido capitán James T. Kirk al mando de la nave USS Enterprise en la serie Star Trek. 4 Y me permito señalar aquí que—me resisto a considerarlo una casualidad—el apellido de la autora bien puede traducirse al inglés como During o Meanwhile: estado/condición temporal clave/decisiva cuando se vuela preguntándose cuánto tiempo falta para llegar y si se llegará. Buenas noticias: Durante llega siempre.

FOREWORD [ORIGINAL SPANISH VERSION ]

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Allí donde—estadísticamente—es tanto más fácil estrellarse. Mientras tanto y hasta entonces, embarcar y relax and fasten seat belts. Buen viaje.

Barcelona, España

Rodrigo Fresán

Preface

This book explores how, over the past four decades, fiction and film have transformed our perception and representation of contemporary air travel. It provides a comprehensive interdisciplinary analysis of international cultural productions including novels, short stories, films, poetry, songs, TV series, and commercials, and elucidates the paradigms and narratives that constitute our current imaginary of air mobility. The book hypothesizes that fiction and film have converted the Airworld—the world of airplanes and airport infrastructures—into a pivotal anthropological place endowed with social significance and identity. Moreover, it suggests that the assimilation of the sky into our cultural imaginary and lifestyle has metamorphosed human society into “Cloud People.” The introductory chapter sets the primary objectives of the book: the study of the central role of the imaginary of air travel in contemporary cultural productions, and the effect of these cultural productions on our perception of the Airworld. The chapter presents the research methodology that guides the analyses, drawing on insights generated over decades of scholarship on air mobility in cultural and literary studies. It introduces the vast and heterogeneous corpus of works studied in the book, proposes the emergence of a “fictionscape” as an additional global cultural flow at the intersection of narratives, characters, and places connected through air travel, and underscores the poetic function of the Airworld as inspiration for international fiction and as a creative platform for writers, filmmakers, and artists. xv

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Chapter 2, “The Airworld as an In-Between Space,” explores the topographic location of air transport infrastructures. It argues that airports are perceived as in-between places, situated neither inside nor outside the adjacent city, and that airplanes constitute a self-referential space with respect to the ground. The distance of airports from the city, and of airplanes from earth, becomes a pivotal juncture for fiction and film. The chapter discusses how writers, directors, and artists design their narratives around the exclusion of the Airworld from the parallel outside world. It focuses on cultural productions that depict arrivals and departures, layovers, stopovers and flights as representative of the problematic spatiotemporal relation of the city to airports and airplanes. It further investigates the role of mobile phones in mitigating the exclusion of the Airworld, allowing travelers to prolong their connections to the contingencies of life in the city and on the ground. Chapter 3, “Time Out of Control,” examines time as a complex aspect of air mobility. It suggests that the demand for punctuality, the agonizing delays, and the phenomenon of jet lag associated with traveling across multiple time zones characterize the disordered perception of time in the Airworld. It also examines the unique outcomes of the chaotic representations of time in contemporary air travel fiction. Writers, artists, and filmmakers juggle multiple layers of time, which they compress, expand, and suspend, producing distinctive configurations and temporal experiences for their characters. Chapter 4, “Luxury in the Sky with More than Diamonds,” focuses on the process by which architecture and design have increasingly transformed airports and airplanes into luxurious environments, catering to voyagers’ need for a cocooning shelter that alleviates the fears associated with air travel. It analyzes the association between air mobility, opulence, and consumption of luxury goods as a prevailing pattern of our imaginary since the pioneering years of commercial aviation. It further explores the semiotics of luxury in the Airworld setting, highlighting the exposure of passengers to commercials and airline magazines, and their forced circulation through duty-free areas, shedding light on the osmotic link between fashion trends and air travel culture. Furthermore, it examines numerous clichés in which air hostesses metaphorically represent the triad of beauty, elegance, and comfort, while pilots, endowed with a vibrant masculinity, equally fuel the dream of luxury and aerial style. Chapter 5, “Cloud People: Identities and Paradoxes,” distinguishes three main categories of identities in contemporary air travel: the Airworld

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employee, the fluid passenger, and the vulnerable traveler. The first refers to air transport professionals who suspend their identities and adopt those dictated by their uniform and occupation. The second is composed of ordinary individuals who experience a transformation of their everyday identities into those of passengers, operating within a regime of fluidity, barcodes, and security procedures. The last category consists of vulnerable passengers who are discriminated against because of racial and national prejudices; travelers who are condemned to prolonged isolation, detention, deportation, and authoritarian acts that transform the Airworld into a sordid infrastructure of human ignominy. Chapter 6, “Connections, Disconnections, and Reconnections,” studies various representations of the emotional dimension of the Airworld as an environment of sociability and coexistence. It portrays airport terminals as a setting for passionate encounters and separations, as well as for greetings and farewells. The chapter discusses the overflow of feelings that characterizes the experience of travelers who, due to geopolitical circumstances, return from a prolonged exile or forced migration. It analyzes numerous works of fiction, mainly films, in which the Airworld is a significant relational space for ordinary passengers whose accidental encounters may transform their lives, resurrect former love relationships, and occasionally trigger the emergence of intensely passionate ones. These narratives suggest that the recurrence and the significance of these human interactions establish the Airworld as an anthropological place invested with identity, relationships, and memory. This book has greatly benefited from my collaboration with members of the research group “Les Territoires de l’attente,” created by Laurent Vidal and Mycéala Symington of the University of La Rochelle in France. Within the context of this group, Jean Bessière and Amaury Dehoux played pivotal roles in the design and completion of this work from its very inception. Moreover, the brilliant and inspiring theory of the contemporary novel introduced by Jean Bessière has nourished my critical reflection on contemporary fiction over the past ten years. Amaury Dehoux’s views and scholarly contributions to the study of contemporary world fiction have been instrumental for the development of my analyses and hypotheses. I am also indebted to members of the research group on Latin American literature in the context of globalization—Gersende Camenen, Moira Fradinger, Aníbal González, Gustavo Guerrero, Héctor Hoyos, Vicente Luis Mora, Jesús Montoya, and Catalina Quesada Gómez—for

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their generous suggestions shared during two international workshops at Yale University and the University of Berne. In addition, scholars and doctoral and undergraduate students of the Department of Hispanic Studies, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and the Art@Watson committee at Brown University have provided me with an indispensable research environment over the course of the past three years. I am particularly thankful to Stuart Burrows, Raquel Cabral, Nicolás Campisi, Michelle Clayton, Berta García Faet, Túlio Ferreira, Elizabeth Gray, Chloe Hill, Verónica Ingham, Jessaca Leinaweaver, Fernanda Martinelli, Felipe MartínezPinzón, Jeremy Mumford, Julio Ortega, Iria Puyosa, Ramiro Segura, Ethan Shire, and Vicente Lecuna. I am grateful to the artists, filmmakers, and writers who have enthusiastically agreed to have their art and creations reproduced in this book: Maarten Baas, Oded Binnun, Mihal Brezis, Matthieu Gafsou, Jérôme Game, John Gardner, Adrian Paci, Daan Roosegaarde, Kerem Sanlıman, ¸ and Ally Zhu, and José Ángel Cilleruelo and Alberto Torres Blandina, who have generously provided access to their work. Special acknowledgment goes to Juan Fernando Ramos Toro, an Avianca Airlines pilot, for engaging in extensive conversations with me and providing his unique perspective as a member of an aircrew and expert on air travel history and technology. This book has benefitted from enriching discussions with Guillame Bellon, Franck Bouchard, Graciela Goldchluk, Rana Dasgupta, and Tim Mammen. It likewise owes much to several friends who have kindly shared their expertise or references to films and literary texts related to Airworld fiction, in particular Antonio Antonazzo, Felipe Bonacina, Ruben Durante, Romuald Fonkoua, Diego Ramos Toro, Massimo Scotti, Alfonso Sebastián Alegre, Arturo Tamer Vasques, Gary Urton, Parker VanValkenburgh, and Natasha Wimmer. Special thanks go to Jules Blyth for her thoughtful translations from German to English of literary excerpts cited in this book, and to Cindy Chopoidalo, Kate Goldman, and Maya Judd for their invaluable assistance in proofreading and improving the final version of this manuscript. Finally, I am deeply grateful for Rodrigo Fresán’s readiness to write the foreword of this book in the midst of many flights and novels. He is the

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perfect Mr. Trip and a member of the Cloud People community to which we all belong. Providence, RI, USA November 2019

Erica Durante

Praise for Air Travel Fiction and Film

“By looking at the literature and film of air-worlds, this remarkable book reinvents the scope and signifying potential of travel narratives, and sheds light on urgent questions of hypermobility and displacement. Durante’s masterful close reading of the gestures, rituals, affective gaps, and socio-economic relations that give symbolic substance to airports, hotels, airplanes, and their many in-between spaces gives rise to an insightful and original reflection on the role of fiction in the making and unmaking of the cultural imaginaries that shape the lived experience of globalization, as privileged or vulnerable passengers try and fail to form the dislocated communities where they might inscribe their contingent subjectivities.” —Mariano Siskind, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA “Under globalization airports and their surrounding infrastructures, no longer seen as ‘non-places,’ have become instead sites where cultural, political, and identity flows come together in unexpected and inspiring forms. After reading Erica Durante’s brilliant and surprising interdisciplinary account of the Airworld, with its own spaces, politics, culture, fashions, codes of behavior, and affects; its own grandeur and miseries, a trip to the airport—on business or vacation—will never quite be the same again!” —Aníbal González, Professor of Spanish, Yale University, USA

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PRAISE FOR AIR TRAVEL FICTION AND FILM

“We travel, fly, transit through airports, and often live in the air. Airports, airplanes, and the aerial environment are part of a phenomenology: they appear in different fashions and make things, such as the time that St. Augustine considered invisible, appear. Literary works and films are contemporary means of exposing this traveler phenomenology, which does not refer to a travel imaginary but to fascinating dynamic images. This is the brilliant argument that Erica Durante proposes in her impressive book.” —Jean Bessière, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, Sorbonne Nouvelle University, France “It takes a keen eye and much attention to detail to see our present in its transience. In this learned book, Durante historicizes air travel, making its invisible scaffolding visible to the eye. A trove of examples from various national literatures underpins this thoughtful contribution to what, paraphrasing Gayatri Spivak, one could call ‘the frequent flying intellectual condition.’” —Héctor Hoyos, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture, Stanford University, USA “Erica Durante’s Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People is as prudent as it is adventurous and it is as delightful as it is academic. … This is the perfect airplane reading, and Durante is the perfect pilot.” —Rodrigo Fresán, novelist

Contents

1

Introduction 1 Skyward 2 From Aeromobilities to Airportness 3 From Airborne to Air-born: Cloud People 4 The Airworld as a Methodology References

1 1 4 7 10 14

2

The Airworld as an In-between Space 1 Urban Center Versus Airport Periphery 2 The Traveler and the Absent City 3 Globalizing the Local 4 Crossing(s) from the Micro-world to the Meta-world 5 The Telephone as a Cable Between the City and the Airworld References

19 19 21 28 32

Time Out of Control 1 The Ever-Present and Unrelenting Burden of Time 2 Crystallized Waiting Time 3 The Compressed Time of Jet Lag References

51 51 63 75 85

3

43 48

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CONTENTS

4

Luxury in the Sky with More Than Diamonds 1 Luxury as an Air Travel Brand 2 Semiotics of Luxury 3 Fashion and the Eroticization of the Air Cabin Crew References

89 89 102 111 123

5

Cloud People: Identities and Paradoxes 1 Airworld Personnel 2 The Fluid Passenger 3 The Vulnerable Passenger References

129 130 135 145 156

6

Connections, Disconnections, and Reconnections 1 Airborne Families and Relationships 2 Chance Encounters and Existential Turning Points 3 Love Out of the Blue References

161 161 168 178 188

7

Coda: Flying Over References

193 196

Index

199

List of Figures

Chapter 1 Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Matthieu Gafsou, Galerie C.: Photograph from the Ether series (Courtesy of the artist) John Gardner: Cloud People [2019] (Courtesy of the artist)

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Chapter 2 Fig. 1

John Gardner: South West—National Airport [2018] (Courtesy of the artist)

22

Chapter 3 Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Maarten Baas: Real Time|Schiphol clock (www.maartenbaas. com) Erica Durante: Transparent vivarium of passengers. Frankfurt am Main Airport

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Chapter 4 Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Kerem Sanlıman: ¸ Autoban Cocoons. Baku Heydar Aliyev International Airport Studio Roosegaarde. Press Room: Beyond (http:// pressroom.studioroosegaarde.net, Creative Commons Non-Commercial applies to all material)

100

103

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LIST OF FIGURES

Chapter 5 Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Jérôme Game: Selection of Iata Airline Codes in Salle d’embarquement [page 55] [2017] (Courtesy of the author) Adrian Paci: Centro di Permanenza Temporanea [2007], still from video (Courtesy of the artist, kaufmann repetto, Milano and New York, and Peter Kilchmann, Zurich)

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Chapter 6 Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Ally Zhu: Reunion [2019] Ally Zhu: Papa! [2019] Mihal Brezis and Oded Binnun: Frame from the short film Aya [2012] (Courtesy of the directors)

164 167 176

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

1

Skyward

In Moby-Dick, Herman Melville explores and questions the hypnotic and mysterious attraction of the human gaze and mind to the captivating forces of the ocean. From the beginning of the story, the narrator, Ishmael, is astounded by the number of people willing to travel long distances to contemplate the sea from close proximity: [H]ere come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. […] They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither? (Melville 1952, 2)

Ishmael would today, two hundred years after Moby-Dick, ascribe a similar “magnetic virtue” to the sky. Thus, if Melville were to write a novel about the individual’s relationship to an element other than the water, he would most likely choose the air. He would describe our glance skyward, pondering the destinations of thousands of airplanes that cruise above us daily. The descriptions of whaling ships would be replaced by equally monumental portrayals of airplanes hovering across the blue sky, sketching white lines with their turbines (Fig. 1). Mutatis mutandis, © The Author(s) 2020 E. Durante, Air Travel Fiction and Film, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52651-1_1

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E. DURANTE

Fig. 1 Matthieu Gafsou, Galerie C.: Photograph from the Ether series (Courtesy of the artist)

Captain Ahab’s obsession with the enormous white sperm whale could remain at the heart of Moby-Dick, if Melville were to draw inspiration from the protagonist of the Argentinean novel in which an “air harpooner” confuses airplanes for giant white whales (Costagliola 2016). Similarly, rather than depicting sailors at work aboard the Pequod, he would describe the protocols of flight crews and passengers circumnavigating the globe in just over fifty hours. The reference to Melville’s novel highlights the gap between two major moments in human history. Having remained empty of any vehicle for thousands of years, the sky has gradually been populated by an exorbitant number of airplanes, particularly over the course of the last seventy years with the rise of commercial aviation. Under the virgin skies of the nineteenth century, in the absence of any event that could anticipate the future of aircraft, Melville could hardly have envisioned the existence of the Airworld. Even the unbounded imagination of Jules Verne, author of adventure novels such as Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon, 1863), falters in describing the aerial views of the East African lands over which his characters fly in a hydrogen balloon. Based on the knowledge and representations of the time, Melville and Verne were more

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3

accustomed to imagining life at sea than human movement through the sky. At the antipodes of the ocean and of the earth, the sky belonged to the sphere of the divine, transcendence, and immateriality, rather than to progress and technology. It was only in the early twentieth century that the introduction and increasing flow of airplanes (airmail, military, and commercial) changed the direction and perception of our gaze and our way of conceiving ourselves as humans that can fulfill the dream of takeoff and flight. This two-directional verticalization has affected the contemporary imaginary of air voyage and our relationship with gravity, altitude, and even falling, as revealed in an extreme fashion during the 9/11 attacks.1 As natural environments domesticated by humans, the sky and the earth are now entwined in our visual and spatial representations of the planet. Due to the condition of elevation (and of levitation) that air travel permits, our view has evolved and has gradually detached from the ground.2 Despite their small windows, airplanes allow travelers to enjoy the once-unthinkable experience of being above and amidst the clouds, no longer feeling the earth below. As much as our perception has been reshaped by the novel view of the horizon that the aerial environment offers, our condition as humans and travelers has been reconfigured by this specific setting. The flight paradoxically exposes us to an inevitable distance from the external aerial landscape that envelops us. Nevertheless, the visual experience of the sky through the aircraft window necessarily implies the presence of an irremovable transparent filter that impedes our immersion and direct interaction with the sky. Unlike land or sea travel, where photography allows us to insert our bodies into the landscape and transform it into a scenery (Crawshaw and Urry 1997, 194), we cannot modify or appropriate the atmosphere in the context of air travel. Air mobility reveals the air landscape and excludes us from being air tourists. Our attitude in the aerial environment is comparable to that of Verne’s character Phileas Fogg, who is predominantly driven by his quest 1 For a systematic study of the changes in representation that the attacks on the Twin Towers have produced in our imaginary of human flight, gravitation, and falling, see, especially, Dawes (2011). 2 See Nathalie Roseau (2012, 2013a) for an insightful analysis of the major historical changes resulting from the introduction of airplanes in the evolution of our gaze and perception of the modern city as seen from above. See also Dorrian’s (2013) study of the implications of satellite imagery and, in particular, of Google Earth in our understanding of space on a planetary and cosmic scale.

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E. DURANTE

to demonstrate that it is feasible to travel around the world in eighty days. Similarly, our air journey is not driven by the desire to visit the place we are traveling through, but by our impatient wish to reach our destination and thus the end of the journey. In reality, we have only one option to appropriate the air landscape and transform it into a scenery: include ourselves as creators or characters of the stories that we place or experience in the Airworld. Air Travel Fiction and Film: Cloud People explores the cultural influences of international contemporary fiction, both literature and film, on our perception of the Airworld and on air travel.

2

From Aeromobilities to Airportness

This book is based on a comprehensive exploration of a wide range of literary and cinematic sources across different languages, cultures, and regions. It studies the central role of the imaginary of air travel in contemporary cultural productions, and the effects of these cultural productions on our perception of the Airworld. Its analysis does not disregard the anthropological ties that have bound fiction to the aerial environment since the emergence of mythological narratives and throughout the pioneering age of aviation; it focuses on literary and cinematic creations that have transformed our representations of the Airworld in the past four decades, since the rise of globalization. Air Travel Fiction and Film goes beyond the apparent superficial and operational aspects of the functioning of the Airworld. Fiction unveils the human side (humanized and humanist) of this space, which is usually perceived as the prototype of anonymity and optimization. In engaging with the many heterogeneous narratives that take place in the Airworld or contain references to its annexes, this book affirms our identity as “Cloud People.” It analyzes how our relationship with ourselves, others, and the world is shaped by air mobility and its constant hybridization of travel in the sky and life on earth. This book examines the complexity of this phenomenon from a literary and cultural studies perspective. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines fundamental insights on the study of air travel from a wide range of disciplines, including the anthropology of globalization, architecture, contemporary philosophy, geography, mobility studies, and communication and media studies. Scholars of mobility studies have played a particularly important role in shaping our understanding of the intricate “practices, spaces, and

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subjects” of today’s air voyages (Cresswell and Merriman 2011) and their sociopolitical and cultural implications. The field of mobility studies, which examines contemporary air travel through a broad lens that exceeds the primary transportation function of airplanes, airports, and the Airworld as a whole, has progressively generated innovative sociological and anthropological insights about actors and infrastructures of contemporary air travel. The groundbreaking contributions of prominent scholars from the field, notably John Urry (1990, 1995, 2000, 2003, 2007), John Urry and Mimi Sheller (2006), Peter Adey (2004, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010a, b, 2014, 2016, 2017a, b, Adey et al. 2007), Tim Cresswell (2006), Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman (2011), and Peter Merriman (2012), as well as the contributors to the edited volume Aeromobilities (Cwerner et al. 2009) and the authors of articles published in the international journal Mobilities (Urry et al. 2006–2019) have consistently refined our knowledge of air transportation in the context of the “global and hypermobile age” (Cwerner et al. 2009, 10). Mobility studies focus on the spatial and social experience of mobility, as derived from empirical observations of behaviors, “social patterning” (Urry 1995, 63), and lived relations (Adey 2010b, 3), and in doing so has significantly furthered research on the social, cultural, environmental, and political aspects of contemporary (air) mobility. In particular, these scholars have addressed factors such as affectivity, emotions, sociability, and surveillance, expanding the theoretical and analytical framework of the field in response to the major “‘mobility’ turn” experienced since the early 1980s (Urry 2007). The field of mobility studies has further shown the need for a truly “transdisciplinary (or post-disciplinary)” approach to the phenomenon of present-day air travel (Cwerner et al. 2009, 9). In this respect, the work of human geographer Peter Adey, at the intersection of humanities, social sciences, and mobility studies, is emblematic of the methodological and conceptual challenges of mobility research today. His perspective is central for this book because of its rich content, analytical finesse, and transdisciplinary approach. Adey has helped not only to grasp the notion and imaginary of mobility through the history of science, mentalities, and societies (Adey 2010b), but offered a critical overview of our relationship with air as a natural and cultural element whose imaginary has constantly nourished philosophy, poetry, and art (Adey 2014, 2017b). Just as importantly, his work provides a comprehensive overview of the technological

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evolution of the airplane across time, highlighting its military use and role in the two World Wars (Adey 2010a). In its study of representations of air travel in the era of globalization, this book also draws upon the theories of several sociologists and anthropologists. In particular, the contributions of Marc Augé (1995), Arjun Appadurai (1996), Zygmunt Bauman (2000), Manuel Castells (2010), Michel Agier (2016), and Néstor García Canclini (2014) have been essential for the understanding of the “new mobilities paradigm” (Urry and Sheller 2006) within the context of the central cultural and social patterns of our globalized society and lifestyles. Certain concepts that these scholars have introduced, notably “non-places” (Augé), “global cultural flows,” (Appadurai), “liquid modernity” (Bauman), and “cosmopolitan condition” (Agier), have facilitated the framing of representations of air mobility in the context of the novel physical and imaginary geographies that have emerged since the last quarter of the twentieth century. This book’s analyses of literary works, films, and cultural productions have also been enriched by insights from other disciplines in the humanities, including contemporary philosophy, architecture, contemporary art, and literary and cultural studies, in particular Jochen Eisenbrand and Alexander von Vegesack (2004), Alastair Gordon (2004), Hugh Pearman (2004), Brian Edwards (2005), Gillian Fuller and Ross Harley (2005), David Bissell and Gillian Fuller (2011), and Nathalie Roseau (2012, 2013b). These studies have highlighted the aesthetic and artistic dimensions of the Airworld. In particular, the air-inspired projects of Tomás Saraceno have provided visionary representations of air as an inhabitable environment of the future. The philosophical considerations of Michel Serres (1995) on the new identity of contemporary homo viator, together with the fictionalized reports and travel testimonies of James Kaplan (1994), Mark Gottdiener (2001), Pico Iyer (2001), Alain de Botton (2009), Alexandre Friedrich (2014), and Bruce Bégout (2019), have deepened the interpretation of Airworld fiction. Within the domain of cultural studies, David Pascoe’s monograph (2001) has also been an important reference because of its historical completeness, remarkable interdisciplinary dimension, and detailed literary and film analyses of airport representations in the twentieth century. Christopher Schaberg (2011, 2016, 2017) has produced an impressive trilogy of essays on the Airworld as a space of production and consumption of the contemporary imaginary of air mobility, particularly

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from a perspective of cultural and literary studies. Schaberg’s monographs, interspersed with observations, personal memories, and numerous references to English-language literary and cinematic narratives, form a cornerstone for the understanding of the practices, objects, representations, and feelings that air travel entails. His notion of “Airportness” (2017), which describes our powerful dependence on the Airworld, in terms of attitudes, cultural references, and material culture, has been inspiring in identifying patterns of contemporary airport culture. The anthology edited by Schaberg and Mark Yakich (2016) is yet another contribution to the understanding of today’s Airworld through the voices and autobiographical stories of artists, writers, journalists, and aviation professionals.3 As part of the “Studies in Mobility, Literature, and Culture” series, coedited by Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson, and Lynne Pierce, this book examines contemporary air mobility as a truly poetic principle that has inspired the creations of present-day writers, filmmakers, and artists. Air Travel Fiction and Film follows the framework of “the recent ‘humanities turn’ in mobilities studies” (Aguiar et al. 2019, 2), and is devoted to exploring the deep nexus between the stimulating imaginary of air travel and contemporary international fiction, aspiring to unravel the roots of the emergence of an actual air travel culture. The book strives to further advance the original notion of “Airportness” and investigates the representations of the Airworld beyond the airport terminal. Regardless of whether we have never flown before or are frequent or occasional flyers, we are subject to the inescapable presence of air travel evoked by media, cinema, art, and advertising, or a simple glance skyward.

3

From Airborne to Air-born: Cloud People

If we could add another landscape to the taxonomy established by Arjun Appadurai to describe the “dimensions of global cultural flows” (1996, 33) that define our world in an era of globalization, it would be the “fictionscape” drawn by the contemporary Airworld fiction studied in 3 In terms of anthologies that gather the stories of different authors and eras of air travel, see those edited by Dorothy Spears (2009), by Stephen King and Bev Vincent (2018), and the short story collection À l’aéroport … from the 2013 literary contest organized by the Swiss publisher Éditions Encre Fraîche, devoted to young writers taking up the “challenge of imagining a storyline in this fascinating place” (3) that is the airport.

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this book. This other “imagined world” (33), which is generated by the intersection of narratives, characters, and places connected through air travel, would be a holographic copy of our world. Fiction distances us from reality, allowing us to observe the gestures, practices, movements, representations, and contradictions that we have assimilated and experienced in our recurrent interactions with the Airworld. Like the “mediascape” that Appadurai describes as a repertoire of “images, narratives, and ethnoscapes” (35), the fictionscape mirrors the rising of a global population of air travelers and multiple actors of the Airworld, as well as writers, directors, artists and fictional characters who create or embody narratives located in this space of mobility. In this book, “Cloud People” are those billions of travelers who relentlessly circulate through international air transport infrastructures,4 and those individuals who are exposed to the daily view of planes in the sky (Fig. 2). This term was earlier used by archaeologists to refer to the Andean civilization Quichua Chachapoyas, who resided in the heights of the cloud forest of precolonial Peru, and who were known by the Incas and the Spaniards for their strength, resilience, and unusual light skin and blue eyes.5 The expression “Cloud People” oxymoronically merges two entities that are in principle irreconcilable: on the one hand, clouds, an intangible and largely weightless substance, and on the other hand, individuals with anatomical shapes and gravitational mass. This book draws on Peter Sloterdijk’s spherology theory (2016), while keeping in mind the Cloud Cities (2016) and the ecological aerial environments conceived by Tomás Saraceno (2012, 2013) to advance the hypothesis that by being increasingly more connected through air, we have incorporated the atmosphere into our cultural and social imaginary and, more fundamentally, into our contemporary human condition. We have transitioned from an acquired and transient condition of “airborne” to a more internalized and ontological identity of “air-born,” to use Steven Connor’s dichotomous terminology in his excellent study on air (2010, 14). In other words,

4 According to available statistics (Mazareanu 2019), in 2019, a record of 4.6 billion passengers have been transported by the global airline industry since 2004. The data suggest that there has been a 130% increase over the past 15 years. 5 For more on the denomination and remains of this Andean community, see Church and Guengerich (2017).

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Fig. 2 John Gardner: Cloud People [2019] (Courtesy of the artist)

the Airworld fosters a metamorphosis of our perceptions and representations. Indeed, by its very existence and through the numerous sources it encompasses, this book argues that we have become Cloud People, and that, following the traits indicated by Augé, our identity, relationships, and memory have evolved through our exposure to air travel and the atmosphere.

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4

The Airworld as a Methodology

Air Travel Fiction and Film offers a systematic analysis of a large, multilingual corpus of cinematic and literary fiction that shares the common denominator of the Airworld. The book considers the airplane, the airport, and their annexes as transdisciplinary objects that require the updating of existing concepts and the definition of new notions. Based on the hypothesis of the Airworld as a “narrative crossroads” (Lagier 2015), this monograph analyzes the aerial infrastructure as a setting that involves singular spatiotemporal patterns while originating its own rhetoric, narratives, and agencies. Indeed, fiction goes beyond the reality of the journey, providing a unique perspective on the Airworld due to its ability to elucidate the paradigms and representations of our globalized world. It reaches a tremendously large audience across the world, and has an iconic function in the spread of global trends and behaviors and in the dissemination of collective fears and traumas. Fiction thus plays a major role in the construction of the global imaginary of air travel. It operates both as a tool and an experimental terrain for new narratives and creations that establish in the Airworld their décor and legitimacy. This study of fiction from the early 1980s to the present day reflects the outburst in air mobility in recent decades and the corresponding extraordinary rise in the representation of this phenomenon in contemporary literature, film, and cultural productions. In light of the transnational nature of air mobility and the major geopolitical challenges it entails (Goetz and Budd 2014), its international corpus captures the diversity and consistency of representations of air travel in different geographical and linguistic regions of the world. This broad spectrum of international fiction required the challenging task of translating numerous literary extracts from novels, short stories, and poems that are currently unavailable in English. The translation and analysis of a wide range of primary sources allows the book to introduce Anglophone readers to literary works written in German, French (from France and African countries), and Spanish (from Spain and Latin America) while exploring the global scale of the contemporary imaginary of the Airworld. The international breadth of the corpus reveals that the Airworld joins and mediates between sky and earth while fostering networks and connections between individuals and populations across the globe. This book considers the Airworld as a synthesis of cultural and anthropological data, and as a catalyst of encounters and multiple identities, and studies air

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travel and the environment that it generates as instances of a vast cultural and hermeneutic approach. Recent air mobility fiction is inseparable from the new anthropological perspectives, resulting from the process of globalization and its repercussions on the forms, contents, and challenges of the contemporary novel (Bessière 2010). It draws a humanized cartography of our world, where the representation of otherness leads to the depiction of a close interdependence between individuals in different geopolitical contexts. These works of fiction also introduce a transindividual viewpoint, since the human subject no longer acts in isolation, but in an evident awareness of their connections to others and to the world. Air Travel Fiction and Film presents a series of similar shared features of Cloud People, while also highlighting the disparities and paradoxes that surround representations of the Airworld in international fiction. Theoretically, the travel enabled by air mobility is meant to be global and to transcend national borders. However, in reality, air voyage remains subject to hierarchical and colonialist logics of power and exclusion, as revealed in works of fiction originating in countries of the Global South. The adoption of this broad global perspective is also reflected in the inclusion of creations of contemporary artists who, with their live performances and installations, have participated in enriching the aesthetic imaginary of the Airworld. Along these lines, the study of popular culture in general, and of television series, songs, and advertising in particular, has allowed us to verify and ultimately nuance the hypotheses formulated with regard to literary and cinematic fiction. In considering the wide range of airports, airplanes, and characters that interact in Airworld fiction and cultural productions, Air Travel Fiction and Film explores the world of contemporary air travel as a kaleidoscope of languages, viewpoints, identities, encounters, stories, and images. The book focuses primarily on ordinary air travel narratives, in an effort to evaluate their influence on the construction of identity, contemporary social life, and cultural imaginary. From this perspective, its objective is to provide a diverse and comprehensive overview of everyday representations of air mobility and travelers. Therefore, the corpus of this book excludes works of science fiction; accounts of air crashes, catastrophes, or hijackings; autobiographies of civil and military air personnel; and so-called “airport novels.” Science fiction, which follows well-established dramatic plots, and airport novels, which are guided by entertainment constraints, are less relevant to the research goal of this book. Similarly, due to the extreme circumstances that they describe, narratives of air crashes and

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aerial catastrophes, which rely on exceptional representations of global risks and the tightening of security controls, are not featured prominently in the analysis. Furthermore, the exploration of fiction, visual productions, and popular culture conducted through the lens of the Airworld has brought to the fore the creative potential of this space. The common trend among authors and artists of either writing, filming, or conceptualizing an artistic project in connection to, or in the context of, the Airworld, originates in the symbolic and cultural imaginary studied here. This poetic function, understood in the etymological sense of the term poïesis, is reflected in two main tendencies: the creation of a work conceptually inspired by the Airworld, and the choice of the aerial infrastructure as the setting for a fiction or artistic creation. In other words, the increasingly frequent recourse to the airport as a scenery of international fiction over the past forty years is a striking phenomenon, and a significant number of authors, filmmakers, and artists temporarily occupy this space as a platform for creation.6 This book takes a contrary view to that of Marc Augé’s theory of “non-places,” and instead advances the hypothesis that literary fiction, film, and art anthropologize the Airworld, transforming this pivotal space of the global culture into a place endowed with social significance and a life of its own. Through this novel approach, which relieves this space from the binary and controversial antagonism between “place and placelessness” (Merriman 2012, 60), the Airworld is analyzed in terms of its crucial impact on the textual genesis and trends of today’s fiction.7 In 6 Among others examples, Manuel Puig worked as an Air France steward in New York in the 1960s while drafting writing projects at the company counter at JFK Airport (Puig 2006). More recently, authors such as Argentinean Samantha Schweblin (Blanc 2019, s.p.) and Bolivian Edmundo Paz Soldán (2008), consider airplanes and airports conducive to writing or reading. Mario Vargas Llosa also dedicated a short essay (1999) to books he compulsively consumed while flying in order to alleviate his fear of air travel. These testimonies reveal a great interest in the Airworld among Latin American writers, due particularly to the demands of the editorial market, located primarily in Madrid and Barcelona. This dependence on air mobility is also reflected in the significant presence of Latin American authors in this book. 7 The inescapable presence of the Airworld in contemporary fiction also appears, albeit in negative terms, in stories intended to prove that it is possible, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to avoid air travel in journeys across the globe. For example, French authors Christian Garcin and Tanguy Viel’s (2019) work, as indicated by its subtitle, recounts a voyage “around the world without airplane.” Their work pays homage to one

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fact, the initial stages of the creation of a narrative appear inseparable from the Airworld, stemming from situations that occur in this context and involve the aerial environment in a unique manner. Among wellknown and representative examples of this osmotic nexus between air travel and contemporary literature and cinema are novels such as Walter Kirn’s Up in the Air, Rana Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, and Greg Baxter’s Munich Airport, as well as films such as Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, Pedro Almodóvar’s Los amantes pasajeros (I’m So Excited), and Robert Schwentke’s Flightplan. To use the fine formulation of Jésus Montoya Juárez and Ángel Esteban, the airport—and the entire Airworld—has become “the gateway to a new trend of fiction that […] poses novel challenges in terms of representation” (2008, 7).8 Portrayed either as a character per se, or as the ghostwriter of novels and films, the Airworld emerges, more fundamentally, as the instance of a new poetics of contemporary fiction that deeply influences representations of time, space, and human narratives. Air Travel Fiction and Film investigates the new impetus that the Airworld infuses into contemporary creation, and in return, the influence of air voyage narratives on our imaginary of today’s Airworld. The book further demonstrates how contemporary air travel significantly contributes to the ancient and inextinguishable art of storytelling.

hundred days of slow traveling “by freighter, train, car, bus, but not by plane” (Garcin and Viel 2019, 7). Furthermore, the ecological challenge launched by the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, who sailed across the Atlantic in August 2019 to attend the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City, is another example of this new trend. Thunberg’s initiative, driven by her desire to reduce carbon emissions generated by air travel, reflects the mission of the Swedish environmental movement “Flygskam” (“flight shame”) that has inspired an increasing number of voyagers around the world to opt for alternative ways of traveling. 8 Similarly, Eduardo Becerra titled his anthology of stories written by young Latin Amer-

ican authors at the crossroads between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries Líneas aéreas (1999), or Airlines. The choice of this title clearly indicates an aim to go beyond the local geographical frontiers within Latin America and to provide a general overview of this emerging literature, by including writers from the Latin American diaspora in the U.S.

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References Articles and Essays Adey, Peter. 2004. Surveillance at the Airport: Surveilling Mobility/Mobilising Surveillance. Environment and Planning A 36: 1365–1380. Adey, Peter. 2006. If Mobility Is Everything Then It Is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobilities. Mobilities 1 (1): 75–94. Adey, Peter. 2008. Airports, Mobility and the Calculative Architecture of Affective Control. Geoforum 39 (1): 438–451. Adey, Peter. 2009. Getting into the Flow: Airports, Aeromobilities and AirMindedness. In Aeromobilities, ed. Saulo Cwerner, Sven Kesselring, and John Urry, 194–207. London: Routledge. Adey, Peter. 2010a. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Chichester and Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Adey, Peter. 2010b. Mobility. London: Routledge. Adey, Peter. 2014. Air: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion. Adey, Peter. 2016. Airports: Terminal/Vector. In Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, ed. Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman, 137–150. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Adey, Peter. 2017a. Mobility, 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Adey, Peter. 2017b. Levitation: The Science, Myth and Magic of Suspension. London: Reaktion. Adey, Peter, Lucy Budd, and Phil Hubbard. 2007. Flying Lessons: Exploring the Social and Cultural Geographies of Global Air Travel. Progress in Human Geography 31(6): 773–791. Agier, Michel. 2016. Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition, trans. David Fernbach. Cambridge and Malden: Polity. Aguiar, Marian, Charlotte Mathieson, and Lynne Pearce. 2019. Mobilities, Literature, Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe. London and New York: Verso. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Becerra, Eduardo (ed.). 1999. Líneas aéreas. Madrid: Ediciones Lengua de Trapo. Bégout, Bruce. 2019. En escale: chroniques aéroportuaires. Paris: Philosophie Magazine Éditeur. Bessière, Jean. 2010. Le Roman contemporain ou la problématicité du monde. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bissell, David, and Gillian Fuller (eds.). 2011. Stillness in a Mobile World. London and New York: Routledge.

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Blanc, Natalia. 2019. Samanta Schweblin, Rodrigo Fresán y Alberto Fuguet, tres viajeros en San Isidro. La Nacion, March 15. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/ cultura/samantha-schweblin-rodrigo-fresan-alberto-fuguet-tres-nid2229049. Accessed 9 July 2019. Castells, Manuel. 2010. The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. with a new preface. Oxford and Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Church, Warren, and Anna Guengerich. 2017. Introducción. La (re)construcción de Chachapoyas a través de la historia e historiografía. Boletín de Arqueología PUCP 23: 5–38. Connor, Steven. 2010. The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal. London: Reaktion. Cramshaw, Carol, and John Urry. 1997. Tourism and the Photographic Eye. In Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, ed. Chris Rojek and John Urry, 176–195. London and New York: Routledge. Cresswell, Tim. 2006. On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. New York: Routledge. Cresswell, Tim, and Peter Merriman (eds.). 2011. Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Cwerner, Saulo, Sven Kesselring, and John Urry. 2009. Aeromobilities. London: Routledge. Dawes, Birgit (ed.). 2011. Ground Zero Fiction: History, Memory and Representation in the American 9/11 Novel. Durham: Duke University Press. de Botton, Alain. 2009. A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary. London: Profile Books. Dorrian, Mark. 2013. On Google Earth. In Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture, ed. Mark Dorrian and Frédéric Pousin, 290–307. London: I.B. Tauris. Edwards, Brian. 2005. The Modern Airport Terminal: New Approaches to Airport Architecture. New York: Spon Press. Eisenbrand, Jochen, and Alexander von Vegesack (eds.). 2004. Airworld: Design and Architecture for Air Travel. Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Museum. Friedrich, Alexandre. 2014. EasyJet: Espace, Temps, Argent. Paris: Éditions Allia. Fuller, Gillian, and Ross Harley. 2005. Aviopolis: A Book About Airports. London: Black Dog. García Canclini, Néstor. 2014. Imagined Globalization, trans. George Yúdice. Durham: Duke University Press. Goetz, Andrew R., and Lucy Budd (eds.). 2014. The Geographies of Air Transport. London: Routledge. Gordon, Alastair. 2004. Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Gottdiener, Mark. 2001. Life in the Air: Surviving the New Culture of Air Travel. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Iyer, Pico. 2001. The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home. London: Vintage. Kaplan, James. 1994. The Airport: Terminal Nights and Runway Days at John F. Kennedy International. New York: William Morrow and Company. Mazareanu, Elena. 2019. Global Air Traffic—Scheduled Passengers 2004–2019. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/564717/airline-industry-passen ger-traffic-globally/. Accessed 10 November 2019. Merriman, Peter. 2012. Mobility, Space and Culture. New York: Routledge. Montoya Juárez, Jesús, and Ángel Esteban (eds.). 2008. Entre lo local y lo global: la narrativa latinoamericana en el cambio de siglo (1990–2006). Madrid and Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana Vervuert. Pascoe, David. 2001. Airspaces. London: Reaktion. Paz Soldán, Edmundo. 2008. Lecturas en el avión. El Boomeran(g): blog literario en español, June 11. http://www.elboomeran.com/blog-post/117/4158/ edmundo-paz-soldan/lecturas-en-el-avion/. Accessed 10 November 2019. Pearman, Hugh. 2004. Airports: A Century of Architecture. London: Laurence King Publishing. Roseau, Nathalie. 2012. Aerocity: quand l’avion fait la ville. Marseille: Parenthèses. Roseau, Nathalie. 2013a. The City Seen from the Aeroplane. Distorted Reflections and Urban Futures. In Seeing from Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture, ed. Mark Dorrian and Frédéric Pousin, 210–226. London: I.B. Tauris. Roseau, Nathalie. 2013b. Learning from Airports’ History. In Mobility in History, ed. Peter Norton, et al., 95–100. New York: Berghahn Books. Schaberg, Christopher. 2011. The Textual Life of Airports: Reading the Culture of Flight. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group. Schaberg, Christopher. 2016. The End of Airports. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Schaberg, Christopher. 2017. Airportness: The Nature of Flight. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Schaberg, Christopher, and Mark Yakich (eds.). 2016. Airplane Reading. Winchester: Zero Books. Serres, Michel. 1995. Angels: A Modern Myth, trans. Francis Cowper. Paris: Flammarion. Sloterdijk, Peter. 2016. Foams: Spheres Volume III: Plural Spherology, trans. Wieland Hoban. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Urry, John. 1990. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage. Urry, John. 1995. Consuming Places. London and New York: Routledge. Urry, John. 2000. Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. London and New York: Routledge.

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Urry, John. 2003. Global Complexities. Cambridge: Polity. Urry, John. 2007. Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity. Urry, John, and Mimi Sheller. 2006. The New Mobilities Paradigm. Environment and Planning A 38 (2): 207–226. Urry, John, et al. 2006–2019. Mobilities. Abingdon: Routledge Journals. Vargas Llosa, Mario. 2007. How I Lost My Fear of Flying. In Touchstones: Essays on Literature, Art and Politics, trans. John King, 131–134. London: Faber and Faber.

Films Almodóvar, Pedro. 2013. Los amantes pasajeros. Madrid: El Deseo. Schwentke, Robert. 2005. Flightplan. Burbank and Beverly Hills: Touchstone Pictures and Imagine Entertainment. Spielberg, Steven. 2004. The Terminal. Universal City: DreamWorks Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Parkes, and MacDonald Productions.

Novels and Short Stories Baxter, Greg. 2015. Munich Airport. New York: Twelve. Costagliola, Maximiliano. 2016. El arponero del aire. Buenos Aires: Seix Barral. Dasgupta, Rana. 2005. Tokyo Cancelled. New York: Black Cat. Garcin, Christian, and Tanguy Viel. 2019. Travelling. Paris: JC Lattès. Kirn, Walter. 2002. Up in the Air. New York: Anchor Books. Melville, Herman. 1952. Moby-Dick, or, The whale, ed. Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent. New York: Hendricks House. Verne, Jules. 2015. Five Weeks in a Balloon: A Journey of Discovery by Three Englishmen in Africa, trans. Frederick Paul Walter. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Anthologies Alaoui, Salima, et al. 2013. À l’aéroport…. Geneva: Éditions Encre Fraîche. King, Stephen, and Bev Vincent (eds.). 2018. Flight or Fright. Forest Hill: Cemetery Dance Publications. Spears, Dorothy (ed.). 2009. Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories About Flying. New York: Open City Books.

Installations Saraceno, Tomás. 2012. On Space Time Foam. Milan: HangarBicocca.

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Saraceno, Tomás. 2013. In Orbit. Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen. Saraceno, Tomás. 2016. Stillness in Motion—Cloud Cities. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Documentaries Lagier, Luc. 2015. Blow-up: l’aéroport au cinéma. Paris: Camera Lucida Productions. https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/065424-082-A/blow-up-l-aeroportau-cinema/. Accessed 27 September 2019.

Letters Puig, Manuel. 2006. Querida familia: Tomo 2, Cartas Americanas: New York— Río (1963–1983). Buenos Aires: Entropía.

CHAPTER 2

The Airworld as an In-between Space

1

Urban Center Versus Airport Periphery

The word airport, like the earlier term airdrome, contains an explicit, concurrent reference to the air and the ground. Unlike ports and ships, which share the same marine environment, airports are anchored to the ground while serving the airspace. Their ground-based infrastructures facilitate take offs and landings and air traffic control. The nexus between the sky and the earth that airports establish characterizes them from their inception. This interdependence is particularly evident when one considers the ties between the airport and its host city: terminals are city satellites as well as “open sesame[s],” linking the city to the world (Roseau 2012a, 104).1 Notwithstanding their unique connective role, airport infrastructures tend to be located outside urban agglomerations, far removed from the downtown districts. Despite the pervasive inclination of architects and urban planners to integrate airports into the metropolitan landscape, they remain distinct and nearly self-sufficient spaces in the contemporary imaginary. The airport is neither inside nor outside the city, and is cognitively associated with representations of grand scale and immense distances. Moreover, it conceptually involves those intangible, dematerialized, and immeasurable notions of air and space that contribute to the broadening 1 My translation.

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Durante, Air Travel Fiction and Film, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52651-1_2

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of the gap between the airborne environment and life on the ground (Bachelard 1988). “Originally conceived and built as stand-alone facilities outside town” (Güller and Güller 2003), the airport has come to occupy an increasingly remote place in urban geography, especially in comparison to other mobility infrastructures such as train stations and highways. Airports emerged well after the height of the industrial and technological development of modern cities, and have been built beyond urban perimeters since the early 1930s, “incarnating the image of an urban Wild West” (Roseau 2012a, 96).2 This “exfiltration of the airport ‘outside the city’” (Roseau 2012c, 97),3 a pattern maintained since the twentieth century, has progressively etched the tension between the urban center and the edification of this new infrastructure that has solidified into a “border-object” (Roseau 2012a, 93) into our imaginary.4 The unparalleled architectural scale of airport projects and the mobility function of this platform have also sharpened the exceptional status of these distant, uninhabitable spaces, conforming to infrangible access restrictions. These infrastructures, designed to serve as global hubs rather than as spaces of local belonging, represent a unique interstitial setting, commonly found in a “liminal area between the urban and the non-urban” (Roseau 2012b, 34). In the absence of anthropological and historical connections to their host cities, these “central stations of the twenty-first century” (Güller and Güller 2003, 181) have been built, and function, according to their own spatial-temporal configurations that are untied to the urban environment. The process of globalization has exacerbated the gap between airports and urban centers by making airports part of a novel cartography of the world, governed by air travel. New paradigms of fluidity, speed, mobility, and connectivity have largely contributed to placing the infrastructure of the Airworld (Kirn 2002) at the core of a global lifestyle (Iyer 2001). The premonition of science fiction writer J. G. Ballard that the airport “will be the true city of the twenty-first century” has become a reality for a large fraction of contemporary travelers who transit between “the suburbs of

2 My translation. 3 My translation. 4 My translation.

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an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose border towns are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Nagoya” (2004, 254). By interconnecting multiple hubs, airports trace a dynamic world map that generates a hologram of “a centripetal city whose population forever circles its notional centre and will never need to gain access to its dark heart” (Ballard 2004, 254). Ballard’s imaginary city, whose circumference is everywhere and whose center is nowhere, is a holographic metropolis, charted by the incessant and accelerated movement of individuals across the globe, that becomes perceptible only when one adopts the perspective of those who “zigzag” across it, alternating between sky and earth5 : “I lead a zigzag life. For some reason, my itineraries lead to cities that require making connections: Antwerp, Oslo, Barcelona (Villoro 2007, 24).”6 Considered a hub rather than a destination in and of itself, the contemporary city follows the trajectory described by Mexican author Juan Villoro, and ceases to identify with its old stagnant and sunken nerve center or, to use Ballard’s image, its “dark heart,” which monopolizes the history of the place and the human community around it. Through the airport, the city stretches and launches itself into the world. Like an umbilical cord (Fig. 1), the terminal attaches the city to the plane, supplying the latter with personnel, passengers, fuel, and other vital services.

2

The Traveler and the Absent City

Representations in contemporary fiction of the airport and its relation to the city reflect the complexity of the spatial perception of the airport in relation to the city. In emphasizing the impermeability and exclusion of the airport vis-à-vis urban spaces, these works of fiction and film, produced in geographical and culturally different contexts, express a form of resistance of the urban environment to interactions with the airport and its surroundings. This irreducible distance from the city becomes a 5 This brings to mind the projects developed by Argentinean artist Tomás Saraceno, particularly On Space Time Foam (2012) and In Orbit (2013). These projects provide tangible representations of the new environment envisioned by Ballard, where the human and the aerial interact in an inclusive fashion with respect for the planet, creating together a flexible, eco-friendly, and collaborative habitat. 6 My translation. In the original: “Llevo una vida en zigzag. Por alguna razón, mis itinerarios desembocan en ciudades que obligan a hacer conexiones: Amberes, Oslo, Barcelona” (Villoro 2007, 24).

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Fig. 1 John Gardner: South West—National Airport [2018] (Courtesy of the artist)

pivotal juncture for fiction, as a character shifts from a state of traveling, and thus being excluded from the city, to one of reintegration into the urban fabric. This diegetic pattern appears in many texts, both literary and

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cinematic, which sometimes trivialize and sometimes heighten the difference and disjunction between the two parallel spheres of the city and its airport. Chilean author and director Alberto Fuguet’s short film 2 horas (2008) is a representative example of the impossibility of merging these two timespaces within fiction. During a two-hour wait at the Santiago de Chile International Airport, the protagonist, José Pablo Gómez—a young man arriving from another flight and whose final destination is Germany—is reunited with his father, Pablo Cerda, who joins him at the airport during the layover. From the outset, the short film builds on a constant alternation between the sky and the earth, and the impossibility of any actual fusion between these two landscapes, which are rarely joined in a single shot. After an initial sequence of the son waking up in an anonymous bedroom, the camera sharply shifts to an airplane cabin, in which the same character is seen sleeping against the window. The brusque change in scenery is conveyed through a transition to the sound of airplane turbines, even before becoming visual. Fuguet’s camera plunges once more to the ground, situated at the city level, to depict the father’s trip to the airport amidst urban traffic jams. The camera is repositioned in the airplane cabin, accompanied once again by humming engines. It drops abruptly to the ground, focusing on the wheels of the father’s motorcycle, emphasizing the length of this tedious ride: a precondition for the reunion of the two characters. The noise of the turbines anticipates the character’s journey, projects the shadow of the sky on the ground through the echo of passing planes, and exposes the ground to an aerial parallel happening thousands of feet above the earth. This same paradigm, by which the airplane is caught in a tension between sky and earth, and is ultimately incorporated into the human urban space, is repeated each time that the character hears or sees planes pass above him. The vision of the airplane, glimpsed from the city or just barely heard, recurs in representations involving life on the ground.7 For the son, the layover represents the separation between 7 Nearly two and a half centuries after the emergence of the first flying objects, humans have been intrigued and fascinated by the sight or noise of an airplane above, temporarily disrupting the static perception of the earth and the noisy platitude of the city. On the history of flight, the perception of air, and technological progress in air travel, see in particular the remarkable work of Peter Adey (2014). Many airline advertising campaigns also stress this simultaneous perception of sky and earth that the passing of a plane over a city or town produces. One such example is Air France’s promotional film “Le Passage”

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the Airworld and the space adjacent to the city, and explicitly highlights the distance from the city that a passenger experiences during a layover. This phase of the trip is emblematic of the feelings of in-betweenness the passenger experiences as he finds himself between the sky and the ground, between the city and the runway. During this temporary interruption of the trip, the father—who lives in Santiago and makes his way toward the airport to meet his son who is in transit—leaves the urban area and encounters, if only temporarily, the airport’s free circulation spaces (parking lots, terminals, and hotel lobbies). He also finds himself divided between the city that occupies his mind and the airport in which his body is located, while the traveler in transit has the imminent flight in mind as his body is momentarily grounded near a city from which he is de facto excluded. In its efforts to address the “extra-urban dissociation” of the airport (Roseau 2012a, 158)8 through mirror effects and concomitant actions, Fuguet’s short film leads to an impasse. The contrast between antithetical depths of field, sometimes filmed from the city, other times from the airplane, is accentuated by the sound delay between urban hubbub and the auditory reality of the cabin and the airport. This only sharpens the dissymmetry between the urban environment and the aerial world. It is as though these two spaces were structurally designed to remain parallel and fundamentally separate, with the expressway as the only possible jointure. 2 horas displays the impossibility of connecting these two spaces by failing to reconcile them and by just cracking their geographical impermeability through sensory elements and characters who are, in turn, marked by an irreparable separation. If we extend the reflection of the layover as a problematic articulation of contemporary air travel, we can observe many occurrences that stigmatize this time-space as a limbic place saturated with uncertainty, a floating state between the terrestrial and aerial worlds. Many travelers report that (Gondry 1999), launched as part of a global advertising campaign for the French national airline, titled “Making the sky the most beautiful place on earth” (Faire du ciel le plus bel endroit de la terre). This fusion between sky and earth was also at the heart of a commercial campaign that Air France went on to develop, with the emblematic title “France is in the air.” This campaign aimed to project notable stereotypes and worldwide recognized aspects of French culture, such as fashion, new cuisine, the ballerinas of the Paris Opera, the striped sailor t-shirt, and others, into the blue of the sky seen through airplane windows. 8 My translation.

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they have been to a city or country even though they have barely spent the time of a layover within an airport, without actually having ever set foot in either the city or country in question. This is the case of, for example, the protagonist of Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air, played by George Clooney in Jason Reitman’s film adaptation (2009). In one of many reflections on the experiences of the frequent flyer, Ryan M. Bingham expresses his relation with the city that he has only experienced from the airport hotel: “I even enjoy the suite hotels built within sight of the runways on the ring roads, which are sometimes as close as I get to the cities that my job requires me to visit” (Kirn 2002, 5). In line with this relatively widespread perception—which forms part of a generalized pattern in terms of the acceleration of travel and the use of airplanes as means of daily transport for many professionals—passing through an airport replaces any glimpse, however hasty, of the city. It can even substitute for the latter through the problematic contiguity between the airport and the urban territory. Like a contemporary Phileas Fogg, hurried by the travel time of the trip and hardly concerned with the discovery of different destinations, the traveler in Up in the Air dispenses with place and prefers to shut himself away in the Airworld space. This renunciation of the city is legitimized by professional constraints and the comfortable conditions of proximity to the departure terminal offered by airport hotels, and is primarily expressed in terms of the spatial distancing and physical separation the passenger feels relative to the city. In the air traveler’s perception, the smooth and seamless flow within the Airworld’s infrastructures contrasts with the congested roads that lead to the city and influences the passenger’s decision to isolate himself within the perimeter of the airport during a layover, or even for the duration of a longer stopover. Airports and their ancillary infrastructure, including airplanes, thus come to constitute an autonomous and homogeneous whole in the imaginary of the frequent traveler that is almost self-referential with respect to the space of the city. Airports embody a state of the world parallel to that of the adjacent city, geographically split from the latter and sometimes perceived as a paradise in the type of altered values they convey in terms of scale, perception of time, and the relationship of individuals to themselves, to others, and the world: “Airworld is a nation within a nation, with its own language, architecture, mood, and even its own currency—the token economy of airline bonus miles that I’ve come to value more than dollars” (Kirn 2002, 7).

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The spatial, architectural, semiotic, and anthropological differences that Kirn’s protagonist repeatedly highlights further deepen, and even exacerbate, the dichotomy between city and airport in the representation of the contemporary traveler. In fact, from the outset, the traveler tends to separate these two environments and imagine them as isolated, without considering any interaction other than a rapid transfer from one space to the other. Frequent travelers, engulfed in the fluid airport infrastructure, often express the considerable division between these two antipodes, which is an everyday experience for them. For this particular category of air travelers, the city functions as an antithesis to the airport, in that it only has a status if it acts as an access portal to the Airworld and beyond: As long as you’re aimed at a city with an airport, you can get anywhere from anywhere […]. In Billings, Montana, I’d find a portal to Airworld, and I could be back in Salt Lake by 9 A.M. then off to Vegas by noon. This is how the country is structured now, in spokes, not lines. Just find a hub. (Kirn 2002, 201)

This biased view, introduced by recent air hypermobility, posits the ground as nothing more than a threshold for the constant pursuit of flight. As such, the city is once again relegated to an ancillary function relative to the airport, sharpening the morphological incompatibility between these two spaces: one seen as a platform open to the world and the other as confined and gravitating around a city center (Ballard 2004, 253–255). The abandonment of the city in favor of the airport is a dominant trait in many accounts told by fictional frequent travelers. Mexican author Ignacio Padilla’s posthumously published short story Última escala en ninguna parte (2017) provides, in this sense, another paradigmatic example of the type of assessment expressed by Ryan M. Bingham and shared by a large number of contemporary travelers. In this case, a sudden change in the main character’s attitude reflects a shift in the traveler’s representation of the contrast between the airport and the city. Abilio, the protagonist of Padilla’s story, is gradually caught up in the Airworld routine, to the point of being blinded, much like Bingham, by the compulsive need to earn miles. Abilio initially appears as a novice tourist, fascinated by the wishing fountains into which he throws coins in hopes of future trips. His increasingly frequent and elaborate itineraries, punctuated by visits to new cities and fountains, are planned to include

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layovers that are just long enough to allow him to visit a city and its fountains before rushing back to the airport and flying off to another destination: “I also discovered how to travel with layovers long enough to visit a city in a day and photograph myself in front of some historical site before running back to the airport to either sleep there or catch my next flight” (Padilla 2017).9 Abilio is more comparable to Jules Verne’s character Passepartout than to Phileas Fogg, who is indifferent to the places to which he travels. He is initially subject to the urgent and familiar necessity of experiencing new cities, being photographed in front of historical monuments, and sharing through postcards and letters the impressions of these attractions. In this phase of his life, excursion into the heart of a city constitutes the sole objective of his trips, with the airport functioning only as relay and gateway toward another place in the world. This paradigm is, however, turned entirely upside down when the airline that is to bring Abilio back to his country awards him the prize for being passenger number 10,250: a voucher that allows him to travel around the world at will. This prize is the first of a series of rewards that will later be given to him, in a surreal fashion, by other airline companies and associations of experienced travelers, indefinitely extending his flights around the globe. This shift without transition from the status of tourist to that of frequent traveler causes a major change in Abilio’s identity and fundamentally transforms his spatial representation of the earth. From the moment that he accepts the voucher that will convert him into a permanent air traveler, he renounces the diversity of places and local specificities of different cities, including his wishing fountain excursions. He ultimately establishes his new home aboard airplanes and in the airport terminals in which he temporarily lands: Between one thing and another, I also found a way to continue to know and learn without having to abandon my life on airplanes. Although I had given up visiting and taking photographs of myself in front of historical monuments, I always carefully read travel guide entries about the countries I passed through […]. I wrote postcards during long flights so as to send

9 My translation. In the original: “También descubrí cómo viajar con escalas lo bastante largas para visitar una ciudad en un día y fotografiarme en algún lugar histórico antes de correr de regreso al aeropuerto para dormir allí o alcanzar mi siguiente vuelo” (Padilla 2017).

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them from post offices in the airports where I landed. In them, I would recount to my uncle what I was learning from my travel guide. (Padilla 2017)10

Abilio’s acquisition of a nomadic identity quickly translates into a distancing from the world and the sites he once found attractive, as reading travel guides replaces visits to urban spaces. The city and, by extension, the ground become evanescent, nothing more than memories or mirages of reality, brief segments of descriptions written out in guidebooks, or stereotypical shots printed on postcards. In addition to reiterating the inevitable spatial disjunction between sky and earth, this reversal ultimately plunges the city into obsolescence relative to the airport, which instead takes on a form of exclusivity in terms of both circulation environment and habitat. In line with the new way of living that Abilio embraces, the city exists only through correspondence and intermediaries to whom the journey is recounted. This paradoxically amounts to attributing a function to the metropolitan space that is more temporal (providing a continuum to the story of the trip) than spatial.

3

Globalizing the Local

Contemporary authors often perceive attempts to provide terminals with an ad hoc identity specific to the host city as failed representations of the place, which are sometimes extremely stereotyped and distorted. Air travel narratives through different terminals of the world highlight this significance of the local in the global space of the airport and emphasize the discrepancy that the voyager feels. Ecuadorian author Yolanda Reinoso Barzallo’s short story “El aeropuerto más bello del mundo” (2014) provides an eloquent example. The story focuses on the grueling experience of an Ecuadorian forced to leave, for just an hour, the territory of the United Arab Emirates in order to have the right to return and apply to renew her residence permit. To do so, the young woman 10 My translation. In the original: “Entre una cosa y otra, encontré también el modo de seguir conociendo y aprendiendo sin tener que abandonar mi vida en los aviones. Aunque había renunciado a visitar y a tomarme fotos en monumentos históricos, siempre tuve el cuidado de leer sobre los países por los que pasaba en una guía de viaje […]. Las postales las escribía en los vuelos largos para enviarlas desde las oficinas de correos de los aeropuertos en los que aterrizaba. En ellas contaba a mi tío lo que iba aprendiendo en mi guía de viajes” (Padilla 2017).

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travels to Doha Airport in Qatar and then immediately flies back to Dubai International Airport. However, due to a computer glitch, she finds herself stuck for several days in the terminal. Sentenced to a prolonged period of waiting, the desperate protagonist searches the terminal for food and a hotel. Over time, she devotes the passing hours and days to a true ethnographic analysis of the airport. Her descriptions accentuate the encroachment of the surrounding city and its culture into the international airport, as reflected in a number of local referents: “I spent that weekend exploring every corner of the ‘duty-free,’ looking curiously at kitsch objects displayed as souvenirs, trying sweets from the Arab world, smelling exotic fragrances without interest in those of Western origin” (Reinoso Barzallo 2014, 130).11 Beyond the shops promoting various local products, other less obvious signs, albeit directly connected to the cultural and religious identity of the place, emerge in the airport, echoing the city and the host nation. The main character’s “purgatory zone” is defined and disrupted by the local Muslim time schedule that interrupts the regular operation of basic services and further delays immigration procedures, as well as the eventual exit from the jaula (cage) of the terminal: It was in this way that I found myself on a Thursday afternoon in November at the Dubai International Airport. The month of Ramadan was coming to close in just a few hours, so all the food court shops were closed, because here the culture demands that non-Muslims morally support practitioners of Islam who fast throughout the day until breaking this fast with “Iftar” at the end of the day. […] When the weekend was over, I had to stay two more days at the airport. To the yet unresolved technology breakdown was added the fact that the work days of the public offices were reduced to three or four to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, a festival celebrating the sacrifice of fasting during Ramadan. (Reinoso Barzallo 2014, 129 and 132)12 11 My translation. In the original: “Ese fin de semana me dediqué a explorar cada rincón del ‘duty free,’ viendo con curiosidad los objetos kitsch desplegados cual souvenir, probando golosinas del mundo árabe, oliendo los perfumes de esencias exóticas sin interesarme en los de origen occidental” (Reinoso Barzallo 2014, 130). 12 My translation. In the original: “Fue así que un jueves por la tarde de un mes de noviembre, me encontraba en el aeropuerto Internacional de Dubai. El mes del Ramadán estaba por concluir en unas cuantas horas más, por lo que todos los locales del patio de comida se encontraban cerrados, debido a que allí la cultura exige que los no musulmanes apoyen moralmente a los practicantes del Islam que ayunan durante todo el día hasta que

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As Reinoso Barzallo’s protagonist notices, the international terminal absorbs symbolic features of the local city or country.13 In line with this semiotic adhesion to the surrounding region, many airports display a connection, often stereotypical, to their geographic location. This alignment with the contiguous territory is sometimes implicit through the adoption of the calendar and sociocultural behaviors of the place. In other cases, it involves the showcasing of images or items promoting monuments, important figures, and local brands and products. Indeed, the airport frequently entails references to notable people, such as John F. Kennedy or Charles de Gaulle, or to the nearby city, such as Frankfurt or Atlanta, and these references establish a connection to the city and the local cultural identity.14 As infrastructure directly linked to the communication and commercial aspects of the world of tourism, the airport terminal becomes a sponsor of the city or country it serves. This mimetic relationship to the local place changes the décor of the airport into “less gateways to some exotic destination miles away than embarkation points for the local area” (Gottdiener 2001, 13).15 It is thus not surprising that Argentinean writer Andrés Neuman recounts being offered “tequila in little plastic cups” (2016, 143) when passing through the duty-free shopping area of the Mexico City-Airport, a gesture he feels is a nod to passengers who have just landed and are disoriented, letting them know that they are now in the land of tequila. Neuman also notes this blending of the local and the global when he arrives in Santo Domingo, where inscriptions on the walls of the airport take the passenger back to the time of Columbus’s arrival on the island:

rompen ese ayuno con el ‘Iftar’ al final del día. […] Cuando acabó el fin de semana, tuve que quedarme dos días más en el aeropuerto. Al fallo de la tecnología aún no resuelto, se sumó el hecho de que las jornadas de trabajo en las oficinas públicas se reducían a tres o cuatro, pues se celebraba el ‘Eid-al-Fitr,’ festividad que solemniza el sacrificio del ayuno llevado a cabo durante el Ramadán” (Reinoso Barzallo 2014, 129 and 132). 13 Barzallo’s character depicts the Dubai International Airport in a fictional way, rather than describing faithfully the actual setting of the terminal lounges during Ramadan. 14 On issues and practices relative to the naming of airports, whether in reference to a city, as a tribute to a particularly representative person, or in terms of the magnitude of destinations served by the airport in question (international, national, etc.), see Halpern and Graham (2013). 15 In a stimulating essay, Gottdiener (2001) mentions the extreme case of the McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, whose décor, saturated with slot machines, sees “the expected behavior of the locale—legalized gambling” (13).

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“I’m surprised, when I land, to see quotes from Columbus’s diaries reproduced on the walls. Columbus called this island Hispaniola. In the airport they seem to celebrate that. I take out my Spanish passport with some relief” (198). Through a process of inclusion from afar, the territory or the city to which the airport is geographically connected is displayed to passengers on the walls, panels, or screens that abound in waiting areas and that decorate nondescript and bare boarding passageways. Fragments of the surrounding place are thus virtually incorporated into the terminal. The city is no longer treated as a travel destination, but as a diffraction of the real, an optical illusion that replays other inputs and other distractions meant to alleviate the waiting. This alignment of the usual “neutrality” (Roseau 2012c, 98) of the airport with local connotations similarly applies to the more exclusive spaces of the terminal such as lounges, to which access is reserved for a specific type of passenger traveling in business or first class. These luxurious and selective spaces provide a sheltered atmosphere behind closed doors, aestheticized and protected from the typical disturbances of a mass transit place, while exhibiting clear signs that “connect cognitively with the place and the destination” to which the airport is physically anchored (Wattanacharoensil et al. 2016, 324). Despite their sleek design and “very office-like feel” (Grey 2018) exalting a digital and futuristic environment, these lounges—showcases of airline companies in large international hubs—align with the city or host country and turn them into actual destinations for passengers departing or on layover. Lounges provide alternative stopover areas relative to the urban amenities and welcome architectural forms, art objects, background music, color tones, and menus that create an illusion of the city.16 This virtual inclusion of the territory in the semiotics of the terminal produces a tourism experience, which in turn complicates the problematic articulation between Airworld infrastructures and the contemporary city, whose 16 An example can be seen in the Turkish Airlines advertising film “A Destination on Its Own: Lounge Istanbul” (2016), which from its very title highlights the inclusion of the Turkish capital in the airline’s lounge at the Istanbul Airport. The film uses video images of key sites and attractions of the city projected on large flat screens, as well as other sensorial elements such as references to local gastronomic specialties prepared on site by native chefs. The phrase that ends the commercial—“We have gathered a magnificent city together; and spread it to a marvelous lounge”—reflects the aim of extending the space of the city to the terminal, by recreating the natural beauty and unique atmosphere of Istanbul in the isolated and artificial sphere of the lounge.

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presence is made possible and explicit through absence. Many airport companies are tasked with the challenge of giving the terminal a unique identity through the introduction of “multisensory elements” that are meant to “project a sense of the place” (Wattanacharoensil et al. 2016, 321, 323).

4

Crossing(s) from the Micro-world to the Meta-world

Once the passengers leave the terminal and make their way to the city, they are revealed to be blind to the surroundings of the airport. The transition can be abrupt when the adjacent suburban landscape is exposed without the filter of the aseptic antechamber of the terminal. In some places, the exit from the terminal exposes the travelers to inhospitable suburbs and shantytowns that have sprung up in intensive conurbations. After contemplating the uniform and clean scenery of the sky from the plane, passengers often endure the squalor of the slums that they see through the taxi window prior to arriving in the city center. These marginalized and dehumanized territories interpose an additional buffer between the airports and the city, increasing the distance between these two edges of the trip. Puerto Rican author Luis Rafael Sánchez’s “La guagua aérea,” which narrates a passenger’s journey into the historical district of Caracas, conveys this discordant perception between the airport and the peripheral landscape around the city: The route from Maiquetía Airport to the old city center of Caracas […] is now a tapestry of the propaganda of political parties […]. It also reveals the other face of this country of black gold and legendary wealth, the grimy side of Saudi Venezuela: poor houses, poorer houses, series of apartment complexes whose balconies are filled with children’s toys and hung clothes, sometimes interspersed by stalls selling fruit or corn liquor, houses falling down, houses sagging, fallen houses, houses in the rubble. As one approaches the city, after the taxi has left the immense tunnels that bore through the belly of the mountain, when the capital shows its profile, when space and lines proclaim an intense marriage of function and creativity, faces and bodies appear. (Sánchez 1994, 71–72)17

17 My translation. In the original: “La ruta que va desde el Aeropuerto de Maiquetía hasta el centro viejo de Caracas […] la contagia estos días la propaganda que efectúan los

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As the traveler is plunged from the macro-level of the airport into the micro-level of the periphery, their gaze drops from the heights of the sky to a flat view of the earth. This ground-level perspective evokes a burst of snapshots that disclose the degrading and stagnant aspects of the local urban context. Corruption, precarious dwellings, abandoned toys, clothes hung out to dry, illicit commerce, abandoned ruins: the dregs of suburban areas pile up and clutter the minds of passengers while welcoming them to the doors of the city. Sánchez’s portrait of the Caracas suburbs captured from the taxi underscores the significance of this intermediate journey between the terminal and the city in terms of the traveler’s adjustment to the time-space of the ground. This drive is a sine qua non condition of displacement to and from the terminal. Without this linking journey, the airport would remain out of reach due to its often difficult extra-muros location, just as the intra-muros city would remain an unreachable destination for recently arrived passengers. This trip should thus be understood as a gateway that connects the city to an undefined elsewhere, in the sense of all potential destinations served by the airport, and that reintroduces individuals to the surface of the earth, returning them to the inhabited space of the city. Due to the transition and connection function of this interstitial trip, which in the case of departure excludes and in the case of arrival (re)includes the character within the urban territory, this segment is emphasized and reiterated in contemporary fiction without ever being exhausted. The itinerary to or from the airport can take on different dimensions for the traveler or the narrator. It is sometimes recounted in detail and sometimes described succinctly. It might be perceived as a banal step in the travel ritual or might be dwelt upon for its diegetic function as a transitory but necessary moment for the continuation of the trip. The taxi phase clearly highlights an awareness of non-belonging, of nonattachment, and of the related status of everywhere and nowhere that defines

partidos políticos […]. La ruta, en su comienzo, revela también, la otra cara del país del oro negro y la riqueza legendaria, la cara sin lavar de la Venezuela saudita: casas pobres, casas más pobres, multifamiliares seriados en cuyos balcones hay juegos de niños y ropa tendida, uno que otro espaciado tenderete de frutas o venta de chicha, casas cayéndose, casas cayéndose, casas caídas, casas entre los escombros. Después cuando la ciudad se hace inminente, cuando el taxi ha salido de los túneles inmensos que taladran el vientre de la montaña, cuando se perfila la urbe, cuando el espacio y las líneas pregonan un maridaje intenso de función y creatividad, aparecen los rostros y los cuerpos” (Sánchez 1994, 71–72).

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global individuals in their daily mobility. The taxi ride to or from the airport thus comes to represent a protocol forming part of general airport predeparture or postlanding procedures. Many novels, short stories, films, and advertisements evoke this new paradigm of travel and contemporary air passengers. These works fittingly use arrival at, or the trip to the airport, as a turning point in the story, and often start with a scene of arrival or departure from the airport by taxi.18 Sofia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation (2003) is a particularly striking example of this transition between air travel and entry into the city, and the return to the airport at the end of the film. The film somewhat elliptically starts with the arrival of the protagonist, Bob Harris (Bill Murray), but omits the scene of landing itself, instead showing a black screen accompanied by the conventional background roaring noise of a plane, followed by an anonymous female voice welcoming passengers to Tokyo in Japanese and English. After this brief sequence depicting Bob’s arrival, the first real shot of the film is a taxi scene in which he is first shown asleep, with his head leaning against the window. After a few moments, he awakens and is quickly enthralled by the colorful animated advertising signs that populate the skyscrapers of the city, standing out in the urban night landscape. This simultaneously mobile and passive discovery of Tokyo, enhanced by soft and evocative background music, ends once the taxi reaches the hotel entrance door. The arrival signals the crossing of a new threshold for the traveler, signifying his gradual inclusion into the local community, shedding the anonymity of his status while being acknowledged and welcomed by his hosts. The film’s finale is also symptomatic of this treatment of the trip as a moment of inclusion in and exclusion of the voyager from the city and life on the ground. Bob leaves the hotel without really saying good-bye to Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), and is seen riding in a taxi that, presumably, will take him to the airport. Sitting in the back seat of the taxi, thoughtful and melancholic, he excludes himself from Tokyo by departing from the hotel, and then rejoins the city, if only momentarily, in a last 18 Examples include films such as Amour et Turbulences (Love Is in the Air, 2013), Bounce (2000), Décalage horaire (Jet Lag, 2002) and Up in the Air (2009), as well as commercials such as Lufthansa’s “New York” (1998), Pepsi Max’s “Ride to the Airport” (2010), and United Airlines’ “Taxi Driver” (2013).

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embrace with Charlotte, after having caught a glimpse of her through the crowds. The return trip truly begins with this final gesture, as he gets back into his taxi toward the airport and to the United States. The visual perspective used in this closing scene is similar to the one featured in the opening sequence. As the taxi moves away from the hotel, the camera loses sight of the streets and passersby. It focuses on the skyscrapers and towers of Tokyo in an increasingly anonymous and distant manner, as the highway signs display the various directions for exit from the capital. Lyrics from the Jesus and Mary Chain’s song “Just Like Honey” (1985) accompany this melancholic moment of exclusion from the city and reconcile the character with the return to his usual space of life, in which he intends to be newly included by means of the flight. Just as at the beginning, neither the departure nor the flight is explicitly portrayed, as they are evident and obvious. The taxi ride, which at the outset served as a slow mediation for the traveler relative to the disorientation he felt after landing at night in an unknown metropolis, is imbued with nostalgia toward the place from which he departs, and which has by then become familiar. The late afternoon light chosen for this last taxi scene emphasizes the languid perception of the urban landscape, echoing the character’s intimate thoughts. His role is now only that of a silent spectator of this exit from the city, which serves as an implicit prelude to the airport and beyond. The taxi ride suffices to recount the end of the trip and tacitly sets into motion the return journey without any need to refer explicitly either to the airport or the passenger himself. Another eloquent example of an emphasis on the trip from the Japanese airport of Narita to the downtown districts of Tokyo can be found at the beginning of Peruvian author Santiago Roncagliolo’s novel Tan cerca de la vida (2010). The peripheral location of the airport makes the taxi trip a paradigmatic element of transit toward the capital and a portrayal of the first real interaction, sometimes unsettling, with the local context. In a sense, the taxi ride represents a second landing. After the plane’s first contact with the ground, the taxi sets the traveler down in the metropolis, exposing him to urban hazards and inconveniences along with a sensation of disorientation and confusion. In this case, such feelings clearly surface when the passenger is confronted with an insurmountable linguistic barrier. The protagonist finds himself grappling with a Japanese driver who ignores his attempts to communicate and whose ideograms he can barely decipher:

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The airport was far from the city. The taxi passed through an endless industrial area. […] On the dashboard, the GPS screen blinked with city maps and Japanese characters. […] Thick safety glass separated the driver from the backseat. […] Only when they left the highway and entered the traffic of the city did the driver say something. Almost nothing. No more than one or two quick monosyllables, Max couldn’t understand his words. (Roncagliolo 2010, 10–11)19

The contemporary passenger is conventionally represented as an isolated, anonymous individual who usually goes to and returns from the airport alone.20 The large number of professionals who fly regularly have made the airplane a daily form of transportation and have dampened the emotional charge that once marked scenes of departure or arrival. Even long journeys have ceased in the current imaginary to signal a dramatic separation of the individual from the place and community of departure. One arrives at the airport and leaves again aboard an equally anonymous taxi, paying an unknown driver. In the contemporary context of aerial hypermobility, the taxi ride has become an evident pattern in airport scenes in literature, film, and advertising. Describing or filming a character sitting in a taxi in New York, Paris, or Tokyo21 is now an important part of the travel ritual, as much as carrying a suitcase or waiting in the terminal. The succinct manner in which certain segments of the taxi trip are recounted demonstrates its utilitarian function and its commonality, as well as the fleetingness and urgency that characterize this part of the journey: “So he quickly dresses and runs off to catch a taxi. He appears at

19 My translation. In the original: “El aeropuerto quedaba lejos de la ciudad. El taxi atravesó una zona industrial interminable. […] En el tablero de mandos, la pantalla del GPS parpadeaba con mapas de la ciudad y caracteres japoneses. […] Un grueso cristal de seguridad separaba al conductor de los asientos traseros. […] Sólo cuando abandonaron la autovía y entraron en el tráfico de la ciudad, el conductor dijo algo. Casi nada. No más de uno o dos rápidos monosílabos, Max no llegó a entender sus palabras” (Roncagliolo 2010, 10–11). 20 To understand the change of habits that contemporary hypermobility has introduced in air travel, see the airport arrival and departure scenes photographed by Winogrand (2004) in the late 1950s and in the early 1980s. 21 These three airports are mentioned as they often appear in the works studied here. Other frequently cited airports include London Heathrow, Dubai, Singapore, and to a lesser extent, Beijing.

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the airport buying a round trip ticket to Chicago for that same evening” (Galarza 2005, 105).22 The taxi ride to the airport thus becomes the antechamber to air travel. It anticipates anonymity and functionality even as it gradually excludes passengers from the local “micro-world” and then introduces them into the “meta-world” that awaits them as soon as they pass through the departure gate. As a passageway toward a prospective destination, this trip also emblematizes certain patterns of the contemporary globalized world, such as acceleration, multiculturalism, anonymity, and the end of exoticism. For example, the taxi driver, who replaces friends and family, is often represented as an immigrant, a member of a reconstructed diaspora in the host country. As such, the driver becomes a bearer of both cultural diversity and social inequality. Sometimes the passenger’s interaction with the driver may have an ambivalent function in the perception of the territory of arrival, divided between fascination with the exotic and realization of a certain similarity between cities across the world. Conversation with the driver is often the first verbal exchange for the lone passenger outside the airport enclosure, as in the following passage from Colombian author Santiago Gamboa’s novel Los impostores (2002), which describes the arrival at the Beijing Airport of one of the protagonists: “The first person I will speak to will be the taxi driver who will take me to the hotel. And now that I think about it: who will it be? What might he be doing at this moment? […] He will be more important to me that I will be to him.” (98)23 The frequency of air travel in the era of globalization exposes the individual to anonymous and ephemeral encounters similar to those that Gamboa’s character describes. Even before the city itself, the trip between the terminal and the urban areas, occurring thanks to the intervention of a local driver, plays a determining role in the perception of the place and the construction of contemporary narratives. Taxi chauffeurs thus become initiating guides and intermediaries between the passenger and

22 My translation. In the original: “Entonces se viste a la volada y sale corriendo a tomar un taxi. Aparece en el aeropuerto comprando un pasaje de ida y vuelta a Chicago para esa misma noche” (Galarza 2005, 105). 23 My translation. In the original: “Mi primer interlocutor será el taxista que habrá de llevarme al hotel. Y ahora que lo pienso: ¿quién será? ¿qué estará haciendo en este momento? […] Él será más importante para mí de lo que yo seré para él” (Gamboa 2002, 98).

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the place. Language permitting, they may even be a confidant with whom the traveler shares, not without disinhibition, the story of their journey or life, converting them into a sort of temporary trip companion. Perhaps because they are anchored to the ground, in contrast to other air travel personnel such as airport staff, operators, pilots, and flight attendants, taxi drivers are endowed with speech and local knowledge and thus contribute to shifting the voyager from the time-space of the “non-place” (Augé 1995) to that of the place. In his compilation of travel chronicles across different air spaces and cities of Latin America, Argentinean author Andrés Neuman describes as “almost spouse-like” his “routine with drivers who take [him] to the airport” (2016, 100). Neuman is initially distrustful and prefers trivial topics such as the weather, but gradually engages in more personal conversations as he shares his impressions of the barely visited city that he leaves behind as he approaches the airport. Once the conversation turns to Neuman’s work as a writer, he feels reluctant to proceed and prefers to change the subject to local politics. The complicity that is established between the driver and the traveler who has just landed or is about to depart, in addition to being “almost spouse-like,” is transitory, generally lasting only for the limited duration of the trip. In this respect, the interaction enabled by the taxi ride to or from the airport reinforces the “inclusion–exclusion” division that the trip produces. The contrast between the driver’s sedentary lifestyle and the traveler’s mobility unfolds in the small space of the taxi, which joins two ways of life that cannot be assimilated into a strongly condensed time-space. Conversely, the absence of a taxi or public transportation in the displacement between the airport and the city may be perceived as a reflection of anomalous circumstances. Moroccan writer Fouad Laroui’s novel Les Tribulations du dernier Sijilmassi (2014) illustrates this reversal in the prevailing paradigm of the taxi ride. During a return flight to his home city of Casablanca “at an altitude of thirty thousand feet,”(9)24 Moroccan engineer Adam Sijilmassi abruptly decides to put an end to his frequent intercontinental airplane journeys required by his profession. Standing in front of the terminal hall, he decides not to take the usual taxi ride and engages instead in a picaresque return to Casablanca by means that are considered inadequate in the context of an airport environment:

24 My translation. In the original: “à trente mille pieds d’altitude” (Laroui 2014, 9).

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A pack of taxi drivers swooped down on him, one claiming his suitcase as if it belonged to him, another promising the most comfortable car, a third tugging him by the sleeve. He extricated himself as well as he could, repeating that he had a car and it was waiting for him in the parking lot. Why tell this lie? It seemed to him that it was just what had to be said as it was more believable than the decision he had just made: he would walk to Casablanca. (14–15)25

Adam’s out-of-the-ordinary decision to walk from the airport to the city is noticed, questioned, and pointed at by drivers who are surprised to see an individual, in a suit and a tie, surely just off a plane, walking along the highway and nonchalantly pulling his suitcase behind him. Wondering whether he might be in need of help, some drivers offer the engineer a ride; others honk, make “cabalistic signs,” (25)26 or shout out at him. Adam, however, remains indifferent and scarcely reacts to their surprise and insistence, reaffirming his deliberate intention to continue on foot, as far-fetched as it may seem: “I am going to Casablanca. But I want to walk. Thanks for the offer. Have a good trip.” “Walk?” […] The driver’s head popped out of the window. He was circumspect, almost worried. “You are an emigrant, huh? You live in Europe? Man. […] We do not walk to Casa. It is impossible. It does not happen. If you want to walk to Casa, the best thing to do would be to go back in time, after all, time is relative, right? And go back a century […].” Adam started walking again. His suitcase was now making an infernal noise. It was not made for Moroccan asphalt but rather calibrated for airports. It creaked and moaned, but he grew accustomed to its protests. (19–20)27

25 My translation. In the original: “Une meute de chauffeurs de taxi fondit sur lui, l’un revendiquant la valise comme si elle lui appartenait, l’autre lui promettant la voiture la plus confortable, le troisième se contenant de l’agripper par la manche. Il se dégagea du mieux qu’il put, répétant qu’il possédait une voiture et qu’elle l’attendait au parking. Pourquoi ce mensonge? Il lui sembla que c’était ce qu’il fallait dire parce que c’était plus vraisemblable que la décision qu’il venait de prendre: il allait marcher jusqu’à Casablanca” (Laroui 2014, 14–15). 26 My translation. In the original: “signes cabalistiques” (Laroui 2014, 25). 27 My translation. In the original: “‘Je vais à Casablanca. Mais j’ai envie de marcher.

Merci pour l’offre. Bon voyage.’ ‘Marcher?’ […] La tête du conducteur émergea de la vitre. Il avait l’air circonspect, presque inquiet. ‘Tu es un émigré, hein? Tu habites en

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Adam’s deliberate refusal of the taxi as a gateway between the airport and downtown Casablanca outlandishly and ironically reveals the extent to which this means of transport is associated with the common imaginary of the airport and the city-airport connection. This is especially true in the case of a young dynamic professional, a “high-flyer” (210) belonging to that category of “executive” passengers. It is, moreover, this basic perception of the taxi as an extension of air travel and the Airworld that causes a commotion among drivers in response to Adam Sijilmassi’s choice to amble down the road toward Casablanca with his suitcase. In renouncing the taxi, he breaks one of many protocols that define circulation within and around the airport, and thus merits denigration for his exceptional preference. In refusing to acknowledge the use of a taxi or public transportation as the sole means of reaching the city, Adam is called “crazy” (20) or “strange” (25), and even treated as an “assassin” (29)28 who would not dare to take a taxi from the airport for the fear of being caught. As the taxi forms an integral part of the landscape around the airport, its abandonment can only be understood as a punishable disruption, an act that goes against the norm. Adam finally capitulates to the social pressure: he stops a cart, driven by a farmer along the side of the road, and rides to Casablanca until suspicious police officers force him to continue the journey to the city aboard their jeep. The visual representation that Laroui provides is quite eloquent: Traveling so to speak backwards, he could see in the distance cars returning from the airport; they approached at full speed, honking as a matter of form before overtaking the horse and cart—and then he saw all the shades of astonishment coloring the faces of the driver and passengers, once they were upon him. (31)29

Europe? Pauv’gars. […] On ne va pas à pied à Casa. C’est impossible. Ça n’existe pas. Si tu veux aller à pied à Casa, le mieux, c’est de remonter le temps, après tout, le temps est relatif, non? … et de revenir un siècle en arrière […].’ Adam se remit en marche. Sa valise faisait maintenant un bruit infernal: elle n’était pas faite pour l’asphalte marocain, on l’avait calibrée pour le feutre des aéroports, elle grinçait et gémissait, mais il s’habitua à ses protestations” (Laroui 2014, 19–20). 28 My translation. In the original: “fou” (Laroui 2014, 20), “bizarre” (25), “assassin” (29). 29 My translation. In the original: “Voyageant en quelque sorte à l’envers, il pouvait voir apparaître au loin les voitures qui revenaient de l’aéroport; elles approchaient à toute allure, klaxonnaient pour la forme avant de dépasser l’attelage—et alors il voyait toutes les

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Sijilmassi’s denial of the taxi ought to be understood as a gesture that follows a more general refusal of the nomadic lifestyle of frequent air travelers. During his return trip from China to Morocco, the engineer has an illuminating epiphany (40–42) in which he realizes his deep dissatisfaction with the nomadic “stork” life that uproots him and leads him to the “sky and the clouds” (210). He then decides to “never again take an airplane” (13), engaging in related acts of resistance.30 He invalidates otherwise vital spaces, such as taxis and airport hotels, and eradicates the Airworld from his new life. This distancing from the world of planes and airports marks his self-exclusion from the Airworld and makes his (re)inclusion on the ground and in urban space possible again. Like Ryan M. Bingham’s ultimate resolution in Kirn’s Up in the Air, Sijilmassi’s awareness of the cleavage between these two separated worlds removes him from the supersonic speed of aircraft, and slowly brings him to the ground, although not without some disorientation and difficulty in (re)landing. Similarly, in French director Pascale Ferran’s film Bird People (2014), exclusion from daily air travel, and hence the world of airports, airplanes, and airport hotels, is for some the necessary condition for reintegration into real life on earth. Like Adam Sijilmassi, Ferran’s male protagonist Gary Newton (Josh Charles), an American businessperson in transit to Paris for less than forty-eight hours, decides to put an end to his migratory life and anchor himself to the ground instead. This decision is even more radical because it is made during a stopover in an anonymous room at the Hilton hotel located at the Charles de Gaulle Airport, overlooking crowded airport runways. At the same time, the main female character, Audrey (Anaïs Demoustier), a young Parisian student working as a housekeeper in the same hotel, also represents the problematic spatial and temporal relations of the airport to the city. Here, the inclusion–exclusion relationship between the city and airport is transposed to the individual spheres of the characters and their narratives. In different ways, Gary and Audrey constantly repeat this city-airport “in-between”: Gary travels from his hotel to Paris by taxi to attend work meetings, while Audrey makes multiple trips each week back and forth between her Parisian apartment and the Hilton Charles de Gaulle Airport Hotel. nuances de l’étonnement se peindre sur le visage du conducteur et des passagers, quand il y en avait” (Laroui 2014, 31). 30 My translation. Original text: “le ciel et les nuages” (Laroui 2014, 210); “que jamais plus il ne prendrait l’avion” (13).

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From the outset, Audrey highlights differences in attitudes and thoughts between the commuters who shuttle daily on public transportation between the historical center and the suburbs north of Paris— including the Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Roissy—and travelers who make this trip on the RER train with the sole purpose of catching a plane. The camera scrutinizes the faces and inner dialogues of the RER users bound for the Roissy terminals. These people include businesspersons and professionals in transit, tourists and airport employees, airline crewmembers, and ordinary individuals immersed in the flow of their own thoughts. This population is different from the more homogeneous group that Gary sees aboard the private shuttle that takes him from the terminal exit to his hotel room, all within the enclosure of the airport. In focusing on the transition by train, Ferran emphasizes the two extremes of the city-airport junction: at departure, the Gare du Nord station; and at arrival, the fluid space of the international airport. This “central hub” (Thierstein and Conventz 2012, 21)31 consists of the airport itself, the nearby hotel infrastructures, and the web of offices, parking lots, dwellings, and roads. It allows interconnections between Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport, the city, and the whole of France via a network of shuttles, taxis, buses, and trains. The concentration of ancillary infrastructures portrayed in the film gives the impression of a distinct space relative to Paris, with different narratives, saturated with references to air mobility. The distinction established between those for whom the airport represents a place of work and those who only travel this path as a one-way trip toward a remote final destination, can be understood according to the “inclusion–exclusion” spatial paradigm. Air travelers leave Paris behind, excluding themselves from the city, so as to be included in Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, and vice versa. For the RER travelers who will depart from the Parisian airport, this exclusion is clearly definitive; for those who inhabit the airport (Urlberger 2012) as a “professional space” (Thierstein and Conventz 2012, 28) the “geographic and relational” (24) exclusion from the city is rather temporary.32

31 My translation. 32 My translation.

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5 The Telephone as a Cable Between the City and the Airworld In addition to taxi rides and public transportation services, mobile phones have significantly increased interconnections between the airport and the city. This essential device in our globalized society extends the space of the city to the moving platform of the taxi, the airport, and the airplane cabin. Telephone calls play a crucial role in parallel narratives that happen simultaneously inside and outside the Airworld. The mobile telephone, whether used for conversations or text messages, erases the physical distance between the terminal and the city. It diminishes the exclusivity of the Airworld and allows passengers to be virtually reconnected to the contingencies of life in the city and on the ground. A striking example of such satellite communication linking the Airworld to the ground appears in Pedro Almodóvar’s film Los amantes pasajeros (I’m So Excited!, 2013). The movie takes place entirely within the Airworld, depicting the vicissitudes of a group of passengers traveling first class aboard a plane headed to Mexico City. After they hear the captain announce a mechanical failure that prevents the aircraft from reaching its original destination and endangers the lives of the crew and passengers in a possible emergency landing, each passenger rushes in turn to the cabin phone to communicate with people on the ground. Almodóvar’s camera explicitly shows a sky-earth alternation put into place through these satellite calls, with simultaneous views of shots sometimes filmed in the airplane cabin and sometimes on the ground. The synchronization of these two antithetical spaces is especially apparent in the story of passenger Ricardo Galán (Willy Toledo) who, using the telephone on the airplane, unknowingly prevents the suicide of his girlfriend in Madrid. His call from the airplane cabin phone reaches Alba’s (Paz Vega) mobile phone just as she is about to throw herself from a viaduct. In a series of coincidences typical of Almodóvar’s works, the panicked Alba drops her mobile device as she climbs back to safety. The cell phone accidentally falls into the bike basket of Ricardo’s former lover, who answers the call and finds herself surreally involved in a situation that hardly concerns her, which Ricardo orchestrates from the plane. During the flight, the other passengers, frightened by the impending death that could occur in an emergency landing, engage in equally bold conversations with loved ones on the ground as the airplane circles the Spanish airspace in a desperate search for an available landing ground.

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Alexandre Castagnetti’s Amour et turbulences (Love Is in the Air, 2013) presents a similar interdependence between actions in the sky and on earth. A parallel montage reveals a nexus between the main line of the story that unfolds in the airplane cabin and scenes occurring in the city. The film revolves around the accidental meeting of two Parisian former lovers, Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and Antoine (Nicolas Bedos), who find themselves seated next to one another in business class aboard a flight from New York to Paris. During the trip, Julie and Antoine use the airphone to contact Antoine’s friend Hugo and Julie’s mother. Driven by a pressing need to share this exceptional and unexpected reunion, they make the calls with the objective of receiving urgent instructions from the ground on how to handle this unforeseen circumstance. The passengers’ shared past is recounted in flashbacks that connect the flight in the present with their relationship in the past. A series of memories bring into the airplane the urban micro-world of art galleries, evening outings, and Parisian apartments that formed the contours of their previous love story. The use of cell phones and the latest generations of smartphones in the terminal and at cruising altitude magnifies the interactions between the sky and the ground, both in actual air travel and in works of fiction. Unlike the telephone booth, which was nailed to the ground, mobile devices accompany the passengers throughout their travel in the Airworld, facilitating fluid communication and a constant updating between the ground and the air. The mobile phone’s nomadic nature, contemporary design, and power of connection perfectly reflect the lifestyle of moving through different time-spaces. Numerous scenes in films and novels depict travelers compulsively using their cell phones and often hanging on to them until the very last instant before take-off: The first-class cabin fills with other businessmen who switch on their laptops […] or use the last few moments before takeoff to punch in cellphone calls to wives and clients. Their voices are bright but shallow, no diaphragms, their sentences kept short to save on tolls, and when they hang up they face the windows, sigh, and reset their watches from Central time to Mountain. (Kirn 2002, 1)

These last-minute phone calls involve matters that are often urgent for travelers or the people to whom they are speaking on the ground, and must be made in extremis. “I [am] put[ting] down the phone. I have a plane to catch,” exclaims the protagonist of Up in the Air,

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losing his patience during a never-ending and uninteresting conversation with his sister (39) that obstructs the fluidity of his rapid transit as a hyperflier. The reachability provided by the cell phone and particularly the smartphone within the confines of the Airworld contributes to an unprecedented conciliation between mobility and domesticity. Whether in the airport hotel, in the terminal, or on the airplane, passengers are able to track events on the ground. When they activate the much-desired “airplane mode” function, the appearance of the small airplane icon on the smartphone screen confirms the shift to an offline status and defines an immunological bubble for passengers that aspire to be unreachable from the ground, for at least the duration of the flight. Like the suitcase, the eye mask, the credit card, and the laptop, the cell phone is an object that embodies the material culture of globalization and is considered indispensable for the fluidity of the journey. Whenever characters misplace their mobile devices, a series of unpredictable twists and turns follow, the inconvenience of which is eased only by the momentary borrowing of another device from a fellow passenger. French director Danièle Thompson’s film Décalage horaire (Jet Lag, 2002) portrays the unique situation of an inexperienced traveler, Rose (Juliette Binoche), who, from her arrival at the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Parisian terminal, obsessively uses her phone to engage in banal last-minute conversations until the device falls clumsily into a toilet bowl. Rose is forced to ask for help from a fellow passenger, Félix (Jean Reno), in order to urgently reconnect with the city and provide her last instructions before departure. The important mediating function of the mobile phone in this film persists until the last scene, which marks the climax in terms of transatlantic communication—made possible by the use of this device—between the two passengers, located in France and Mexico. After borrowing Felix’s cell phone before take-off, Rose accidentally leaves it in her pocket, permitting their rapport to be reestablished. Felix uses a phone booth in a village in Burgundy, where he has just arrived, to call the airport in Acapulco and ask that a message containing the cell phone’s PIN be communicated to Rose upon her landing. Felix hopes that this will allow Rose to listen to the voicemail that he has left for her in the meantime. The phone that Rose unwittingly finds upon landing in Mexico plays the role of a matchmaker, becoming the depository of an avowal that will lead to the onset of a romantic relationship. On her way by taxi to Acapulco, where she is planning to settle, Felix’s voice on the telephone quickly convinces her to head back to the airport, where she catches the first

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flight back to Paris. Communication en route, made possible by the use of the cell phone, shifts the purpose of Rose’s journey to the point of reversing the outcome. The use of the mobile device not only connects travelers to the environment outside the Airworld, but also connects them within it and weaves ties between passengers, sometimes through the act of loaning, as in the case of Rose and Felix in Jet Lag, and sometimes through passive listening to fragments of conversations overheard in a boarding lounge. German director Angela Schanelec’s film Orly (2010) illustrates this mediating function of the mobile phone within the terminal, depicting it as a tool that ensures simultaneous and parallel communication inside the airport and beyond it. The characters’ cell phones ring repeatedly, filling the impersonal void of the airport. Whether lining up at the counter or staring at the departures board while walking through the corridors of Orly, Schnalec’s characters hold mobile phones in their hand at all times. This is particularly true in the first of the four stories that make up the film: the fortuitous meeting of two passengers, Juliette (Natacha Régnier) and Vincent (Bruno Todeschini), within the terminal. The phone calls that they alternately make or receive interrupt their progressively meaningful conversation. Juliette and Vincent are repeatedly pulled out of the protective bubble of the Airworld, and then remotely reconnected to the domestic and urban space that they have just left. This first story clearly portrays the tension between the intimate space of cell phone conversations and the public space of the terminal. In the midst of the hubbub that punctuates the wait of passengers in transit, a paradoxical situation of “intimacy without proximity” develops relative to the outside along with “proximity without intimacy” relative to other passengers (King 2014, 144). In addition to being a means of professional communication, “ubiquitous mobile phones” can be used, as in Orly, to convey and extend affective relationships within the air infrastructure. In Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham and Alex move from one terminal to another, from one airport hotel to another, through layers of calls and messages (Kirn 2002, 211) found in the voicemail boxes of their cell phones each time they land and turn their devices back on. However, these forms of intercession provided by the mobile phone are not always welcomed by passengers, some of whom are looking to use the time-space of the terminal and the flight as an opportunity to take a break from the outside world. Mobile devices weaken the transparent boundaries between the inside and outside of the

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air infrastructure, and are thus often regarded as intrusive and irritating burdens on travelers who are about to part with circumstances from which they were hoping to be temporarily relieved. It is thus not surprising that some characters in the airport space perceive these calls as though they are coming from Mars (Uhart 2003, 60), a metaphorical interpretation of the mental distance that voyagers experience when they communicate with the external world. In other stories, mobile phone communication is central to characters’ decisions to leave the airport space and return to life outside. For instance, in Yolanda Reinoso Barzallo’s short story “El aeropuerto más bello del mundo,” a long-awaited call ends many days of waiting in the transit zone of the Dubai Airport terminal. The passenger’s husband calls from the other side of the immigration office to let her know that her visa has been granted and that she can prepare to cross the border. Other works of fiction similarly use the mobile phone as the medium that brings a passenger’s time in the Airworld to an end. Calls made from the airport or its annexes may announce frequent passengers’ decisions to terminate their nomadic air travels. The telephone conversation thus marks the shift from a life devoted to constant journeys across different airports toward a more fulfilling and sedentary one. The protagonist of Bird People calls his sister from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport to inform her that he has decided to give up his professional life and settle in Paris, renouncing his everlasting air mobility. Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air ends with a similar, albeit more paradoxical, situation. Upon landing in his hometown, Ryan M. Bingham calls his landline from his mobile phone, as if to prove to himself that he really does have a home to return to, once he gives up his life as a frequent flyer: “You’re there,” the message says, then tapes my answer. “We’re here,” I say. Just that. No more. “We’re here.” (Kirn 2002, 303)

The choice to re-root oneself to the ground is reflected by symbolically abandoning the mobile phone and the opportunity to be connected to a landline, attesting to the physical presence of a permanent dwelling, and ruling out the ubiquity granted by the portability of the cell phone. Self-exclusion from the Airworld implies that the mobile phone becomes irrelevant and obsolete, and loses its pertinence in the new sedentary context. The ending scenes in Bird People and Up in the Air reverse

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the paradigm of the phone call, whose purpose is no longer to reduce the physical distance between the passenger and the outside world, but to anchor the characters to the ground. This confirms the ambiguous paradigm of inclusion and exclusion that defines the Airworld as a threshold that allows travelers to reintegrate into the city space by renouncing air travel.

References Articles and Essays Adey, Peter. 2014. Air: Nature and Culture. London: Reaktion Books. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe. London and New York: Verso. Bachelard, Gaston. 1988. Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell. Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications. Ballard, James Graham. 2004. The Ultimate Departure Lounge. In Terminal 5, ed. Rachel K. Ward, 253–255. New York: Lukas & Sternberg. Gottdiener, Mark. 2001. Life in the Air: Surviving the New Culture of Air Travel. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Grey, Eva. 2018. In Pictures: The World’s Best Airport Lounges. Airport Technology, March 28. https://www.airport-technology.com/features/picturesworlds-best-airport-lounges/. Accessed 25 June 2019. Güller, Mathis, and Marc Güller. 2003. From Airport to Airport City. Barcelona: Ed. G. Gilli. Halpern, Nigel, and Anne Graham. 2013. Airport Marketing. London: Routledge. Iyer, Pico. 2001. The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home. London: Vintage. King, Alasdair. 2014. Still Lives in Transit: Movement and Inertia in Angela Schanelec’s Orly (2010). Studies in European Cinema 11 (2): 139–150. Roseau, Nathalie. 2012a. Aerocity: quand l’avion fait la ville. Marseille: Parenthèses. Roseau, Nathalie. 2012b. Airports as Urban Narratives. Toward a Cultural History of the Global Infrastructures. Transfers 2 (1): 32–54. Roseau, Nathalie. 2012c. Habiter la grande échelle. In Habiter les aéroports: paradoxes d’une nouvelle urbanité, ed. Andrea Urlberger, 91–100. Geneva: M¯etisPresses. Thierstein, Alain, and Sven Conventz. 2012. Les aéroports comme plaques tournantes et Urban Generator. In Habiter les aéroports: paradoxes d’une nouvelle urbanité, ed. Andrea Urlberger, 21–30. Geneva: M¯etisPresses.

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Urlberger, Andrea. 2012. Introduction. In Habiter les aéroports: paradoxes d’une nouvelle urbanité, ed. Andrea Urlberger, 9–17. Genève: M¯etisPresses. Wattanacharoensil, Walanchalee, Markus Schuckert, and Anne Graham. 2016. An Airport Experience Framework from a Tourist Perspective. Transport Reviews 36 (3): 318–340. Winogrand, Garry. 2004. Arrivals & Departures: The Airport Pictures of Garry Winogrand. New York: D.A.P/Distributed Art Publishers Inc.

Films Almodóvar, Pedro. 2013. Los amantes pasajeros. Madrid: El Deseo. Castagnetti, Alexandre. 2013. Amour et turbulences. Paris: Révérence, Thelma Films, Manchester Films, and Universal Pictures International. Coppola, Sofia. 2003. Lost in Translation. San Francisco and Los Angeles: American Zoetrope and Elemental Films. Ferran, Pascale. 2014. Bird People. Paris: Archipel 35 and France 2 Cinéma. Fuguet, Alberto. 2008. 2 Horas. Santiago: Cinépata. Reitman, Jason. 2009. Up in the Air. Universal City and Culver City: DreamWorks Pictures, The Montecito Picture Company, and Cold Spring Pictures. Roos, Don. 2000. Bounce. Los Angeles: Miramax Films. Schanelec, Angela. 2010. Orly. Berlin and Paris: Ringel Filmproduktion, Nachtmittagfilm, La vie est belle Films Associés, Films Boutique, ZDF, and CinéCinéma. Thompson, Danièle. 2002. Décalage horaire. Paris: Alain Sarde.

Novels and Short Stories Galarza, Sergio. 2005. La soledad de los aviones. In La soledad de los aviones, 97–105. Lima: Estruendomudo. Gamboa, Santiago. 2002. Los impostores. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Kirn, Walter. 2002. Up in the Air. New York: Anchor Books. Laroui, Fouad. 2014. Les Tribulations du dernier Sijilmassi. Paris: Julliard. Neuman, Andrés. 2016. How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America, trans. Jeffrey Lawrence. Brooklyn: Restless Books. Padilla, Ignacio. 2017. Última escala en ninguna parte. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Reinoso Barzallo, Yolanda. 2014. El aeropuerto más bello del mundo. In Ecuador cuenta, ed. Julio Ortega, 129–134. Madrid: Del Centro Editores. Roncagliolo, Santiago. 2010. Tan cerca de la vida. Madrid: Alfaguara. Sánchez, Luis Rafael. 1994. La guagua aérea. San Juan, P. R.: Editorial Cultural. Uhart, Hebe. 2003. Del cielo a casa. In Del cielo a casa, 57–63. Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo.

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Villoro, Juan. 2007. Patrón de espera. In Los culpables, 23–29. Oaxaca de Juárez: Almadía.

Installations Saraceno, Tomás. 2012. On Space Time Foam. Milan: HangarBicocca. Saraceno, Tomás. 2013. In Orbit. Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen.

Commercials Gondry, Michel. 1999. Air France-Le Passage. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Srhp-iLG_G8. Accessed 25 June 2019. Lufthansa New York Commercial. 1998. Youtube video. Posted by minhtuan1995. April 25, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0E UPPOkkh4. Accessed 25 June 2019. Pepsi Max Commercial—Ride to the Airport. Youtube video. Posted by funwithads. June 27, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aY2vBAQBU. Accessed 25 June 2019. Turkish Airlines: A Destination On Its Own—Lounge Istanbul. Youtube video. Posted by Turkish Airlines. February 29, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=JsWDjLZS1Sg. Accessed 25 June 2019. United Airlines ‘Taxi Driver’ New Commercial 2013. Youtube video. Posted by Clayton. September 22, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKriuC 9HgmE. Accessed 25 June 2019.

CHAPTER 3

Time Out of Control

1 The Ever-Present and Unrelenting Burden of Time Paul Virilio’s observation that “‘time’ now counts more than ‘space’” (1997, 69) ideally describes the complex and problematic representation of time within the context of air travel. Even before setting foot in an airport, the air passengers are trapped in an infernal time machine that holds them hostage until they reach their destination. The list of temporal constraints experienced by the air traveler is far from short. The voyager ought to arrive sufficiently early to the airport, check in at least two hours prior to the flight, reach the boarding gate on time, endure the length of the flight, pass through customs control, and then wait in front of the baggage carousel. More than any other platform of terrestrial mobility, such as train stations or bus terminals (which are equally regulated by precise arrival and departure schedules), time stands out as the preeminent authority of the airport space. It exercises a constant pressure on the traveler and demands vigilance and respect, leaving no room for free time or negotiation. Despite its intangibility, time is visible and audible in the airport space via multiple technological devices, which replicate it and call for constant synchronization on the part of the passenger. Among these devices that measure and indicate time, the arrival and departure board occupies a prominent place in both the configuration and the imaginary of airports. © The Author(s) 2020 E. Durante, Air Travel Fiction and Film, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52651-1_3

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This unmistakable temporal landmark is the first interface with time that the air passenger encounters upon entering the airport: it displays time horizontally and reflects the immediacy and frenzy of contemporary air hypermobility. Like a giant movie screen, it has an informative function, displaying both the local hour and status of different flights as well as the variations that time undergoes in the context of air circulation. Past, present, and future are thus constantly refreshed in this metaphorical object of time. When an airplane takes off and its place on the board quickly gives way to the announcement of another flight, time is immediately updated. It leaves behind obsolete information, announces unpredictable events, and cyclically repeats the daily schedule of flights expected at departure or arrival. Like a navigation beacon, the arrival and departure board sends sound signals and displays flashing lights, sometimes red and sometimes green, which alert or reassure the travelers and position them relative to the imminent timelines that shape their passage through the Airworld. The board regulates the duration of the trip, updates fluctuations in air circulation, and compresses onto its smooth and dynamic surface the gears and operations of air traffic, which remain implicit behind its standardized and minimalist character. The board is a synthesis and icon of air travel within literary fiction and cinematography, indicating that the story takes place within an airport and that the progression of the narrative follows the temporal logic of aviation. This irreplaceable accessory for displaying flight information appears in many films, old and new, such as Escale à Orly (1955), Die endlose Nacht (1963), Playtime (1967) and Airport (1970). Scenes in these films depict travelers checking the status of their flight on the boards placed at each departure gate, sometimes manually updated by airport personnel.1 Since the 1980s, the airport arrival and departure board has become a protagonist of airport fiction, appearing in its modernized version with an automatic split-flap display revolving on the visual and auditory horizon of the terminal. The flight information display located at the entrance 1 This obsession with time as implicit in the function of air transport was also found in the first aerodromes, which were not equipped with the technological and highperformance means of modern airports. Blacklock (2005), for instance, shows the presence of various wall clocks hung in different areas of JFK Airport. In mentioning the presence of a “time kiosk” (16) erected at the center of London’s Corydon Aerodrome around 1928, Alastair Gordon (2004) recalls, in a rather comical tone, “at the one hand of the hall an attendant ran back and forth on a raised platform updating weather and arrival information on a giant map of Europe” (16).

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of the airport, like the main clock in a railway station plaza, provides a meeting point for passengers and their companions or visitors. As an object, it becomes a “quasi-object” (Latour 1993), an animated entity, which, through its alphanumeric characters speaks to travelers in an almost poetic fashion, directing them toward the destinations they long for: Their eyes searched for take-off information, which rattled over their heads in a whirring clack of plastic flaps, confirming their existence in this place. They were reassured by the certainty of the letters announcing an arrival. Hong Kong. Frankfurt. Tel Aviv. It starts with a word that vanishes in a swirl of flaps, only to reappear a position higher up. Red and green light signals guided him. Travelers seemed to believe in the metamorphosis of the displayed words more than in the stars. They would follow the flickering instructions of these cold, mechanic poetry boards. Tokyo. Kyoto. Athens. (Overath 2009, 14)2

The flight information display can arouse either disappointment or immediate excitement, depending on the alphanumeric data provided. It mesmerizes impatient or disoriented passengers seeking information, verification, or an estimation.3 The very beginning of the film The Terminal, one of the initial scenes in both Thompson’s Jet Lag and Roos’ Bounce, 2 My translation. In the original: “Ihre Blicke suchten die Startpläne, die in einem Lamellengefieder über ihren Köpfen rauschten und ihr Dasein hier bestätigten. Sie beruhigten sich mit der Buchstabensicherheit einer Ankunft. Hongkong. Frankfurt. Tel Aviv. Am Anfang war das Wort, das im Wirbel der Plättchen um sich schlagend verschwand. Und wieder auferstand, um eine Zeitposition verrückt. Rote oder grüne Lichtsignale gaben ihm Geleit. Reisende glaubten an die Metamorphosen dieser Namen mehr als an die Gestirne. Sie würden nach den flimmernden Anweisungen dieser kühlen Poesieautomaten fliegen. Tokio. Kyoto. Athen” (Overath 2009, 14). 3 The remarkable audio-visual interaction between the traveler and the board’s flap display makes the latter an inevitable feature in many art installations and works of fiction that include airport décor. In 2006, the Slovenian artist Jasmina Cibic screened a live video installation at the Brnik Local Airport, whose terminal flight information display showed a series of fictitious place names borrowed from A. Manguel and G. Guadalupi’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Similarly, the Belgian art collective Lab[au]’s sound and kinetic creation Signal to Noise (2012) consists of a circular display made up of “512 split-flap displays at eye height.” The visitor is placed at the center of this visual structure for an audio-visual experience of a “random flow of comprehensible words, significations and associations,” and thus becomes aware of the inside of the “calculation processes” that regulate the functioning of the flight schedule monitor, here akin to an “auto-poetic machine” capable of generating, like a dynamic dictionary, a cascade of brief words in English (Lab[au] 2012).

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the long airport segment in Twelve Monkeys (1995), and the last shot in the film Up in the Air provide different examples of the tacit dialogue established between the traveler and the flight schedule monitor. These sequences use different modalities of filmic inclusion to illustrate the narrative function attributed to this object, which is by definition linked to the representation of time. When the shot of the flight information display is short and fluid, as in The Terminal and Twelve Monkeys, it serves to place the action within the airport. When the departure board is at the core of the scene for several seconds, as in Jet Lag and Bounce, and its alphanumeric characters become decipherable to the spectator, it serves to introduce a temporary halt to the trip, which aptly begins with an extended shot of the split-flaps display listing a litany of delayed and canceled flights. In the din of the crowd and repeated sound of announcements, the extended view of the departure board can turn into true contemplation and trigger a moment of epiphany for the character, who is struck by the sheer quantity of flights that appear and promptly disappear from the board. Literary fiction also explicitly invokes the flight schedule monitor using capital letters, which imitate those of the departure board and include messages related to the time of the trip. Rana Dasgupta’s novel Tokyo Cancelled (2005), for example, reproduces the same graphic correspondence between the title of the book and the airport letters displayed on the flaps of the departure board.4 In addition to having an informational function relative to time, here the apparatus also has a diegetic function; its inclusion in the narration swings the trip (and the story) toward an initially unexpected development: “The place felt like an emergency ward. Captions on the departure board rustled frantically—TOKYO CANCELLED TOKYO CANCELLED TOKYO CANCELLED” (Dasgupta 2005, 3). As in Tokyo Cancelled, the departure board, as a mirror of aviation time, has the power to alter the behavior and movement of the air passenger in that it sometimes communicates an acceleration, and other

4 A similar overlap between the title of the film and the flight information display can be observed in the credits of the films The Terminal (2004) and Jet Lag. Spielberg’s movie trailer also resorts to the graphic aesthetic of the flight schedule monitor to succinctly describe the subject of the film, using brief sequences shown in the airport letters of the automatic flaps of the departure board alternated with short narrative segments.

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times a standstill in travel time. In the latter case, due to the temporary pause of time it announces, the flight schedule monitor loses its usual function of constantly measuring time. It shifts from an instrument tracking the immediacy of time to a device that alleviates wait time. In the area around the board, travelers passively stand amidst the flow without any anticipation. In these circumstances of the suspension of time, a face raised toward the monitor confirms and legitimizes the individual’s condition as passenger, while the spatial perimeter defined by the latter becomes a sort of vaulted shelter for the traveler in transit. German author Angelika Overath’s novel Flughafenfische describes, not without some surreal touches, ongoing situations within airports and airplanes. It aptly represents the departure board as an element under which the female protagonist stops, so as to feel part of the anonymous flow surrounding her: “As if caught, she went a few steps further, then stopped under one of the departure monitors. That seemed a plausible action, given that she was in the Flight Connection Center. She looked up at the board without any intention of reading it” (Overath 2009, 59).5 During delayed or canceled flights, the departure board induces the slowdown of passengers’ mobility. Under normal air traffic circumstances, this mechanism plays a propulsive role by accelerating movement. The arrival and departure board is a temporal and spatial landmark with a kinetic function that regulates movements by providing time alerts and dispatching travelers toward different areas of the airport through the notifications it displays. It extracts passengers from their state of “stillness, forcing people to move, to re-arrange themselves, or to hurry up” (Harley 2011, 39). Such a diegetic articulation occurs, for example, in Greg Baxter’s novel Munich Airport (2015), in which consultation of the flight information display ends an interminable waiting situation and advances the narrative toward its conclusion. In this story, the sudden update of the time of the flight headed to Atlanta triggers rapid movement on the part of the two protagonists, who pull themselves together and resynchronize relative to the time, having lost track of the latter after long hours of inertia: “We stop at a departures board and check for Atlanta. Our flight is scheduled, at last. There it is—Go to Gate. Trish 5 My translation. In the original: “Wie ertappt ging sie ein paar Schritte weiter und blieb, weil ihr das noch passend schien für eine plausible Außenwirkung auf dem Areal des Flight Connection Centre, wieder unter einer der Abflugtafeln stehen. Sie blickte hinauf, ohne etwas lesen zu wollen” (Overath 2009, 59).

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checks the time on her phone. I check the time as well. Considering all that lies ahead of us, we do not have a lot of time” (Baxter 2015, 174). This obsessive gesture of “checking time,” to use the terminology of aeronautical operations, reflects the dependence of the air passenger on time and expresses the uncertainty and incredulity that the announcement of a schedule can elicit in the context of the Airworld. This compulsive need to be constantly synchronized with the time is also found among frequent travelers who commute daily between different cities and who, like aviation personnel, learn the flight schedules of a given airport by heart. Despite the ease with which he travels, the protagonist of Up in the Air cannot refrain from the ordinary gesture of keeping track of the departure time on the monitor. Here the expertise of the traveler is not only expressed in a seasoned ability to move through the airport and airplane protocol procedures, but also in an accustomedness to multiple delays and a mastery of the many formulations used within the air infrastructure to provide estimates: “I check the departures monitor. Bad news. Our flight, 119, is twenty minutes delayed, and twenty minutes is almost always a lie. It means we’ll get back to you. It means buzz off” (Kirn 2002, 159–160). Due to its uncertainty and unpredictability, time ought to be monitored by multiple measurement devices such as watches or mobile phones. Within the terminal, this tracking of time is increasingly carried out via the interface of the small screens of smartphones, smartwatches, or tablets, in a sort of one-to-one communication such that passengers turn less and less instinctively to the large format and public display of the time. Smartphone applications connect the passenger to the airline company through the reservation number, and in turn enable real-time notifications of departure schedules. This individuation of portable electronic devices that allow users to monitor the time at any point during the trip aligns better with the condition of fluid movement between different counters, corridors, shuttles, and terminals. Nevertheless, as precise as these instruments of measurement and display of time available to the traveler are, schedule fluctuations remain de facto incalculable. As Ryan M. Bingham bitterly remarks—before the time of smartphones, but on the cutting edge of the technology of his time—these mechanisms are often bearers of dubitable data that fail and disappoint more often than they reassure:

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I turn on my HandStar and dial up Great West’s customer information site, according to which our flight is still on time. How do they keep their lies straight in this business? […] No wonder I’ve grown suspicious of them lately—they haven’t spoken the truth to me in years. How many times have I gazed up at blue skies and been told that my flight’s being held because of weather? (Kirn 2002, 169)

By definition elusive and relentless, time within the Airworld is characterized by a certain opacity that makes its perception even more unmanageable and unpredictable. Behind the precise flight schedules listed on the display boards of the terminal and repeated on each screen of the departure lounges and boarding gates, the passenger suspects that these temporal values formulated up to the minute relay only estimates. Ryan M. Bingham, who is very familiar with the inside workings of the Airworld, shows that he is well aware of such uncertainties and is mindful of the unspoken and the degree of approximation encrypted behind these “never-ending list of initials, digits, [and] codes” (Iyer 2001, 58). This reiterated mistrust of time makes the traveler ever more vigilant with regard to potential sudden change in the schedules and timing of airport procedures. The Dutch artist Maarten Baas’s installation Real Time|Schiphol clock (2016) stigmatizes the enslavement to time in the Airworld (Fig. 1). People become prisoners of the watch dial, excluded from the rest of the world, reduced to embodying a function of measurement of the passage of time. During his performance, before the start of each new minute, the artist must incessantly erase and then repaint the hands on the face of an erasable clock, advanced sixty seconds each time. The individual observer is unable to divert his attention, and is thus represented as a slave to time without the possibility of emancipation or even temporary escape from its grip. As the human body is obliged to be synchronized with time, it is deprived of its own rhythm. Each gesture and movement must comply with the unbending law of the punctuality of time. Maarten Baas’s installation represents the oppression that characterizes the tense relationship between the individual and time within the Airworld. The nightmare of the “last call,” of the “immediate boarding” or the “final boarding process” haunts the passenger from the moment he leaves for the airport. The inconveniences associated with arriving late to the airport are much more problematic for the air passenger than missing a train or a bus for the land traveler. Hence, even before being bound to the forced inertia of

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Fig. 1 Maarten Baas: Real Time|Schiphol clock (www.maartenbaas.com)

the terminal and the airplane cabin, the air voyager often ends up racing against the clock in order to arrive on time to the airport. As seen in many literary works and films, the hurried trip to the airport followed by the hasty entrance into the terminal correspond to moments marked by panic and suspense. Traveling characters seem choked by time, worried, even desperate, trembling until the moment when, finally, panting, they lean against the check-in counter or detect their gate number in the horizon. The paradigmatic condition of the air passenger pressured by the tightness of time brings together different typologies of travelers (women, men, families, frequent flyers, vacationers), sharing the fear of delays and of missing their flight. Through its recurrence and its sometimes comical, sometimes spectacular representation, the air passenger’s race against the clock has become the leitmotif of cinematic and literary narratives,

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including older productions in the history of aviation cinema.6 It suffices, for example, to recall the iconic mainstream films Home Alone (1990) and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (1992), in which an entire family rushes down the crowded corridors of JFK Airport on Christmas Eve, reaching the boarding gate at the last minute. Films also routinely feature reunifications that miraculously happen just before the doors close, moments before takeoff. Some less touching and more adventurous scenes show passengers displaying extraordinary prowess to rejoin their loved ones who are about to board or take off. From the perspective of the one who is not leaving, but is nevertheless temporarily entangled in the schedule constraints of the Airworld, time is experienced as an ominous and antagonistic entity. In Indian director Abbas Tyrewala’s film Jaane tu… Ya Jaane Na (2008), the end of a spectacular horse race toward the airport shows Jai (Imran Khan), who manages to reunite at the boarding gate threshold with his beloved Naditi (Genelia D’Souza), who is about to fly to JFK Airport. The protagonist’s uninhibited sprint turns into a two-and-a-half-minutelong police chase through passengers, suitcases, and terminal shops. A similar experience of the body put to the test by the stress of time is at the heart of the famous airport scene in Tom Shadyac’s film Liar Liar (1997). The sequence in this case shows the father (Jim Carrey), attempting to prevent the plane, aboard which are his son and former wife, from taking off. Having managed to slip inside a suitcase that takes him to the tarmac, he jumps aboard a motorized staircase, dodges passenger planes, and, in a breathtaking race in which he is exposed to incredible perils, is able to raise himself up to the level of the airplane passenger windows. Still not satisfied, he manages to attract the attention of the pilot and succeeds in preventing the plane from taking off, before falling, injured, onto a baggage truck in the middle of the runway. Such situations of unrestrained travelers challenging time, made particularly effective by suspense and by melodramatic tones, have also inspired the creators of advertisements to use similar in extremis scenes to promote different brands and products, even those not directly related to the commercial sphere of the airport. Netflix’s 2014 “Airport” advertisement is, for example, developed entirely around Steven’s (Gary Smith) cliché rush to and in the airport, motivated by the pressing need to find his 6 Think, for example, of classics such as Airport, the pioneering novel by Arthur Hailey (1968), adapted for the cinema by George Seaton (1970).

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fiancée before she disappears behind the boarding gate. Netflix parodies the romantic imaginary commonly associated with the surprising lastminute arrival of a lover at the airport, and exploits the suspense generated by Steven’s apparent rush toward his fiancée, to communicate the promotional message of its advertising campaign: “You Gotta Get It, To Get It.” In reality, the urgent question Steven needs to ask Elizabeth is not a wedding proposal, as they have just ended their relationship, but rather a request for the password of their joint Netflix account, which is none other than “ilovesteven.” This pattern of the last (and singular) passenger on the flight attempting to board the plane at any cost and regardless of his tardiness is also found at the beginning of the French film Love is in the Air (Castagnetti 2013). The main character’s race against time is paralleled by the peaceful arrival of another passenger, who does not generate the same amount of attention typically reserved for travelers performing a true gesta to catch their airplane in time. Before reconnecting the lives of these two characters through their chance meeting onboard, the beginning of the film portrays their antithetical behavior in terms of attitudes toward time in the world of air travel. The viewer first follows Julie as she wakes up well in advance of the departure time of her flight and, with the help of multiple Post-Its and checklists, carries out several domestic tasks in the apartment loaned to her in the city. Julie is not stressed by the clock as she calmly closes her suitcase, gets into a taxi reserved beforehand, and sets off for the JFK terminal. The male protagonist, Antoine, however, presents the opposite perspective to that of the organized traveler Julie. Antoine, who has just woken up after a night of partying, looks at his watch and discovers that he is extremely late for his flight. Still sleepy, he rushes to get ready, hastily packs his suitcase, and catches the first taxi he can find. Once at JFK Airport, he runs to the departure hall with his luggage, then down the corridors of the terminal, all the way to the boarding gate. Out of breath and inventing ridiculous excuses to justify his lateness, Antoine tries to negotiate with the steward to let him embark the plane. Thanks to the steward’s leniency, he manages to board at the very last minute, while all the other passengers have been seated and the airplane is almost ready for take-off. Like Antoine, also late and breathless, the main character in Fresán’s novel The Invented Part tries everything to get on an airplane already positioned on the runway: “Almost collapsing, he presented himself panting at the gate of the departure, which was about to close, and they

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took him in a car to the airplane, which had already cut the umbilical cord connecting it to the airport” (461–462). The character’s negligence of the plane’s departure time is strongly denounced as soon as he enters the cabin of the aircraft, where he is notably humiliated by the other passengers, who point at him and collectively reprimand him for his outrageous tardiness. Having broken the law of time of the Airworld, the traveler deserves to be shamed, and the murderous looks of the other voyagers are insufficient. The captain’s announcement singling out, by last and first name, the culprit of the delay, is necessary to relieve the frustration of the stirred-up crowd. Like a convict, Fresán’s protagonist walks down the corridor of the plane to reach his seat amidst a general animosity. He thus symbolically pays a late ticket fee to be granted the privilege of taking off: “Now, entering that airplane, for him, is also an unpleasant experience: because he has to traverse the whole plane until he gets up to the front end and climbs up to first class, and several of the passengers sarcastically applaud his arrival as he passes by” (462). Far from being exceptional, the episode Fresán recounts is as commonplace in reality as in Airworld fiction. According to the narrator of Jorge Carrión’s novel Los Turistas (2015), among the passengers “very few arrive on time and can sit and read a book or a magazine, have a drink from McDonald’s, chat for a while, or take a nap” (20).7 Even the more experienced travelers, who are used to the pressure and extortion that aviation time imposes on their schedules, sometimes find themselves at a disadvantage with respect to time. These moments of tension bring out a certain aversion toward invasive and time-consuming constraints. Ryan M. Bingham, the hyperflier businessperson in the novel Up in the Air, whose entire life is punctuated by his day-to-day airplane take offs and landings, accepts, though not without irritation, the yoke of time: “There’s no time for my usual breakfast of frozen yogurt topped with sliced cling peaches, so I head down the moving walkway toward my gate, aggressively clearing lanes between the laggards” (Kirn 2002, 14). Bingham’s obsession with punctuality is more broadly embedded within a real dependence on time, which represents both a sine qua non condition of travel and the thread from which the passenger literally hangs. In fact, the first four pages of the novel Up in the Air, 7 My translation. In the original: “son pocos los que llegan con tiempo y pueden sentarse a leer una novela o una revista, tomarse una bebida del McDonald’s, charlar un rato o echar una cabezada” (Carrión 2015, 20).

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which precede the first chapter, contain the character’s travel itinerary, covering five days and condensed into various names of airports and airline companies, numbers, and schedules of flights and hotel reservations. This subordination to time is restated throughout the narrative and contributes to a recurring phobia of delays and strikes that could potentially disrupt the frequent traveler’s routine and schedule. The voice announcements, updates, and alerts spreading to every corner of the airport (including the privacy of bathrooms) also constantly renew the fearful obsession with time. These announcements, preceded by a stereotypical ring, give a certain tempo to the “timescape” that is the airport and act like soldiers of time, coming to wake or shake the passenger immersed in a state of “stillness” (Bissell and Fuller 2011). Whether they warn a passenger of last-minute unforeseen events such as immediate boarding or imminent departure; unpleasant events such as delays or flight cancellations; or exceptional circumstances such as immediate evacuation of the terminal, public announcements are often bearers of information inseparable from time. In their immateriality, they extend the informative function of the departure board without immobilizing the individual in front of a monitor or other screen. On the contrary, they allow themselves to move around within the terminal. As if resonating from the beyond, these ghostly and anonymous voices pierce the muffled atmosphere of the terminal and, in a kind of Annunciation scene (Serres 1995, 101–113), become intermediaries between the Airworld and its users, to whom they deliver a message of faith in time. With their standardized intonation and formulations, which vibrate and echo identically across all the airports of the world, these voice messengers disclose the remaining time or directly address a given passenger, identified by name, as in W. G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn: Every now and then the announcers’ voices, disembodied and intoning their messages like angels, would call someone’s name. Passagiers Sandberg en Stromberg naar Copenhagen. Mr Freeman to Lagos. La señora Rodrigo, por favor. Sooner or later the call would come for each and every one of those waiting here. […] presently I heard my name from afar, followed by the injunction Immediate boarding at Gate C4 please. (Sebald 1998, 89–90)

These announcements are unbearable to the ears of those who must inhabit the airport, as they break the continuity of the sound universe

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of the terminal that is already cluttered by the hubbub of the flow of passengers, and pollute the atmosphere with their iteration and constant invasion of the sound environment.8

2

Crystallized Waiting Time

Paradoxically, air travel is associated with waiting time, diametrically opposed to the constraining and condensed time of punctuality, yet just as tedious and daunting. The wait in the airport, as well as in the airplane, haunts the passenger even before the journey begins. In the compartmentalized and isolated context of the Airworld, the waiting time appears more distressing than the coercive respect of punctuality, since the traveler cannot escape the aerial infrastructure and is exposed to destabilizing and demanding physical and psychological challenges. Following Pico Iyer (2001), who describes the airport terminal as an emblematic space of a globalized lifestyle, more so than any other contemporary place, the environment of the air journey is imagined from the outset in terms of an interior design based on a crystallized waiting time: “Airports are among the only places in our lives where we sometimes have to wait for six hours, or eight, or even ten; where we are actually paid off for waiting with free hotel rooms, or offered two hundred dollars in cash if we will voluntarily wait another three hours” (61). In line with this view, waiting takes on a marketable value within the Airworld. The hours spent waiting in the terminal are promptly softened, or capitalized upon, by the airport boutiques and retail stores, which transform the unavoidable wait into a high-end shopping experience. The conversion of terminals into luxury shopping centers takes advantage of the inevitable wait as a void that could be filled with window-shopping and the purchasing of brand-name products, from chocolate and Rolex watches to Hermès silk scarves. Thus monetized, the wait provisionally shifts from a temporal representation to a consumerist dimension, whose goal is to alleviate the frustration of time lost to waiting with the traveler’s appetite for luxury goods. This overlay between waiting time and consumerist temptation is observed both in airport terminals and in flight. In several works of fiction, descriptions of waiting travelers recount strategies that passengers have devised to mitigate the wait, emphasizing

8 See Powell (2015).

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the presence of numerous items and accessories that ensure their material comfort. German author Husch Josten’s novel Hier sind Drachen (2017) is entirely built on a sine die waiting situation, unfolding a colorful catalogue of reactions and positions of travelers stuck in a waiting area, frustrated by the announcement of a series of delays of their flight to Paris: The passengers were like headless sheep. Stoic. Docile. Used to misery. They flipped through newspapers and magazines, talked on the phone, adjusted headphones, bit into an apple, drank from plastic bottles and paper cups, stared into the crowd. They had reason to expect that on this morning, a plane to Paris would likely be delayed in departing, if it would depart at all. (18–19)9

This resigned renunciation of the productivity of time in the Airworld implies, on the one hand, a grouping of passengers as a “herd,” gathered in a shared condition of waiting and, on the other, an apparent reliance on the materiality of objects and bodies. The list of antidotes used to counteract the wait is long and varied, from food to technological gadgets, but proves insufficient and ineffective. Like punctuality, waiting foremost compromises the body of the passenger. Its duration produces core physical needs such as hunger, thirst, and sleep, and unpleasant physical contingencies such as overly close proximity to strangers and restricted freedom of movement. In flight, waiting translates into the consumption of different products, some edible, offered as deceptive substitutes of time. Carrión’s novel Los Turistas accurately illustrates this paradigm of the airplane voyage, which converts the duration of the flight, as a waiting segment, into an incessant parade of meals washed down with top-end champagne and broken up by several films: A Boeing 747. Passenger compartment with bed. Have a glass of Dom Perignon and a couple of scallop appetizers with parmesan. Watch Fight Club, which twists your guts and brain for two hours but in the ends leaves you indifferent. […]. Have a salmon sandwich and a Caesar salad, washed

9 My translation. In the original: “Die Fluggäste nahmen es hin wie eine hirten-

lose Herde. Stoisch. Gefügig. An Kummer gewöhnt. Man blätterte in Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, telefonierte, rückte Kopfhörer gerade, biss in Äpfel, trank aus Plastikflaschen und Pappbechern, starrte in die Menge. Sie alle hatten erwartet, dass ein Flug nach Paris an diesem Morgen nur mit Schwierigkeiten an den Start kommen würde. Wenn überhaupt” (Josten 2017, 18–19).

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down with two more glasses of champagne. Sleep until arrival without waking up even once. […] An hour and a half later, you are buying two suits, two shirts, a pair of shoes and a coat (it must be cold in Russia). […] and a small Samsonite […]. (Carrión 2015, 47)10

Under the pleasant conditions of flight in the business cabin, the air passenger perceives the wait as a moment of rejuvenation that is softened by the consumption of entertainment products and hours of sleep. In addition to being represented as a complete standstill of time, waiting is also depicted in different situations of the deceleration of the journey. Without exception, all contemporary air travel procedures are marked by the temporal instance of waiting. The flight as the central, uninterrupted segment of air travel is highlighted as the most restrictive portion of the wait. In her short story “Mancha de agua” (2010), translated as “Flying Home,” Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli emphasizes the particular circumstance of the flight duration as a long and exhausting experience during which the passenger faces the “cruel” challenges of impatience. Luiselli focuses on the screen positioned on the back of the seat in front of the passenger, and more specifically on the “tiny white aircraft advanc[ing] a millimeter every sixty seconds” (2014, 19). Descriptions of transatlantic flights often mention the airplane icon on the screen, and its ability to give rise to feelings of immobility and a sense of powerless waiting: Thirty minutes, an hour, seven hours go by and the icon is still crawling over the same blue surface far from the coasts of the two continents. […] those of us who lack patience are condemned to fixing our eyes on the tiny aircraft, as if by staring hard enough we could make it advance a little farther. (Luiselli 2014, 19)

Although the airplane map is primarily meant to showcase the process of traversing the globe in real time, it is also consistently related to the representation of time passing. Real-time data, such as the time appearing 10 My translation. In the original: “Un Boeing 747. Habitáculo con cama. Toma una copa de Don (sic) Perignon y dos canapés de vieiras con parmesano. Ve El Club de la lucha, que le retuerce las tripas y el cerebro durante dos horas pero al final le deja indiferente. […] Cena un sándwich de salmón y una ensalada César, regada con dos copas más de champán. Duerme hasta la llegada sin despertarse ni una sola vez. […] Una hora y media más tarde se está comprando dos trajes, dos camisas, un par de zapatos y un abrigo (en Rusia debe de hacer frío). […] también una Samsonite pequeña […]” (Carrión 2015, 47).

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on the margins of the map, contribute to localizing the passenger both spatially and temporally. The indication of the amount of time passed since departure is consistently accompanied by mentions of the distance from the initial airport, while the local time at the original location is also displayed and constantly compared to the current time at the destination. In tracking geographical distances, the “miniature plane” (Luiselli 2014, 19) on the screen measures time and embeds the trip in a complex temporal dimension. Paradoxically, through the “static, timeless surface” (19) of the screen, the duration of the flight as waiting time is enhanced by different simultaneous and concurrent time units, and the map is transformed into a time-based cartography. Thus, the wait experienced aboard ceases to be “frozen in time” (19), but is in progressive motion. As such, waiting materializes as a territory per se, inhabited by its own traveling citizens, and framed by the spatial and temporal boundaries imposed by the flight duration. The waiting time spent crossing the sky is thus substantially different from that in the terminal, precisely because of its itinerant status. If in airport gates and lounges, the passenger can still randomly circulate in a spacious environment. However, due to the intrinsic restrictions of the airplane’s internal design, waiting during the flight is much more consuming, unendurable, and claustrophobic. The perception of time in air travel is altered by the inconveniences suffered by the body. Usually regulated, standardized, and technologized, it proves uncertain, uncontrollable, and problematic. Moreover, as the human body is foremost implicated in the absorption of the complications generated by waiting, unexpected comparisons to similarly overcrowded and asphyxiating waiting places arise in the air travel narrative. The narrator of Fresán’s novel The Invented Part introduces this unusual convergence as follows: “Airports are like hospitals: you know when you go in but not when you’ll come out” (2017, 451). The homology established between clinical and airport environments, an aesthetic already explored in Jacques Tati’s film Playtime (1967), expresses the dread of waiting and the feelings of helplessness and ignorance the passenger experiences during the trip. From a similar perspective, Greg Baxter’s novel Munich Airport provides a detailed exploration of waiting scenes in the terminal that is much less pleasant than lounges or luxury stores and explicitly involve imminent physical needs. Lines of men in front of urinals are brought to the fore of the narrative, augmenting the irritation of waiting with a nauseating dimension:

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The line for the urinals moves swiftly, but the line for the stalls is stagnant. There is a bushy-haired man in a pin-striped suit who has just filled a newly empty spot at the urinal. […] The men along the wall of urinals, all of them, finish all at once, and everybody […] walks to the sinks, which sends them right through us, the lines for the stalls, osmotically. (Baxter 2015, 49–50)

The steady procession of passengers next to the terminal’s public toilets shows the undesirable effects of waiting in an even more degrading light. The promiscuity of bodies is certainly the most dreaded aspect of this space, in which strangers find themselves squeezed together as they expedite their bodily needs, avoiding contact with one another. While conducting the same ordinary acts, such individuals are represented not so much as air passengers but as prisoners lined up along white walls damp with urine, which they quickly leave to return to a waiting area saturated with human heat and odors. The terminal’s aseptic and refined logic is distorted by explicit references to these unattractive areas, due to the numbers of travelers with the same irrepressible physiological needs. Beyond the strictly hygienic component that characterizes the spatial representation of the terminal, the perception of the strong effects of waiting on the body more generally undermines the whole spirit of the terminal’s interior architecture. Despair and frustration sharpen the individual’s feelings of overload and suffocation as they encounter waiting areas, shops, catering spaces, or other spaces congested with delayed travelers, transformed from zones of transit to overcrowded way stations. This is, for example, the impression of the main character of Munich Airport, cited above. Exhausted by a wait of several days in Berlin, then hours in the Munich Airport terminal, before completing the necessary procedures for the repatriation of his sister’s coffin to Atlanta, the passenger recounts: “Because of the delays, the terminal is badly overcrowded, and I have to step over lots of feet and suitcases. […] At the restroom, I have to wait in a line of men leaning against the wall of a long, plain, windowless, glossyblue corridor. A line of women wait on the other side, too” (Baxter 2015, 1–2). In addition to prompting a suspension of time, waiting inspires chaotic depictions of the airport, marked especially by a general impression of accumulation and overcrowding of bodies, objects, and histories. The deceleration, or even momentary paralysis, of the trip awakens an unexpected interest in observing innocuous scenes of normal movement within

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the airport. The voyager abandons himself to the torpor of the wait, as his gaze slows and he observes the margins of the airport. The exhausting distention of the wait thus fundamentally alters the passenger’s relationship with the spatial perception of the terminal, given that time, unexpectedly solidifies, pollutes, and weighs down the usual airport décor, making it abruptly seem compressed and congested. Numbed by the lethargy of waiting, the description of different airport operations in the terminal and the runways, occupies a central place in the stories of the traveler-character, who ends up finding a pastime in the idle observation of the banality of these service scenes: “The tarmac is busy. […] The queue of jets taxiing for takeoff is long, and it moves slowly. I imagine it must be a bit dispiriting to find yourself on an airplane after five or six hours of waiting, only to wait two hours on the tarmac, squashed in a seat you can’t leave” (Baxter 2015, 146). Although the passenger is constantly stimulated by displays and advertising, the imaginary of both supersonic speed and the inordinate grandeur of the airport is temporarily suspended by the spatial-temporal obstruction imposed by waiting. In Baxter’s novel, the unalterable and intense condition of waiting turns the passenger’s weary gaze toward similarly static elements such as fog on the runway, a pile of heavy suitcases or the multitude of feet hindering passage. The transparency and lightness of typical airport design and architecture are replaced by images that give an impression of claustrophobia and heaviness. Further on in the novel, the narrator is worn out by endless hours of waiting and becomes even more jaded, drawing a gloomy picture of the time-space of the airport, subverted by the inertia of waiting. The immobile terminal weighed down with the compact crowd of stalled voyagers turns into a warehouse filled with bodies that cannot be reinjected into the regular flow of passengers in transit: The terminal seems twice, or ten times, as crowded now as it did when we were sitting in front of our breakfasts. All you have to do is to look around to see that there is not enough capacity and there are not enough hours in the rest of the day to get everybody out of here. We are no longer all in it together, this paralysis. (Baxter 2015, 66–67)

The representation of time spent waiting allows for a description of the environment of air travel that is both distorted and detailed; an overflowing, seeping vessel rather than a calm, clear area. On the ground

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and in flight, waiting brings to light the worst defects and contradictions of the Airworld: its magnitude turns into constriction, its chronometric precision into excessive delays. This reversal of the usual spatial-temporal parameters appears in different ways in airport fiction. In many stories, the waiting individual is immersed in a contemplative solitude that discourages encounters with other travelers. In temporarily deactivating the state of alert and constant monitoring of time, waiting opens up space for meditative and silent interstices. The waiting traveler, excluded from the steady flow of passengers, surrenders himself to his thoughts and functions in slow motion, incongruous with the accelerated air transport landscape. Grounded, he gauges both the spatial and temporal paradox to which the wait in the airport condemns him. Although he finds himself in a place that by definition allows for extreme mobility, he is forced to forego movement and settle into a seat in a boarding area without any other option than to wait. At the mercy of time, the air passenger appears to the outside world as a fish floating in a terminal-size aquarium. One of the main characters of Angelika Overath’s novel Flughafenfische, whose title references this half aquatic, half aerial interstitial condition, describes the slowed and numbed travelers as creatures swaying against “moving water wallpaper”: “swimming in close proximity, neither speaking nor touching, moving this way and that, each pursuing a secret path, startled as a swarm, each turning with the ease of a blink of an eye, a colorful mobile of incomprehensible tenacity” (2009, 16).11 The waiting traveler drifts in a sealed and unapproachable space, in which he loses all distinguishing marks of identity. He appears to be carried by a homogeneous school of other passengers, all as taciturn and lost as he, who tries to carve out a space of their own in the glass tank that contains them all in an alienating microclimate (Fig. 2). This condition of forced stagnation heightens his cognizance as an anonymous inhabitant of the Airworld, leading to him withdrawing into himself, causing temporary detachment from the rhythm of the trip and from others. Several scenes in Colombian author Santiago Gamboa’s novel Los impostores (2002) depict this defining solitude of the airport through the eyes of a waiting character. Alone and facing a sea of individuals marching through an 11 My translation. In the original: “nur in ferner Nähe wort- und berührungslos hinter der Scheibe schwammen, sich drehten, einzeln eine geheime Spur verfolgten, im Schwarm erschraken und leicht wie ein Wimpernschlag wendeten, ein buntes Mobile von nie verstandenem Eigensinn” (Overath 2009, 16).

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Fig. 2 Erica Durante: Transparent vivarium of passengers. Frankfurt am Main Airport

impersonal transit area, the passenger is freed from his usual tasks and must find a way to pass the time. In a sort of side monologue during his wait for takeoff to Beijing, the character reflects on the particular caste of airport users to which he belongs, by sitting in a lounge reserved to holders of a priority card. It is then that, “in order to kill time while waiting to board” (Gamboa 2002, 96),12 Professor Gisbert Klauss decides to develop a theory of travelers who, like him, sit waiting in the VIP lounge of Frankfurt Airport. Driven by a need to fill the idleness of the wait with “inane ideas” (96),13 he conducts field observations that lead to a genuine ethnography of the businesspeople who populate the terminals of the world. These individuals seem like clones, sharing the same “way of dressing, type of briefcase, demeanor of indifference towards anything having to do with their work” (96).14 The confined space of the airport 12 My translation. In the original: “para matar el tiempo mientras [l]e llaman al embarque” (Gamboa 2002, 96). 13 My translation. In the original: “ideas ociosas” (Gamboa 2002, 96). 14 My translation. In the original: “forma de vestir, un tipo de maletín, una actitud de

desgano hacia lo que no tenga que ver con su trabajo” (Gamboa 2002, 96).

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makes them stand out as members of a closed community, recognizable in their identical appearances and their similar solitude. In some cases, the narrative also recreates the state of irritation that waiting produces by interspersing the story with detailed time schedules, to simulate the slowed passage of minutes and seconds, exacerbated by the waiting situation. The aforementioned German novel Hier sind Drachen uses a narrative construction to represent the slow flow of time over a paradoxical situation of several hours. The openings of the different chapters of the novel work as temporal markers that hauntingly remind the reader of the immutable wait endured by the two main characters, who are trapped at Heathrow Airport due to serious circumstances that are never disclosed: 11:08am. Still no sign of the plane to Paris. (Josten 2017, 43, beginning of chapter 3) […] 11:55: Reached contact at Heathrow. […] There was an anonymous tip about a possible attack on your airplane. (61, beginning of chapter 4) […] 12:46: Caren sat down next to her again (85, beginning of chapter 5).15

The regular updating of time elapsing without any information on the cause of the delay leads up to the culminating moment of the novel, which coincides with the tragic outcome of the story. After spending hours waiting in vain for their flight from London to Paris, the exhausted travelers are suddenly victims of a terrorist attack on the airport. This deadly act brings the wait to a dramatic conclusion, ending the passing hours and minutes that the narrator reports at the beginning of each chapter. The explosion of a suicide bomb on the Heathrow Airport runways rapidly engulfs the terminal, and the clocks that had measured the long wait freeze forever and place the entire story in a zone outside time: “The explosion was enormous […] The clock—frozen at 1:01 pm—tumbled

15 My translation. In the original: “11.08 Uhr. Von der Maschine nach Paris nach wie vor keine Spur” (Josten 2017, 43); “11.55 Uhr. Kontaktmann in Heathrow erreicht. […] Es gab einen anonymen Hinweis auf einen in Deiner Maschine geplanten Anschlag ” (61); “[…]12.46 Uhr. Caren setzte sich wieder neben sie” (85).

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off the wall and shattered into a billion digital fragments” (Josten 2017, 102).16 Although waiting occurs within the airport area, it is susceptible to contingencies; the wait is often determined by unforeseeable phenomena and situations near the ground (such as in the case of the novel discussed above) or in the sky. References to weather conditions, as one of the various recurring factors causing inconveniences, are common in airport novels that have a narrative “anchor” in waiting circumstances. In addition to the works of fiction already mentioned in this chapter, British writer Rana Dasgupta’s novel Tokyo Cancelled is entirely built on a thirteen-hour wait caused by a snowstorm that interrupts travel to Tokyo. A number of works of fiction set at airports or on airplanes involve unexpected perturbations related to meteorological conditions, interrupting the regular flow of air travel and making the stories that take place within the Airworld more intense and entangled. Following the narrative scheme of the frame tale, as in The Decameron or The Canterbury Tales, the initial perturbation constitutes the unifying story from which many more passenger tales branch off. Weather and time jointly contribute to the disruption of travel and subvert the normally desirable notion of optimizing time and distance. In situating the action overnight in an unspecified airport in central Asia from which no flight can take off before dawn, the author introduces a particular modality of the wait that places the collective at the fore, and generates the complex time of the polyphonic shared narrative. In contrast to other airport waiting stories, Tokyo Cancelled reverses the duration of the wait for both the characters and the readers. The cancellation of the flight, and the delay extended until the next day, lead to an otherwise unthinkable proximity between thirteen passengers who gather to recount their life stories and alleviate the inconvenience of the wait. This narrative schema, reminiscent of One Thousand and One Nights but condensed into a single night, means that the empty time of the wait is filled by various stories that evoke different temporalities, spaces, and discourses, but which only have coherence in the very situation of waiting that generates and inspires them as a pastime. Waiting also appears in stories as a collective time that brings individuals together as a diverse and polyphonic subject. When the subject is 16 My translation. In the original: “Die Explosion war gewaltig. […] die Uhr—13.01 Uhr zeigte sie an—stürzte von der Wand und zersprengte in flirrende Digitalsplitter” (Josten 2017, 102).

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withdrawn from the transitory flow of the trip, it proves open to other representations and updates of time, which involve connecting with peers similarly affected by the inertia of the wait. This group dimension of waiting, as an imposed experience of togetherness, is also at the heart of British composer Jonathan Dove and librettist April De Angelis’s opera Flight (1998). This three-act opera was inspired by the true story of Merhan Nasseri, a.k.a. “Sir Alfred,” an Iranian citizen who lived at the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport for eleven years due to the theft of his “immigration papers” (Dove and De Angelis 1998, vii–ix). The opera depicts two contrasting states of waiting: on the one hand, the transient wait of a handful of passengers and crew members, dictated by a storm that “grounds everyone overnight” (vii) at the airport; and, on the other hand, the sine die wait to which the displaced character is condemned. In contrast to the regular passengers who are pressed for time, the refugee finds himself in a drawn-out, never-ending time that pushes him toward others in the hopes of filling the emptiness of the wait with words. The hours that these passengers lose waiting for the departure of their plane are instead, so to speak, won by this individual, who finds these bits of conversation momentary distractions from his usual state of waiting. Nevertheless, the enormous gap between these two waiting interludes cannot be bridged, as emphasized by the chorus of so-called regular passengers who proudly distinguish between their ordinary, limited wait and his undefined, marginally illegal wait: TINA, STEWARDESS, MINSKWOMAN, OLDER WOMAN, BILL and STEWARD What can we do? Our cases are packed, Our tickets are booked. Although we sympathize with your condition, We’re on a holiday, Not a mission. They’re calling our flight. We really can’t stay. Although we sympathize with your dilemma, We need to get our hand luggage together. Our seats await us. You mustn’t engage us. Our seats await us. (21)

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References to material details characteristic of air travel such as suitcases, seats aboard the plane, or the prospect of vacation only deepen the discrepancy between the imminent end of waiting for some and the endless wait of the refugee. While these are opposite temporal frameworks, the state of waiting and the human consequences the wait generates, in terms of chance encounters and the temporary sharing of stories, determine the entire action on stage. The wait is constantly evoked by the refugee in the casual conversations of other travelers and in the midst of public announcements that resound within the terminal. More an existential condition than a provisional situation, the wait marks the rhythm of the story both from a narrative and a scenic point of view. Moreover, the wait requires the preservation of a single unit of time and place. The movement and the agency of the characters are restricted, prohibiting passengers from departing and unduly immobilizing the refugee. In this sense, the opera’s choral dimension connotes a general situation of waiting through a collective consciousness that all of the travelers bear relative to the paradoxes of the aerial world. In addition to limiting their freedom of movement around the globe, the wait introduces discrimination between individuals. This persists until the finale, which insists once more on the impossible reconciliation between these two waiting conditions: CONTROLLER (To R efugee) This is your home now. REFUGEE This is my home now. TINA, STEWARDESS, MINSKWOMAN, OLDER WOMAN, BILL, STEWARD and MINSKMAN Good-bye. Good-bye. We’re for the sky. (72)

The temporal divide that waiting invokes makes it synonymous with spatial exclusion and social discrimination. In the short term, it brings together strangers around a shared inconvenience in the short term; however, in the long term, it brings out differences and social and political inequalities, of which the refugee character’s experience is emblematic. Waiting is a porous territory, a “great big wonderful open space of time” (32), permeable to different discourses, hopes, and stories. It temporarily

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involves an experience of human sharing, even if only of time, yet ends up revealing, or sharpening, the differences between the travelers that populate the microcosm of the terminal. Dove’s opera is in this sense exemplary in its effort to denounce the injustices that certain less fortunate passengers suffer, who, for political reasons that transcend them, become hostage to airports and are forced to adopt these places as their so-called fixed address. As Dove highlights, waiting in the transit zone of the airport is different from other kinds of waiting, given the additional tension of legality, surveillance, detention, and exclusion for political reasons. Steven Spielberg’s film The Terminal (2004), similarly inspired by the story of “Sir Alfred,” uses the interminable wait of Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) to show the degree to which the airport can represent a distance from a place rather than a connection to it. When war breaks out in his country while he is on a flight toward JFK Airport, Spielberg’s passenger discovers that his passport is no longer considered valid by airport authorities, meaning that he is unable to enter the US territory. His wait is prolonged, without an end in sight, becoming a sort of colossal delay that holds him hostage in the airport. Thus kidnapped in the terminal, he invents multiple ways to fill the overwhelming emptiness of the wait, transforming dead time into a time of life, passing from the status of passenger to that of impromptu airport personnel. Forced to wait and satisfy his basic needs for food, water, and shelter, Navorski interacts with airport employees, who realize more quickly than others that he is actually an inhabitant of the terminal. As in the opera Flight, waiting is a sine qua non condition of the entirety of Spielberg’s film. It establishes a unity of place while exhibiting a multitude of competing wait times: departure and arrival timetables, connections, and schedules of airport staff that repeat incessantly and, by extension, punctuate his prolonged stay within the walls of the terminal. Eventually, Navorski is told that his documents have recovered their legal value because peace has been restored in his country. The reappropriation of this transitory function ends both the wait and the film. The airport regains its dimensions of threshold-place, of thoroughfare, and of temporary waiting, and returns the traveler to the city.

3

The Compressed Time of Jet Lag

There is no jet lag without air travel, without long-distance physical displacement in which one or more of the twenty-four time zones are crossed in a short period. From the start, jet lag is engraved in a transition

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of places that coincides with a desynchronization of the body clock and the world clock. As the term itself indicates, there is no jet lag without a Jet Age, without long-distance travel in a relatively brief amount of time. Speed is primarily responsible for this time decompensation. Travel by train, car, or boat does not expose us to the same upheaval that a long journey by plane supposes on a metabolic level. The time difference certainly still exists, but there is no urgent need to absorb it because it is assimilated progressively as one physically crosses time zones, without sudden disruption from one temporality to another. As one of the most common and unpleasant side effects of air mobility, jet lag is incorporated into contemporary Airworld narratives as a recurring leitmotif, if not as décor itself. An unmistakable reference to jet lag as a diegetic framework can be found in the cross-media project developed in 1999 by The Builders Association and the architect/media artists Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. The creators of the Jet Lag performance were inspired by two true stories of paradoxical situations of time and space disruption, one of which was the story of an American grandmother, Sarah Krassnoff (Doris), who embarked on 167 transatlantic flights between New York and Paris in 1970 without ever leaving the Airworld. She undertook this travel, accompanied by her grandson Howard Gelfand (Lincoln), in order to “elude the pursuit of the child’s father and psychiatrist.”17 The perception of jet lag in this context reflects a sense of awareness that the traveler has about her displacement rather than an urgency to metabolize the time difference. Jet lag does not manifest itself in its usual ways because the passengers are in constant flight. In fact, Sarah Krassnoff collapsed from exhaustion and died from what doctors diagnosed as terminal jet lag. In this extreme reversal of the usual spatial-temporal markers of the trip, and thus of the travel narrative, this work paints a biased picture of the singular temporality of jet lag, drawn from an improbable experience of expansion and compression of the time and space of the world. The multiplicity of the world’s hours, responsible for jet lag, is described in a roundabout

17 In fact, in the actual story, the flying route that Sarah Krassnoff and her grandson took was between the airports of JFK and Amsterdam Schiphol, while in the artistic production, the journeys were between the airports of New York and Paris. For more on the Jet Lag Project, see The Builders Association web page (http://www.thebuildersasso ciation.org/prod_jetlag_2010_info.html).

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way, abstracted from the ground by the absence of landing or progressive assimilation of the time difference. In a whirlwind of never-ending round trips, time constantly advances, then retreats, following a deregulation that hardly makes it possible to either measure it, or follow its rhythm. The only snippet of temporal cognition that remains is the difference between night and day, imposed by a glaring change of light: “You know what I miss?” said Doris. “I miss the dark. Know what I hate, I hate the sun” (Jackson and Weems 2015, 140). With the exception of this performance, which does not fully exploit the conceptual and narrative richness of jet lag, explicit reference to jetlagged characters within “Air-port, -plane, -travel fiction” (Ward 2004, 200) often legitimates the emergence of situations that would otherwise appear grotesque and implausible. Nevertheless, the specific timeconfusion that characterizes jet lag, as a complex temporality, ultimately makes these circumstances credible. The difficulty in “figuring out the tense” (more than the time), as in the lyrics of Canadian rock band Simple Plan’s song Jet Lag (2011), generates paradoxical and chaotic behaviors and reactions including schizophrenic symptoms, hallucinations, dreamlike states, or even severe anxieties and emotional disorders. Jet-lagged individuals are often found in a dystopian setting, typical of an oneiric or fantastic tale or a science fiction story. The stretching of space and time may even create an uncontrolled condition of dual personality, which emerges after boarding. Geographically uprooted during the in-between segment of the flight, passengers are already engaged in a double dynamic of both deterritorialization and dechronologization. Although the body remains mostly static throughout the flight, the chaotic flow of the passenger’s thoughts reflects the incoherent perception of time. Hours appear or disappear from the face of the watch, depending on whether we move the hands forward or backward, rendering tangible the oddly relative and reversible nature of time. This zapping of time also produces bewilderment over the boundaries that usually separate the present of the flight from the past of departure and the imminent future of landing. While on the ground, we may be in different places at the same time, as, according to Neuman, “wherever we are, we can check our email and messages, read newspapers from around the world, follow international events” (2016, 13); in flight, the coexistence of multiple and parallel times and spaces is intensely experienced. As the plane icon moves across the screen, showing the approaching destination, memory travels backward, toward the place of departure, as if it was challenging to

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mentally condense and assimilate the distance that separates the two edges of the journey. Undoubtedly, time perception involves the unconscious, which, as Neuman notes, is equally affected by jet lag: “Waking up in Lima, I discover that my unconscious has also suffered jet lag: I dreamed I was still in La Paz” (2016, 88). Numerous writers emphasize the impact of jet lag on physical and psychological states, often representing their characters as victims of the discrepancies of time perception engaged in a constant search for time alignment. The puzzling sensation of gaining an hour or losing an hour— as in the lyrics of French singer Zazie’s song Jet lag (2007)—leads to an uncertainty of the self reflecting the impossibility of reconnecting with one’s original consciousness. Michel, the protagonist of Houellebecq’s novel Platform (2003), appears disturbed by a recollection of Parisian time unexpectedly coming to mind during his morning routine in a Bangkok hotel. The significant geographical distance separating the two cities is not sufficient to disconnect him from the departure place, whose original time persists in his recent memory: “It was just after six in the morning—midnight in Paris, I thought, for no reason—but activities were already well under way, and the breakfast room had just opened” (25–26). Landing and the initial hours spent at the destination catalyze the first apparent symptoms of jet lag. Contact with the ground naturally raises an awareness of the local time and implies common gestures such as the synchronization of a watch, which explicitly symbolizes the shift and subsequent switch to another time. Yet this mechanical and banal act of changing the time on the clock simultaneously involves the body and the mind, and activates an adherence to “another world” through compliance with the time at the destination. Jet lag is unquestionably caused not only by the challenge of reconciling different temporalities, but also implies a struggle to maintain an individual identity in the face of temporal disorder generated by moving from one place to another. Forward/backward, past/present: jet lag is a floating temporality, an ambiguous in-between that can itself provoke a sensation of division. If what gives time the measure of time is the place in which time occurs, and if this place cannot be located, then time will also be fractured in its identity, which is primarily local. This is why identifying the position of the subject in the spectrum of world time is so difficult, and why navigating the seemingly irreconcilable disassociation between the body that travels at airplane speed and mental time that remains attached to the

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ground and anchored in the temporality of the place of departure, is so perplexing, particularly when the departure location is home: I was still, and I remained for a long time, in that state of suspension one enters while traveling, that intermediary state in which the body, in motion, seems to be making steady progress from one geographical location toward another (like the arrow I’d tracked on the in-flight video screen on my trip back from Beijing, charting the plane’s movement over a stylized world map, covered with mountains) […]. I was still in Beijing, but already in Elba at the same time, my mind unable to move from one place to the other as easily as my body, to forget one place so as to focus on the other, stuck instead in the temporary between-ness of the journey, as if this transitory state, extendable and elastic, could be stretched to the point that, in thought, I was nowhere, neither in Beijing nor in Elba, but always outside the borders of either place. (Toussaint 2009, 112–113)

To be still in and, concurrently, already in another place, to the point of feeling entirely lost in the antipodes of this duality, defines the in-between intermediary state to which Belgian writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint refers in his novel Fuir (Running Away). The interstitial time and space described therein do not coincide with either the point of departure or that of arrival, but rather reside in the time-space of transit. Traveling through the sky undermines our usual perception of space. We have wings, we are suspended, our gaze reversed, the earth from above and our feet in the clouds, while the only reference we can hold onto is, as Rodrigo Fresán writes in his novel The Invented Part, the computerized arrow “on that small and sadistic map that tracks the trajectory, simultaneously so fast and so slow, of the airplane there to convince passengers of the lie that the skies can be delimited, beginning with the ground at their feet” (2017, 540). Once we are back on earth, this in-between dimension remains operative and even monopolizes post-flight hours and days. Santiago Roncagliolo’s novel Tan cerca de la vida opens with an airport scene before rapidly relocating to a taxi and then to a hotel, jet lag’s “landing spot.” The route from the airport to the city is not only a leitmotif of contemporary air travel narratives, but also, as in Tan cerca de la vida, the first space outside of the airport in which the effects of jet lag appear visibly, superimposed onto the temporality of the local destination. The taxi marks the first contact with Tokyo, the city in which the protagonist Max lands after a twelve-hour flight. The crushing consequences of jet lag first emerge on

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the taxi ride. Max experiences a state of being between dreams, dizziness, and confusion of temporal references that makes it impossible to distinguish “when morning ends and when night begins” (Roncagliolo 2010, 9).18 This approximate definition is in itself mimetic of the symptoms of jet lag: an “elastic, slow,” protracted time that hosts multiple temporalities, including all those that were not experienced but were crossed over during flight. These initial effects turn perverse not only in the case of Roncagliolo’s character, but also in various other stories of jet lag, where the latter is directly linked to a resilient feeling of ambivalence, of in-between identity, and the internal division that characterizes this phenomenon. The dimension of otherness is implicit in this chronobiologic syndrome. The malaise that jet lag causes is due to the difficulty of conforming to a time other than one’s own, as it belongs to places and individuals located elsewhere in the world. From this otherness derives the tainted reception, on a psychophysiological level, of the “new” time. Many jet lag narratives use this paradigm of division or serial multiplication of the subject. Max’s initial perception in Tan cerca de la vida is a chaotic fragmentation of identity: a sensation that the character himself explains as an effect of jet lag, and which then transforms into that other “feeling of being no one that hotel rooms rouse” (Roncagliolo 2010, 33).19 Right from the taxi ride from the airport to the hotel, a strange dream of doubles, truly uncanny, pops into Max’s head, as he observes the traffic of Tokyo beyond the taxi’s window. The impression of seeing himself multiplied in all the faces that surround him remains until he arrives at the hotel. Here, jet lag is responsible for a distortion of reality that coincides with the duplication of the individual. The time disruption gives rise to a form of paranoid schizophrenia that results in replicated images of the traveler on every corner and at every stoplight of the city in which he has just disembarked. Neuman similarly writes “I land with part of me in other parts” (2016, 19) in How to Travel Without Seeing, making numerous allusions to a feeling of dichotomy and intermittency between reality and dream, much like the hallucination Roncagliolo describes in Tan cerca de la vida. 18 My translation. In the original: “dónde termina la mañana y dónde comienza la noche” (Roncagliolo 2010, 9). 19 My translation. In the original: “sensación de no ser nadie que brindan los cuartos de hotel” (Roncagliolo 2010, 33).

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Neuman emphasizes this impression of fragmentation of the self, here more relative to the dimension of time: “When traveling to certain places, we move forward with our bodies and backwards in our memories” (38). The mistiming is in this case another, but the trip continues to function as a factor that breaks down his unique identity and disassembles it in a conflictual relationship between objective movement and subjective perception. The fluidity of space-time categories also spreads to the individual, leading him to doubt his identity. The tension that Neuman describes relative to the impression of an internal disassociation between body and mind is a recurrent struggle in the tradition of literature of the double, which, with jet lag, takes on a more problematic dimension as the split occurs within time, with the body flowing forward and the mind fleeing to the past. As Neuman writes, the notion of memory as a stable reservoir of reminiscences is threatened by our circulation across different time settings, since, oddly, “we travel without a past, we erase while we travel, we fly while we forget,” and as air travelers, we lose consistency and become “a mixture of moving amnesia and fleeing memories” (69–70). We find a similar disassociation as an effect of jet lag in the text that perhaps most extensively addresses this syndrome, William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition (2003). Gibson draws out this internal conflict to a certain transcendence, formulating another view of jet lag, one for each character, that converges into a metaphysical theory. Constructed along similar lines as the struggle Neuman describes, this theory foresees that souls travel slower than the travelers seated in an airplane over the Atlantic. As souls cannot move quickly, they are left behind and, once passengers land, they must wait for them at the terminal, like one awaits lost luggage: Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage. (Gibson 2003, 1)

The irresolvable episodes of “double-self” that characterize many of these air narratives clearly portray jet lag as in-between, complex, and oxymoronic from its very name. The term expresses speed and fluidity by the reference to “jet,” while alluding to slowness and delay, as reflected in “lag.” Discontinuity appears at the beginning and ending of the

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majority of these narratives. The disconnect between body and soul of the passenger in a state of jet lag can persist to the extent of causing a deeper disintegration of individuals, who abandon their normal identities and transform into the “other” that they have always repressed. Argentinean author Alan Pauls goes even further in writing that “jet lag exists for lives that are turned inside out like gloves” (Pauls 2013b).20 In his short story Noche en Opwjik, he represents jet lag as a situation of change that finally allows the character to salvage a stagnated existence. The narrative is appropriately set in a limbic situation of time difference, an out of place, away from home “stand by,” as can be that of the writing residency abroad, or Belgium in his specific case (Pauls 2013b).21 The “reset” that time change entails involves not only a biological but also, and perhaps primarily, a geographical and hence cultural reprogramming: “Lives that have been turned inside out” are lives that are allowed the possibility of change, even radical change, back and forth, “inside out.” In this short tale, as in other narratives, jet lag is imagined as the possibility of reversing the course of existence, since it allows for an altering of the linearity of time, even creating the illusion of boarding a time machine that produces a 360° shift. This is what happens to Pauls’s protagonist, who is temporarily uprooted from Buenos Aires to Brussels and finds himself in this in-between condition during a night in the small Flemish city of Opwjik. Here, he decides to fulfill his desire to radically change professions and become a DJ at the ripe age of almost 50. Jet lag does not merely arise as a provisory segment of time, but acts as an exponential state of the individual, allowing him to realize his aspirations in a foreign context, where he can finally cultivate a novel self. As a syndrome of unaligned timing, jet lag also involves a pattern of substitution, to a certain extent, through the bifurcation due to relocation and adjustment to another temporality. Notably, jet lag only appears in narratives that recount outbound as opposed to return journeys, since, fittingly, a return home negates the possibility of an estrangement effect, and therefore of change. As these episodes of internal division show, a fictitious sense of empowerment is sharpened by jet lag, fueled by the possibility offered by such trips across multiple temporalities of the globe

20 My translation. In the original: “para las vidas que se dan vuelta como guantes existe el jet lag” (Pauls 2013b). 21 See also Pauls (2013a).

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of (re)inventing time. Jet lag immediately establishes time difference as a syndrome of globalization. Jet lag corresponds to the first reaction produced when bringing together and trying to incorporate the city of departure, which exists, and that of arrival, which in theory does not truly exist. This act of connecting transforms jet lag into misalignment and discrepancy between two concurrent realities, one structured and evident, and another still premature. The connection finally comes by means of the subject who, in relocating, switches on, off, and orchestrates the plurality of temporalities of the planet. An analogous perception of illusion can be found in William Gibson’s novel, which refers to the notion of the “mirror-world,” a world in front of the mirror, whose geography works through reflections of parallel realities of peoples and objects on the surface of the globe: “Somehow she sleeps, or approximates it, through the famously bad hour and into another mirror-world morning” (Gibson 2003, 25)—the end of sleep, the waking in another morning of the mirror-world, turning off somewhere and turning on elsewhere in the world-system (Wallerstein 2004). We thus move from the uncertainty of being one but feeling like two to the optical illusion that causes the encounter with places on the other side of the world, fluctuating between dream and reality. These jet lag narratives are framed in fine by the place the individual occupies in this new fluid cartography of the globe, in which there are no centers or monopolies that curb the primacy of time. Global time is the same as that in which we project ourselves when we are in front of the screen and enter the web, which, like the world, is open at all hours (de Azúa 2007), beyond jet lag, in the “logic of timelessness” (Castells 2010, 497). In the space of flows that emerges from the map of time zones, the adjacent temporalities of global time are updated intermittently, according to the time zone in which we find ourselves. In this manner, an individual in a state of jet lag not only acts as a link between different places in the world connected by the individual’s movement, but incorporates this same nexus as a way, even if temporary, of being in the world. Jet lag is the syndrome that simultaneously accounts for some of the most distinctive symptoms of the global homo viator, recurrently identified as Ulysses, bird of passage, or perhaps most harmoniously, as nowhere man sitting in his nowhere land, in a nowhere time and a “nowhere state” (Iyer 2004). In the protocol of air traffic, in which everything appears perfectly mechanized and calculated, jet lag is a fundamentally destabilizing factor

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that deeply distorts the certainty of time and the anchoring of the individual to the real. Indeed, although passengers systematically accept, and sometimes even wish, that a change of space will occur during the journey, their attitude relative to the time variation involves an initial reluctance that is ultimately replaced by a willingness to negotiate. The shift to another time involves a momentary loss of bearings that leads to a state of vulnerability, or even instant awareness of the relativity of the ordinary world. Through this subjective and mental component, jet lag in stories of plane travel triggers a rush of psychological reactions, though not immediate physical ones, as one might expect. Although they are disturbed first, the biological clock and the effects of its malfunctioning, such as fatigue and insomnia, are not necessarily at the heart of stories that describe the state of the passenger. This, moreover, marks an important difference between fiction, and the neutral and functional language aviation professionals and airline companies use to refer to jet lag.22 Under the effects of jet lag, travelers experience vertigo and fluctuation, making them doubt the permanence and stability of the real, thrusting them into a haze, and translating into a sort of helplessness vis-à-vis themselves and the world. When it occurs, especially in the case of long-haul flights, jet lag is represented as a black hole that escapes any localization, even if it is determined by an underground (or terrestrial) geography. Additionally, jet lag is, in itself, a paradox: on the one hand, it supposes an excess of hours that cannot be immediately diluted in the time of the body; on the other, it derives from a time difference that cannot be bridged, as the latter has somehow evaporated. This vanishing of time lends to a description of jet lag in terms of the elusive, the ephemeral, and the unfathomable. Jet lag is perceived as a time of floating and attenuation of unique identity on the spectrum of multiple temporalities that define contemporary air travel. As such, it bears a greater degree of subjectivity than waiting, whose consistency is more palpable and objectively measurable. Travelers suspended like tightrope walkers on taut lines that are the meridians of the world become themselves “the meridian opposite” (Iyer 2004), without gravity attaching them to a unique time-space. As in Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” or “Melting Clocks,” time loses its usual linearity and multiplies in the form of various desynchronized yet contiguous clocks that 22 Take, for example, the Sweatlag program promoted by Delta Airlines to prevent, from as early as the phase of flight, the secondary effects of jet lag.

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project a fragmented, ambiguous, and ephemeral image of time. In its surrealist dimension, jet lag injects into air travel a rupture of the ordinary schema of time, so that we accept the aporia of “wak[ing] up in Tokyo today and arriv[ing] in LA last night” (Iyer 2001, 61).

References Articles and Essays Bissell, David, and Gillian Fuller (eds.). 2011. Stillness in a Mobile World. London and New York: Routledge. Blacklock, Mark. 2005. Recapturing the Dream: A Design History of New York’s JFK Airport. London: Mark Blacklock. Castells, Manuel. 2010. The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. with a new preface. Oxford and Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. de Azúa, Félix. 2007. Abierto a todas horas. Madrid: Alfaguara. Gordon, Alastair. 2004. Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Harley, Ross. 2011. Airportals: The Functional Significance of Stillness in the Junkspace of Airports. In Stillness in a Mobile World, ed. David Bissell and Gillian Fuller, 38–50. London and New York: Routledge. Iyer, Pico. 2001. The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home. London: Vintage. Iyer, Pico. 2004. In the Realm of Jet Lag. The New York Times Magazine, March 7. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/07/magazine/in-the-realmof-jet-lag.html. Accessed 25 June 2019. Jackson, Shannon, and Marianne Weems. 2015. The Builders Association: Performance and Media in Contemporary Theater. Cambridge: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pauls, Alan. 2013a. Noche en Opwjik: el cuento por su autor. Página 12, February 3. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/verano12/23-213128-2013-02-03. html. Accessed 25 June 2019. Powell, Laura. 2015. Business Traveller. Silence, Please. This Is an Airport. CNN Travel, July 6. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/silent-airports/ index.html. Accessed 25 June 2019. Serres, Michel. 1995. Angels: A Modern Myth, trans. Francis Cowper. Paris: Flammarion. Virilio, Paul. 1997. Open Sky. London and New York: Verso. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Ward, Rachel K. (ed.). 2004. Terminal 5. New York: Lukas & Sternberg.

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Films Castagnetti, Alexandre. 2013. Amour et turbulences. Paris: Révérence, Thelma Films, Manchester Films, and Universal Pictures International. Columbus, Chris. 1990. Home Alone. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox and Hughes Entertainment. Columbus, Chris. 1992. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox and Hughes Entertainment. Dréville, Jean. 1955. Escale à Orly. Munich and Paris: Corona Filmproduktion, Hoche Productions, and Marina Films. Gilliam, Terry. 1995. Twelve Monkeys. Universal City and Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, Atlas Entertainment, and Classico. Reitman, Jason. 2009. Up in the Air. Universal City and Culver City: DreamWorks Pictures, The Montecito Picture Company, and Cold Spring Pictures. Roos, Don. 2000. Bounce. Los Angeles: Miramax Films. Seaton, George. 1970. Airport. Universal City and Los Angeles: Universal Pictures and Ross Hunter Productions. Shadyac, Tom. 1997. Liar Liar. Universal City and Beverly Hills: Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment. Spielberg, Steven. 2004. The Terminal. Universal City: DreamWorks Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Parkes, and MacDonald Productions. Tati, Jacques. 1967. Playtime. Paris: Specta Films and Jolly Films. Thompson, Danièle. 2002. Décalage horaire. Paris: Alain Sarde. Tremper, Will. 1963. Die endlose Nacht. Berlin: Will Tremper Filmproduktion, Inter West Film, and Hanns Eckelkamp Filmproduktion. Tyrewala, Abbas. 2008. Jaane tu… Ya Jaane Na. Mumbai: Aamir Khan Productions and PVR Pictures.

Novels and short stories Baxter, Greg. 2015. Munich Airport. New York: Twelve. Carrión, Jorge. 2015. Los Turistas. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg. Dasgupta, Rana. 2005. Tokyo Cancelled. New York: Black Cat. Fresán, Rodrigo. 2017. The Invented Part, trans. Will Vanderhyden. Rochester: Open Letter Books. Gamboa, Santiago. 2002. Los impostores. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Gibson, William. 2003. Pattern Recognition. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Hailey, Arthur. 1968. Airport. New York: Doubleday. Houellebecq, Michel. 2003. Platform, trans. Frank Wynne. New York: Vintage Books. Josten, Husch. 2017. Hier sind Drachen. Munich: Piper Verlag. Kirn, Walter. 2002. Up in the Air. New York: Anchor Books.

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Luiselli, Valeria. 2014. Flying Home. In Sidewalks, 17–30. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Neuman, Andrés. 2016. How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America, trans. Jeffrey Lawrence. Brooklyn: Restless Books. Overath, Angelika. 2009. Flughafenfische. Munich: Luchterhand. Pauls, Alan. 2013b. Noche en Opwjik. Madrid: Anagrama (eBook). Roncagliolo, Santiago. 2010. Tan cerca de la vida. Madrid: Alfaguara. Sebald, Winfried Georg. 1998. The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 2009. Running Away, trans. Matthew B. Smith. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press.

Installations, Performances and Exhibitions Baas, Maarten. 2016. Real Time. Amsterdam: Schiphol. Cibic, Jasmina. 2006. Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Ljubljana: Brnik Airport. Lab[au]. 2012. Signal to Noise. Toronto: Luminato Festival. The Builders Association et al. 1999. Jet Lag. North Adams: Mass MoCA.

Commercials Airport Netflix Commercial Ad. YouTube video. Posted by Eunjin Kim. April 8, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv-tyVuZTls. Accessed 25 June 2019.

Operas Dove, Jonathan, and April De Angelis. 1998. Flight. Leipzig, London and New York: Edition Peters.

Songs Simple Plan. 2011. Jet Lag. In Get Your Heart On! New York: Warner Music Group. Zazie. 2007. Jet Lag. In Totem. Paris: Mercury Records.

CHAPTER 4

Luxury in the Sky with More Than Diamonds

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Luxury as an Air Travel Brand

Following a widely held cliché, our collective imaginary of air travel is closely associated with the display of luxury and opulence. This representation is so deeply rooted in our minds that it dominates our thinking about the airport and the airplane, and even the primary function of transportation that characterizes such infrastructure. The omnipresence of luxury in business class transforms the flight into an experience of consumption, rest, and escape, more in line with life on the ground than travel through the sky. It aims to establish an atmosphere that temporarily conceals and ultimately nullifies the aerial sensation of the flight. This assimilation of pomp and luxury in the Airworld dates back to the pioneering years of commercial aviation. The condition of privilege that defined the clientele of commercial airline companies between the 1950s and 1980s left a major mark on the industry and established patterns that inform the contemporary imaginary of aeromobility. For decades, the airplane was a means of travel reserved for a class of individuals and represented eo ipso a status symbol. As Chadeau (1996, 350–351) aptly observed, this unshakeable nexus between air travel and the fable of luxury should also be understood in light of another once fashionable type of transportation, the transatlantic cruise ship voyage.

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Durante, Air Travel Fiction and Film, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52651-1_4

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The aesthetics of the “superfluous” and the hyper-consumption of material goods encouraged during transoceanic crossings reserved for upperclass travelers quickly infused the style of travel by air. Common patterns in terms of appearance and “distinguished consumption” (Chadeau 1996, 353) thus spread from the sea to the sky, notably thanks to the efforts of American airline companies such as Pan Am, which sought to recreate the standards of the luxury classes of large international ships in the airplane cabin (Chadeau 1996, 353). Access to air transport ennobles and draws the flatteries of the beau monde, while air travel brings together celebrities who share the two interdependent traits of wealth and success. Following this doxa, established by films and archival images featuring scenes of departure and arrival of the famous, the Airworld has progressively been normalized as the showcase of an elite made up of upper-class individuals, such as prominent financial executives, politicians, and/or actors and actresses, who deserve to be welcomed aboard by the pampering flight attendants selected for their impeccable manners and physical appearance, conforming to the canons of elegance and beauty of each epoch. Despite the incessant transformation of airports and aeronautical infrastructures and services,1 this glittering and exclusive vision continues to be strongly rooted in our conception and representation of air travel. Numerous contemporary novels reveal, sometimes implicitly, a certain nostalgia for the luxury and prestige connoted by the air voyage since its inception. In an interview with Natalia Blanc, the Argentinean novelist Rodrigo Fresán expresses the discomfort that he shares with many others when he must pass through airports, nostalgically remembering the relatively recent era when airplanes were the privilege of a happy few, to the extent even of requiring a dress code similar to that expected at church on Sunday: “I am from a time when flying was a whole experience: you put on your best clothes, like going to Mass. Now it’s been quite trivialized, though I still think that flying is almost miraculous. I still do not understand how planes go up” (Blanc 2019).2

1 For a history of the evolution of the aircraft cabin, see Litton Hauß (2004). 2 My translation. In the original: “Soy de la época en la que volar era toda una expe-

riencia: te ponías tu mejor ropa, como para ir a misa. Ahora se ha banalizado bastante, aunque sigo pensando que volar es casi milagroso. Sigo sin entender cómo suben los aviones” (Blanc 2019).

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Fresán’s idealized reminiscence of the golden age of air travel implicitly refers to the democratization and trivialization of air transport, emphasizing clothing as a mark of distinction of those who once could fly. High heels, fashionable suits and clothes, hats and ties, and chic and expensive travel accessories comprised the prevalent, if not implicitly required, dress code for passengers in the era that Fresán recalls. Since the second half of the twentieth century, increasingly refined and spectacular terminal architecture and futuristically inspired interior design have significantly influenced our representation of this infrastructure and have become inseparable from conventional portrayals of air travel. Over the last few decades, and despite numerous metamorphoses driven by the need to accommodate the ever-increasing flow of passengers that emerged in the 1980s, the aerial world has maintained its distinctive appeal in terms of easy access to luxury, if only in terms of idle contemplation of high-end products.3 Contemporary fiction expresses this implicit and widespread expectation of luxury in the context of air mobility. Even in stories that depict passengers occupying the economy class seats in the back of the airplane, a sense of luxury persists, expressed in the form of a disenchanted nostalgia for a prototypical voyage characterized by great elegance and comfort. Other works of fiction, such as Fresán’s The Invented Part, Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014), and Charles Dantzig’s Dans un avion pour Caracas,4 provide examples of the lack, or even the mourning, of luxury. As the characters chronicle the inconveniences that they face, they generally refer to an overall decline in aerial luxury and the degradation of air travel conditions. The frequent flyer portrayed in The Invented Part complains about the food served on board, which always tastes the same: “(chicken/pasta/meat/fish, of uniform aerodynamic flavor) but with less space between the seats” (Fresán 2017, 455). References to packaged meals and limited menu options signal a considerable drop in the level of traveler satisfaction, echoed by other fictional characters who are equally

3 On access to “easy luxury,” see Thubert et al. (2017). For a history of airplane meals, see Foss (2015). 4 Similar, even more vehement appraisals appear in many other contemporary works of fiction. See, for example, the novels Platform by Michel Houellebecq (2003, 22–23), Munich Airport by Greg Baxter (2015, 1–2, 49), Bilbao-New York-Bilbao by Kirmen Uribe (2009, 22), and the story “En contra de los aviones” by Juan Murillo (2011, 108).

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disappointed by the quality of service, the narrowness of the seats, and the lack of legroom.5 Without mincing words, the protagonist of the French novel Dans un avion pour Caracas provides an almost infernal description of the cabin atmosphere and the abuses of air travel in economy class: hunched-over travelers “protecting themselves from the air conditioning with a blanket that is too short,” others stiff “against the headrest of their seat,” or straining to look out at the view “over the shoulders of seated passengers” (Dantzig 2011, 213).6 This promiscuity of bodies and ambient odors clearly contrasts with the exaltation of luxury as preached by airline company commercials. The narrator of Rachel Cusk’s Outline also aptly captures the defining nuisances of economy class: In the juddering cabin the lights flickered fitfully on; there was the sound of the doors opening and slamming, and tremendous clattering noises, and people were stirring, talking, standing up. A man’s voice was talking over the intercom; there was a smell of coffee and food; the air hostesses stalked purposefully up and down the narrow carpeted aisle and their nylon stockings made a rasping sound as they passed. (2015, 6)

When portrayed as an infernal circle filled with the cries of the damned and with unpleasant scents and noises, the aerial world temporarily loses its appeal, as it is described using only pejorative adjectives that reflect the degeneration of the cabin landscape and the minimal services provided to the passengers.7 Luxury is visibly expelled if not eradicated from the

5 Another example echoing Fresán’s can be found in a passage of Kirmen Uribe’s novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao, whose protagonist describes an implicit disappointment with the two-option menu provided by the flight attendant: “‘Pasta or meat,’ she asked us while handing out dinner trays from the cart. […] Renata and I chose pasta. Red wine to drink. Danke. Bitte.” [My translation. In the original: “‘Pasta o carne’, nos ha preguntado la azafata del avión mientras reparte las bandejas de la cena con un carrito. […] Renata y yo hemos elegido pasta. Para beber vino tinto. Danke. Bitte” (Uribe 2009, 106)]. 6 My translation. In the original: “se protégeant de la climatisation par une couverture trop courte”; “contre la têtière d’un fauteuil”; “par-dessus l’épaule des passagers assis” (Dantzig 2011, 213). 7 The Emirates commercial starring Jennifer Aniston plays exemplarily on this nightmarish dimension of economy class travel. Believing she is flying as usual in business class, the actress walks through the airplane cabin in a bathrobe, holding her toiletries, searching in vain for a shower and a bar. Without a response from the airplane staff, who are stunned by such a request, Aniston begins to panic, only to realize it was just

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rows of economy class, and ceases to be a utopian lure as it is negated by the fixtures, appearances, attitudes, and behaviors of the passengers and personnel.8 Thus emptied of its aura of glamor, the air voyage becomes a nightmare that degrades the body and the spirit, hardly an occasion for the performance of opulence. These narratives of shortages of luxury reaffirm, albeit negatively, the point to which the stereotype of elegance and chic associated with air travel is crystallized in the minds and habits of passengers. The passage of time and the rampant market of low-cost companies notwithstanding, the flamboyant fantasy of luxury and the elite continues to shape our perceptions of the Airworld. And although the demography of airports has greatly diversified over the last forty years with the democratization of air travel due to globalization and hypermobility, luxury remains in the background as an underlying cliché that applies to airline companies on all continents, including low-cost companies that aim to match the services offered by their competitors.9 In fact, the expectation of luxury fundamentally conditions, if not stigmatizes, contemporary “airportness” which, according to Christopher Schaberg (2017), is equivalent to the feelings and meanings that we naturally attribute to this place and its annexes. Due to the dominance of luxury, the current discourse on airports and air travel often invites analogies to other contemporary lavish places such as high-end shopping malls or five-star hotels. Through their shared aesthetics and common iconography, airport terminals and, by extension, airplane cabins form part of the “phantasm of weightlessness and mobility in the artificial paradises of consumption, where people a nightmare upon waking up comfortably stretched out in a spacious and shiny leather seat, ready to go to the well-provisioned bar awaiting her in the middle of the onboard business lounge (Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R 2015). 8 In this regard, Nina Katchadourian’s project “Seat Assignment” (2010 and ongoing)

provides a good example. The piece, which consists of photographs, videos, and sound works, is entirely produced in flight, using makeshift materials of little value available in the airplane cabin. She uses the camera on her mobile phone to take pictures of pieces of pretzels, chips, and peanuts, or small packets of snacks, napkins, toilet seat covers, and inflatable pillows, to provide an original and hyperrealist representation of the air voyage. She revisits the airplane cabin with irony and the absence of a filter, showing the other side of luxurious travel. See http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/photography/seatassig nment.php, and http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/photography/sa-catalog.php. 9 See Alexandre Friedrich (2014), who fittingly comments on the progressive alignment of the low-cost British company Easyjet, with a higher quality of travel that seeks to follow the standards typical of legacy carriers.

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sample a personal identity based on corporate material ” (De Cauter 2004, 44). These observations explain why references to air voyages unleash a series of reminiscences that paradoxically fall outside the imaginary of flight or the air, and are instead more connected to retail and consumer society. A fragment of dialogue from Fouad Laroui’s novel provides a perfect illustration of the sort of instantaneous reactions that the word “airplane” provokes even outside of a strictly aeronautical context. The plane is immediately associated with the ease of business class or the exotic beauty of flight attendants, and therefore conjures a luxurious experience that reaches beyond the vast distance that it allows passengers to cover in a short time period: —The plane? Ah, yes! But of course! And you are traveling in business? Automatically upgraded to first class? Air France, Lufthansa, British Airways! Garuda and her pretty Indonesians! Cathay Pacific: the name is a poem! And you will stay in luxury hotels in all the capitals of the world… Room service… Body care against stress… A double, triple, even quadruple bed! (Laroui 2014, 58)10

This inventory of airline company names and services condenses allusions to and illusions of the airplane. Far from referring to the power or the safety of this or that model of plane, the character alludes to the comfort of business class and indulges in amusing considerations that express a certain fetishism of the air journey. The mental association established between the first-class flight and luxury hotels is also striking since its combination of hotel luxury and air travel reflects the transfer between luxury infrastructures on the ground and the passenger cabin in the air. Additionally, in the context of Laroui’s novel, these remarks are all the more significant as they are uttered sarcastically by a former frequent flyer who decides to give up the nomadic life and, thus, the ephemeral pleasures flaunted by the legacy airlines. The Airworld’s absorption and refraction of luxury trends, cultivating and exacerbating a true culture of opulence, also reveals the permeability 10 My translation. In the original: “L’avion? Mais oui! Mais bien sûr! Et vous voyagerez en business ! Surclassé d’office en première! Air France, la Lufthansa, British Airways! Garuda et ses jolies Indonésiennes! Cathay Pacific: le nom est un poème! Et vous logerez dans des hôtels de luxe dans toutes les capitales du monde… Room service… Soins du corps, contre le stress… Lit double, triple, voire quadruple!” (Laroui 2014, 58)

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and versatility of this environment that is so easily penetrated by influences outside the specific domain of air transport. The terminal thus constantly changes, becoming not only a luxury department store, but also, and sometimes even simultaneously, a museum or a concert hall. This redefining of airport infrastructure into an “informal setting where the experience of art is often presented in a casual and non-threatening way” (Szekely 2012, 34) should also be understood as an extension of the function of luxury that defines this place. The implicit intertwining between “luxury brands [and] the arts,” illustrated over time by sponsorships and collaborations (McNeill and Riello 2016, 265–270), as well as enviable architectural configurations in terms of volume and light, contribute to the increasingly common use of this setting as a “housing” for the exhibition of artwork, performances, and interactive multimedia installations.11 This colonization of luxury, operating through competing high-end brands in airport shopping areas (McNeill and Riello 2016, 277–278), also appears in the growing development of rejuvenation spaces and services for passengers in transit. The ostentatious display of luxury and the enchantment, if not dependence, that it casts have strongly affected this new trend of the airport terminal becoming a destination in and of itself (Falcus 2018), equipped with extravagant amenities and infrastructures. As Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk observes in Flights (2018), airports now offer high-end services that increasingly redefine them as places of entertainment and escape:

11 Particularly since the early 1990s, numerous free artistic experiences have been offered to connecting passengers in airports around the world (Carmichael 1991). Some examples include the collection of two hundred works of art, including masterpieces by Miró, Picasso, Calder, and Dalí, possessed by the JFK International Airport; the initiative of Turkish Airlines in partnership with the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art to host three temporary exhibitions a year in the business class lounge of the capital’s international airport, presenting a selection of works from the museum; the year-round “Santa Cecilia al volo” concerts organized by the Rome Airports (Aeroporti di Roma) in collaboration with the musical institution Accademia nazionale di Santa Cecilia; the creation of the “large immersive multimedia system” in the LAX Tom Bradley International Terminal in 2015 (https://momentfactory.com/work/all/all/los-angeles-airport-lax); and the surprise performance of “The Beatles LOVE” by Cirque du Soleil dancers in the McCarran International Airport in 2014, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the band’s arrival in Las Vegas (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paiTYRLfxcM).

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They have gardens and promenades; they instruct: at Amsterdam’s Schiphol you can see excellent copies of Rembrandt, and there is an airport in Asia that has a museum of religion […] We have access to good hotels and a wide variety of restaurants and bars from inside airports. […] There are gyms, places that offer both traditional and Eastern massage, hairstylists and customer service representatives from banks and mobile phone companies. […] Sometimes they host readings and book signings for travelers. (Tokarczuk 2018, 55)

The contemporary locus amoenus of the Airworld absorbs the current imaginary of well-being and luxury and promotes its own models of wealth and style.12 The functional areas of the airport, whether the checkin and immigration counters or the runways, temporarily fade behind the optical illusion produced by pleasant and less degrading zones, such as those Tokarczuk describes in Flights. The terminal is thus no longer just a threshold to elsewhere, but more and more a place that is out of the ordinary, which immerses travelers in a land of milk and honey where the pleasures of the senses, body, and mind are satisfied at will, provided that they have the means and the time.13 The layout of luxury in the Airworld is, in this sense, expressly linked to the irreducible place occupied by the materiality of the body within such infrastructure. Whether food, areas to rest, or services for the physical well-being of the traveler, the luxury air market is clearly shaped by the bodily dimension of the passenger. The unmistakable entity of the body triggers a demand for a wide range of products and services, from the primary to the frivolous, but nevertheless all relevant for the personalized treatment of the individual who wishes to stand out from the crowd and be cared for in their singularity. More generally, the paradigm of luxury in the Airworld gives anonymous travelers an opportunity to differentiate themselves from the masses and publicly identify as members of the elite whose social status 12 For a study of the rhetorical strategies of airline companies, see Blanco Gómez (2012). 13 More and more frequently, airport departure halls have resting areas equipped with ergonomic chairs and spas offering leisure and care services, as well as the sale of specific objects for body relaxation such as pillows, kits, blankets, or masks. The appearance within airports of stationary bicycles that allow users to charge their phone or computer by pedaling, together with the opening of an increasing number of fitness centers or yoga studios, reflect the attention given to the well-being of the bodies of passengers in transit. On the problematic status and experience of the body in the Airworld, see Shih Pearson (2018).

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and purchasing power allow them to attract the exclusive attention of air personnel. The action of turning left as opposed to right upon boarding the airplane marks a hierarchical, if not hegemonic, bifurcation, which lasts until the doors open after landing. The benefit of luxury is not only the privilege of comfort in airport lounges and flight, but also a flattering of the travelers’ ego, boosting a sense of self-importance and self-achievement and providing the opportunity to distinguish themselves from the herd. The Concorde flights of the past and the first-class suites and private jets of today are perhaps the greatest expressions of this desire for exclusivity and luxury which requires traveling apart and in a unique fashion.14 Indeed, with the Concorde, “brand identity quickly became a lifestyle” (Azerrad 2018, 114). Beyond the airliner’s iconic design and supersonic speed, it was above all the high standard of refinement and luxury aboard that made this aircraft and its style of travel exceptional. The national pride of the French and British even after its retirement from the sky in 2003, the Concorde still symbolizes ultimate luxury on board in all of its details, from the elaborately decorated tableware to the fine wines and vintage champagnes offered to the select passengers, and the delicacies served during sumptuous meals featuring caviar, lobster, or salmon.15 The Concorde on the one hand, and the emergence of first and business classes on the other, demonstrate that the imaginary of comfort and luxury goes hand in hand with a select group of airport clientele characterized by very high needs and living standards. The offerings of the Airworld, including partnerships between banks, financial companies, credit cards and airlines, or loyalty programs to earn miles, are primarily designed for passengers of superior traveling classes.16 Such services allow companies to increase their sales, but demand the guarantee of a certain

14 Although I do not reflect further on first-class cabins or private jets, given that the latter are not common in the contemporary works of fiction studied here, I should note that these two types of air travel are increasingly prevalent. 15 On the question of luxury aboard the Concorde, see Azerrad (2018). 16 One could add to this list priority services allowing travelers to cut in at the front of

the line, access to “privileged check-in” operations, or reserved spaces at the airport that “pursue or maintain high status,” such as lounges or elite clubs (Wiesel and Freestone 2019, 231). The possibility of “buying priority” provided by an increasing number of airlines forms part of the top services offered to exclusive “higher-paying customers” (231).

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level of quality and comfort. This upgrading is clearly visible in the advertising images produced by airlines and in works of fiction. Moroccan novelist Fouad Laroui underlines, among other aspects, the importance of a recognized population that dictates the tone of air travel and imposes certain standards of style and behavior by their mannerisms in the cabin: “He glanced around the cabin of the plane once again. Everywhere, businessmen focused on magazines, reports, screens… It dawned on him that they all looked like him, they wore the same dark suits, the same white shirts, the same ties” (Laroui 2014, 10–11).17 Such a panoramic view of the interior of the plane insists on criteria of differentiation, particularly relative to the travelers’ clothing and their dependence on high-tech devices. This description illustrates the homogeneity of business class passengers and their unique relationship with their workplace in the sky, in which they replicate the daily gestures they perform in their offices on the ground. This executive caste, accustomed to flying, is concerned with the spaciousness of the personal space assigned to them, the quality of the five-course meal offered, and the variety of the in-flight entertainment programs. These travelers are acclimatized to the experience of privileged circumstances, and show no surprise upon taking their seats aboard. Travelers faithfully repeat the ritual of the enjoyment of luxury without giving any apparent signs of the satisfaction that they derive from this artificial environment that is entirely designed for their convenience. Their behavior follows an established protocol that is both neutral and nonchalant, resembling that of the femme fatale in Gabriel García Márquez’s story “El avión de la Bella Durmiente” (“Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane”). Márquez’s character ignores the polite gestures of the onboard personnel, takes her seat, sets up a cozy nest, and sleeps through the duration of the Madrid-New York transatlantic flight, emblematic of these luxury norms. For her, the sumptuousness of the plane is a given that tacitly forms part of her travel protocol, as reflected by her habitual movements that, for lack of space, could hardly be reproduced in an economy class seat:

17 My translation. In the original: “Il jeta de nouveau un regard circulaire dans la cabine de l’avion. Partout, des hommes d’affaires penchés sur des revues, des rapports, des écrans… Il lui apparut qu’ils lui ressemblaient tous, qu’ils portaient le même costume sombre, la même chemise blanche, la même cravate” (Laroui 2014, 10–11).

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In the seat next to mine, beside the window, Beauty was taking possession of her space with the mastery of an expert traveler. […] She settled in as if she were going to live there for many years, putting each thing in its proper place and order, until her seat was arranged like the ideal house, where everything was within reach. In the meantime, a steward brought us our welcoming champagne. […] At last she pulled down the shade on the window, lowered the back of her seat as far as it would go, covered herself to the waist with a blanket […], put on a sleeping mask […], and then slept without a single pause […], for the eight eternal hours and twelve extra minutes of the flight to New York. (García Márquez 1993, 57–58)

These examples borrowed from contemporary fiction show that, like many other contemporary infrastructures, the Airworld is increasingly designed and constructed according to a logic of “capsularization” (De Cauter 2004, 46), whereby we live in and domesticate available spaces as if those spaces temporarily constitute our home.18 In the safety of this “home-away-from-home” (Fuller and Harley 2005, 38) composed of the terminal, the plane, and the nooks and nests that we build or find, in flying we indulge in a true cocooning experience. Like Márquez’s character, we try to isolate ourselves within a “shell of safety” (Popcorn 1992, 27), a simulacrum of an artificial interim dwelling that gives the illusion of temporary withdrawal from the prying eyes of others, and of comfortable isolation in an “ideal house” with the advantage of having everything within arm’s reach (Fig. 1).19 Such references to the sensation of satisfaction and privacy granted by access to comfort are present in many air travel scenes, which describe 18 In this regard, consider the experiment carried out by IKEA in the summer of 2012 at the Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, refitting Terminal 3 as an entirely free temporary “IKEA lounge” for families with children traveling in economy class. The aim of this initiative was to offer a large rest area open to all, equipped with IKEA beds, sofas, armchairs, tables, lamps, and rugs, placed within the fictive environment of different rooms in a house (Frearson 2012). 19 Airports have increasingly chosen to install ad hoc structures within their terminals, whose primary function is to guarantee privacy and relaxation. Among the particularly ambitious structures for their design and scale are the enormous cocoons which, since 2014, have been located in the Heydar Aliyev International Airport in Baku, Azerbaijan. Inspired by principles of local hospitality, these “custom-made wooden” cocoons of different sizes, designed by the architectural firm Autoban Red Dot, endeavor to produce a warm and humane environment and places of either interaction or retreat (https://www.architekturzeitung.com/architecture-magazine/3502-hey dar-aliyev-international-airport.html).

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Fig. 1 Kerem Sanlıman: ¸ Autoban Cocoons. Baku Heydar Aliyev International Airport

the moment of acclimatization and familiarization the passenger experiences, either upon entering the airplane or during the flight. For instance, the story of Ignacio Padilla’s main character, who is accustomed to the standards of economy class, emblematically brings into stark contrast the enormous disparity when he is upgraded to first class thanks to the miles he has accumulated as a professional frequent flyer on his countless transatlantic flights. Settled at the heart of this artificially cozy atmosphere, the body enjoys the comfort, ease, and idleness of a luxury hotel. From the size of the bathrooms to fine cabin linens, personal hygiene products, travel accessory kits, the à-la-carte menu, and entertainment options, everything is thought out for the well-being of the body and mind of the “hyper-cocooned consumer” (Popcorn 1992, 30), and bears little or no comparison to the space and service limitations of economy class: Things are very different when you travel in first class, regardless of what flight or type of plane. Here you can take a full bath, as if you were in a luxury hotel, with fluffy cloth towels and lotion that smells like man of the world or baby cream. What’s more, in first class they give you free orange

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juice, extra breakfast, and some very comfortable and relaxing slippers. You have a television all to yourself where you can choose among a hundred films, exclusive video games, and thirty music channels. (Padilla 2017)20

The feelings of relaxation and material enjoyment Padilla describes evoke a relatively ordinary state of fulfillment for customers of higher travel classes. The seats, lights, vanity kits, and gadgets provided to them are designed to make the environment in the cabin soigné, cozy, and welcoming. The mention of drinks and dishes served aboard and the reference to accessories and personal care offered to travelers reflect the impatient search for a niche of one’s own, where voyagers can finally momentarily abandon themselves to a form of “cocooning, [equivalent to a] hypertrophy of the private sphere” (De Cauter 2004, 46). Entertainment on board, including films, video games, and radio programs, displayed on an individual screen, clearly adds to the sensorial experience aimed at recreating a sort of “mobile cocoon” (Popcorn 1992, 30). Isolation and insulation thus conjoin in the deliberate soundproofing of the proximate environment. Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air, an iconic tale of a contemporary frequent traveler, repeatedly features a similar appraisal. Despite his daily air travel routine, Kirn’s protagonist looks for the opportunity to recreate a “little nest,” precarious as it may be, with the help of a pillow, blanket, and a few extra inches of space furtively taken from the neighbor in the row behind. Ultimately, his attempt to control the surrounding space fails, as the nest simulacrum proves inadequate: I ask for an extra pillow and a blanket and shift my seat to its fully reclined position. […] I twist shut the air nozzle blowing on my forehead and drain a second glass of grapefruit juice […]. I can’t get comfortable in my little nest. My feet have swollen inside the cowboy boots, but I fear the odor if I kick them off. (Kirn 2002, 106–107)

20 My translation. In the original: “La cosa es muy distinta cuando viajas en primera clase, no importa en qué vuelo ni en qué tipo de avión. Entonces sí que puedes bañarte completo, como si estuvieras en un hotel de lujo, con toallas de tela esponjosa y loción que huele a hombre de mundo o a crema para bebé. Además, en primera clase te dan gratis jugo de naranja, desayuno extra y unas pantuflas de lo más cómodas y pachonas. Tienes para ti solo una televisión donde puedes elegir entre cien películas, videojuegos exclusivos y treinta canales de música” (Padilla 2017).

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This need to re-establish a feeling of home inside the cabin is a paradigm also found in numerous airline commercials, which fittingly emphasize the prophylactic dimension of the time-space of the airplane trip. Such insistence on comfort and coziness, conveyed by the figure of the flight attendant who cares for travelers, gently removing their glasses or tucking them in, forms part of a precise strategy on the part of companies who seek to personalize the aseptic space of the plane by making it more welcoming and intimate. The cabin seat alone emblematically embodies this obsession with comfort on board. Avoiding the piling up of bodies and organizing a pleasant management of the cabin so as to transform the assigned space into a relaxing and soothing nook are the prerogatives of airlines who seek to improve their customer service by investing in the ergonomic performance of the seats (Bissell 2008).

2

Semiotics of Luxury

The choice of the color blue also contributes to this artificial atmosphere of luxury, protection, and relaxation within the enclosure of the cabin. Surrounded and cradled by the softness of blue, which through the open windows spreads from the inside to the outside of the airplane and vice versa, the passenger switches into “airplane mode,” ready to savor the moment of downtime granted by the flight. Known for its soothing qualities, this color inundates the Airworld. Blue is found in all its tones and shades precisely with the intent of producing a soothing atmosphere; it is tinted and soft-edged, making it conducive to the escapism of travel, the emergence of the calm daydreamer, and the contemplation of the sky and the earth from above.21 In its boundless versatility, the color blue and 21 Gaston Bachelard’s appraisal of the semantics and evocative power of the blue sky as a leitmotif of many western poets perfectly applies in this sense to the context of air travel, and the frequent contemplation of the color of the sky. A vast number of contemporary “flying narratives” specifically refer to the observation of blue, often inseparable from the poetic qualities of immateriality and “elusive sublimation” that Bachelard (1988, 165) identifies in his study of the topos of the blue sky in poetry. In parallel, airline advertising also frequently employs the paradigm of blue. Examples include, among others, the 1993 British Airways commercial “Club World,” and the United Airlines advertising videos “Orcas” (1992), “Kaleidoscope” (1994), and “Onboard” (2013), all with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue playing in the background. We should also mention Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde’s permanent installation “Beyond” (2016) in Departure Hall 3 of the Amsterdam Schiphol International Airport. Roosegaarde’s 110-meter-long, 10-centimeterthick, 160-billion-pixel wall gives passengers the immersive experience of a compact blue

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Fig. 2 Studio Roosegaarde. Press Room: Beyond (http://pressroom.studioroo segaarde.net, Creative Commons Non-Commercial applies to all material)

its many variants—bluish, pale blue, navy, electric blue, indigo—predominate in cabin furnishings and accessories.22 Sometimes light, sometimes dark, it standardizes as much as it calms, supporting the cocooning experience on board while enhancing the surrounding elegance, whether in the carpeting on the floor, the upholstery of the seats, the fabric of the curtains, the tepidity of the lights, or the uniforms of the staff (Fig. 2). As novelist Greg Baxter explains in Munich Airport, blue is omnipresent in airports and airplanes because this reassuring and pure color evokes and connotes serenity. It banishes fears of flight or falling, and fosters a feeling of security, so coveted in the situation of air voyage: Munich Airport is a blue airport, there is blue everywhere. The blue is a serious and efficient blue but also an ebullient blue, full of promise and optimism and reassurance, a blue that says, Everything will be on time,

sky with scattered white clouds. The use of 3D enhances the density of the blue of the sky and the vaporous white of the clouds, which become palpable to the passerby. 22 The blue palette is also similarly ubiquitous in the large majority of airline logos around the world, beginning with Pan Am (Tungate 2018, 104).

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society is safe, planes become faster and faster and also burn cleaner and cleaner, our floors are bacteria-free, the sandwiches are fresh, only beautiful people fly, all destinations are beautiful, everybody is getting wealthier and taller, we are conquering our weaknesses […]. The blue is numinous, full of depth, somehow both spiritual and electromagnetic. (Baxter 2015, 47)

Baxter’s semiotic study of blue highlights the prophylactic connotations of this color. Blue is idyllic, hygienic, and hypnotic, instilling transparency and confidence. With the stroke of a brush, the entire landscape of the air trip becomes more beautiful, temporarily allaying passenger fears. This color reconciles disconnection and “retreat in the sky,” inviting the sort of “mini-Sabbath in the skies” (Iyer 2014, 25 and 57) that the traveler seeks when rising above the clouds, wrapped up in his “flying Cocoon” (Popcorn 1992, 31). With these virtues in mind, blue is an integral part of both the ritualization of luxury and the need for protection and rejuvenation that plagues the passenger in flight. Luxury, comfort, and cocooning are thus three constants of the air travel imaginary that can be read under the common denominator of blue, the dominant and holistic hue of the Airworld. The other color that defines the luxurious environment of airports is white. It homogenizes the terminal landscape and subliminally guarantees a certain standard of cleanliness, transparency, and clarity. A particular location in the airport epitomizes the profusion of luxury, and white, in line with the reiteration of opulence and ostentation that characterizes the imaginary of the air transport infrastructure. This location is the duty-free shopping area, which, by definition, offers the ephemeral temptations associated with the acquisition of products such as perfumes and cosmetics, drinks, tobacco, and jewelry. This commercial wing of the airport, full of signs and bright lights, intensifies the relationship of air travel with luxury and consumption. Duty-free shops are inevitable settings in many novels and films that, at some point, play out within a terminal of the world. They are often described as an excess of items, sections, and illuminated signage that dazzle passengers on their obligatory route toward the departing gate. Jérôme Game’s description of the duty-free shop in his novel Salle d’embarquement (2017) demonstrates the excess and amorphous abundance that are commonly perceived as the defining features of this showcase of luxury: “Different signs, most often for luxury or last-minute shopping, announce one after the other silk

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scarves, precious bottles, chocolates, watches, it sparkles” (Game 2017, 67).23 In both reality and fiction, the airport terminal is in itself a trademark that guarantees, in terms of appearance, a flamboyant décor conducive to the impulses and joys of temptation and consumption of superfluous goods. In this regard, a striking parallel between a lavish setting and the splendor of plentiful and well-kept sections of luxury stores is paradigmatically drawn from the very beginning of French-Hungarian author Nina Yargekov’s Double nationalité (2016). The novel’s protagonist is impressed by the lighting and glamorous atmosphere of the terminal where she has just landed, which she immediately compares to a Parisian shopping mecca. The effect produced by this initial description in the novel is all the more destabilizing because only one comparative aspect is initially made explicit to the reader: There is something that is amiss at the Galeries Lafayette. You examine the lighting, scrutinize the vendors, sniff the temperature. Among the customers, so many tourists, it must be spring or summer […]. You see perfumes, mascaras, body lotions, and sausages. Taken separately, each element seems irreproachably normal, and yet the whole is somehow strangely deformed and quite coarse, the ceiling is too low, the labels askew, the music dissonant, and then the sausage, you can’t demonstrate it in a strictly scientific way, but you have the intuition that it does not really belong in the perfume section. (Yargekov 2016, 11)24

The landscape and sensory experiences created by the wide range of cosmetic products, the regulated temperature, the lighting imitating

23 My translation. In the original: “Différentes enseignes, le plus souvent de luxe ou relevant d’emplettes de dernière minute se succèdent à base d’écharpes en soie, flacons précieux, chocolat, horlogerie, ça brille” (Game 2017, 67). 24 My translation. In the original: “Il y a quelque chose qui cloche aux Galeries Lafayette. Vous examinez l’éclairage, détaillez les vendeuses, humez la température. Parmi les clients, quantité de touristes, on doit être au printemps ou en été pour qu’ils soient si nombreux […]. Vous voyez des parfums, des mascaras, des laits pour le corps et des saucissons. Pris isolément, chaque élément vous semble d’une normalité irréprochable, pourtant l’ensemble est comme atteint d’une déformation étrange et très disgracieuse, le plafond est trop bas, les étiquettes posées de travers, la musique de fond dissonante, et puis le saucisson, vous ne sauriez le démontrer d’une manière résolument scientifique, cependant vous avez l’intuition qu’il n’est pas réellement à sa place au rayon parfumerie” (Yargekov 2016, 11).

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daylight, and the flawless appearance of the salespeople suggest that the “something that is amiss” the narrator observes may reflect her biased impression, as the décor appears to perfectly correspond to the interior of the Galeries Lafayette. Yet, as time passes, the perception of the place conforms less and less to the upscale Parisian department store. Then the great discrepancy appears, putting an end to the analogy hitherto unequivocally maintained: You look upwards, seeking the stained glass dome, and realize that you are not at the Galeries Lafayette but in the tax-free shop of an airport, darn, you were confused, although in your defense there was a touch of resemblance in terms of atmosphere. So that is why you have a suitcase, you were wondering what you were doing pulling that rectangular parallelepiped along behind you. (Yargekov 2016, 12)25

The comparison of the two places, ultimately betrayed by the absence of the majestic cupola of the Galeries Lafayette, is justified by the narrator’s unhesitating observation of the strong resemblance in “terms of atmosphere” between the department store and the unnamed airport terminal. It is only through the suitcase, an accessory not intrinsic to the place, that the setting as a whole is placed in the proper perspective and is finally explicitly identified as the “tax-free shop” of the airport. Such a mental and visual superimposition of these two places, which produces a trompe l’œil if not déjà vu, is not, however, unique to the character of Yargekov’s novel. Benjamin C., the frequently traveling protagonist of Game’s Salle d’embarquement, makes some strangely identical observations, albeit from a male point of view. Benjamin C. is awed by the entry to the duty-free shop, especially after the excruciating experience of security checks, and suddenly seized by the glaring lights that welcome him into this sector of the Hong Kong terminal, giving rise to a feeling of intimidation due to his casual clothes, which he has readjusted after going through the body scanner. Here “everything is pink and white and

25 My translation. In the original: “Vous levez les yeux à la recherche de la coupole aux

vitraux et vous comprenez, vous n’êtes pas aux Galeries Lafayette mais dans la boutique détaxée d’un aéroport, zut vous aviez confondu, on admettra à votre décharge qu’en termes d’ambiance cela se ressemble un brin. C’est donc pour cela que vous avez une valise, vous vous demandiez aussi ce que vous fabriquiez à tirer ce parallélépipède rectangle derrière vous” (Yargekov 2016, 12).

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shines. It smells of musk, sweetness” (Game 2017, 106–107).26 Passengers immersed in the beauty salon-like atmosphere of rose-beige colors reminiscent of “finely powdered skin” (Game 2017, 106) are focused on their purchases, their contemplative silence broken only by “the noise of credit card receipts being printed out” (Game 2017, 107).27 From one country to another, major brands of travel, beauty, and luxury products populate airports around the world. The Airworld, designed according to the commercial logic of the lures of luxury, encourages consumption of high-end products and rewards the loyalty of wealthy customers. Credit cards, which provide access to exclusive airport lounges around the world, as well as frequent flyer programs, are levers intended to foster the consumption of fictitious values such as miles and superfluous duty-free shopping. These methods of intensifying the acquisition of luxury goods spread without resistance to the duty-free shops of the airport and to the airplane itself. The shopping experience within the confined space of the cabin is, however, no longer described under an aura of refinement, but, on the contrary, reveals an enslavement to hyperconsumption. In the absence of a gleaming infrastructure that showcases merchandise and luxury icons, the descriptions of the tax-free products sold in the cabin are more akin to long lists that characters unfurl over the course of the narrative and that take inventory, in detached and dull tones, of the uselessness of the articles. A particularly significant example of such passages that resemble sales catalogues more than narrative segments appears in Charles Dantzig’s Un avion pour Caracas. The narrator is surprised by the types of products sold on board, and wonders both about their inanity and about the company’s absurd decision to offer them in the duty-free shop at such exorbitant prices: The chief flight attendant announces that the tax-free shop is open. Who might like a braided steel diving watch or a bottle opener “in material tested by NASA?” Who still has this 1978 alpha male style? In Noms à vendre, Xabi says that the Institute of Meteorology in Berlin, who decides the names of the storms in Western Europe, also sells them. They are priced

26 My translation. In the original: “tout est rose et blanc et brille. Ça sent le musc, le sucré” (Game 2017, 106–107). 27 My translation. In the original: “grain de peau finement poudré” (Game 2017, 106); “le bruit des imprimantes de facturettes de cartes de crédit” (107).

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199 euros a low-pressure system, 299 euros a cyclone. “I wonder who are the people that can give money to an organization to buy something that does not belong to them and, what’s more, is immaterial.” (Dantzig 2011, 135)28

This haphazard list format is also inspired, in a sort of parody, by traveler characters’ reading of airline magazines, which feed the perverse machine of air luxury by encouraging compulsive consumption during flights and layovers.29 In international fiction, references to in-flight magazines are systematically accompanied by immediate allusions to the composite selection of goods that fill their advertising pages. The space that literary narratives give to this type of media is a reflection of the role that such publications play in terms of marketing and promotion of a certain standard of life of the jet-setter and globe-trotter (Thurlow and Jaworski 2003, 601). Numerous characters are depicted flipping through one or another of these magazines. Sometimes they are described at the moment the characters succumb to the temptation to buy, and other times when, bored by the magazines’ uninteresting content, they look away from the page to contemplate the blue of the sky. Yet in both cases, without variation, the emphasis is on the pro-luxury and consumerist discourse that this medium fosters.30 The phrasing of magazine descriptions immediately takes the form of an inventory and the tone of a manifesto of elite global culture. For example, while carelessly leafing through the British Airways magazine, Sandra, a character in the second novel of Agustín Fernández Mallo’s trilogy Nocilla Dream, contemplates the aerial panorama she sees from the plane window: 28 My translation. In the original: “La chef de cabine annonce que la boutique en détaxe est ouverte. Qui peut vouloir de montres de plongée à bracelet en acier tressé ou d’ouvre-bouteilles ‘en matière expérimentée par la NASA?’ Qui a encore ce style de macho à cravate de 1978? Dans Noms à vendre, Xabi raconte que l’Institut de météorologie de Berlin, qui décide des noms des tempêtes en Europe occidentale, les vend aussi. C’est tarifé. 199 euros la dépression, 299 euros le cyclone. ‘Je me demande quelles sont les personnes qui peuvent donner de l’argent à un organisme pour lui acheter quelque chose qui ne lui appartient pas et qui, de plus, est immatériel’” (Dantzig 2011, 135). 29 See, for example, Kirn (2002, 43), Escobar (2012, 33 and 61), Uribe (2009, 168), Game (2017, 52–53). 30 Interestingly, through a sequence of actions of his character Pierre Dupont, Marc Augé (1995, 3) highlights in the prologue of his book Non-places the collusion between the consecration of luxury on board and the encouragement of hyper-consumption through in-flight magazines and cabin duty-free shopping.

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She flicks through the in-flight magazine, British Airways News. Reports on wine production in Ribeiro and Rioja, the latest high-tech architecture in Berlin, mail-order Majorca pearls. A tear falls onto a photo of a Caribbean beach […]. She looks out the window, looks ahead, sees neither clouds nor earth. […] on airplanes, there is no horizon. (Fernández Mallo 2019, 5)

The accumulation of goods and idyllic destinations extolled by airline company magazines is a recurring element in contemporary air travel storytelling. This medium distributed to passengers, even those in economy class, encourages unrestrained consumption driven by the inertia and downtime of the trip. Although they are often unwilling to purchase these sorts of products, the characters are usually unable to resist the temptation of glancing at these magazines. From the British Airways News columns of the character in Nocilla Dream to the Lufthansa magazine that draws the protagonist’s gaze to a Danish brand Skagen watch (168)31 in Basque Kirmen Uribe’s novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao (2008), these commercial publications undoubtedly produce an overload effect. This is reflected in the endless stream of titles that Benjamin C. peruses in Game’s Salle d’embarquement: He flips through En Route, Hemispheres, Escala, High Life, Air France Magazine. He browses American Way, Skylights, Wings of China, Gateway. He skims Bon voyage!, Gulf Life, Going Places, Royal Wings. […] Right there, a mahogany cognac shines against a blue background, in closeup, before an electrical adaptor in the form of a Swiss army knife with integrated SIM card reader, one-year international warranty. Then come the leatherwork for smartphones, tablets, and credit cards, fountain pens, model aircrafts in the colors of the company, and an 18 Megapixels Canon Electro-Optical System, Full HD Video-Recording, with LCD screen, the

31 Remarkably, perhaps, compared to other references to in-flight magazines, Uribe’s novel makes narrative use of the watch spotted in the advertising pages of the Lufthansa publication. It is, in fact, the brand name Skagen, more than the men’s watch itself, that attracts the protagonist’s attention. The trademark evokes memories of the northernmost port of Denmark and its connections to the family saga that the character mentally reconstructs throughout the entire novel, which corresponds to the duration of his Bilbao-New York flight.

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best of pocket size EOS photography! if you believe the advertisement. (Game 2017, 52–53)32

This catalog of the catalogs paraphrases the ephemeral joys of shopping on board and, through the eccentric enumeration of superfluous gadgets, mimetically connotes the consumption logic that inspires these magazines, regardless of the company that produces them. Generally, these stand-alone inventories have little value other than that of unpacking in the form of rambling and endless lists of the surplus of goods that the passengers can accumulate with the wave of a credit card, without even having to leave their seats. This compulsive logic of hyper-consumption and the immediate satisfaction of varied material needs can sometimes produce an unhealthy relationship with objects and trigger a climate of “generalized hysteria” on board (Baudrillard 1998, 77). A scene from Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) and the entirety of Pedro Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited (2013) both clearly show the excesses that can arise from the uncontrolled, or uncontrollable, consumption of alcoholic beverages served to passengers in business class. In The Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belford, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, marvelously embodies the debaucheries that can result from immoderate access to luxury and comfort during a transoceanic flight. Given access to unlimited amounts of alcohol, Belford turns the first-class lounge upside down, hassling and publicly groping the flight attendants. In Scorsese’s film, this is an isolated incident; however, a similarly raucous performance takes up a large portion of Almodóvar’s film, which reaches a pinnacle in terms of bacchanal and orgy. Aware that the airplane on which they are traveling will attempt an emergency landing due to a mechanical problem, the airplane staff and business class passengers participate in frenzied consumption of alcohol and sex to allay their skepticism about a

32 My translation. In the original: “Il feuillette En Route, Hemispheres, Escala, High Life, Air France Magazine. Il survole American Way, Skylights, Wings of China, Gateway. Il parcourt Bon voyage!, Gulf Life, Going Places, Royal Wings. […] Juste à côté, du cognac acajou brille sur fond bleu, en gros plan, avant un adaptateur électrique au format couteau suisse avec lecteur de cartes SIM intégré, garantie internationale d’un an. Puis viennent de la maroquinerie pour smartphones, tablettes et cartes de crédit, des stylos-plume, des modèles réduits d’avions aux couleurs de la compagnie, et un Canon Electro-Optical System à 18 Mégapixels, Full HD Video-Recording, avec écran LCD, le meilleur de la photographie EOS au format poche! à en croire la publicité” (Game 2017, 52–53).

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successful landing. The passengers in economy class, who have been previously drugged by the hostesses, are separated by a simple curtain from the travelers and stewards in the business class, who empty glasses and bottles of tequila, Valencian water, and whisky, and prepare explosive cocktails seasoned with mescaline. At the same time, other individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation, wildly copulate in the bathrooms and the aisles. Here again, despite the paradoxical circumstances, the material affluence and ample available space on board contribute to a reversal of the ambiance and style of the cabin and the dissolution of any standard of public behavior or security rules. If not all that glitters is gold when consumed without limits, even luxury on board can lose its unique value and trigger collective and outrageous debauchery.

3

Fashion and the Eroticization of the Air Cabin Crew

As the Scorsese and Almodóvar examples demonstrate, the airport and the airplane are spaces in which luxury is gaudily displayed. In other words, the Airworld becomes a constant show featuring passengers and crew members alike, all of whom strive to follow and even embody the latest fashion trends. In this respect, luggage becomes a paradigmatic accessory of the travelers’ “fashion-attitude.” As an extension of the physical and material identity of the individual (Löfgren 2014, 443), it maintains a reassuring connection between the self and the local.33 Baggage does much more than preserve the identity of each voyager: in reflecting fashion trends, technology, and socioeconomic status, it becomes a factor of distinction. The design, shape, quality of its outer shell, logo, and number of wheels allow viewers to classify the passenger transporting the luggage. Moreover, due to the differentiation they are capable of achieving, suitcases were early on cornered by the travel and luxury industry, which, as early as 1854, became one of the fetish objects in Louis Vuitton’s “traveling with style” luggage line (Vuitton 1983). The aestheticization of luggage over time, mainly to the benefit of luxury and fashion brands, is now more than ever sought out by a

33 For a more in-depth study of the representation of luggage in contemporary air travel, see Durante (2016).

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certain airport clientele, and gives rise to sometimes paradoxical situations, in that luggage goes well beyond the receptacle function normally associated with suitcases, irrespective of appearance, size, or value. A passage from Michel Houellebecq’s novel Sérotonine (2019) is particularly enlightening in terms of the representative and distinguishing, as opposed to containing, function that this accessory takes on in the context of air travel. Florent-Claude Labrouste, the protagonist, heads to Orly to pick up his girlfriend, recognizing her at a glance thanks to her fashionable luggage. Even before he can discern Yuku’s facial features, the retro design of her trademark baggage sociologically singles her out and makes her unique by the exclusive style of her travel accessories: By now, I knew her luggage well; it was a famous brand that had slipped my mind, Zadig and Voltaire or maybe Pascal and Blaise, the idea anyways had been to reproduce on their fabric one of those Renaissance maps where the world is depicted in a very approximate form […] at any rate, they were chic bags, their exclusivity enhanced by the fact that they were not equipped with wheels, unlike common Samsonites for middle managers; it was thus necessary to lug them about, just like the trunks of fashionable people in the Victorian era. (Houellebecq 2019, 25–26)34

A product of the French company Zadig and Voltaire, here caricatured by a wordplay on philosophical references to the non-existent brand, Pascal and Blaise, saturates this ordinary arrival and encounter in a crowded Parisian terminal. The fashionable, compact, and neutral-colored bags that Yuku nonchalantly carries stand out from the mass of Samsonite suitcases that clutter the terminal halls, due not only to their vintage design inspired by a voyage theme and early cartography, but also, paradoxically, to their lack of wheels. In fact, Labrouste perceives this element as a sign of a certain snobbery, the lack of wheels implicitly supposing the obsequious duty of a porter. The interdependence between the travel industry and the world of fashion that Houellebecq highlights has been 34 My translation. In the original: “Ses bagages je les connaissais bien, à force, c’était une marque célèbre que j’avais oubliée, Zadig et Voltaire ou bien Pascal et Blaise, le concept quoi qu’il en soit avait été de reproduire sur le tissu une de ces cartes géographiques de la Renaissance où le monde terrestre était représenté sous une forme très approximative […] enfin c’étaient des bagages chic, leur exclusivité était renforcée du fait qu’ils n’étaient pas équipés de roulettes, contrairement à des vulgaires Samsonite pour cadres moyens, il fallait donc bel et bien se les coltiner, exactement comme les malles des élégantes de l’ère victorienne” (Houellebecq 2019, 25–26).

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promoted and exploited by the masters of haute couture, who have gradually colonized duty-free airport shops, investing in this infrastructure to make it a space both dominated by and dominating fads around the world. The osmotic link between style trends and air travel culture has given rise to an interesting holographic superimposition between airport runway and fashion catwalk. For example, for the presentation of its 2016 springsummer collection, emblematically titled “Chanel Airlines,” the French high fashion house transformed the exhibition space of the Grand Palais Museum in Paris into an airport departure hall, bursting with light, luxury, and finesse.35 The installation of an impressive timetable, a waiting room, check-in machines and counters supervised by ground staff, as well as boarding and departure gates, immersed spectators in a true terminal atmosphere. Male models dressed as airline pilots rolled suitcases down the runway, while female models wearing either pilot sunglasses or the shape of a blue mask made up around their eyes sported different outfits and accessories such as shoes, jewelry, hats, gloves, and carry-on luggage. Karl Lagerfeld himself closed the show appearing in a captain’s uniform in the Chanel Airlines arrival hall, where all the models joined him, and then continued to smoothly circulate the shiny floor space of the terminal. In using airport décor to frame the show, Chanel endeavored to make explicit the constant appeal of the Airworld to the world of fashion, primarily through the figure of the flight attendant.36 Indeed, the outfits of air hostesses, initially inspired by the khaki and navy military uniforms of the “maritime tradition” (Kolm 2003, 151) and luxurious sleeping cars, have gradually been modified in terms of cut, comfort, and appearance, and have evolved into identity symbols and cultural references. It became apparent, in fact, that in addition to healthy smiles, slender bodies, fine features, graceful movements, and the art of service, the degree of sophistication of the stewardess’ clothing itself represents an important lever in the retention of new clients. Legacy airlines thus turned to international designers, requesting original, fashionable, and functional attire. From the Air France uniforms designed by Christian Dior and Cristóbal Balenciaga in the 1960s, Nina Ricci in 1986, and Christian 35 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJebP-toiUs. 36 Among the many studies of the history and cultural imaginary of the stewardess, see

in particular Kolm (2003), Erisman (2009), Vantoch (2013), Stadiem (2014), and Black (2013, 2017).

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Lacroix in 2005, to those of Singapore Airlines, created in 1968 by Pierre Balmain, or those of Qantas, produced by Yves Saint Laurent in 1986, international haute couture has strategically engaged in the design of ground and air personnel outfits. As a result of this history, the air hostess is often portrayed like a model, within a convoy of other hostesses coursing through the terminal in a whirlwind of colors and dapper clothing. Unlike the steward, whose presence is generally much more subdued,37 the flight hostess appears as an inevitable cliché in cultural productions inspired by aeronautical professions. The hostess is often slipped into fiction in a sort of ghostly and impersonal fashion, as one signage element among others whose function is to announce a shift in action into the aerial context. She metaphorically represents, through her body, uniform, and service, the triad of beauty, elegance, and comfort. She is ignored in her individuality, standardized in her appearance, silent or pronouncing phrases that form part of airline protocol, and established by her service uniform, which is expected to be fitting, trim, and neat. The air hostess is meant to embody a pleasant and reassuring image of the company in any given situation through the materialization of her figure, and must be able to satisfy the epicurean needs of the passenger. Other times, given that she is valued especially for her body, her representation is fragmented and limited to certain parts of the latter, particularly the neck and feet, often those most subject to inquisitive eyes. An eloquent example of the almost voyeuristic obsession with the air hostess is Ryan Bingham’s demanding depiction in the novel Up in the Air. The character is attentive to even the smallest detail that could, even slightly, interfere with the strict syntax of the hostess’s uniform, as he scrutinizes her impudently from head to toe: the flight attendant’s smile seems to exceed the parabolic millimetric facial crack diagrammed in her Great West training manual. She’s not a free being as you and I are free, and when her behavior varies, it’s on purpose. Federal regulations rule her life […] Even the bows in her shoelaces have been optimized. Two loops, just so. If she wore laced shoes, that is. It’s

37 Pedro Almodóvar’s film I’m So Excited is certainly an exception in terms of the representation of the steward. Indeed, the three first-class stewards who appear in the film have protagonist roles from beginning to end. Another example, following this same modality, is Juan Murillo’s description of a “black, stout, shaven-headed and highly effeminate” steward (2011, 105).

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forbidden; she might trip on them evacuating, helping some class-ring salesman down the slide. (Kirn 2002, 281–282)

Bingham stares at the hostess’s pumps and their non-existent laces, and expresses a genuine aesthetic expectation that reveals a manual-like familiarity with the rules of uniform-wearing that the flight attendant is obliged to respect to the letter under the captain’s supervision. This simultaneous attraction to and irrepressible masculine judgement of the hostess appears, in an analogous manner, at the beginning of Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon’s novel Monasterio (Monastery). Here, the arrival of the female crew not only paralyzes the narrative flow, but also confirms the paradigm of visual homogenization of the hostess in the image of the airline. Having just landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, and notwithstanding exhaustion from the flight and a never-ending wait at the baggage carousel, Halfon’s narrator-character Eduardo is suddenly enchanted by the appearance of a throng of Lufthansa air hostesses who hypnotize him with the radiance of their beauty and uniforms: “[…] suddenly I was dazzled by a fleet of Lufthansa flight attendants. Five or six girls, all wearing radiant Lufthansa uniforms and yellow Lufthansa caps and smiling enormous Lufthansa smiles” (Halfon 2014, 14). The pronounced yellow of their caps and splendor of their clothes distinguish the fleet of Lufthansa hostesses, conforming them to the canons of beauty and the behavioral codes of the company. Unlike the formal and less exuberant uniforms of pilots and stewards, that of the female flight attendant becomes an explicit interface of stylishness and the exclusive framing of the airline.38 Distinguishable at a glance by its colors and insignia, the uniform also seeks to highlight details that differentiate and make it unique relative to other prescribed outfits. Distant and unapproachable in the wearing of a legacy airline uniform, Halfon’s hostess also intimidates and demands respect of the rules of

38 The importance given to uniform design, often entrusted to high fashion houses, is also well highlighted by the counterexample attempt that the low-cost company Easyjet, founded in 1995, launched in its early days. In positioning itself against the usual dress codes, the airline made the risky distinguishing choice of the color orange, aimed at promoting an alternative vision of air travel that was less conformist and sophisticated. However, as Friedrich (2014) explains, in 2005, due to the significant proportion (25%) of executive travelers aboard their airplanes, the company quickly revised their use of all-orange.

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conduct.39 When Eduardo suddenly recognizes among the cluster of young Lufthansa women his former lover Tamara, and then decides to speak to her, the uniform, by means of its solemnity and austerity, raises a barrier that he dares not cross. His hesitation as he is daunted by the sight of Tamara in Lufthansa dress underlines the normative and corporatist function of the uniform, actualized under the sign of aesthetics and refinement. A similar function is equally emphasized from beginning to end in Bruno Barreto’s film View from the Top (2003). In this work, more than elsewhere, the uniform reflects professional and social climbing. The film, a Bildungsroman of the flight attendant, shows the extent to which the hierarchy of air occupations is measured and expressed by the degree of garment sophistication. When the latter is too tight and garish in its colors and coarse in its cut, its accessories, and the material of which it is made, so that it resembles a disguise, it is synonymous with a low-cost and unreliable company. In contrast, when the apparel is modest, elegant, and refined in its tailoring and fabric, it designates an established, rigorous, and respected airline. After being hired without previous experience by the low-cost company Sierra Airlines, Donna Jensen (Gwyneth Paltrow) passes an admission screening that allows her to enter the Royalty Airlines flight attendant school. During her training, she meets Sally Weston (Candice Bergen), the mentor she follows and imitates up to the moment she achieves her lifelong dream of becoming a first-class air hostess on international flights. Under Sally’s wing, Donna learns of the elegance and the luxury to which she will be entitled after having passed the tests to serve as a crew member in the higher class cabins on intercontinental voyages. In an initiation ritual fit for a knight, Donna is introduced into her mentor’s wardrobe, where she is filled with awe at the sight of Sally’s legendary first-class flight attendant attire and the enormous quantity of clothes that she has been able to acquire thanks to her professional success. Sally’s blue uniform, with its golden braiding made of “soft and luxurious” material (Barreto 2003), which mimics the natural fibers of Pan Am, holds the prospect of a fantasy career. By the end of the film, Donna has been transformed from a low-cost Cinderella into an Air Royalty flight hostess queen, with her hair made up in a bun, her makeup 39 With regard to uniforms throughout the history of commercial aviation as “visible signifiers of the line of command,” see Black (2013).

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done in a delicate and classic way, and her nails manicured. Donna is finally ready to take the baton from Sally Weston: the privilege of wearing the precious tailored outfit and blue cap adorned with the golden insignia of the company. Now qualified, Donna stands in front of her mirror, as in a self-inauguration ceremony, and puts on the uniform she has received from her mentor. The camera films each stage of the performance in detail: first the arranging of the cuffs of the sleeves, the zipping up of the skirt and jacket, the closing of the strap of the high heels around the ankle, and that of the silver watch, the personalized golden pin inscribed with the first name, and the final and unmistakable touch of the cap. Thus edited into successive takes, the radiant figure of Donna finally emerges in its entirety, rising like a Venus from the foam of the escalator, with cabin baggage matching the colors of her uniform, proudly conquering the airport.40 Ultimately, as Sally has predicted, Donna’s ascension to the high echelons of the hierarchy translates into the consumption of luxury hotels and products, which she aptly experiences at Christmastime, in Paris, capital of fashion and worldly life. This last reference to shopping and the consumption of expensive goods with regard to the air hostess can be understood in two ways. The flight attendant encourages consumption through her service, while being perceived as a sexually consumable object. These two patterns are historically intertwined and pertinent to the traditional equation of fashion, luxury, and comfort. Since the glorious early years of aviation, the air hostess held a leading position in the world classification of sex symbols. William Stadiem’s study of the jet set describes the flight attendant as “Hefnerian Bunnies and Playmates with wings” (2014, 244), and she continues to this day to be characterized as such by both air companies and popular culture.41 The advertising campaign “Fly me. I’m Cheryl,” launched in 1972 by National Airlines, and the British best seller Coffee, Tea or Me? (1967) are clearly representative of this consumerist and sexist vision of the air hostess.

40 In the last scene of the film, Donna wears yet another uniform, that of a pilot. Due to her marriage, she gives up her career as an intercontinental flight attendant and becomes a pilot by profession. 41 The previously cited references on the history of the air hostess accurately describe the process of reification of this figure in the 1960s and 1970s. The works of Suzanne L. Kolm (2003) and Prudence Black (2017), especially Chapters Five and Six of the latter and the iconographic documents contained therein (241, 246) are particularly enlightening.

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Three decades later, Colombian writer Santiago Gamboa’s short story “Tragedia del hombre que amaba en los aeropuertos” (1999) takes this chauvinistic paradigm, supported by notions of luxury and comfort, to the extreme. After a first crisp encounter on a plane with Mary Lim, a young Singapore Airlines flight attendant, photographer Aníbal Esterhazy falls into the trap of a network of air hostesses who exchange services and lovers in airport capsule hotels around the world.42 The Roissy Cocoon, a complex of “resting cabins, mini-bedrooms rented for 30 dollars at the airport” (Gamboa 2001, 162)43 constitutes the pivotal setting of the story, a place of incessant movements of an army of hostesses involved in this network between Africa, Asia, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East: One of the young hostesses […] ended up sitting next to me, in the back corner of the airplane. Dressed in the Singapore Airlines uniform, that is a blue skirt and white shirt […]. The bell rang at the scheduled time. […] I opened the door […]. It was a young black woman with a light chocolatecolored uniform with lettering on the shoulder that read “Gabon Air.” […] I opened the door and saw a young redhead. Her uniform was navy blue and the mark on her cap was from British Airways. (Gamboa 2001, 157–168)44

Gamboa’s enchanting and corruptive hostesses, all of whom lack first names, engage in one rendezvous after another, and are each time laconically described by the uniform of the company that hired them. Addiction 42 This reference to Singapore Airlines is not insignificant. The airline is famous for its charm and sense of Asian hospitality, and the “Singapore girl” is its internationally recognized “living logo” (Tungate 2018, 135). A brief CNN documentary that retraces the history of the invention of this female icon in the early 1970s captures the values of aesthetics and success socially linked to the myth of this figure (https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=P8U7MQXjztQ). 43 My translation. In the original: “cabinas de reposo, mini dormitorios que se alquilaban por 30 dólares en el aeropuerto” (Gamboa 2001, 162). 44 My translation. In the original: “Una de las jóvenes azafatas […] terminó por sentarse

a mi lado, en la esquina trasera del avión. Vestía el uniforme de la Singapur Airlines, es decir falda azul y camisa blanca […]. A la hora prevista sonó el timbre. […] Abrí la puerta […]. Era una joven negra con uniforme chocolate claro y un letrero en la hombrera que decía ‘Gabón Air.’ […] Abrí la puerta y vi a una joven pelirroja. Su uniforme era azul marino y el signo de la gorra era de la British Airways” (Gamboa 2001, 157–168).

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to opulence and consumption, as an attractive factor of air travel, is portrayed in the eroticism and desirability associated with the apparel of the various flight attendants that target the traveler. Even when the hostess strips off her uniform, revealing the nakedness of her skin, there is always a shadow of the company, cast by scattered pieces of apparel, as in the scene Esterhazy describes below: the bathroom door opened. Then I saw her leave, Louise, I mean, with her skirt in her hand and her shirt open. Lilac panties were lost between the folds of black and abundant flesh. —Come—she said—we are going to fly to Gabon together, non-stop and without leaving this room. (Gamboa 2001, 164)45

From a similar perspective, using refined and suggestive aesthetics, Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai also delves into his male protagonist’s fetishistic obsession with the air hostess uniform in his film Chungking Express (1994). A young police officer called Cop 663 (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung) starts a relationship with a flight attendant. Before she leaves the apartment to go back to the airport (never to return), the camera captures a long sex scene marked by a strong eroticization of the hostess. In her bra but still wearing her regulation skirt and belt, the air hostess (Valerie Chow) gazes provocatively at her lover, mad with desire. While the words of the song playing in the background overlap with prerecorded airplane security instructions, the young woman mischievously improvises the safety demonstration, consisting of indicating the emergency exits and the use of the lifejacket. Watching her perform this pre-flight ritual, the aroused policeman makes a toy airplane swoop and dive through the air, which he lands on the young woman’s naked and sweaty body at the end of their lovemaking. The scene concludes with the air hostess leaving Cop 663’s sordid apartment with neatly styled hair and makeup, wearing her uniform and regulation heels, and pulling her suitcase on an escalator. In a sort of loop, at the end of the film a second lover, Faye (Faye Wong), who has in the meantime also become a flight attendant, comes to see

45 My translation. In the original: “la puerta del baño se abrió. Entonces la vi salir, a Louise, quiero decir, con la falda en la mano y la camisa abierta. Un calzón lila se le perdía entre los pliegues de una carne negra y abudante. —Ven—me dijo—, vamos a volar juntos a Gabón, sin escalas y sin salir de este cuarto” (Gamboa 2001, 164).

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the policeman in exactly the same apparel as the first, as if his desire could only be stirred by the wearing of an air uniform. This eroticization of the air hostess is also found in the music video of Britney Spears’ song Toxic (2009), which, moreover, alludes to the constant demand for consumption, hedonism, and sublimation that characterizes the imaginary of air luxury. The singer’s performance exemplifies the shift from the glamorous aura usually associated with the figure of the flight attendant toward a voluptuous and sexist representation. In a tightfitting, very short blue uniform and cap (an explicit reference to Pan Am), Spears sports excessive jewelry, makeup, and nail polish, as she marches down the narrow corridor of the cabin, pushing the drink cart past a male-only clientele. This airplane scene is broken up by a series of microsequences showing the singer without a uniform, dressed only in a sparkly nude catsuit, which exhibits what the airborne voyeurs would like to see of her body, but which is masked by her uniform, no matter how tiny. In using referents that, once again, evoke the routine gestures and service tools of the air hostess, such as the intercom, cart, champagne flute, overhead bins, and blanket, this clip employs and subverts the stereotype of reification and consumption of the body of the flight attendant. As in Gamboa’s story, and in contrast to the traditional chauvinist imaginary, here the hostess randomly chooses a passenger seated aboard and takes him to the airplane restroom, where she gropes him and takes his wallet. To this figure of the dashing, sexy, and sometimes even seductive stewardess, contemporary fiction enlists a sort of “male vis-à-vis” through the character of the pilot. As examples such as Airport (1970) with Dean Martin, Pan Am with Mike Vogel, Flightplan with Sean Bean, and Sully (2016) with Tom Hanks show, the pilot is generally depicted as a dapper, elegant, meticulously shaven man with a toned body and calm demeanor. This myth of the pilot, captured in a universe that idolizes appearances and ostentation, is particularly notable in Steven Spielberg’s film Catch Me If You Can (2002). The film, which focuses on protagonist Franck William Abagnale Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), retraces the life of commanders, copilots, and hostesses through a lavish vision of aviation professions of the 1960s. Following the model promoted and fetishized by the giant Pan Am, these representations were dominated by displays of beauty, elegance, and easy access to luxurious

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accommodations around the world.46 Attracted by the confident and refined allure of a Pan American Airways crew triumphantly entering a New York hotel, Abagnale, without experience but with much guile, decides to join the company, posing as a young copilot. As in a fairy tale, the imposter’s illicitly obtained uniform raises him to celebrity status, likening him to a hero when he walks the streets, hotels, and airports, drawing looks and the sultry smiles of women. A set of official accessories—white kepi, navy blue suit with sleeves embroidered with three gold stripes, shirt with the shoulders similarly adorned, tie decorated with the Pan Am pin, perfectly polished shoes, and briefcase—suddenly transforms an anonymous young man without a profession or resources into a model and brand image that is desired by the heart and devoured by the eyes. In line with this still-operative stereotype, the pilot continues to fuel the dream of luxury and aerial style, though to a less significant degree than in the past, and though his uniform is of a less refined and expensive quality than before and his presence rarer in advertising campaigns. The pilot is perceived at some times as a cold and unapproachable figure marching through the terminal, at others as a metallic voice delivering technical announcements to the cabin. He is often shown as a bon vivant, enjoying the benefits and prestige of his profession, and endowed with a vibrant masculinity that confines him to the role of polygamous seducer. “Cinematically handsome in [their] uniform[s] and cutting such a capable male figure” (Kirn 2002, 62), the captains of Airport (1970), those of the television series Pan Am, and those of Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited— the latter with a bisexual component—actualize this pattern, drawing on the imaginary of navigation and aviation in which the pilot often wavers between a wife on the ground and a crew hostess in the air. A sequence from Costa Rican writer Juan Murillo’s novel En contra de los aviones provides a relevant description of the pilot in light of the traits attributed to him by contemporary popular culture, emphasizing the accessories, 46 As Mark Tungate (2018) observes, “Pan Am was arguably the first to represent the flight attendant as an icon” (103). The spectrum of meanings linked to this icon was very broad. Pan Am stewardesses were not “merely decorative,” but “college-educated and were required to speak at least one foreign language” (102). The iconic emblem that these flight attendants progressively fostered, while fitting the initial “aspirational, elitist approach to flying,” thus also contributed to the actual growth of the image of the airline, which, as early as 1957, pioneered mass air travel, becoming the first actual world airline (103).

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attitudes, and consumeristic talk of the aviator in the privacy of the cockpit: In the cockpit of my airplane, there is a pilot who likes Harleys. He bought the same goggles as those of Travolta, who is also a pilot, even if he hates him. He puts coconut-bronzing cream on his arms because he always sunbathes on this route. He drinks a martini. He tells the copilot of a friend he has in New York who is a contortionist. The copilot listens to the pilot talk about what the girl can do and thinks, while asking the flight attendant for another piña colada, that the pilot must be making it all up, because he is a big liar. I do not know if any of this is actually true, because there is a security door that protects them from curious eyes, but that is what I imagine. Luckily, there is autopilot. (Murillo 2011, 97)47

Murillo’s pilot is obsessed with his body, which he takes care of even in flight, while sipping cocktails served by the air hostess and making somewhat delicate and dubious remarks about the performances of a New York contortionist. His caricatural portrayal also reproduces the cliché of the male admirer of motorcycles and the biker-inspired look. This condensed and cheap version of the captain prototype echoes decades of commercial aviation and, in its sarcastic tone, highlights the deterioration, in popular perception, of the traditionally distinguished pilot, who seems to have been swallowed up by the massification of air travel and contemporary hyper-consumption. In short, precisely because of these cartoonish excesses, Murillo’s character functions as a radical explication of the Airworld’s tendency to attract and exhibit luxury, its fashion-centered attitude, its consumerist fever, and, in a sometimes involuntary and sometimes ardently desired corollary, its most frenetic, or most fetishistic, extravagances.

47 My translation. In the original: “En la cabina de mi avión hay un piloto al que le gustan las Harley. Se compró unos anteojos iguales a los de Travolta, que también es piloto, aunque lo detesta. Se pone bronceador de coco en los brazos porque siempre se asolea en esta ruta. Se toma un martini. Le cuenta al copiloto sobre una amiga que tiene en Nueva York y que es contorsionista. El copiloto escucha al piloto hablar sobre lo que la chica esta puede hacer y piensa que el piloto debe de estar inventándolo todo, porque es un gran mentiroso, mientras le pide a la aeromoza otra piña colada. Todo esto yo no sé si pasa de verdad, porque hay una puerta de seguridad que los protege de las miradas de los curiosos, pero me lo imagino. Por suerte hay piloto automático” (Murillo 2011, 97).

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References Articles and Essays Architektur Zeitung. 2018. Azerbaijan’s Heydar Aliyev International Airport. https://www.architekturzeitung.com/architecture-magazine/3502-heydar-ali yev-international-airport.html. Accessed 9 July 2019. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe. London and New York: Verso. Azerrad, Lawrence. 2018. Supersonic: The Design and Lifestyle of Concorde. Munich and New York: Prestel. Bachelard, Gaston. 1988. Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell. Dallas: Dallas Institute Publications. Baudrillard, Jean. 1998. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London, Thousand Oaks, and New Delhi: Sage. Bissell, David. 2008. Comfortable Bodies: Sedentary Affects. Environment and Planning 40: 1697–1712. Black, Prudence. 2013. Lines of Flight: The Female Flight Attendant Uniform. Fashion Theory—Journal of Dress Body and Culture 17 (2): 179–196. Black, Prudence. 2017. Smile, Particularly in Bad Weather: The Era of the Australian Airline Hostess. Crawley: UWA Publishing. Blanc, Natalia. 2019. Samana Schweblin, Rodrigo Fresán y Alberto Fuguet, tres viajeros en San Isidro. La Nacion, March 15. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/ cultura/samantha-schweblin-rodrigo-fresan-alberto-fuguet-tres-nid2229049. Accessed 9 July 2019. Blanco Gómez, M.L. 2012. Informing or Persuading Travellers: The Language of Airlines Advertisements. Aula 18: 81–94. Brown, Jessica. 2017. The Important Reason Seats on Planes Are Blue. The Independent, August 11. https://www.indy100.com/article/important-rea son-seats-on-planes-are-blue-airline-flight-flying-holidays-trip-away-7888651. Accessed 9 July 2019. Carmichael, Suzanne. 1991. Stuck at the Airport? Then Look at the Art. New York Times, December 15. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/15/travel/ stuck-at-the-airport-then-look-at-the-art.html. Accessed 8 July 2019. Chadeau, Emmanuel. 1996. Le Rêve et la puissance: l’avion et son siècle. Paris: Fayard. De Cauter, Lieven. 2004. The Capsular Civilization: On the City in the Age of Fear. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers. Durante, Erica. 2016. Check-in para el destino global: la maleta en la ficción hispanoamericana de hoy. Cuadernos de Literatura 40: 332–348. Erisman, Fred. 2009. From Birdwomen to Skygirls: American Girls’ Aviation Stories. Fort Worth: TCU Press.

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Falcus, Matt. 2018. How Asian’s Airports Are Changing the Way We Travel. CNN Travel, October 1. https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/asia-airportsworlds-best/index.html. Accessed 8 July 2019. Foss, Richard. 2015. Food in the Air and Space: The Surprising History of Food and Drink in the Skies. Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Rowman & Littlefield. Frearson, Amy. 2012. IKEA Lounge at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Dezeen, July 16. https://www.dezeen.com/2012/07/16/ikea-lounge-at-charles-degaulle-airport/. Accessed 8 July 2019. Friedrich, Alexandre. 2014. Easyjet: Espace, Temps, Argent. Paris: Éditions Allia. Fuller, Gillian, and Ross Harley. 2005. Aviopolis: A Book About Airports. London: Black Dog. Iyer, Pico. 2014. The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere. New York: TED Books and Simon & Schuster. Kolm, Suzanne L. 2003. ‘Who Says It’s a Man’s World?’ Women’s Work and Travel in the First Decades of Flight. In The Airplane in American Culture, ed. Dominick A. Pisano, 147–164. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Litton Hauß, Barbara. 2004. A Trip Through Time in the Aircraft Cabin. In Airworld: Design and Architecture for Air Travel, ed. Alexander von Vegesack and Jochen Eisenbrand, 82–122. Weil am Rhein: The Museum. Löfgren, Orvan. 2014. Holidays. In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, ed. Peter Adey et al., 442–449. London: Routledge. McNeill, Peter, and Giorgio Riello. 2016. Luxury: A Rich History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Popcorn, Faith. 1992. The Popcorn Report: Faith Popcorn on the Future of Your Company, Your World, Your Life. New York: HarperCollins. Schaberg, Christopher. 2017. Airportness: The Nature of Flight. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Shih Pearson, Justine. 2018. Choreographing the Airport. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Skytrax—World Airline Awards. 2019. World’s Best Low-Cost Airlines 2019. https://www.worldairlineawards.com/worlds-best-low-cost-airlines-2018/. Accessed 9 July 2019. Stadiem, William. 2014. Jet Set: The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation’s Glory Years. New York: Ballantine Books. Szekely, Ilona. 2012. Art at the Airport: An Exploration of New Art Worlds. Art Education 65 (4): 33–39. Thubert, Svetlana, et al. 2017. Duty-Free Shops: Are Luxury Brands Being Democratized? Procedia Computer Science 122: 533–540. Thurlow, Crispin, and Adam Jaworski. 2003. Communicating a Global Reach: Inflight Magazines as a Globalizing Genre in Tourism. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4): 579–606.

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Tungate, Mark. 2018. The Escape Industry: How Iconic and Innovative Brands Built the Travel Business. London and New York: Kogan Page Limited. Vantoch, Victoria. 2013. The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Vuitton, Louis. 1983. A Journey Through Time: A Louis Vuitton Retrospective Exhibition. Paris: Louis Vuitton. Wiesel, Ilan, and Robert Freestone. 2019. Queue city: Authority and Trust in the Waiting Line. Geoforum 100: 229–235.

Films and TV Series Almodóvar, Pedro. 2013. Los amantes pasajeros. Madrid: El Deseo. Barreto, Bruno. 2003. View from the Top. Los Angeles: Brad Grey Pictures. Eastwood, Clint. 2016. Sully. Los Angeles, Santa Monica, and Burbank: Village Roadshow Pictures, Flashlight Films, The Kennedy-Marshall Company, Malpaso Productions, and Orange Corp. Orman, Jack. 2011–2012. Pan Am. Culver City: Jack Orman Productions, Out of the Blue Entertainment, Shoe Money Productions, and Sony Pictures Television. Scorsese, Martin. 2013. The Wolf of Wall Street. Hollywood: Red Granite Pictures, Appian Way Productions, Sikelia Productions, and EMJAG Productions. Seaton, George. 1970. Airport. Universal City and Los Angeles: Universal Pictures and Ross Hunter Productions. Spielberg, Steven. 2002. Catch Me If You Can. Universal City: Amblin Entertainment and Parkes-MacDonald Productions. Tati, Jacques. 1967. Playtime. Paris: Specta Films and Jolly Films. Wong, Kar-wai. 1994. Chungking Express. Hong Kong: Jet Tone Production.

Novels and Short Stories Baxter, Greg. 2015. Munich Airport. New York: Twelve. Cusk, Rachel. 2015. Outline. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dantzig, Charles. 2011. Dans un avion pour Caracas. Paris: Éditions Grasset. Escobar, Iván. 2012. Kamikaze. Madrid: Temas de Hoy. Fernández Mallo, Agustín. 2019. Nocilla Experience, trans. Thomas Bunstead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Fresán, Rodrigo. 2017. The Invented Part, trans. Will Vanderhyden. Rochester: Open Letter Books. Gamboa, Santiago. 2001. Tragedia del hombre que amaba en los aeropuertos. In Cuentos apátridas, ed. Enrique de Hériz, 147–191. Madrid: Suma de Letras. Game, Jérôme. 2017. Salle d’embarquement. Bordeaux: Éditions de l’Attente.

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García Márquez, Gabriel. 1993. Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane. In Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories by Gabriel García Márquez, trans. Edith Grossman, 54–61. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Halfon, Eduardo. 2014. Monastery, trans. Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn. New York: Bellevue Literary Press. Houellebecq, Michel. 2003. Platform, trans. Frank Wynne. New York: Vintage Books. Houellebecq, Michel. 2019. Sérotonine. Paris: Flammarion. Kirn, Walter. 2002. Up in the Air. New York: Anchor Books. Laroui, Fouad. 2014. Les Tribulations du dernier Sijilmassi. Paris: Julliard. Murillo, Juan. 2011. En contra de los aviones. San José: Editorial Costa Rica. Padilla, Ignacio. 2017. Última escala en ninguna parte. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Tokarczuk, Olga. 2018. Flights, trans. Jennifer Croft. New York: Riverhead Books. Uribe, Kirmen. 2009. Bilbao-New York-Bilbao, trans. Ana Arregi. Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral. Yargekov, Nina. 2016. Double Nationalité. Paris: Gallimard.

Commercials and Other Videos Becoming a ‘Singapore Girl.’ Youtube Video. Posted by Mahmdiya Liyan. June 26, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8U7MQXjztQ. Accessed 9 July 2019. British Airways—Club World (1993, UK). Youtube Video. Posted by The Hall of Advertising. January 16, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DO2 X0e-yUc. Accessed 9 July 2019. Britney Spears—Toxic (Official Music Video). Youtube Video. Posted by Britney Spears. October 25, 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOZuxw Vk7TU. Accessed 9 July 2019. Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R. 2015. Wake Up to Flying as It Should Be (Emirates A380 featuring Jennifer Aniston). https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=kwYr4LAIUjk. Accessed 9 July 2019. Spring-Summer 2016 Ready-to-Wear CHANEL Show. Youtube video. Posted by CHANEL. October 7, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJebPtoiUs. Accessed 3 July 2019. The Beatles LOVE Surprise Airport Anniversary Performance—Cirque du Soleil. Youtube Video. Posted by Cirque du Soleil. August 22, 2014. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=paiTYRLfxcM. Accessed 9 July 2019. United Airlines Commercial—Kaleidoscope—1994. Youtube Video. Posted by krisjetz. June 27, 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O17Hvb 5mEXQ. Accessed 9 August 2019.

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United Airlines Commercial—Orcas—1992. Youtube Video. Posted by krisjetz. June 26, 2006. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOBnfR9WHSk. Accessed 9 August 2019. United Commercial Onboard with ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ Youtube Video. Posted by Giorgi Moshe. September 25, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= E3Gak1JOito. Accessed 9 July 2019.

Installations, Performances & Exhibitions Roosegaarde, Daan. 2016. Beyond. Amsterdam: Schiphol Airport. https://www. studioroosegaarde.net/project/beyond. Accessed 9 July 2019.

Catalogs Katchadourian, Nina. 2010a. Seat Assignment. http://www.ninakatchadourian. com/photography/seatassignment.php. Accessed 9 July 2019. Katchadourian, Nina. 2010b. Nina Katchadourian: Seat Assignment. http:// www.ninakatchadourian.com/photography/sa-catalog.php. Accessed 9 July 2019.

Other References Moment Factory. 2015. Los Angeles Airport (LAX). Next Generation Airport Terminal in LAX. https://momentfactory.com/work/all/all/los-angeles-air port-lax. Accessed 9 July 2019. Sleep-n-fly. 2019. https://sleep-n-fly.com. Accessed 9 July 2019.

CHAPTER 5

Cloud People: Identities and Paradoxes

The cloudscape that emerges from the continuous movement of air travelers introduces new ways of domesticating space and perceiving the aerial environment; it splits and suspends human identity and materiality between the terrestrial surface and the celestial dome. Contemporary passengers and Airworld personnel thus become Cloud People: a vast global community of “winged messengers” (Serres 1995, 139) who “anthropologize” the troposphere, inducing the urgency for an ethnographic study of the sky and its interdependence with the earth. In other words, this homo flotantis identity (Saraceno 2019), granted by presentday aeromobility, implies that we can neither conceive of the sky without an airplane nor the world without an airport, just as we cannot visualize the extent of the globe without integrating the flows and interconnections made possible by air travel. Regardless of whether the human gaze is directed downward or upward, the engagement with this interstitial dimension in which earth and sky merge is mediated by air travel. Beyond the traditional representations of space and time, different paradigms that define the contemporary way of being in the world are shaken by the interference of the sky with life on the ground and vice versa. The once-unalterable dichotomies of mobility and immobility, gravitation and levitation, materiality and immateriality are challenged by the important role of air imaginary and transport in the experience of reality. At the same time, the uniqueness of © The Author(s) 2020 E. Durante, Air Travel Fiction and Film, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52651-1_5

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identity is fragmented by the circulation through the Airworld, regardless of the agency—“driving” or “being driven” (Adey et al. 2012, 170)—that characterizes individuals within this environment. The defining “ontogenetic” capacity to temporarily modify one’s identity by engaging with a “becoming ” process (Adey 2006, 79), through the consumption of mobility, converts the Airworld into an anthropological place that diverges from Marc Augé’s definition of “non-place” (1995). Just like other places, airports and airplanes are, in fact, concerned with identity and are thus also relational and historical (Merriman 2012, 55– 60). They foster an interplay between individuals and the world, preserve narratives and memories, and above all, permit the human subject to experience multiple identities.

1

Airworld Personnel

Air personnel, whether on the ground or on board, are the first to see their subjectivity reshaped by their circulation in the Airworld. This identity shift occurs each time the subjects enter the airport or airplane dressed in their work uniforms. Their privileged access to air transport infrastructures instantaneously suspends their usual identity and activates one that is dictated by the specificity of the aerial environment in which they operate. Numerous examples in literary and cinematic fiction illustrate the advent and effects of this identity transition, which indiscriminately concerns various actors of the contemporary Airworld. The portrayal of airport runway agents and baggage handlers (who are not featured prominently in films and novels and are largely treated as semantic markers of airport décor) at the beginning of Almodóvar’s film I’m So Excited perfectly captures this fragmented identity. The characters appear divided between their personal worries and the tasks they are responsible for on the runways. Jessica (Penélope Cruz), a baggage tractor operator, is filmed driving a special machine that allows her to pull carts loaded with the suitcases of passengers on Peninsula flight 2549 from the terminal to the cargo compartment of the airplane. Crossing the runway, dressed in blue work coverall and a yellow vest, Jessica spots her colleague and husband, León (Antonio Banderas), who is dressed the same way, busily preparing the Peninsula airplane for takeoff. As she watches and waves to León from her vehicle, Jessica causes an accident that makes the suitcases and an agent standing on the runway fall to the ground. Among the bags scattered across the ground, Jessica reveals to León that she is two months pregnant.

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This sudden intrusion of Jessica’s personal life, which happens just below the Airbus A340 that is preparing for takeoff, distracts León, who fails to remove the chock in front of one of the aircraft’s wheels. This oversight will be fateful since the chock will become entangled in the landing gear, causing it to malfunction and preventing the pilot from being able to land the plane. This initial scene catalyzes the continuation of the plot, marked by the suspense of a dangerous emergency landing that could cause the death of the passengers and crew. Almodóvar’s film plays on the potential consequences of a lack of clear demarcation between the here and beyond of the Airworld. From the moment Jessica and León fail to entirely assume the identity of runway agents assigned to them when they crossed the threshold of the airport environment where they work, and from the moment they let their usual urban selves prevail, drama occurs. To avoid catastrophic outcomes, the subject’s identity split ought to be maintained as long as the subject remains in the Airworld environment. All other characters in the film, from the officers to the stewards and copilot, embody the aporia of the competing personal and professional identities, which continually overlap instead of operating separately depending on whether one is within or outside the aerial circuit. A similarly implausible situation, also caused by an accidental intrusion of external factors in the identity of the subject working in the aerial environment, can be observed in Paul Currie’s film 2:22. JFK Airport air traffic controller Dylan (Michiel Huisman) has a well-honed routine between his life in his apartment, the city and his job in the control tower. His daily metro ride from Grand Central Station to the airfield is both the link and the dividing line between his professional sphere and his private one. One afternoon at 2:22, while directing planes through takeoff and landing from his lookout tower, Dylan is struck by the reminiscence of a dream that bursts into his head. This memory muddles his thoughts to such a degree that he temporarily ceases to communicate with the pilots, nearly causing the collision of two planes and the death of nine hundred passengers. The probability of an accident, small as it may be, demonstrates that Dylan’s two identities, as routine-loving bachelor and as an air traffic controller, must remain separate and airtight, precisely to avoid the risk of a disaster. Temporarily relieved of his duties in the control tower, Dylan removes his badge and takes the subway back toward Midtown Manhattan, discarding the aerial identity conferred by his profession and reconnecting with his urbanite identity. Although his return to a unique self wavers as soon as an airplane flies overhead and pushes his alter ego

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to the surface, his destiny is now wrapped to the city. The disconnect between Dylan’s urban and aerial experiences due to his suspension from the aeronautical profession enables him to focus on addressing a series of coincidences that punctually occur at 2:22 in Grand Central Station. The freedom he gains relative to his air controller identity allows him to partially avoid the drama that is expected to occur there at exactly 2:22 in the afternoon, as forecasted in a dream and then the premonitory vision that overwhelmed him in the control tower. This fluctuation in identity between sky and earth also affects, albeit less dramatically, another prominent figure of the Airworld: the air hostess. Similarly split between these two spheres of the institutional aerial infrastructure and personal life on the ground, the hostess has an identity predicament. More than pilots or stewards, the female flight attendant, by her strictly standardized appearance and uniform, is caught in an identity dissonance between her authentic individuality as an ordinary woman and her institutional role as hostess, which normalizes her behavior and body within the hierarchy of air personnel. A number of stories offer exemplary illustrations of this identity vacillation that takes place from the moment that the clothing ritual transforms the woman from her casual private outfit into a public figure that symbolizes a company, a profession, and ultimately, a nation. Argentinean director Daniel Burman’s film Todas las azafatas van al cielo (2002) portrays the air hostess in line with this hypothesis. In the opening scene, Teresa (Ingrid Rubio), the flight attendant who is the protagonist of the story, is seen in her apartment in Buenos Aires surrounded by ordinary urban sights and sounds. Sitting on the floor of her terrace with her hair already made up in a bun, barefoot and dressed in a few pieces of her uniform, Teresa reads aloud the instructions for a pregnancy test. Neither her posture nor her attitude convey adherence to protocols; she offers neither “measured smiles” nor “pantomimes” while serving “reheated food trays” (Burman 2002). Meanwhile, her jacket, high-heeled shoes, and cap await her, strewn over the living room sofa. Upon the arrival of her mother, who comes to take care of the house in her absence, Teresa properly adjusts her blue uniform, puts on her shoes and her earrings, grabs her purse, her regulation suitcase, and her airline company overcoat, and closes the door, leaving behind her private shelter. Instantly, a long airport terminal scene begins, displaying a panoply of common Airworld objects, sounds, and landscapes. Teresa now appears as an air hostess standing in the airplane cabin, welcoming passengers aboard

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and giving the safety demonstration with “perfect gestures, copied from a flight operation manual” (Burman 2002). The initial reference to the pregnancy test is particularly pertinent since this object, which will reappear time and again even as she performs her tasks on the plane, allows Teresa to remain connected to her status as a woman and a future mother. The film follows Teresa and her colleagues in their shifting identities between life on the ground and work in the clouds. Indeed, the stewards and pilots are also victims of this impossibility of negotiating the identity imposed by the air profession and the identity that characterizes them on the ground. Once more, like an “interchanger [that] provides a key for us to pass between two worlds” (Serres 1995, 170), the Airworld is a kind of multiplier of “volatile” identities (44), which are capable of “changing very rapidly from one state to another” (44). At the end of Burman’s film, Teresa appears sitting in a plane, dressed in civilian clothes, and holding a baby on her lap. A colleague has taken over the safety instructions ritual. The narrator’s voice-over references the title of the film, suggesting that “all air hostesses go to the sky, but there is always one that comes back,” the one who renounced life in the sky to reconnect with her ordinary identity as a woman and a mother. The reversibility of the role of air hostess thus implies that Teresa’s choice of self-exclusion from the aerial world restores her as a unique subject who cannot be normalized by a uniform or by customary gestures and conduct. In dissociating herself from the Airworld, Teresa breaks the symmetry between these two identities and renounces the alternation, specific to Cloud People, between these two existences, “the one down there and the one down here” (Serres 1995, 161). The identity ambivalence that affects the air hostess is also present in Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (2005). The film shows the split that occurs in a young woman, Claire (Kirsten Dunst), as she fulfills her duties as an air hostess in the cabin of a plane curiously occupied by just one traveler, Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom). She later dates Drew on the ground, gets to know him, and begins a love affair with him. In a somewhat schizophrenic fashion, Claire’s behavior, attitude, spontaneity, and gestures outside the aerial environment are at odds with her actions in the airplane. During the flight and under the cover of her role as an air hostess, she is particularly enterprising toward Drew. She visits him tirelessly, sits next to him, and conducts a conversation to the point of exhaustion. In contrast, when they meet in Elizabethtown, she shows who

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she really is: sweet, empathetic, discreet, and considerate. This change, which occurs as soon as Claire crosses the threshold of her apartment and trades her uniform for a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, persists for the rest of the film and demonstrates how her authentic identity prevails over that of an intermittent stewardess. Ultimately, after their accidental encounter during a night flight, their exit from the terminal triggers a true twist in their story that could have never taken place without recovering her identity as a woman, at the expense of that of an air hostess. Following this same modality, the initially uncomfortable meeting in Halfon’s Monastery between Eduardo and the Lufthansa flight attendant Tamara at the baggage carousel of the Tel Aviv Airport, and their subsequent rendezvous, repeats this paradigm of identity tension produced by professional affiliation with air transport. Tamara, who was shown just one day earlier exiting the terminal and wearing a perfect blue and yellow Lufthansa uniform, is now dressed in Very short, old torn khaki shorts, leather sandals, a flowing, almost seethrough white linen blouse that showed the top of her freckled shoulders […] No makeup. Her copper hair was wild […] Tamara immediately gave me a hug, an urgent hug, and this time there was no Lufthansa uniform and it wasn’t awkward at all. (Halfon 2014, 49–50)

Without her uniform and its relational barrier effect, Tamara reappropriates her own intentionality. Her body language becomes fluid and expressive, and she can now appear as she is, warm and still attached to the relationship with her former lover Eduardo. Behind the scenes of the terminal and from a humanistic, or simply humane, perspective of the airport, Steven Spielberg’s film The Terminal addresses this aspect in even stronger terms. The vast community of Cloud People for whom the terminal constitutes a place of daily labor is kaleidoscopically depicted as a diversity of individuals and trades, all of which are again presented in terms of an identity game. The often-invisible police officers, customs agents, security guards, maintenance staff, technical personnel, cooks, restaurant owners, and salesmen emerge both as individuals and as a group according to the two identities that characterize them. They are both employees of the Airworld and independent subjects. Despite the varied uniforms that differentiate them in accordance with the service or hierarchy to which they belong, Spielberg’s characters are caught in an identity dichotomy between their lives within and outside of JFK Airport.

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As they gradually establish a relationship of trust and friendship with Viktor Navorski, the protagonist of the film who is stuck sine die in the airport, they bare their own vulnerability and share the intimacy of their secrets and aspirations. They reveal the fissure between the roles that define them in the airport and the identities that individualize them outside of the aerial world. In the uninhabited halls and poorly lit hangars of JFK Airport, Enrique (Diego Luna), a food service worker, shares with Viktor his infatuation with an immigration officer (Zoe Saldana). Similarly, Gupta, an old janitor (Kumar Pallana), confesses to killing a corrupt police officer when he was much younger and still lived in India; for that reason, he emigrated to the United States without ever being able to return to his country. Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones), the air hostess with whom Viktor falls in love, also participates in this pattern, but with yet another twist. When Viktor invites her to a terrace of the terminal for an intimate dinner organized with the help of his new friends, Amelia is seen for the first time in something other than her official uniform: a black dress with a plunging neckline. She walks through the airport in the company of Viktor, as a woman and not as an air hostess. The ban imposed on Viktor, which forbids him from leaving the terminal, makes her identity split visible within the air infrastructure itself. This aporia, brought about by Viktor’s paradoxical circumstances as an inhabitant of the airport and no longer a passenger, more fundamentally expresses the identity contradictions and issues that characterize the circulation of individuals in air travel infrastructures.

2

The Fluid Passenger

As soon as they enter the terminal, ordinary people also experience identity alterations, temporarily splitting into passenger and individual. The plane ticket, boarding pass, identification documents, and luggage all provisionally transform the subjects into transitory entities excluded from the external world and included in the workings of the aerial universe. Such an implicit pact or “contractual relationship” (Augé 1995, 101), established between the individuals, others, and the environment, alters the subjects’ usual condition of immobility. This provisional state endows them with a status of ubiquity and a sort of discontinuity conferred by the temporal–spatial fragmentation of the journey. Caught in this other system of referents, subjects are only relevant and legitimate in their new identity of the passenger, which defines and embeds them in the regime

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of fluidity and the regulations and safety systems that govern circulation in the air context. This suspension of daily identity should be read in conjunction with the observation of Michel Serres, who characterizes airports and airplanes as “interchanger[s]” (1995, 170) since they allow the passage from one space to another, from one system to another, shifting individuals from their unique and sedentary identities to multiple and mobile ones. The role assumption of the passenger reiterates the anthropological function of the airport and its annexes, which applies both to the place and the subject. Yet the adhesion to the identity of the passenger entails the integration of a series of movements, behaviors, and practices that are different from the ordinary. In fact, the transitional function of air transport requires the subject to respect the procedures in terms of identity and security checks and to act quickly and efficiently to comply with multiple protocols. This adaptation to the role of fluid traveler plays a central part in Walter Kirn’s novel Up in the Air. For Kirn’s protagonist, Ryan Bingham, check-in procedures, security checks, boarding and disembarking, and the actions the latter require on the part of the passenger become such banal and mechanic gestures that he enjoys doing them each time more rapidly and fluidly, though not without sarcasm: Rushing, racing, delayed at the hotel by a wake-up call that never came, I hop from the parking lot shuttle to the curb without nothing to check, just a briefcase and a carry-on, cross the terminal, smile at the agent, flash my Compass Class card and driver’s license, say Yes, my bags have remained in my possession, say No, I haven’t let strangers handle them, then take my upgraded boarding pass and ticket, recross the terminal to security, empty my pockets—change, keys, mobile phone, foil blister-pack of sleeping tablets, mechanical pencils; […] flop my bags on the X-ray, straighten up, and step through the metal detector. (Kirn 2002, 12)

Bingham’s cascading narration mimics the dexterity and swiftness of movements that differentiate him from the mass of travelers as a homo aeroportis globalis (Salter 2008, 11): his impeccable mastery of the slightest gesture, his experienced knowledge of each potential question, his ultra-light luggage and, above all, his record time in completing this rite of passage from landside to airside. He is fully inducted into the fluidity of aerial transit and its annexes. The quick pace of this competitive slalom, from one counter to another, one reply to another, and

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one line to another, is a similarly distinctive trait of the hyperactive and hyper-performing traveler in French writer Jérôme Game’s novel Salle d’embarquement. The repetitive movements of the hyperflier form part of an invariable and alienating schedule that extends from the terminal to the plane and vice versa without allowing for respite or escape from anonymity: Wake-up. A nice day smiles the hostess, window raised. Fresh coffee, natural light, freshly squeezed juice. […] [Where exactly? He travels with Aeroflot, Air Canada, Air India, Alitalia, American Airlines, British Airways. He flies on Cathay, China Air, China Eastern, China Southern, Delta Airlines, Egyptair. He takes Emirates, Iberia, Japan Airlines, Lufthansa, United. […] [But where does he go like this? (Game 2017, 51–52)1

The questions in italics, inserted into the text, reflect the passenger’s progressive loss of individuality as he is hurried and trapped in the hell of flights, companies, and nights spent on planes. Reduced to an enumeration of the names of airline companies, the subject dissolves into the planetary journeys he consumes. The vital dimensions of space and time are no longer measured in terms of duration, but by flight connections and airport schedules (61). In jumping from one airplane to the next, the character becomes a prisoner of a web of acronyms, codes, and operations that pile up on the page (Fig. 1) without any logic beyond the bustle and perpetual movement of frequent travelers. The subject is little more than pure movement, powerfully engulfed in the fluidity of the Airworld. Perfect control of airport motions singles out the fluid passenger not only in the terminal, but also in the airplane cabin. The limited space of the latter emphasizes certain automatisms of expected conduct and demeanor. As in fiction, contemporary poetry also highlights this neurosis of well-established gestures that occupy the passengers from the moment they enter the airplane, and that obsess fluid air travelers who are 1 My translation. In the original: “Réveil. Une bonne journée sourit l’hôtesse, fenêtre

levée. Café frais, lumière naturelle, agrume pressé. […] [Où ça exactement? Il voyage avec Aeroflot, Air Canada, Air India, Alitalia, American Airlines, British Airways. Il vole sur Cathay, China Air, China Eastern, China Southern, Delta Airlines, Egyptair. Il prend Emirates, Iberia, Japan Airlines, Lufthansa, United. […] [Mais où il va comme ça?” (Game 2017, 51–52).

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Fig. 1 Jérôme Game: Selection of Iata Airline Codes in Salle d’embarquement [page 55] [2017] (Courtesy of the author)

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aware of their exceptional status relative to the amorphous, ordinary, and sluggish masses. Spanish writer José Angel Cilleruelo’s poem “Vuela” (2006) offers a minimalist and mechanical description, like an instruction manual, of the regulated behaviors of the traveler and the surrounding objects. In a series of hendecasyllables, almost all connected by enjambments that accelerate the poem, the passenger enumerates the material and bodily actions that he mechanically and seamlessly performs once aboard the plane: I look for my seat. I put up my luggage. I contemplate the plastic of the armchair while opening my mouth as we take off. I read a newspaper as if the flight was a waiting room or a maybe a small plaza. I do not even ask for a window seat, and, if I do get one, I lower the shade. There are those of us who are afraid of words, but we do adore the airline companies. (24)2

Due to their regular and repetitive actions and their constant immersion in the flow, individuals experience fluid identities that are gradually replaced by the smooth identity of the passenger. Fluid passengers become indifferent and blasé with regard to themselves, others, and the world; they allow themselves to be swept along by the current, without resistance, in perfect harmony with the rhythm demanded by the air voyage. In the hermetic environment in which they are temporarily encapsulated in an “entubulated experience of mobility” (Adey et al. 2012, 184), voyagers adopt behaviors that make them imperceptible to others in the stream in which they circulate. These impeccably honed rituals allow 2 My translation. In the original: “Busco el asiento. Cuelgo el equipaje. / Contemplo el plástico de la butaca / mientras abro la boca al despegar. / Leo un diario como si el vuelo fuera / una sala de espera o una plazuela. / Ya ni siquiera pido ventanilla, / y, si me toca, bajo la persiana. / Los que tenemos miedo a las palabras, / adoramos las compañías aéreas” (Cilleruelo 2006, 24).

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them to blend into the place, but also exclude them from human interaction and enclose them within an aseptic and impenetrable bubble. Such adhesion, if not conversion, to the fluidity of the aerial environment can occur to more or less extreme degrees depending on the circumstances. The protagonist of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club (1996) offers an eloquent example of such submission to the rules of the flow when he compares his body to that of Alice in Wonderland, since he is forced to shrink in order to adapt to the “tiny life” of the Airworld. Air travel dictates a unique conception of the body and the identity. The body and subjectivity are adapted to the compressed environment of the cabin, like the in-flight meals and air conditioning that engulf the voyagers from the terminal entrance to its exit.3 This miniaturization is also part of the experience of identity fluidification that passengers, nolens volens, undergo in order to be packed into the airplane. The minimization of the body and its needs extends more broadly to the passengers, who see their primary identities reduced to the strictly essential, like the luggage of the frequent traveler (Palahniuk 1996, 41). The subjects are temporarily disconnected from the exterior world, engaging in a solipsistic experience involving a tête-à-tête with their own selves. From the simple technological function of smartphones, airplane mode becomes a defining state of fluid passengers, who detach from others and rise above usual congestion as they conform their bodies and minds to the sanitized linings of the air environment. In light of these remarks, it is essential to nuance Marc Augé’s theory, according to which the passage through the “non-place” of the airport exposes individuals to “passive joys of identity-loss, and the more active pleasure of role-playing” (Augé 1995, 103). In reality, transition through the Airworld does not condemn subjects to a loss of identity, but involves a temporary replacement of their usual identity with that of a fluid passenger. Another depiction of this identity shift, which maximally expresses the state of fluidity achieved by the subject in the air milieu, is offered by what Andrés Neuman calls “the liturgy of changing states before actually changing places” (2016, 15–16). He describes this shift in condition as a substantial modification that affects even the perception of bodily consistency. In circumstances of suspension–elevation brought about by the “flatness” (Serres 1995, 252) of the plane in the sky, individuals 3 For an analysis of air mobility at the level of the body, particularly relative to notions of discipline, reification, and “bodily ‘togetherness’,” see Shih Pearson (2018).

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develop an awareness of the density and the nature of their body. Exceptionally immersed in the clouds, travelers are de facto metamorphosed into “volatile” beings (Serres 1995, 44) that are more atmospheric than terrestrial and can join the flow in movement without the usual impediments of materiality. Neuman uses expressions such as “transcendent” and “mystic” (2016, 19) to describe the state of the traveler during the delicate phases of takeoff and landing, while Serres’ angelic interpretation of the contemporary passenger similarly articulates the notion of the changing state of individuals-in-flight. They also convey a certain transfiguration, legitimized by the reconciliation between the sky and the earth, “two realms […] once foolishly separated” (Serres 1995, 296), as performed by air travelers. In this sense, attention to the aircraft cabin window and aerial views is a recurrent element in many works of fiction and cultural productions, that symbolizes the blooming of an aerial identity and the condition of immateriality in transit through the sky.4 Whether it falls upon the white of the clouds, the blue of the sky, or the sight of another airplane flying alongside, this gaze from the heights strongly modifies the relationship of the voyager to the landscape.5 It establishes the temporary identity of the individuals as air passengers, and places them in the unique position of spectators. Through the reflection of their own gaze in the window (Augé 1995, 86), the travelers paradoxically find themselves included in the air performance they witness, and indulge in a solitary tête-à-tête punctuated by the “variable language of the clouds” (Fresán 2017, 540). Numerous fictional characters attest to the contemplative state resulting from exposure to the aerial and vaporous vision of the clouds. Passengers savor the pleasure of rising into the emptiness thousands of feet above the ground and experiencing a different perception of their body, of themselves, and of the planet, which brings them closer to “the essential nature of what man first glimpsed in the flight of birds” (Luiselli 2014, 23).

4 The imaginary that has been recently developed around cloud computing technology and representations of the cloud as an increasingly frequent icon associated with accessible human content, data, and services, and no longer heavily divine or angelic, is relevant here. 5 Note that airline advertisements often play on this close-up view of the clouds that air travel makes possible. For example, the Air China commercial, aesthetically inspired by the imaginary and colors of the sky, emphasizes an osmosis between passenger and cloud, through the message “I enjoy flying in the clouds. I enjoy Air China” (https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=EUDDB_iHRqI).

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This sensory relationship to the exterior of the airplane is reminiscent of Baudelairian poetic correspondences, often expressed by writers in lyrical tones that stand out against the procedural and codified language of the aeronautical environment. The sky is depicted as a light, pure, floating environment, sometimes compared to “cotton fields” (Galarza 2005, 97) or to an abstract painting in which the clouds progress delicately along like moving commas (Dantzig 2011, 70). The vision of this scenery gives an impression of inconsistency, to the point of producing a sort of “fictional relationship between gaze and landscape” (Augé 1995, 86). The description given by the traveler in Michaël Ferrier’s Tokyo. Petits portraits de l’aube (2010) exemplifies “this reversal of the gaze” alluded to by Marc Augé (86): In the plane, en route to Tokyo. In flight, ten thousand meters above sea level, window seat. The thought that there are living people down there always moves me tremendously. I also like to look at the masses of clouds, their thousands of shapes, their compositions (it is rare to have clouds like this below oneself). (Ferrier 2010, 13)6

The horizontal vision of the sky and the vertical appreciation of the earth seen from above make the character aware of the exceptionality and paroxysm of his position, with his feet in the clouds, his head tilted down, and his thoughts turned toward the ground. This unique aerial identity provides an immersive view of the sky and gives rise to an ethereal and somehow divine perception of the body and the mind, which gradually dissipates as the plane descends to the ground. Renewing contact with the earth, landing, disembarking, and associated controls drastically put an end to this aerial ontology and restore the subject to his original terrestrial identity. The return to the terminal circuit, the presentation of traveling documents, and the reappropriation of luggage as a visible container of the materiality of the body (Durante 2016) upend the identity paradigm of the aerial individual and refasten the subject to the ground. Indeed, in fiction, the retrieval of baggage corresponds to the exit from the aerial 6 My translation. In the original: “Dans l’avion, en route vers Tokyo. En vol, dix mille mètres d’altitude, côté hublot. La pensée qu’il y a des hommes qui vivent en bas m’émeut toujours infiniment. J’aime aussi à regarder l’immense peuple des nuages, ses mille formes, ses compositions (il est rare d’avoir les nuages ainsi en dessous de soi)” (Ferrier 2010, 13).

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bubble and the nonnegotiable return to the material body. Even the most conscientiously fluid passenger succumbs to the imperatives of this anchoring to the ground and the slowdowns that follow. It does not suffice to be experienced and fast, or, like Ryan Bingham, to carry a standard executive suitcase with adaptable wheels and a retractable handle, exaggeratedly minimalist in its impersonal content.7 In fact, the suitcase is an object-symbol of fluidity and transit that can also lead to disruption of the flow, or deceleration of the trip to the point of bringing it to a standstill. The calculation Bingham makes in Up in the Air, which allows him to dodge lines with families and the elderly and head instead to a line of Asian entrepreneurs, shows the extent to which he fears luggage congestion due to excessive security measures and loss of time. Occasionally, even the fact of traveling light can be a cause of congestion. In Neuman’s How to Travel Without Seeing, for instance, the check-in counter becomes an impediment to the normal unfolding of transit. Even though the passenger, Neuman himself, has only a carry-on bag as he departs from the Guatemala airport for the United States, he is delayed. The American Airlines employee finds something strange, even suspicious, about his “traveling light,” and subjects him to questioning. Neuman finds this particularly irritating as he has transferred for various weeks between airports and airplanes across Latin America, and has taken the precaution of reducing his luggage precisely to avoid being held up by security controls. Especially since 9/11, and in the current context of global terrorist threats, luggage, irrespective of its shape and size, represents a risky object

7 Bingham’s suitcase contains shirts, ties, transparent plastic bags for underwear and dirty clothes, garment bags, and shoes (Reitman 2009). Other equally standard objects can be found, almost even in the same arrangement, in any given suitcase of a traveling executive (Faulconbridge 2014). The content itself is consequently a determinant factor insofar as the wisdom of experienced travelers is measured by the fluidity of their baggage, in terms of distribution of its content, ergonomics of the design, and lightness and ease of transport (Caplan 1986, 95–126). In the absence of fluidity, as a primary condition of the frequent traveler, we encounter situations such as that portrayed in another sequence in Up in the Air, in which the suitcase of a novice airplane traveler, Natalie (Anna Kendrick), represents a now obsolete, if not ridiculous, way of getting around (Reitman 2009). Her suitcase does not roll well; it is slow and heavy, filled with useless objects (such as a neck pillow and bed pillow), compared to what Faulconbridge defines as typical “executive aeromobility” (2014, 376–377).

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for which new controls and security devices have been adopted worldwide. This perception of the suitcase and the human body as suspicious elements has become common to our way of traveling and appears in numerous cultural productions and works of fiction as a menacing entity that can, moreover, substantially delay the journey. Among other examples, French author Catherine Cuisset’s novel Indigo (2013) describes the incredible vicissitudes of a passenger stuck at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport due to a bomb threat linked to a piece of abandoned luggage, which ultimately turns out to belong to the traveler herself (11–20). Charlotte’s hand luggage, which she lost during the rush to catch her flight to Delhi, is neutralized by bomb-disposal experts for security reasons. Due to the generalized fear of suspicious baggage and the toughening of counterterrorism measures, the innocent woman finds herself in violation of the law and forever stripped of her personal belongings. The narrative reveals the contradictions of fluidity, and clearly recounts the hypersecuring of the airport machine, with its prohibitions and its neuroses sustained by the constant fear of danger that the other represents.8 This filtering and the inflexible dimension of the airport has become a defining feature of the air environment and air travel. From the obligatory walk through a metal detector to the presence of a security camera, from luggage imaging to body scans and increasingly efficient biometric and facial recognition technologies, the airport setting is represented as an interface of inspection and restriction of the subject’s freedom of movement. As Fuller and Harley observe, the airport is able not only to transform “a body on the ground into a body in the air, but it also involves the incorporeal transformation of the travelling body into a series of processing categories, like citizen, passenger, baggage allowance, threat (red code) or ‘innocent’” (2005, 44). This inflation, if not saturation, of control devices and rituals also explains why narratives rarely fail to mention either a security device or protocol operative in the international terminal. This imaginary of fear, “the theatricalization of risk and the staging of global security” (Degoutin and Wagon 2018, 172) now inevitably characterizes real and fictional airport geography. It has given rise to a proliferation of narrative sequences that, like the extract from Spanish writer Iván Escobar’s novel Kamikaze (2012), describe the congestion of 8 For a recent critical study of collective paranoia and neurosis brought about by the security culture of the international airport, see Degoutin and Wagon (2018).

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the flow and the testing of the body during security checks. The process of passing through the metal detector, narrated from the point of view of a terrorist trying to control his perspiration and conceal his panic, marks a climax in the story: “An orchestra of clocks, belts, coins, iPhones, and keys landed resoundingly on the slippery surface of the trays […] Slatan’s heart twisted inside his chest […] The hairs on the back of his neck standing up. Eyes burning. Hands icy cold” (Escobar 2012, 31). Whether in this exceptional situation or under more ordinary circumstances, air travelers temporarily see their belongings confiscated and their bodies taken hostage. Their biometric and emotional identities are exposed to the point of becoming “transparent” (Hall 2015).9 The interruption of fluidity no longer involves just corporeal and kinetic factors, but also affects the behavior and feelings of the individuals (Salter 2008, 145–160). Such intertwining of physical, sensorial, and biopolitical factors, as maximized by the painful phase of the security control, is recounted by numerous fictional characters who experience search process as a violation of their privacy. The protagonist of Spanish author Antonio Muñoz Molina’s novel Ventanas de Manhattan (2004) insists on this particular aspect when recounting his arrival at New York’s JFK Airport. During transit, his suitcase passes between the “transparent plastic gloved hands” (28) of various security guards, who carefully check its insides (26).10 These formal gestures imposed by the security measures of U.S. authorities jumble the initial arrangement of the suitcase, now profaned by the hands and eyes of the customs officers (27–28). Not only the fluid identity of the passenger, but the entire identity of the individual, is jeopardized by the “Big Brother” of the airport machine.

3

The Vulnerable Passenger

As the paradoxical slowing of frequent flyers and their suitcases shows, the logic of flow in the Airworld should also be understood in terms of constraining controls and hyper-surveillance. In fact, air transit allows both for transit and connection, and for an inflexible revocation of the fluidity that characterizes it. This suspension of the aerial environment’s 9 On the issue of security, see also the important contributions of Fuller and Harley (2005) and Salter (2008). 10 My translation. In the original: “manos enguantadas de plástico transparente” (Muñoz Molina 2004, 28).

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transit function often translates into dramatic situations with considerable effects on the traveler’s identity. Rather than assimilating the subject to the shared status of passenger, the Airworld becomes, following “a panoptic modality of power” (Foucault 1995, 221), a discriminatory environment that isolates individuals and categorizes them along legal and institutional parameters linked to their citizenship. It is, indeed, within the framework of the airport that we can observe the immediate effects of international geopolitical configurations, notably those related to immigration and counterterrorism. Among others, the immediate closing of the international airspace on 11 September 2001, the “travel ban” declared by Donald Trump in January 2017, and the massive pro-democracy demonstrations that blocked hundreds of flights at the Hong Kong International Airport in August 2019 all demonstrate the power attributed to aerial infrastructure in the sorting and monitoring of individuals moving around the globe.11 Despite the massification of these “liquid surveillance” procedures (Bauman and Lyon 2013), the coercive dimension of the airport and the airplane sharpens in the presence of certain types of travelers who contravene the regulations of international air travel circulation. In this regard, Albanian artist Adrian Paci’s video “Centro di Permanenza Temporanea” (2007) (Fig. 2) vividly shows, at its pinnacle, the countermodel of the paradigm of aerial fluidity. Under a bright sky, a group of people appears stuck on a mobile staircase abandoned in the middle of an airport runway. These men and women stand crammed onto this precarious platform, devoid of any connection to the terminal or an airplane, dressed in dilapidated work clothes, with marks of exploitation and indigence on their sun-wrinkled and tired faces. The stairway to nowhere becomes more shocking when we observe that they have no luggage and that planes are constantly landing. This prolonged, forced stop echoes the deportations of slaves or prisoners, and denounces the stigmatization and exclusion suffered by certain ethnic groups and social strata in the context of global air voyage. Deprived of freedom of movement, the cluster of migrant workers forgotten in the bleakness of the runway expresses the degree of segregation and detention conditions that the Airworld potentially actualizes.

11 On the increasing strategic role of international terminals in the current global geopolitical context, see in particular Dunn and Boucher (2019).

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Fig. 2 Adrian Paci: Centro di Permanenza Temporanea [2007], still from video (Courtesy of the artist, kaufmann repetto, Milano and New York, and Peter Kilchmann, Zurich)

The forced interruption of the fluidity of the trip is far from being the effect of episodic excesses, and is a recurring feature of contemporary airports. Numerous novels and films explore this other side of the aerial universe and reveal a landscape that often remains hidden from fluid passengers. Through their poignant tone and focus on problematic situations, these narratives paint a grim picture of the airport as an infrastructure of incarceration, of police authority, inquisition, and, above all, isolation and degradation. Spanish writer Juan Francisco Ferré’s novel Providence (2009) narrates the paradoxical and unexpected shutdown of a trip of a non-suspicious passenger. The protagonist, a professor of cinema studies who has been invited to Brown University, is arrested for no reason by the JFK Airport police while in transit toward his final destination of Providence, Rhode Island. He is locked in a surveillance cell and questioned, and must obey a series of orders that will allow him to leave this place and revert to his fluid condition of connecting passenger. The professor is required to execute a terrorist who had been arrested the day before while attempting to carry out an attack at the airport. This execution, part of a safety protocol established by the local police,

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shows the degree to which the airport can turn into an infernal machine of cruelty and violation of basic human rights. It furthermore denounces the level of coercion that security authorities exercise, without impunity, to the detriment of the liberty of individuals. Spielberg’s film The Terminal similarly highlights abuses by surveillance personnel, in its depiction of an extreme situation of deprivation of freedom of movement. The circumstances are entirely based on the representation of the airport as an impassable threshold governed by strict, irrevocable measures with the power to question the validity of a passport and the recognition of an identity in transit. Yet this performance of hyper-surveillance, discipline, and punishment engendered by the strong biopolitical dimension of the airport does not necessarily require physical force or bodily harm (Foucault 1995, 26), but is often practiced in a subtler form (26), using strategic but no less invasive or punitive methods of subjugation. This discipline of the body, which aims to soften and make it docile (Foucault 1995, 146) according to a spatial organization governed by a need for control and order, is a defining trait of air transport. Many works of fiction expose the “political anatomy” and “political technology” mechanisms (Foucault 1995, 36) at work in the airport, not without producing an alarming atmosphere of anxiety and fear, the antithesis of the limpidity and fluidity commonly associated with this infrastructure.12 Among others, films such as Ben Affleck’s Argo (2012), Oliver Stone’s Snowden (2016), and Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis (2000– 2003) perceptively show how simply entering the airport is a trying experience for characters in terms of rituals of control of their identities and undesirable nationalities. This ghettoization of travelers carrying passports issued by certain countries is one of the more frequent causes of congestion of the flow and interruption of the voyage. Like many novels on immigration and return to the home country, Djiboutian author Abdourahman A. Waberi’s Transit (2003) recounts a flight that is not so much an encapsulation, but an imprisonment, for its protagonist, Bashir. Bound and huddled in the back of the aircraft, Bashir describes how he was mistreated on board: OK, this trip here, everything went all right. I gobbled the good food of Air France. Went direct to the war film before I fell into heavy sleep. I was 12 On Foucault’s reading of the body and its place in the contemporary culture of airport security, see Hall (2015, 3–5, 16).

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stocked, no I mean scotched—taped—in the last row of the Boeing 747 where the cops tie the deportees up tight when plane goes back to Africa. (Waberi 2012, 3)

Later in the novel, during a flight from Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport to Saint-Denis de la Réunion via Cairo and Djibouti, a character named Harbi insists on a pattern common to many flights to Africa related to the presence of passengers repatriated to their country of origin. Harbi’s descriptions underscore the cruelty of the police officers responsible for keeping such individuals away from other travelers, and emphasize the regularity of these deportation procedures in the airport and aboard passenger airplanes. It is here that an entire continent is targeted by the authoritarian and security logic of the Airworld: on a daily basis, one or another flight to Africa is the stage of one of these disgraceful scenes of expulsion that distort and empty air mobility of its functions of connection and mediation, transforming the airplane cabin into a cage (5) or steps to a scaffold. The airport, as a necessary threshold toward either exile or deportation, is depicted in these narratives as the antithesis of what it usually represents to the blissful travelers of globalization. The terminal loses its luster and fluid appearance, becoming a “theater of cruelty and bitterness” (Waberi 2012, 140) now wrapped in a dark color, hardly the usual calm blue but a disturbing “midnight blue” (140). Other novels by African authors, similarly revolving around challenging situations of displacement, expose analogous hostile circumstances experienced by voyagers from countries of the Global South. Distressing stories of the treatment of air travelers from these regions emerge as passengers are caught in the tight net of customs and security controls. Departing from Africa to travel to a northern country often reflects immigration intentions that are typically associated with heightening control procedures and thorough verification of identity and residence permits.13 This frequently unpleasant and degrading transition has a higher cost than other rituals of passage; it sheds an unfavorable light on the outrages of the surveillance system of intercontinental air transport. The story of journalist Asta Diop in Senegalese author Aminata Sow Fall’s novel Douceurs du bercail (1998) provides another example of 13 For a systematic study of air transportation challenges across different geopolitical areas of the globe, including colonial Africa, see Goetz and Budd (2014).

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narratives describing the obstruction of travel due to border control procedures and racial prejudice. While walking the halls of the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport after a night flight from Dakar, Asta recalls the numerous times she has “traveled with people accompanied to the plane by an impressive escort, and forcibly boarded with their bindles and their broken dreams” (Fall 1998, 8).14 This long flashback, resonating with echoes of conversations with deported passengers, takes place just before Asta herself is detained by a police officer who stops her before she passes immigration controls and subjects her to a search of her luggage and a grueling interrogation. Although her papers are in order and she holds an official invitation to attend a Conference on the World Economic Order (16), Asta must nonetheless submit to the “humiliating treatment” reserved for those suspected of being “future immigrant[s]” (16).15 After receiving the stamp from the border police allowing her to cross over into French territory, Asta is the victim of yet another interrogation during customs control, even though she has nothing to declare. After her luggage has been thoroughly searched, even down to the pockets and the “smallest folds of their linings” (24), and even as her personal belongings are torn apart by the customs officers and exposed to the eyes of the world, Asta remains unaware that she must still face a pat-down inspection. Feeling violated and humiliated by the “insolent hand” of an agent (27),16 Asta is progressively seized with rage and ends up strangling the police officer who was frisking her, before losing consciousness. She awakens to the spotlights and cameras of the police and the press, and is handcuffed and taken into custody in the cells of the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport (36). It is in this hangar, called “the depot,” filled mostly with “blacks […], mixed-race and […] Arabs waiting to be expelled to their countries of origin” (39),17 that she will be condemned to wait, without knowing her fate, for eight days in unhealthy and inhumane 14 My translation. In the original: “a voyagé avec des gens conduits jusqu’à l’avion par une escorte impressionnante, et embarqués de force avec leurs balluchons et leur rêves avortés” (Fall 1998, 8). 15 My translation. In the original: “traitements humiliants,” “futur[s] immigré[s]” (Fall 1998, 16). 16 My translation. In the original: “main insolente” (Fall 1998, 27). 17 My translation. In the original: “le dépôt,” “noirs […], métis et […] arabes pour la

plupart [qui] attendent d’être expulsés vers leurs pays d’origine” (Fall 1998, 39).

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conditions without access to food or care. After this wait, which “lasted like an eternity in hell” (131),18 Asta is released and repatriated to Senegal aboard an air convoy that stops in several African capitals to expel rejected passengers. As a story of African immigration, Sow Fall’s novel denounces the misfortunes and penalties suffered by individuals who sacrifice their possessions to buy a plane ticket to Europe, from where they end up being ejected without ever having been able to cross the threshold of the destination airport. The Airworld is as much a protagonist in the story as Asta herself, and is, more than ever, represented as an expiatory place. Constituting the décor of the narrative, the airport is viewed as a sealed surveillance cell, and assimilated to the “temporary detention center” at the heart of the artistic work of Adrian Paci. The rejected of the Airworld with whom Asta rubs shoulders during her “ordeal” (40)19 are abandoned in the dungeons of Charles de Gaulle Airport with no hope of escaping expulsion from the French territory, not only deprived of the opportunity to continue their trip, but also stripped of their identities and freedoms as if entering into a forced labor camp. They are detained while in transit, engulfed in the vortex of abuse and humiliation, and ultimately returned without justification to their country of origin. If their takeoff is associated initially with the realization of a dream of freedom that would allow them to leave their precarious nations behind, their detention and forced return flight are defeats of their identity and community. Many authoritarian acts transform the airport and the air voyage into a sordid infrastructure of human ignominy, including mortification of the body, insults and orders, detention without any right to a lawyer or outside communication, prolonged isolation, and deportation. The transitory function of the Airworld and its optimistic principle of connection sustained by the opulence and comfort of these infrastructures are sabotaged from within, and thus become mirages for these individuals who are deprived of the temporary identity of traveler, which is subverted by the detention conditions that define them. Alongside legal and illegal immigrants, other categories of passengers represented in international fiction similarly fit within this paradigm of marginalization and exclusion for

18 My translation. In the original: “a duré comme une éternité en enfer” (Fall 1998, 131). 19 My translation. In the original: “calvaire” (Fall 1998, 40).

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which the air sector is responsible. Foremost among these at-risk groups are smugglers of illicit goods, particularly narcotics, like the mules who temporarily store drugs inside their bodies in order to make them less easily detectable by superficial security controls. Within the vast tradition of contemporary cultural production related to the phenomenon of drug trafficking, two emblematic works of narcofiction aptly illustrate the connections between air travel and Colombian human courier drug smuggling. The first is “El arriero” (“The Mule Driver”), a short story by Colombian journalist and author Alfredo Molano included in his book Rebusque mayor: Relatos de mulas, traquetos y embarques (Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom: Tales of Drugs, Mules and Gunmen) (2004). The second is the film Maria Full of Grace (2004) by American filmmaker Joshua Marston.20 María Álvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno), the main character of the film, is a pregnant seventeen-year-old Colombian cocaine mule who carries a considerable load of encapsulated illicit drugs in her stomach. Immediately after the opening scenes on the ground, the young mule is shown aboard an airplane taking off, after having passed through security. Airports, airplanes, flight attendants, airsickness, and airport security determine the narrative progression of the film. Alfredo Molano’s short story “The Mule Driver,” recounts the transatlantic travel of Colombian mules toward Madrid in an analogous case of illicit trafficking, mobility, and gender exploitation. The experience of aerial drug smuggling is described from the viewpoint of a male protagonist, the mules’ manager, who surveils the female smugglers throughout the trip, from check-into arrival, and ultimately ensuring the proper delivery of the drugs they carry. The stories of characters involved in air travel narcofiction generally begin in medias res, at the airport terminal. The narrator rapidly mentions several previous circumstances that outline the characters’ general environment in order to present the reasons behind their decision to accept the risk of such a journey. The action then usually moves aboard the plane, without any further transition. The mules do not know each other, and have in common only the fact that they all carry “on average a kilo in their intestines” (Molano 2004, 7). In Molano’s story, Lucía’s experience as a mule starts as soon as she enters the airport terminal in Bogotá and passes through security. The rhythm of her experience is marked progressively by

20 For a more in-depth comparison of these two works, see Durante (2019).

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the ensuing stages of the flight: the takeoff, the transatlantic flight itself, the landing of the plane, and disembarking and customs operations. In this respect, Lucía’s air travel follows the narrative construction of many other flight stories, even those unrelated to narcotrafficking, which similarly show a strong connection between air travel protocols and character agency. The flight is central to the narrative, a critical moment for the mules’ concealment and the continuation of the narrative, and a confirmation of the interdependency between plot and travel procedures. As a temporary phase of collective encapsulation, the flight also highlights the mules’ fears. The plane not only epitomizes a place of respite on the risky path toward the final destination, but also reveals corporal and psychological factors that might not otherwise be relevant or would appear less suspicious on the ground. The mules become especially frightened during takeoff and landing, as pressure and altitude alterations can affect their gastrointestinal system and thus their ability to safely retain the swallowed pellets or drug “cookies” (Molano 2004, 8). Air, as a medium and a condition of mobility, exposes all passengers to the vulnerability of being suspended in the sky; in the specific cases of the mules and their drivers, air denotes an additional aggravating element. Although movement aboard is limited due to the size of the passenger cabin, the internal movements that the mules’ bodies experience during the flight are incessant and sometimes unmanageable. The drugs contained in their intestines make the common symptoms of airsickness, such as dizziness, nausea, and sweating, unbearable. The flight thus produces prolonged physical torture, whose signs must be hidden at all costs so as to go unnoticed by the vigilant eyes of the crew. In Maria Full of Grace, Marston offers a detailed portrayal of the physical inconveniences that mules suffer while in the air. In the case of María Álvarez, her drug-carrying also coincides with her first flight. The women gradually familiarize themselves with security controls and the duty-free shops, and experience on-board and landing procedures such as filling out forms and passing through customs. In addition, María Álvarez and another mule, Lucy Diaz (Guilied López), suffer pain and perspiration as they struggle to hold the pellets in their guts. Nevertheless, they endeavor to resist and not show any signs of pain or discomfort. The flight is a nerve-wracking event that is made worse by constant trips to the bathroom, including the agonizing wait in front of the door and painful moments once inside. While trying to behave as innocently as possible, the mules feel increasingly intimidated by their fellow travelers’ gaze. Even the typical scene

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of the flight attendant serving food is a highly stressful moment for the mules, who are forced to at least partially consume their meal so as not to arouse suspicion. By situating the action during a night flight with closed windows, Marston converts the cabin into a long, claustrophobic tunnel. These shots show María and Lucy in sharp focus, isolating them from surrounding passengers, emphasizing the illegal purpose of their travel, underscoring the necessity of remaining unnoticed, and suggesting their loneliness. In addition to the airplane, the entire airport infrastructure represents a source of peril for the mules. Once they are on the ground, their feelings of vulnerability and physical discomfort resurface, particularly when they have to cross international border controls and are exposed to the mistrustful gaze of the customs agents. In Molano’s story and Marston’s film, as in Sow Fall’s novel, transit through these areas of the airport becomes painfully difficult, as the body’s language and overall appearance may accidentally disclose the illegal shipment and ultimately invalidate the mules’ status as passengers and travelers: There are two big steps, which are the heavy ones. The first is when you exit the plane and you walk down a long corridor, where they look everyone up and down and take in all the details: comportment, relaxation, uneasiness, your clothes, how you look. From there the candidates go to the second step, where they present their papers. This is the place where the guard comes up to one of the mules and says, “Come with me to be searched.” And they already know: eight years, three months and one day. (Molano 2004, 11)

Because of its external signs such as “comportment, relaxation, uneasiness, [and] clothes” (11), the physical body is the most relevant and thus most inspected component of the mules’ illegal transit. Analogously, Marston’s film masterfully dramatizes two “steps” along the mules’ via dolorosa connecting the plane to the customs area inside the airport. Barely having landed at JFK International Airport, María is almost immediately stopped by a police agent, and then stopped again later, because her old-fashioned wheelless suitcase has not gone unnoticed amidst the crowd of passengers, including the other mules, whose carry-on luggage is waiting around the baggage carousel. Since it does not fit the typical characteristics of airport circulation, María’s luggage raises the suspicions

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of a police officer who singles her out from the stream of passengers for a more detailed security check.21 Given the relevance of the human body in such strenuous travel circumstances, the nominal identity of the passenger (Fuller and Harley 2005, 44) has a comparatively lesser effect in terms of the surveillance of the traveler. The body emerges as the focal vehicle and purpose of the journey, and as “the stable token of identity” (Adey 2004, 1369), in police investigations. It is carefully inspected and x-rayed; its internal organs are disclosed. From beginning to end, the mules’ bodies are repeatedly humiliated: first when they must endure the challenge of swallowing several dozen latex pellets filled with heroin or cocaine, then during the pre-flight checks, the flight itself, customs controls, and, eventually, in delivering the goods, usually in miserable circumstances. Under such extreme air travel conditions, the human body is simultaneously assimilated both to the merchandise it carries and to the plane that carries the body itself. The transporting body, the commodities being carried, the plane bringing the body, and the illicit ingested narcotics all form part of the same nested compact structure. They travel simultaneously, sharing the same speed and altitude, crossing the same borders, and constituting a unique mobile (flying) entity. In the case of this specific category of “threatening travelers” (Adey 2004, 1372), the body becomes the pivotal factor in the shift from a condition of fluid transnational mass air mobility to the opposite phenomenon of “immobility” (Urry 2003, 125; Adey 2006). Moreover, this change must be understood in its socioeconomic dimension as an additional paradox of globalized society (Adey 2006). As mentioned above, the human mules who agree to become drug couriers do so because of discrimination on both local and international scales. Their detention by airport security puts an end to their journey, representing an additional exclusion from global society. As in Asta Diop’s story, the stigma of the Global South brands upon them an indelible mark of inequality and powerlessness, and relegates them to permanent exclusion. 21 Clothes are an additional social feature that also play a distinctive role in the mules’ general appearance. The apparel that María wears during her trip represents a considerable upgrade from her usual outfits during the first part of the film. Nevertheless, dressed in her “working wom[e]n’s Sunday best” (Molano 2004, 66), her look is still recognizable.

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They come from the corrupted and criminalized global underworld, and inevitably have no chance of rescue, but remain the pariah of globalized society (Agier 2016, 63–66). Here, however, air travel provides María with the unique and unexpected possibility of leaving the squalor of her home country and beginning a new life in the United States with her future child. Her journey to the North, begun in Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport, is ultimately a one-way trip. The last sequence of the film emblematically depicts the symbolic frontiers that airports and air travel represent for María. On her way to JFK Airport, and later at the gate, holding her passport and boarding pass on the final threshold before departure, María decides to remain in the United States. Previously, María had been picked out of the crowd, her mobility restrained by customs officials. Here, she decides to exclude herself from the multitude of travelers and deliberately opt for immobility. From the moment she withdraws herself from the global flow of passengers and renounces her traveling status, the entire terminal infrastructure becomes superfluous. The choice of Julieta Venegas’s song “Lo que venga después” (2008) for the film’s finale reinforces the rupture between María and her surrounding environment. The lyrics “Aquí queda todo lo que fui / aquí empieza todo lo que soy” (“Here will remain everything that I was / Here begins everything I am”) emphasize the crucial role of the airport as a threshold where contemporary individuals at the crossroads of many possible geographic destinations make significant decisions that often secure them to the ground rather than take them up into the air. On a darker note, these multiple narratives expose the complex nexus between mobility and immobility, and denounce logics of domination and discrimination established by politics of movement (Adey 2006, 83) within this supposedly global environment.

References Articles and Essays Adey, Peter. 2004. Surveillance at the Airport: Surveilling Mobility/Mobilising Surveillance. Environment and Planning A 36: 1365–1380. Adey, Peter. 2006. If Mobility Is Everything Then It Is Nothing: Towards a Relational Politics of (Im)mobilities. Mobilities 1 (1): 75–94. Adey, Peter, et al. 2012. Profiling the Passenger: Mobilities, Identities. Embodiments. Cultural Geographies 19 (2): 169–193. Agier, Michel. 2016. Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition, trans. David Fernbach. Cambridge and Malden: Polity.

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Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe. London and New York: Verso. Bauman, Zygmunt, and David Lyon. 2013. Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Cambridge and Malden: Polity. Caplan, Ralph. 1986. Design for Travel(ers). In Bon Voyage: Design for Travel, eds. J.G. Links, 95–128. New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Design. Degoutin, Stéphane, and Gwenola Wagon. 2018. Psychanalyse de l’aéroport international. Neuilly-Plaisance: 369 Éditions. Dunn, Katherine, and Phil Boucher. 2019. From the Civil Rights Era to Hong Kong: How Airports Became a Global Symbol of Protest. Fortune, August 21. https://fortune.com/2019/08/21/hong-kong-protest-airport-symbol/. Accessed 22 August 2019. Durante, Erica. 2016. Check-in para el destino global: la maleta en la ficción hispanoamericana de hoy. Cuadernos de Literatura 40: 332–348. Durante, Erica. 2019. Can the Subaltern Fly? Female Bodies in Molano’s and Marston’s Narcofiction. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 46 (1): 77–95. Faulconbridge, James. 2014. The Executive. In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, ed. Peter Adey et al., 376–387. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books. Fuller, Gillian, and Ross Harley. 2005. Aviopolis: A Book About Airports. London: Black Dog. Goetz, Andrew R., and Lucy Budd (eds.). 2014. The Geographies of Air Transport. London and New York: Routledge. Hall, Rachel. 2015. The Transparent Traveler: The Performance and Culture of Airport Security. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Merriman, Peter. 2012. Mobilities, Space and Culture. New York: Routledge. Salter, Mark B. (ed.). 2008. Politics at the Airport. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Serres, Michel. 1995. Angels: A Modern Myth, trans. Francis Cowper. Paris: Flammarion. Shih Pearson, Justine. 2018. Choreographing the Airport. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Urry, John. 2003. Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity.

Films Affleck, Ben. 2012. Argo. Santa Monica and Los Angeles: GK Films and Smokehouse Pictures. Almodóvar, Pedro. 2013. Los amantes pasajeros. Madrid: El Deseo.

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Barreto, Bruno. 2003. View from the Top. Los Angeles: Brad Grey Pictures. Burman, Daniel. 2002. Todas las azafatas van al cielo. Buenos Aires: BD Cine and Patagonik Film Group. Crowe, Cameron. 2005. Elizabethtown. Los Angeles: Cruise-Wagner Productions and Vinyl Films. Currie, Paul. 2017. 2:22. Santa Monica and Los Angeles: Lightstream Pictures, Pandemonium Films, and Walk The Walk Entertainment. Marston, Joshua. 2004. Maria Full of Grace. New York: HBO Films and Journeyman Pictures. Reitman, Jason. 2009. Up in the Air. Universal City and Culver City: DreamWorks Pictures, The Montecito Picture Company, and Cold Spring Pictures. Spielberg, Steven. 2004. The Terminal. Universal City: DreamWorks Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Parkes, and MacDonald Productions. Stone, Oliver. 2016. Snowden. Los Angeles and Potsdam: Open Road Films and UFA GmbH.

Novels and Short Stories Cuisset, Catherine. 2013. Indigo. Paris: Gallimard. Dantzig, Charles. 2011. Dans un avion pour Caracas. Paris: Éditions Grasset. Escobar, Iván. 2012. Kamikaze. Madrid: Temas de Hoy. Fall, Aminata Sow. 1998. Douceurs du bercail. Abidjan: Nouvelles Éditions Ivoiriennes. Ferré, Juan Francisco. 2009. Providence. Barcelona: Anagrama. Ferrier, Michaël. 2010. Tokyo: petits portraits de l’aube. Paris: Arléa. Fresán, Rodrigo. 2017. The Invented Part, trans. Will Vanderhyden. Rochester: Open Letter Books. Galarza, Sergio. 2005. La soledad de los aviones. In La soledad de los aviones, 97–105. Lima: Estruendomudo. Game, Jérôme. 2017. Salle d’embarquement. Bordeaux: Éditions de l’Attente. Halfon, Eduardo. 2014. Monastery, trans. Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn. New York: Bellevue Literary Press. Kirn, Walter. 2002. Up in the Air. New York: Anchor Books. Luiselli, Valeria. 2014. Flying Home. In Sidewalks, 17–30. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Molano, Alfredo. 2004. Loyal Soldiers in the Cocaine Kingdom: Tales of Drugs, Mules, and Gunmen, trans. James Graham. New York: Columbia University Press. Muñoz Molina, Antonio. 2004. Ventanas de Manhattan. Barcelona: Seix Barral. Neuman, Andrés. 2016. How to Travel Without Seeing: Dispatches from the New Latin America, trans. Jeffrey Lawrence. Brooklyn: Restless Books. Palahniuk, Chuck. 1996. Fight Club. New York: W. W. Norton.

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Waberi, Abdourahman A. 2012. Transit: A Novel, trans. David Ball and Nicole Ball. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Poetry Cilleruelo, José Ángel. 2006. Vuela. In Frágiles, 24. Málaga: Publicaciones de la Antigua Imprenta Sur.

Songs Venegas, Julieta. 2008. Lo que venga después. In Cosas raras. New York: Sony BMG.

Commercials I Love to Fly. Youtube Video. Posted by AirChina. May 31, 2012. https://www. youtube.com/watch?vz=EUDDB_iHRqI. Accessed 8 August 2019.

Comics Satrapi, Marjane. 2000–2003. Persepolis. Paris: L’Association.

Other References Saraceno, Tomás. 2019. Falling Upward in an Ocean of Air. https://www.you tube.com/watch?v=1RMpclvZqTY. Accessed 6 August 2019.

CHAPTER 6

Connections, Disconnections, and Reconnections

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Airborne Families and Relationships

In the long tradition of films that depict reunions or farewells in the terminal, Richard Curtis’s Love Actually (2003) exhibits the strong emotional component of the airport as a threshold that sometimes brings together, and sometimes separates, two people or groups of individuals. In opening and closing with mosaics of ordinary meeting-scenes in the Heathrow arrival hall, Curtis’s film underscores the mediation function of air travel. Through its power to connect faraway people and thus preserve family, friendship, and romantic ties on a global scale, the Airworld is explicitly highlighted as a platform in which intimate emotions and feelings are expressed. According to David (Hugh Grant), who comments on a sequence of scenes of reunion at Heathrow, the airport terminal conveys a benevolent and pure image of human love, and functions as an antidote, or a redemption “in a world of hatred and greed” (Curtis 2003): Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. […] It seems to me that love is everywhere […] fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. […] I’ve got a sneaking suspicion… love actually is all around… (Curtis 2003)

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Durante, Air Travel Fiction and Film, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52651-1_6

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The terminal is praised for the spirit of mutual affection and fraternity it fosters (Serres 1995, 249), and depicted as an exception relative to other places of modernity, given its potential philanthropic and optimistic dimensions. Regardless of age or ethnicity, the individuals that appear in the reunion scenes of Love Actually—both the fictional characters and the real people filmed by the director while unaware of the presence of a camera—all similarly express an “overflowing love” and heightened emotions (Finger 2013). Without distinction or restraint, they watch the automatic doors looking for the people for whom they have come and, as soon as they recognize them, rush out of the crowd to indulge in one form or another of physical closeness—hugging, kissing, caressing, or cuddling—and offer flowers, balloons, flags, signs, or gifts. From this perspective, the airport belies its conventional image as a cold, rigid, or even hostile place. Its nature as an anthropological place is confirmed, and it is depicted favorably as an environment capable of provoking extraordinarily warm manifestations of affection. This human, if not humanist, treatment of the airport carries a particularly decisive weight in works of fiction depicting arrival situations in international airports in countries of the Global South. Much like in the initial sequence of Love Actually, the terminal loses its connotations of exclusion, marginalization, order, and hygiene, and metamorphoses into a landscape overflowing with people and colors, thick with cries, applause, jumping, smiles, and tears of joy. In these narratives, the focus shifts from the passengers who have just landed to the family members who have come to welcome them. The paradigm of anonymous air travel is subverted, giving way to effusions that a contrario define the airport terminal as a theater in which “drama, fears, and emotions” (Adey 2009, 204) are often uninhibitedly expressed. The Brazzaville airport, as described by the protagonist of Congolese author Daniel Biyaoula’s novel L’Impasse (1996), fills with clamors and visitors of all ages upon the arrival of a flight from Paris. Even before the passengers disembark from the plane, the colorful local crowd crams onto the terrace above the airstrip, gesticulating and shouting at the top of their lungs to welcome their loved ones back home: There are so many people on the terrace. They gesture wildly, they yell. I hear some whistles. I can even make out some of their words. […] I even have the feeling that I won’t be able to cover the few feet that separate me from the airport building, that the hoots and hollers will kill me. […]. They

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keep on applauding, shouting with admiration, making so many comments on the clothes they are wearing. It’s a real sight. […] A few steps from the door through which we will enter the airport hall, I see some of my family members. There is my mother, my father, grandmother Luzolo, my brothers Samuel, Philippe, and Denis, my sisters Julienne, Pierrette, and Marie, my uncle Titémo, my friends François and Théophile and many children. (Biyaoula 1996, 30–33)1

This enthusiastic and spectacular welcome alone is enough to differentiate the international airport of Brazzaville from normally “silent airports” (Adey 2009, 203). The arrival hall is temporarily converted into a venue for family reunions and a place of celebration as relatives finally gather to rejoice over the return of an expatriate (Fig. 1). As the beginning of Biyaoula’s novel attests, airport reunions are made all the more moving when related to a story of migration and the imminence of a long-awaited return. The airport enables and actualizes the connection or reconnection of otherwise faraway individuals. This overabundance of emotions, depicted almost cacophonously by Biyaoula’s protagonist, demonstrates the degree to which the airplane voyage, notably in stigmatized geopolitical contexts, doubles as a rhetoric and a performance of the affective, sometimes with strong ethnographic meaning. The genealogy that the protagonist draws up in naming each family member in the terminal by first name and relation shows the symbolic importance that the local community attaches to the airport as the site at which the ritual of homecoming merriment begins. Yet for such desires and emotions to manifest and spread at the baggage claim exit, extraordinary situations such as the expatriates’ return narrated in Biyaoula’s novel are not always necessary. Often, even when the arrival is not marked by the shadow of exile and uprooting, reunions 1 My translation. In the original: “Sur le balcon, il y a des tas de gens. Ils font de nombreux gestes, poussent des cris. J’entends quelques sifflets. Je saisis même quelquesunes de leurs paroles. […] J’ai même le sentiment que je ne parviendrai pas à couvrir les quelques mètres qui me séparent du bâtiment de l’aéroport, que les huées, les cris des gens me tuent. […] Et ceux du balcon, ils ne cessent d’applaudir, de pousser des cris d’admiration, de faire des tas de commentaires sur les habits qu’ils se sont mis. C’est un vrai spectacle. […] A quelques mètres de la porte par laquelle nous accédons dans le hall de l’aéroport, je vois certains des membres de ma famille. Il y a ma mère, mon père, grand-mère Luzolo, mes frères Samuel, Philippe et Denis, mes sœurs Julienne, Pierrette et Marie, les femmes de mes frères, mon oncle Titémo, mes amis François et Théophile et de nombreux enfants” (Biyaoula 1996, 30–33).

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Fig. 1 Ally Zhu: Reunion [2019]

in the terminal are still characterized by tender and irrepressible outpourings. In a scene from Argentinean writer Alan Pauls’s novel El pasado (The Past, 2003), the male protagonist, Rimini, and his new fiancée, Vera, trigger this modality in their reunion at the Buenos Aires Airport. The encounter, which takes place after four days of family vacation, is described as a crescendo of feelings destined to remain forever inscribed in the memory of the subject in love. The physical concomitance of these previously separated individuals in the airport de facto realizes the reconstitution of the couple, as much for others as for the lovers themselves.2 Sometimes, as in the case of Vera and Rimini, reunions in the arrival hall are synonymous with a rediscovery of the other, spotted in a crowd with a renewed glance. The tête-à-tête is thus like a replay of the first time, as if the separation caused by the trip had suddenly reinvigorated the relationship:

2 Among the cultural productions previously mentioned in this book, films such as Alberto Fuguet’s 2 horas, the epilogue of Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited, and Je vais te manquer also utilize this paradigm of reunification through the plane trip.

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But Vera came back, and when Rimini caught sight of her in the airport, zigzagging between her fellow passengers to pick up her suitcases, and saw how her beauty and grace […] blossomed for being carefree, the incident at the party suddenly seemed as insubstantial as a dream. […] Vera’s parents emerged first. […] They came to a halt in the reception area, looking all round for Rimini, until her mother recognized him and came over, wreathed in smiles […]. Rimini avoided her powdered cheek, avoided the hand with which the father tried to intercept him, left them behind and also avoided a policewoman before flinging himself on Vera […]—and kissed and hugged the breath out of her until the other passengers, forced to queue behind them, shouted at them to clear the exit. (Pauls 2007, 125)

The couple’s reunification happens under the inquisitive eyes of strangers and family members like Vera’s mother and father, who get in the way of the lovers. In a banal and stereotypical fashion, these colorful Fellini-like scenes repeat with each arrival in a terminal somewhere in the world. Nevertheless, their recursiveness hardly lessens the outburst or awkwardness, if not confusion, of the reconnection with others amidst the flow of the travelers and companions. In narrowing in on Vera and Rimini, Alan Pauls engages in a framing frequently employed in this type of scene in film, which consists of a medium shot followed by a close-up shot that isolates the reuniting or separating characters within a bubble of intimacy as if to protect them from external interferences or pressures.3 The airport, relative to other transport infrastructures, is unique in harmonizing cosmopolitan lives and human relationships at the intersection between the large scale of the world and the reduced scale of the city. Furthermore, it connects destinies that would otherwise have remained isolated without the intermediary of air travel. Due to its power of connection, the airport not only influences how contemporary individuals think about time, space, luxury, and human identity, but also shapes their social lives, establishing its own rhetoric of amorous discourse and an original psychology of emotions. From this perspective, the fervor of feelings expressed and diffused in the terminal must more broadly be understood as a leitmotif of air travel that emerges from the moment 3 Examples of these medium or close-up shots that draw the spectator’s attention to a couple, or perhaps a father and son, include the airport sequences in films such as Zach Braff’s Garden State (2004), Nanette Burstein’s Going the Distance (2010), Drake Doremus’s Like Crazy (2011), and Matt Ross’s Captain Fantastic (2016).

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of departure and progressively grows in excitement and apprehension as landing nears. The beginnings of Daniel Biyaoula’s L’Impasse and Aminata Sow Fall’s Douceurs du Bercail (1998, 6) and that of Palestinian author Raba’i alMadhoun’s The Lady from Tel Aviv (2013, 59) demonstrate the diverse and contradictory feelings that evolve over the duration of air travel. The characters in the airplane cabin psychologically prepare for the reunion climax that will crown their landing, and which now monopolizes their thoughts and the story of their trip. In a literal and figurative sense, the airplane, even before the airport, thus emerges in these works of fiction as a liaison and a “homecoming facilitator” between individuals separated by thousands of miles, although it is ultimately the entire air voyage that is invested with this strong internal and emotional connotation. This forgiving perception of the air environment and travel, described as shortening if not eliminating geographical distances, and thus satisfying the inexorable desire of seeing the other again, is in fact so widespread that it is instrumentally exploited by many airline companies to increase ticket sales. Advertising campaigns such as British Airways’ A Ticket to Visit Mum (2013) and Fuelled by Love (2016), Heathrow Airport’s Coming Home for Christmas (2016), Philippine Airlines’ The Heart of the Filipino (2016), KLM’s Bringing People Together (2018), and Scandinavian Airlines’ The Arrival (2018), exemplify this generalized trend of introducing a melodramatic family atmosphere into the usual representation of air transport infrastructures. Without exception, these advertisements are built around the emotional perception and psychological bond between airplanes, airports, and people, which culminate in the final reunion among loved ones. The airlines’ choice of implementing a family-friendly perspective, and often more specifically that of a child, teen, or older person, is by no means accidental in that these are, by definition, the age groups most exposed to the hurdles of longdistance relationships and loneliness. In using such an approach, air travel providers clearly propose a true individualization of the Airworld, so that this setting no longer appears impassive or adverse, but as a space that conveys a strong humane and symbolic value (Fig. 2). It is no coincidence, then, that many romantic comedy directors have chosen the airport as the ideal setting for happy ending scenes in which characters declare their love for one another, exchange a first kiss, propose marriage, or reconcile after a breakup. Beyond family reunions, the airport can also facilitate more sensational reconnections between subjects.

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Fig. 2 Ally Zhu: Papa! [2019]

A clear trend that emerges in this regard is the character who is about to depart deciding at the last minute not to board the plane and to stay instead with the lover who has come to wish them farewell. In particular, the airport sequences in films such as Brett Ratner’s The Family Man (2000), Gore Verbinski’s The Mexican (2001), Zach Braff’s Garden State (2004), Rob and Ronan Burke’s Standby (2014), or Donald Petrie’s Little Italy (2018) emphasize this representation of the Airworld as witnesses to sentimental decisions in extremis and unexpected and life-changing long-term commitments. These and many other cinematic works portray the dread of separation, another salient paradigm of air travel fiction. In the wake of the famous ending of Casablanca (1942), in which the impending physical separation forms an integral part of the sentimental imaginary of the air voyage, these films invariably depict the airport as a demarcation between the one who remains and the one who departs.4 In film plots, the terminal often plays the role of a compass needle indicating the direction of the departure, 4 It is worth noting in passing that even when the farewell scene does not take place within the airport terminal, certain references such as suitcases, the arrival of a taxi, or explicit reference to an imminent flight nonetheless establish a relationship of cause and

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and thus an inevitable separation. In other cases, the character decides not to travel and remains anchored to the ground and a life together. Following recurrent filmic modalities, the characters—usually a man and a woman—are depicted in the departure hall and often in front of the boarding counter of their flight, occasionally surrounded by passengers, other times alone, being the last to board the plane. A coup de théâtre follows, and the departure becomes a return; the character who had been ready to takeoff finally decides to stay by the side of the companion who has come in hopes of remorse, forgiveness, and a last-minute change of heart. In these works of fiction, as in real life, the airport ceases to be the antechamber of separation and instead turns into the gateway toward a new stage of life together. Moreover, the terminal setting confers an exceptionality, if not a solemnity, to the promises and the family bonds that are forged or reforged on its premises.

2 Chance Encounters and Existential Turning Points In addition to connecting and reconnecting families, the Airworld can also enable unexpected and unique meetings of perfect strangers. Numerous literary and cinematic narratives use air travel to introduce an accidental, unforeseen encounter, which often has surprising repercussions for the destinies of the individuals. This recurring hook of the aerial setting, whatever the place or phase of the trip—terminal, plane, or airport hotel—is also accompanied by another frequent pattern. The initial interaction usually involves the fortuitous coming together of two subjects in one of the air transport infrastructures, but the ensuing story often goes beyond the airport perimeter and continues in a stable and lasting time-space that may extend over a lifetime. In other words, if characters are alone upon entering the Airworld, they may nevertheless exit accompanied by other individuals with whom they have established various relationships, including cordial exchanges, friendship, or romantic bonds. Two main categories of airport or airplane meetings emerge from scenes depicting an emerging closeness between strangers in the Airworld.

effect between separation and air travel. The end of Woody Allen’s film Manhattan (1979) perfectly exemplifies this modality.

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The first includes stories that use the encounter in the airplane or at the airport to establish an articulation between the past and present of the character’s life. The second category is composed of narratives that treat the meeting as a true turning point in the tale. In the first modality, during the encounter and conversation that results, the characters succinctly recount pivotal moments of their lives that motivated them to travel. This flashback does not, however, have an immediate effect on the progression of the trip, nor does it create any lasting link between the two interlocutors beyond the duration of their meeting. In this case, the continuation of the plot is not fundamentally altered by the encounter, although it is sometimes placed as an opening. The beginning of Woody Allen’s film Blue Jasmine (2013) is an example of how the trip by plane is used to contextualize the personality and background of the character. Overwhelmed by recent events in her personal life, Jasmine (Cate Blanchett) decides to flee New York for San Francisco and restart her life from scratch. The unflagging flow of words that she unleashes onto the passenger sitting next to her during the flight lasts all the way through the baggage carousel, familiarizing the viewer with her torments, her emotional state, and the turmoil that will continue to beset her in California. Similarly, films such as Angela Schanelec’s Orly and Amanda Sthers’s Je vais te manquer treat the airport encounter and the air voyage as an opportunity for a series of brief and intense chance meetings that, in their profundity, can determine the future direction of a life. Though they do not focus on a single protagonist and instead present a patchwork of individuals and stories, these works’ narrative structures highlight the mediating function of air travel and the condition of coexistence that it implies. Discussions between travelers in a state of waiting thus seem to turn into confessions and confidences, as if the transitory and anonymous décor of the Airworld had a disinhibiting effect on the nature of the human relations established, if temporarily, in this particular context. The encounter between Julia (Carole Bouquet) and Marcel (Pierre Arditi) in the film Je vais te manquer offers an extreme depiction of the sharing of troubles and repressed thoughts in the halls of a terminal as a culminating life experience, if not the occasion for a last confidence before committing suicide. Another example of the disinhibiting role of the air trip in the unreserved sharing of the subject’s intimate sphere is Natasha Waugh’s award-winning short film Terminal (2016). In this work, an anonymous

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terminal is suddenly invested with the tension and empathy generated in the meeting of two passengers. Before diverging toward their respective life paths, two women of different ages wait in the departure lounge of an Irish airport for their journey to Manchester. At the end of a conversation that timidly begins with comments about the delay of their flight, one of the women accidentally overturns her backpack, scattering flyers from the English clinic where she is going for an abortion. The two women thus discover with surprise and bitterness that they are traveling to Manchester for the same reason. While the viewer does not explicitly know the common cause of their suffering until midway through the film, the passengers, who sincerely open up to one another and reveal their fears and feelings of guilt and illegality, immediately establish complicity. In spite of the usual noises of airplanes rolling on the runway and voyagers in movement, the airport is a place of liberating confession, particularly for the younger of the two protagonists, just sixteen years old, who has hidden her pregnancy from her parents. Between tears and intimations, the travelers find refuge in one another through words of comfort exchanged at the boarding gate. The airport terminal is transformed from a place of public transit that is insensitive to any feeling of compassion or affinity, to a bottomless chest where strangers who will probably never meet again deposit secrets they dare not reveal within familial spaces that are, in theory, more suited to the sharing of anxieties and confidences. Such unveiling is not, however, the only option offered by the Airworld setting. Its strongly connotative nature can also produce a second category of encounter that can be so exceptional that it modifies the fate of individuals and their life choices in the long term. In some cases, individuals may even decide to kill themselves. The impact of the meeting in the air context is therefore measured by the extent to which the plot is entirely reconfigured in function of this encounter that occurs for the first time in an airport or airplane. Among the many productions in this second category of works are, as noted above, Gabriel García Márquez’s “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane,” Gamboa’s Los impostores, Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, Escobar’s Kamikaze, Carrión’s Los Turistas, Cusk’s Outline, and the first episode of Szifrón’s film Relatos salvajes. This category also includes novels such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), Spanish author Alberto Torres Blandina’s Cosas que nunca ocurrirían en Tokio (2009), Brazilian writer Bernardo Carvalho’s Reprodução (2013); and films such as Don Roos’s Bounce and Israeli directors Mihal

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Brezis and Oded Binnun’s Aya (2012). Though these works each originated in different geographic contexts, they all refer to the inescapable presence of air travel as a setting for encounters in a global society. In recent decades, this diegetic topos has become an ordinary artifice that ought to be read in conjunction with the democratization and banalization of contemporary air mobility. In line with this assertion, the notion of “airportness” dictates a way of being in the world in a mobile state (Schaberg 2017) and of developing relationships and narratives within the aerial infrastructures as a whole. David Fincher’s film Fight Club (1999), inspired by Palahniuk’s eponymous novel, perfectly illustrates this second category of meetings in the Airworld. The Narrator (Edward Norton) converses with his imaginary double, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), for the first time on a plane. This seemingly ordinary passenger is actually quite different from other “single serving friend[s]” (Palahniuk 1996, 31) and the neighbors with whom the Narrator rubs shoulders during his daily flights from one U.S. city to another. The airplane, the airport, and the unexpected encounters that these platforms generate play liminal roles in the construction of the Narrator-character of the film and novel. References to frequent travel and its degrading rhythm gradually reveal the protagonist’s mental instability and his biased and self-destructive relationship with reality.5 The meeting in the air with Tyler, whom the Narrator immediately perceives as an exception, lays the foundation for the rest of the story. From this initial coming together facilitated by narrow economy class seats, the Narrator and Tyler will be seen as inseparable subjects in a game of attraction and supremacy between the original and his double, governed by the character’s mental pathology. In a similar vein, Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses plays on the doubling of characters to set up the shocking encounters that can occur in the air. The confined space of an airplane, the Bostan, thus becomes the setting in which the fates of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha are decided. Over the course of the novel, the two characters come to think about one another in terms of the relationship that has developed between them in the cabin of the Boeing hijacked by terrorists. In fact, after the explosion of their plane, they face the exceptional, if not extraordinary, nature of the bond that has been established between them. Gibreel, 5 It suffices to recall, in this regard, the scene of the film in which the narrator hopes the flight will crash and end his life.

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suddenly able to fly, saves Saladin from death in a tremendous descent in the London sky, which marks the beginning of their respective metamorphoses: while Saladin turns into a devil, Gibreel takes the form of an angel. In other words, the protagonists now appear as adversaries, as opposing doubles. Therefore, although they are physically separated, they remain deeply related despite being enemies: the good intends to triumph over the evil, just as the demon plans to take revenge on the angel. The two protagonists are constantly driven by the idea of ending the confrontation begun during their celestial encounter. It is, therefore, logical that their wanderings through the streets of London end in a new encounter that marks a sort of reconciliation, but nonetheless does not undo the nature of their relationship. In their final encounter, Gibreel commits suicide in front of Saladin, thus underscoring their link until death. Furthermore, as the first chapter of The Satanic Verses reveals in its account of the characters’ miraculous flight, this unbreakable union is created by the air voyage. Through a symbolism that readily plays on magical elements, the plane is valued for its power of mediation, depicted as nothing less than extraordinary. In connecting India and Great Britain, it allows the relationship to exist between Saladin and Gibreel, between angel and demon, between good and bad. Moreover, in their physical transformations, the protagonists highlight the airplane and its power of mediation always implying the possibility of change: as a bearer of unpredictable meetings, the air context can at any moment upset what had been an individual’s norm and existential trajectory. In Iván Escobar’s novel Kamikaze and Álex Pina’s film based on it (2014), the dichotomy between good and evil is also epitomized by an explicit reference to a terrorist threat. In these two works, unthinkable relationships and long-term ties are forged between passengers stuck for three days in an isolated hotel near the Moscow International Airport due to a snowstorm that prevents their flight from departing for New York.6 This long and unexpected delay fosters trust within the group of voyagers, mostly Spaniards and Russians, and is ultimately providential for their common fate. Among the group is Slatan, a Karadjistan terrorist, who is transporting a heavy belt loaded with two hundred and fifty grams of explosives, and who has been commissioned by the Russians

6 In contrast to the novel, in the film the final destination of the flight is Madrid, not New York.

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to carry out a suicide attack during the flight.7 However, the forced stay in the hotel results in surprising interactions between the kamikaze and the other passengers, who are unaware of his plans. During the seventytwo hours spent in this secluded place amidst the snow and glacial cold, Slatan experiences the joy of a cohesive group. He is warmly integrated into conversations and collective meals during which his limited knowledge of Spanish poses no obstacle to the ties he finally allows himself to establish with others. Kamikaze leaves no doubt as to the decisive effect of an airport encounter on the trajectory of a single individual and on the fate of a Boeing filled with passengers and crew members. After his hotel roommate and a traveler who has fallen in love with him catch him in the act of connecting the detonator on his explosive vest, Slatan decides not to pursue his murderous task. His new perspective on the world, which he has gained as a result of his intense experience of cohabitation in the hotel, also convinces him to coordinate the collective action of the passengers with whom he has become close in order to prevent a second terrorist, whom he identified at the boarding gate, from carrying out a suicide attack that has also been commissioned by the Russians. Under the cathartic and therapeutic effect of the hotel encounter, figured as an extension of the airport and air travel, Slatan radically changes. He ceases to be a “cold terrorist” blinded by the “certainty of death,” and becomes the person that “passengers pat on the back when they meet up with him in the aisles” (Escobar 2012, 251).8 This move toward a mediatory function is even more striking since it allows the passengers to miraculously avoid a bloody suicide attack, based on sincere relationships established with Slatan during the time spent together in the hotel. The reversal of situations and existential shifts that passage through the Airworld can provoke are also on display in Don Roos’s film Bounce. As in the other stories in this second category, the air landscape in Bounce has a transformative power that affects the very existence of the traveler and the well-being of those around him. In this film, an accidental meeting between two passengers turns out to be fatal for one of them. Greg Janello (Tony Goldwyn) exchanges his airplane ticket with Buddy

7 The name of Slatan’s country of origin is clearly an invention of the author. 8 My translation. In the original: “terrorista frío,” “certidumbre de la muerte,” “al que

los pasajeros palmean la espalda cuando se cruzan por los pasillos” (Escobar 2012, 251).

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Amaral (Ben Affleck), giving up his seat so that Greg can return home early and spend Christmas with his wife and children. Unfortunately, the Infinity Airlines plane with Greg aboard crashes over Arkansas, causing his sudden death. From the moment Buddy learns about the tragedy on the TV news, he is haunted by horrible guilt about Greg and especially about his family members. He sets out to find them and progressively integrates himself into their lives, as if to replace Greg as father and husband. The truth about his connection to the accident is ultimately revealed by Mimi (Natasha Henstridge), who had shared a drink with Greg and Buddy at the airport, and who decides to bring a videotape recording of the last moments spent in the bar at the terminal to Greg’s wife. This action, once again linked to the trigger moment of the Chicago O’Hare Airport encounter, is predictably upsetting for Abby (Gwyneth Paltrow), and for Buddy, who is forced to tell the truth to the woman with whom he now has a romantic relationship. Here, a series of conflicting coincidences brings to a climax the repercussions of an unplanned encounter in the airplane or airport in the lives of a network of individuals. This representation of the airport terminal as an intersection at which individuals randomly and temporarily cross paths as if in a magnetic field, moving like free electrons that are theoretically not meant to gather, is also at the heart of Alberto Torres Blandina’s novel Cosas que nunca ocurrirían en Tokio. In this case, the terminal is a full-fledged character, a rich archive of narratives collected by the sweeper Salvador Fuensanta during twenty years of labor spent listening to the stories of passengers in transit. In addition to preserving this collective memory of which he is both witness and custodian, the sweeper discloses this archive “in progress” on a daily basis, sharing its contents with Juana, an employee of the terminal’s newspaper kiosk, and with travelers randomly encountered during his hours of service. Torres Blandina’s novel is structured as a series of nested stories told by a single narrator who filters and recounts the responses and reactions of his interlocutors from his own perspective, evoking works such as Spielberg’s The Terminal, Dasgupta’s Tokyo Cancelled, and Dove’s opera Flight. All of these productions involve metaphorical representations of the airport as an open book of freely accessible stories that unfold or close like an accordion. As an airport saga, a sort of One Thousand and One Nights without exoticism, Torres Blandina’s novel confers a memory of its own onto the airport. The dynamic and social perception of the terminal as a hub and mixer of diverse subjects thus allows Torres Blandina to

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conceive this place not as a smooth and impervious surface, but as a well of stories from which Fuensanta draws the opportunity to start a conversation. Such communicating and networking of individuals, facilitated by the airport and by the sharing of stories that the latter elicits, is reactivated the moment the sweeper initiates an interaction, and thus an enunciation: Where did he die exactly? Well, I don’t know what to tell you. Yes, of course I know the story; I’ve been working here for many years. In fact, I’m the worker who has been here the longest. When I started, it was very different. You can’t even imagine it. The runways were made of dirt and there were very few flights. The airplanes… if you saw them today, there is no way you would get on. And the people who came were very finely dressed. Certainly, only the rich could afford to buy a ticket. It was a real luxury. As you can see, I know this airport well. Each one of its stories. What surprises me is that specifically this one you know. (Torres Blandina 2009, 27)9

As was the case for Scheherazade, words nourished by memory and stimulated by encounters are the remedy the sweeper adopts to lighten his working hours and those of other employees, as well as the time that travelers spend waiting.10 The ancient ritual of sharing stories as a means of socializing within a community, as temporary and unstable as it may be, repeats with each new encounter and determines the subject matter and progression of the novel. These ephemeral meetings inspired by the narration of tales heard and lived in the past paradoxically offer an opportunity to anchor to a place and, in so doing, counter the discontinuity and

9 My translation. In the original: “¿Dónde murió exactamente? Pues no sé qué decirles.

Sí, claro que conozco la historia; llevo muchos años trabajando aquí. De hecho, soy el trabajador que más tiempo lleva aquí. Cuando yo empecé esto era muy distinto. Ni se lo imaginan. Las pistas eran de tierra y apenas había vuelos. Los aviones… si los vieran ahora no se subirían ni locos. Y la gente que venía era muy estirada. Claro, sólo los ricos podían permitirse pagar un billete. Era un verdadero lujo. Como ven, conozco bien este aeropuerto. Cada una de sus historias. Lo que me sorprende es que concretamente ésta la conozcan ustedes” (Torres Blandina 2009, 27). 10 Note the strong resemblance between Fuensanta and the sweeper Gupta Rajan (Kumar Pallana) in the film The Terminal. The two characters are comparable not only in terms of their profession, but also in regard to their age, memory, and attitude toward the airport passengers and personnel with whom they interact on a daily basis.

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obsolescence of departures and arrivals. This process is hardly insignificant for the airport personnel who steadily occupy this place. This perception of the air encounter from the point of view of a static and nontraveling character observed at an angle from, rather than level with, the air environment is perhaps statistically less common, but nonetheless found in a number of other works of airport fiction. Moreover, the characters’ external and steady gaze on the idiosyncrasy of this place makes them more aware of the intersections and interactions that could emerge from the constant flow of diverse individuals passing through the Airworld. Israeli directors Mihal Brezis and Oded Binnun’s film Aya shifts away from the airplane and traveling circumstances, focusing instead on the end of the trip and exit from the airside, a moment no less imbued with meeting opportunities. While waiting for her husband to emerge from the glass doors of the Ben Gurion Airport baggage hall, Aya (Sarah Adler) agrees to help a driver from a private transport company and temporarily holds a sign bearing the name of a Mr. Overby. She is at first reluctant, then somewhat amused by the unexpected role she has agreed to play; she enjoys the rather intimidating experience of having to await and welcome a stranger as if she were a private chauffeur (Fig. 3). Instead of ending the game, Aya decides to continue the adventure: she abandons her original mission of picking up her husband at the airport and chooses instead to drive Mr. Overby (Ulrich Thomsen) to Jerusalem in her own car.

Fig. 3 Mihal Brezis and Oded Binnun: Frame from the short film Aya [2012] (Courtesy of the directors)

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On the way to the city, Aya and Mr. Overby shyly exchange clumsy words in English. This allows Aya, in her role as improvised chauffeur, to learn the reason for the Danish passenger’s visit, a clue that allows her to guess his destination in Jerusalem. During long segments of silence while driving, Aya reflects on how best to convey to her passenger that she is not the driver he was expecting. In the meantime, Mr. Overby listens to a piece of classical piano music on his headphones that he must evaluate for the contest that has brought him to Israel. In this interval, Aya furtively watches the movements of Mr. Overby’s fingers, tapping on his lap to the music he analyzes. Later, when Aya asks if they might use the car’s CD player so that she too can listen to the piece, this same finger tapping, imitating the gesture of the pianist, unleashes a growing erotic tension between the two characters. Aya encourages Mr. Overby to play the piano on the hand she is not using to drive and which she rests on her leg, with her wedding band in plain view. Taking Aya’s request seriously, the Dane uses his two hands to play the piece of music that resounds throughout this scene with flair and frenzy on Aya’s lap. This improvised private concert in the middle of the highway gradually saturates the dark interior of the car with a subtly filmed atmosphere of desire and sensuality. Overwhelmed by the intensity of the moment, Aya and Mr. Overby discuss the exceptionality of their meeting in the terminal, which has created a closeness that they are surprised they do not feel for people in their family or circle of friends. In elevating the encounter in the airport to a more advanced stage of acquaintance and trust, the film shows to what point this chance meeting opens the horizon to multiple developments. Once in front of Mr. Overby’s hotel in Jerusalem, the two find themselves at a crossroads: spend the night together or choose not to take their meeting any further. The film echoes their hesitations and temptations about the further development of their adventure until the end, when Aya returns home and meets with her husband, who has found his own way home from Ben Gurion Airport. The meeting that results from a brief stay in the Airworld offers Aya an “oasis of neutrality” (Bégout 2019, 116). By accepting the role of a private driver, Aya puts her life as mother and spouse “in parentheses” without having to “flaunt [her] pedigree” (Bégout 2019, 116). Her encounter with Mr. Overby remains confined to the Airworld.

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3

Love Out of the Blue

Beyond such life-changing meetings and encounters with perfect strangers, the Airworld also lends itself to bawdier and more alluring interactions between travelers. Whether flirtations, love at first sight, fleeting adventures, adulterous affairs, or romances before marriage, the airplane cabin, the terminal, and the airport hotel are all conducive to the emergence of love or, more temporarily, intense passion. Depending on their location in the Airworld, these interactions can be subjected to specific constraints, such as the duration of the trip, the tightness of spaces, and the overwhelming presence of passengers, which may affect the degree of depth and intimacy and the denouement of the relationship. The temporary nature of transit in the aerial environment does not inhibit either the possibility or potential ardor of relations that can be established or renewed within this framework.11 In fact, within Airworld fiction, reunions are just as frequent and passionate as first-time meetings. Due to a favorable combination of elements, the circumstances of the air voyage both trigger and revive relationships of love. More fundamentally, the meetings and reunions that occurs in the Airworld seem endowed with a romantic dimension and a singular fascination precisely due to the specific setting that activates them.12 Usually perceived as an impersonal and 11 Mention should be made here of the recent creation of free in-flight dating apps, such as BuckleUp and AirDates, that allow users, in just a few clicks, to organize romantic encounters on the plane and thus capitalize on the time of the trip to meet passengers also on the same application. This “Tinder for air travel,” as the media have dubbed it, takes inspiration precisely from the shared imaginary of the Airworld, perceived as an environment of mediation, where connections can lead to casual flirtations or the finding of one’s kindred spirit. Along the same lines, we may also recall that films and advertisements have significantly contributed to instilling the collective fantasy of the mile-high club, which also implies an erotization of the air trip. The famous scene on the plane between Tom (Ashton Kutcher) and Sarah (Brittany Murphy) in Shawn Levy’s film Just Married (2003) or Iranian-American author Roger Sedarat’s short story “In-Flight Mistress” (2016) provide examples of this stereotype. 12 Designed as a kaleidoscope of characters and stories converging at the Parisian Roissy Airport, Amanda Sthers’s film Je vais te manquer combines in an original way ex novo encounters and romantic reunions within the Airworld. Parallel to the poignant meeting mentioned above between Julia (Carole Bouquet) and Marcel (Pierre Arditi) is a similarly unforeseen encounter between Olivier (Patrick Mille), who is accompanying his daughter to the airport, and Lila (Anna Marivin), who is returning to Montreal. After glimpsing him behind a bay window, the young woman undertakes an extraordinary search through the hallways of the terminal and succeeds in approaching Olivier, whom she does not yet know, before he leaves the airport. Impressed by Lila’s spirit of initiative, Olivier suggests

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accelerated space, the air context is not, in principle, regarded as an entity that suddenly brings together two specific individuals in the middle of a shapeless mass. Indeed, it is this surprising power that breathes spectacular life into such encounter situations and which, moreover, explains why cinema, more so than literature, has been so inspired by love adventures and reunion scenes set within the Airworld. Films such as François Truffaut’s La Peau douce (The Soft Skin) (1964) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Une femme mariée (A Married Woman) (1964) present visions of the love encounter in which the aerial infrastructure allows initial connections and, at times, alternatives to unsatisfactory married lives.13 Another original variant in this perspective is the breathtaking meeting between Mark (Mark Frechette) and Daria (Daria Halprin) in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1970). This encounter takes place between the sky and the earth, when Mark starts to spin with the monoplane that he has just flown over Daria’s car in the middle of the California desert. After this courtship from the heights, Mark and Daria engage in a fiery sex scene on the ground at Zabriskie Point, deep within Death Valley. Less exuberantly, but more frequently, more recent works of fiction feature an increasing number of romances in air transport infrastructures, echoing the rise in air mobility. Moreover, a significant number of cultural productions already cited in this book are inspired by the closeness of a man and a woman in one or another location of the Airworld, which becomes a true paradigm of the topos of the romantic encounter in contemporary times. In these works, the aerial milieu is given its own agency and usually has an auxiliary function that is actualized to various degrees. Thus, in some cases, the terminal appears as a temporary matchmaker in a love story that largely endures outside of the airport infrastructures. A notable example is Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon’s Monastery, discussed above, in which the terminal serves as a venue she returns with him to his Parisian apartment, rather than to Canada. The end of the film is marked by the moving reunion scene between Fanny (Monique Chaumette) and Max (Michael Lonsdale). The old woman who has just landed at Roissy is greeted by her former lover Max, whom she has not seen in forty-eight years. Despite the changes to their faces and their bodies due to aging, they recognize one another and discover that they are still very much in love. 13 For a deep analysis of these two films and their nexus to the Airworld, see the last chapter of Pascoe’s Airspaces, and more particularly the sections “Falling in Love” and “The End of the Story” (Pascoe 2001, 261–279).

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for the accidental encounter between Eduardo, the protagonist-narrator, and Tamara, whom he met in Antigua and who has since become a Lufthansa airline hostess. The prolonged wait around the Ben Gurion Airport baggage carousel brings these two former lovers together and sets the stage for the rest of Eduardo’s stay in Israel. The unexpected and incredible reunion, intentionally positioned at the forefront of the story, suddenly rekindles the passionate relationship between Eduardo and Tamara, allowing them to clearly envision the imminent opportunity of a second chance. United by a common premonition, “erupting with the force of a volcano” (Halfon 2014, 18), Tamara and Eduardo share an urgent desire to meet outside the airport, where they can freely express their emotions without Tamara violating the rules of conduct dictated by her crew member uniform: [Tamara] was wearing a pair of very short, old, torn khaki shorts, leather sandals, a flowing, almost see-through white linen blouse that showed the top of her freckled shoulders, and a bra that might have been red. And that was it. No makeup. Her copper hair was wild and matted, as if she’d just awakened. Her eyes were bluer than I remembered. […] Tamara immediately gave me a hug, an urgent hug, and this time there was no Lufthansa uniform and it wasn’t awkward at all. (Halfon 2014, 49–50)

After serving as the point of connection between Eduardo and Tamara, the Airworld is quickly abandoned as the story shifts to Eduardo’s hotel lobby in Jerusalem. Far from the stifling atmosphere of Ben Gurion Airport, the two lovers embrace each other in a spontaneous and ardent rush. Finally, free of her company uniform, Tamara seems laid back and even unkempt. Her clothing reveals the contours of her body and tinges their meeting with eroticism, heralding a promising date resonant of pleasant memories of the past. Halfon’s story depicts the two successive phases in which the romantic encounter or reunions take place in the air context. As in the movement of taking a breath, the Airworld intercedes by provoking first a contraction, or the bringing together of two individuals, and then an expansion, or the dispersion and continuation of the encounter far from the terminal. This sequence, coupled with the baggage carousel as the pivotal location of the encounter, is similarly found in Paul McGuigan’s film Wicker Park (2004). After two years of silence and a series of adverse circumstances contrived by the jealousy of a third person, Matt Simon (Josh

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Hartnett) finally manages to find Lisa (Diane Kruger), the girl with whom he is still madly in love. Their meeting is all the more poignant in that it occurs after a series of improbable coincidences, in the middle of an international terminal invaded by a multitude of travelers and visitors. Chicago O’Hare International Airport serves as the setting, replacing other domestic or urban places that are in principle more plausible for a long-awaited reunion. The terminal opens and closes the film in a sort of loop, without monopolizing the entire story. It is the place where Matt is supposed to depart for China on a four-day business trip, which he abandons in hopes of finding Lisa after catching a glimpse of her in the city. At the end of the film, in chiasmus, the departure function of the airport is once again sabotaged, as it becomes the place where Lisa’s path finally crosses Matt’s as she heads to London. Although it continues to function as a rotating transportation hub for the incessant flow of travelers, for these two lovers O’Hare Airport becomes an Eden of plentitude and peace, justifying their frantic quest and freeing them from the torment of separation and loss. Wrapped in a deep embrace, Lisa and Matt kneel in the midst of an indifferent crowd, incredulously touching each other’s faces, covered in tears, in the middle of a setting bathed in shades of blue. This static position temporarily removes them from the horizon of the terminal where passengers, carts, and suitcases circulate, and in extracting them from the flow, renders them unique. Like Cupid and Psyche embracing with grace and tenderness, they emit an aura of intimacy that protects them from others and restores to them the memory of their bodies and the time they lived together. The scene is accompanied by touching lyrics and the melancholic melody of Coldplay’s “The Scientist,” as McGuigan’s camera uses a close-up to place the two lovers at the heart of the scene and at the center of the terminal, with the subjects and elements in the background losing clarity and significance. In ending on such a scene, Wicker Park reverses the usual schema that Halfon’s novel and many other works of fiction employ. Indeed, the Airworld no longer functions here as the beginning of the plot, but as its outcome, suggesting that the air infrastructure’s role of matchmaker can become an end in and of itself. In a show of amplification, certain works of fiction even push the representation of this role to its climax, and in doing so center entirely on the nexus between the actual love story and the Airworld. The role of intermediary played by the different infrastructures of the air voyage thus extends over the entire story, by means of

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temporary exits that, nonetheless, only reinforce the preeminence of this environment in the progression of the love affair. Films such as Ronan and Rob Burke’s Standby, Castagnetti’s Love Is in the Air, Joe Hopkins’s Last Chance Harvey, and Danièle Thompson’s Jet Lag all build on the recognition of this connective capacity of the Airworld, which may reunite couples or form new ones. Without exception, in these works the initial encounter or reunion occur in the Airworld, and the characters’ exit from it coincides with the “end of the story” (Pascoe 2001, 270). In other words, when the lovers cross over into the air space that generated or reactivated their affair, their story ends and the film comes to a close. Ronan and Rob Burke’s film Standby, articulated according to the rhythms and limits imposed by the Airworld, exemplifies this argument and shows how the characters’ agency and affective relationships are governed by the constraints of the air voyage. In the interval of time between her missed flight for New York and the first available plane leaving the next day, Alice (Jessica Paré) recognizes her former lover Alan (Brian Gleeson) among the employees of the tourist information counter in the Dublin Airport, offering her advice on where to stay. This unexpected coincidence breaks an eight-year silence between Alice and Alan and causes the action to shift entirely in terms of location, pace, and interactions. Due to yet another happenstance, the two find themselves sitting next to one another aboard the same bus toward Dublin, and end up spending the rest of the evening and night together, going from one party to another and one neighborhood to the next, before rushing hastily to the airport the next morning to prevent Alice from missing her return flight again. The missed flight grants Alice the right to temporarily exit the Airworld and gives her the chance to renew her relationship with Alan, which would never have occurred without this setback. Yet despite the physical and mental distancing that this exit establishes between the air journey and the brief stayover in Dublin, the aerial environment remains present in the interaction between the two former lovers. Indeed, from the moment they leave the terminal, the countdown to Alice’s flight for New York begins. Nonetheless, until the epilogue of the film, the viewer is unaware that this departure from the airport implies a second exit, this time without a countdown or return flight. In front of the boarding gate, after running down the corridors of the terminal to catch her flight, Alice finds Alan’s mobile phone in the pocket of the jacket he has lent to her. On it she discovers photos and videos he had taken the day before, during their

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evening in the city. Touched by the happiness that emanates from the images of these moments spent together, she suddenly changes her mind, letting the doors of the airplane close without her and heading toward Alan’s apartment. She announces him her decision to “come back” (Burke and Burke 2014), not to New York, but to him, and gives him a long kiss. The camera opens onto a panoramic view of the street and shows Alice’s suitcase rolling down the pavement, in a last mocking glance thrown at the Airworld. This definitive exit ends the alternation between the Airworld and the exterior and articulates the hesitation between continuing the journey and getting back together. The film depicts air travel and its hazards as an opportunity to dust off the past and move toward the future. Such incessant evocations of happy or unhappy moments of the past relationship mingle chaotically with the present narrative of the reunited, as seen in Castagnetti’s Love Is in the Air. Over the multiple flashbacks throughout the film, Julie and Antoine, who happen to find themselves seated next to one another on the New York-Paris transatlantic flight, cathartically recall their love story from the initial euphoria of their meeting until their separation. This superposition of temporal layers that rupture the static linearity of the present flight allows them to transcend the confines of the cabin and move in and out of the Airworld. As they plunge back into their shared past, Julie and Antoine are shown in the places in which they spent time and then lived together. This constant alternation of the plot between the airplane cabin and their Parisian past lasts until the end of the film, which also coincides with the conclusion of the air trip. Julie and Antoine say goodbye to one another when they land and leave separately for the city and their respective lives. Yet, even as the departure from the Airworld seems to bring their interaction to a close, they find themselves together again in the law firm of Julie’s fiancé, where Antoine has a job interview. This extraordinary coincidence, an extension of and complement to their airplane encounter, ends the doubts and fears that haunted them during the flight and brings them back together. Far from being limited to the reunions of former couples such as those discussed above, this intervention of the Airworld manifests itself in an equally powerful and decisive manner in first-time romantic encounters. Such relationships between subjects in love are not the same because they cannot claim a shared past. However, the narrative and emotional patterns

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relative to the role of matchmaker of the air environment remain basically unchanged. Like Standby, Joe Hopkins’s film Last Chance Harvey explores the meeting between Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman), a traveler, and Kate Walker (Emma Thompson), an employee at Heathrow who is responsible for carrying out customer satisfaction surveys. As Kate is also based in a city attached to the airport, the gradual coming together of the two subjects implies the same in-and-out alternation of the Airworld, with repeated entries and exits between the airport perimeter and London. Much like Alice and Alan in Standby, Harvey and Kate in Hopkins’s film accidentally meet because of a complication that prevents Harvey from leaving as soon as he would have liked for New York, and forces him to extend his stay for twenty-four hours. In an effort to kill time, Harvey, who has come to London to attend his estranged daughter’s wedding, settles down in an airport café. He strikes up a conversation with Kate, who is sitting at the next table as she usually does during her break. As Alan does for Alice, Kate offers Harry hotel advice, and departs by train to London. This interaction rectifies the first missed encounter between Harvey and Kate when, upon his disembarking from the plane, she tries without success to ask him the survey questions. Beginning from this point, they gradually get to know one another and finally unite. At the end of an afternoon spent walking the streets of London, Kate persuades Harvey to go to his daughter’s wedding reception, and even agrees to accompany him so that he feels more comfortable in the presence of his former wife and her husband, whom he secretly reproaches for having taken his place as the father of the bride. Over the course of just a few hours, Kate and Harvey establish a bond that brings them closer to one another than to some members of their respective families. They promise to meet again the next day at noon in the very same spot where they said good-bye early in the morning after the wedding party. However, due to an urgent hospitalization, Harvey misses his rendezvous with Kate. He still manages to see her again after returning to Heathrow and finding out from her colleagues where she is. After he has cleared up this misunderstanding, Harvey, who is now smitten with Kate, shares his resolution to cancel his flight to New York and stay in London with her. The film’s emotional finale is devoid of the languorous effusions of film endings depicting reunions in the Airworld and the resumption of a romantic relationship. The ex novo encounter generates a different dynamic, in that the relationship with the body of the other is at this stage still liminal and inhibited. It is usually after the

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last scene, far from the eyes of the viewer, that the lovers who have left the public space of the Airworld will make their bodily discoveries in privacy. The narrative focuses on the initial moment of the romantic relationship, which blends with the airport terminal and suggests that the lovers’ story will continue and further develop in the external world, as a logical complement to the interaction established. Produced many years prior to Last Chance Harvey, Danièle Thompson’s film Jet Lag illustrates that the air travel infrastructure as a place of mediation between two subjects must be replaced by another setting in order for the initial infatuation to lead to a lasting relationship. Rose (Juliette Binoche) and Félix (Jean Reno) find themselves trapped at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle because of a strike that paralyzes the Parisian airport. Their chance encounter reveals the limits of the connecting role of the Airworld from the moment the story becomes independent of the setting in which it was initially produced. The closeness that is gradually established between the two characters is the result of the various confidences shared in the terminal; however, the romantic bond is actually formed when the characters cross the threshold of the Airworld. Having just landed at the Acapulco Airport and not yet in the arrival hall, Rose receives a message with the PIN code to Félix’s cell phone, which she has accidentally brought with her. Félix has called the Air France counter in the Mexican airport from Burgundy to ensure that Rose can listen to the voicemail containing his declaration of love and his request that she return to France, where he impatiently awaits. The echo of their meeting at Roissy extends across the ocean and convinces Rose to take the first available flight back to Paris. The urgent need to develop this connection beyond the temporary and hazardous setting of the Airworld motivates Rose to throw herself back into the environment she has just left after endless hours. The Airworld is thus no longer called upon in its role as mediator, but in its primary function of transition. Similarly, Reitman’s Up in the Air and Spielberg’s The Terminal paradoxically confirm that, even if it is not represented, the outside world is presumed to be an essential complement to love stories ignited by the Airworld. These films focus on male characters—Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) and Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks), respectively—whose lives are intensely intertwined with air infrastructures for different reasons. Ryan Bingham embodies, to an extreme, the prototype of the frequent flyer who spends most of his time in airports, airplanes, and airport hotels, to the point of being trapped and having a biased relationship with the

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reality of the outside world. For his part, Viktor Navorski is condemned to live in captivity in one of the JFK Airport terminals, without being able to exit for a period of more than a year. Because they are prisoners of the air infrastructure, Ryan and Viktor prove incapable of developing romantic ties to free themselves of this context. Contrary to works of fiction that suggest a continuation of the sentimental story, Reitman’s and Spielberg’s films strictly limit the love affair to the Airworld, tying its lack of durability to the failure of Ryan and Viktor to think or transpose the latter outside the airport infrastructure. These films thus present Ryan’s relationship with Alex (Vera Farmiga) and Viktor’s with Amelia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) as doomed to failure. The saturating, if not stifling, omnipresent air setting impedes romantic trajectories and, thus, the quality of feelings and permanence of the relationship. One scene in particular in Spielberg’s film highlights the mismatch between the terminal atmosphere and architecture and the possibility of gradually transforming the accidental encounter into a solid and stable love story. Viktor is unable to invite Amelia, the air hostess with whom he has fallen in love, to an Italian restaurant in the city because he is prohibited from leaving JFK Airport. Therefore, he improvises a candlelight dinner on a deserted balcony. This failed attempt, which consists of arranging the space to make it seem like a table for two with an external view and serving airplane food as if it were Italian cuisine, insinuates that the Airworld per se cannot offer the proper setting for a durable love. At the end of the dinner, Amelia learns that Viktor is confined to the terminal and decides to decline his advances, thus putting an end to any further development of their relationship. Ryan and Alex’s dates in airport hotels situated in different U.S. cities are located in a much more luxurious and glamourous atmosphere, but ultimately pose analogous limitations. For these two frequent travelers similarly caught in the web of constraints and risks of ceaseless travel by plane, the stopovers in airport hotels represent their only option for meeting and enjoying a space of intimacy between business trips, if only for a night. This situation of constant mobility not only accelerates the relationship between the two lovers, leading them to quickly reach a certain level of intimacy and physical desire, but also generates a certain superficiality. It reduces their encounters to occasional and fleeting erotic stopovers carried out in impersonal hotel rooms. Thus shut away within the Airworld, the relationship is condemned to remain at the level of an initial crush, without the possibility of developing into a strong

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attachment, maturing, or reaching a level of commitment. They are provisionally able to coordinate the schedules of their departures and arrivals in ways that allow them to meet, as long as they do not put their relationship to an external test. Alex and Ryan cannot count on the possibility of a shared address and a trip that will restore them to a life together “back home” (Reitman 2009). It is not until they leave the airport hotel circuit for the first time, to attend Ryan’s sister’s wedding for two days, that they implicitly compare the singularity of their intermittent affair with the stability of an engagement culminating in a family ceremony. The impasse in which their relationship is mired becomes clear when Ryan, full of hope and excitement, shows up unannounced at Alex’s home in Chicago, only to discover that she leads a life outside of the Airworld as a wife and mother. The isolated environment of the Airworld provides a comfort zone for this couple; departure from this comfort zone forces them to confront the superficiality and insufficiency of their relationship, and marks a point of no return at which the paths that once crossed through the air voyage now irremediably divide. This radical reversal of the aerial context’s mediatory function illustrates the limits of this space, which by its transitory nature, cannot guarantee the depth or the stability of romantic affairs, without the counterweight of the outside world. Despite the limitations that can emerge in situations of deregulation and hyper-saturation, the Airworld is established as an environment of coexistence and sociability. The relational power that defines it as space and as time prevents it from serving as an “interchanger” (Serres 1995, 170) in which beings invisible to one another indifferently cross paths. Instead, the Airworld is but a crossroads, where the Cloud People who occupy it look at one another, become (re)acquainted, and even unexpectedly unite or reunite. In a harmonious alternation between solitude and the collective, air voyage infrastructures act as an “idiorrhythmic organization” (Barthes 2013, 30) in which the preservation of individuality does not exclude the integration of the other. In molding and stimulating a fundamentally relational identity of the Cloud People who move through it, the Airworld escapes the stigmatizing notion of “non-place” that makes it seem incompatible with interaction, memory, and identity (Augé 1995). Indeed, due to the numerous spatial and temporal constraints that structure it, this setting reacts like a hypersensitive living membrane to the vibrations of the coexistence of individuals who populate it. In this respect, like the spongy and dynamic surface designed by artist Tomás Saraceno (2012), air space and travel immerse subjects

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in a relationship of hyper-connection and interdependence that not only defines interactions within the Airworld, but also influences ways of living together outside of it.

References Articles and Essays Adey, Peter. 2009. Getting into the Flow: Airports, Aeromobilities and AirMindedness. In Aeromobilities, ed. Saulo Cwerner et al., 194–207. London: Routledge. Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe. London and New York: Verso. Barthes, Roland. 2013. How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces—Notes for a Lecture Course and Seminar at the Collège de France (1976–1977), trans. Kate Briggs and ed. Claude Coste. New York: Columbia University Press. Bégout, Bruce. 2019. En escale: chroniques aéroportuaires. Paris: Philosophie Magazine Éditeur. Finger, Bobby. 2013. Richard Curtis on About Time, Love Actually, and Being a ‘Fool for Love.’ Vulture, October 30. https://www.vulture.com/2013/10/ rom-com-king-richard-curtis-is-a-fool-for-love.html. Accessed 4 November 2019. Pascoe, David. 2001. Airspaces. London: Reaktion. Schaberg, Christopher. 2017. Airportness: The Nature of Flight. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Serres, Michel. 1995. Angels: A Modern Myth, trans. Francis Cowper. Paris: Flammarion.

Films Allen, Woody. 1979. Manhattan. New York: Jack Rollins & Charles H. Joffe Productions. Allen, Woody. 2013. Blue Jasmine. New York: Gravier Productions and Perdido Productions. Almodóvar, Pedro. 2013. Los amantes pasajeros. Madrid: El Deseo. Antonioni, Michelangelo. 1970. Zabriskie Point. Beverly Hills: Metro-GoldwynMayer. Binnun, Oded, and Mihal Brezis. 2012. Aya. Tel-Aviv and Paris: Cassis Films and Divine Productions.

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Braff, Zach. 2004. Garden State. Irvine, Los Angeles, and Beverly Hills: Camelot Pictures, Jersey Films, Double Feature Films, Large’s Ark Productions, and Gilbert Films. Burke, Rob, and Ronan Burke. 2014. Standby. Dublin and Kehlen: Black Sheep Productions, Juliette Films, and Paul Thiltges Distributions. Burstein, Nanette. 2010. Going the Distance. Burbank and Los Angeles: New Line Cinema and Offspring Entertainment. Castagnetti, Alexandre. 2013. Amour et turbulences. Paris: Révérence, Thelma Films, Manchester Films, and Universal Pictures International. Curtis, Richard. 2003. Love Actually. Universal City, Paris, and London: Universal Pictures, StudioCanal, Working Title Films, and DNA Films. Curtiz, Michael. 1942. Casablanca. Burbank: Warner Bros. Doremus, Drake. 2011. Like Crazy. Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Los Angeles: Paramount Vantage, Indian Paintbrush, Super Crispy Entertainment, Andrea Sperling Productions, and Ascension Productions. Fincher, David. 1999. Fight Club. Los Angeles and Hollywood: Fox 2000 Pictures, Regency Entreprises, Linson Films, Atman Entertainment, Knickerbocker Films, and Taurus Film. Fuguet, Alberto. 2008. 2 horas. Santiago: Cinépata. Godard, Jean-Luc. 1964. Une femme mariée. Paris: Anouchka Films and Orsay Films. Hopkins, Joe. 2009. Last Chance Harvey. Beverly Hills: Overture Films and Process Productions. Levy, Shawn. 2003. Just Married. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox and Robert Simonds Productions. McGuigan, Paul. 2004. Wicker Park. Beverly Hills: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Lakeshore Entertainment. Petrie, Donald. 2018. Little Italy. Vancouver: Firsttake Entertainment. Pina, Álex. 2014. Kamikaze. Madrid and Bilbao: Atresmedia Cine, Cangrejo Films, Globomedia Cine, Telefonica Studios, La Sexta, Antena 3 Televisión, Euskal Irrati Telebista, and Canal+ España. Ratner, Brett. 2000. The Family Man. Universal City, Santa Monica, Hollywood, and Los Angeles: Universal Pictures, Beacon Pictures, Riche-Ludwig Productions, Howard Rosenman Productions, and Saturn Films. Reitman, Jason. 2009. Up in the Air. Universal City and Culver City: DreamWorks Pictures, The Montecito Picture Company, and Cold Spring Pictures. Roos, Don. 2000. Bounce. Los Angeles: Miramax Films. Ross, Matt. 2016. Captain Fantastic. Los Angeles and New York: Electric City Entertainment and ShivHans Pictures. Schanelec, Angela. 2010. Orly. Berlin and Paris: Ringel Filmproduktion, Nachtmittagfilm, La vie est belle Films Associés, Films Boutique, ZDF, and CinéCinéma.

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Spielberg, Steven. 2004. The Terminal. Universal City: DreamWorks Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Parkes, and MacDonald Productions. Sthers, Amanda. 2009. Je vais te manquer. Paris and Neuilly-sur-Seine: Sunrise Films, UGC YM, Sofica UGC 1, Soficinéma 5, Canal+, and CinéCinéma. Szifrón, Damián. 2014. Relatos salvajes. Buenos Aires and Madrid: Corner Producciones, El Deseo, Kramer & Sigman Films, and Telefe. Thompson, Danièle. 2002. Décalage horaire. Paris: Alain Sarde. Truffaut, François. 1964. La Peau douce. Paris: Les Films du Carrosse, Société d’Exploitation et de Distribution de Films, and Simar Films. Verbinski, Gore. 2001. The Mexican. Universal City, Los Angeles, and Beverly Hills: DreamWorks, Newmarket Capital Group, Lawrence Bender Productions, and Pistolero Productions LLC. Waugh, Natasha. 2016. Terminal. Dublin: Fight Back Films.

Novels and Short Stories al-Madhoun, Raba’i. 2013. The Lady from Tel Aviv, trans. Elliott Colla. London: Telegram Books. Biyaoula, Daniel. 1996. L’Impasse. Paris: Présence africaine. Carrión, Jorge. 2015. Los Turistas. Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg. Carvalho, Bernardo. 2013. Reprodução. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Cusk, Rachel. 2015. Outline. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Dasgupta, Rana. 2005. Tokyo Cancelled. New York: Black Cat. Escobar, Iván. 2012. Kamikaze. Madrid: Temas de Hoy. Fall, Aminata Sow. 1998. Douceurs du bercail. Abidjan: Nouvelles Éditions Ivoiriennes. Gamboa, Santiago. 2002. Los impostores. Barcelona: Seix Barral. García Márquez, Gabriel. 1993. Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane. In Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories by Gabriel García Márquez, 54–61, trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Halfon, Eduardo. 2014. Monastery, trans. Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn. New York: Bellevue Literary Press. Palahniuk, Chuck. 1996. Fight Club. New York: W. W. Norton. Pauls, Alan. 2007. The Past, trans. Nick Caistor. London: Vintage Books. Rushdie, Salman. 1988. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking. Sedarat, Roger. 2016. In-Flight Mistress. In Airplane Reading, ed. Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich, 98–101. Alresford: John Hunt Publishing. Torres Blandina, Alberto. 2009. Cosas que nunca ocurrirían en Tokio. Barcelona: La otra orilla.

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Installations Saraceno, Tomás. 2012. On Space Time Foam. Milan: HangarBicocca.

Commercials British Airways: Fuelled by Love. Youtube Video. Posted by British Airways. February 1, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFb01y TR9bA. Accessed 18 September 2019. British Airways India—A Ticket to Visit Mum. Youtube Video. Posted by British Airways. July 29, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPcfJuk1t8s. Accessed 18 September 2019. Coming Home for Christmas—Heathrow Airport. Youtube Video. Posted by Heathrow Airport. November 14, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=oq1r_M5a6uI. Accessed 27 September 2019. The Heart of the Filipino Tv Commercial. Youtube Video. Posted by fly PAL. March 15, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqvQYIII2bM. Accessed 27 September 2019. KLM Bringing People Together. Youtube Video. Posted by KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. May 15, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmO PU8MojuA. Accessed 18 September 2019. SAS—The Arrivals. Youtube Video. Posted by SAS—Scandinavian Airlines. October 29, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWUYf_zf2O0. Accessed 27 September 2019.

Operas Dove, Jonathan, and April De Angelis. 1998. Flight. Leipzig, London, and New York: Edition Peters.

CHAPTER 7

Coda: Flying Over

In his essay Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (2018), Bruno Latour uses the metaphor of air travel to describe the state of bewilderment and wavering in the post-globalization era: Instead of tension, there is henceforth a yawning gap. […] People find themselves in the situation of passengers on a plane that has taken off for the Global, to whom the pilot has announced that he has had to turn around because one can no longer land at that airport, and who then hear with terror (“Ladies and gentlemen, this is the captain speaking again”) that the emergency landing strip, the Local, is also inaccessible. (Latour 2018, 32)

The complex and uncertain condition of suspension associated with air travel is reflected in the original French title of his essay, which poses the question, “Where to land?” (Où atterrir?). Latour ponders how we would envision our future “if there is no planet, no earth, no soil, no territory to house the Globe” (5). Moored in the sky and clinging to the aftermath of a globalized world, we, the floating humans as metaphorically depicted by Latour, are observing the world, gazing down to earth. We examine the surface of planet Earth without knowing where “to attempt a crash landing” (32), desperately wondering whether we can land at all. As contemporary inhabitants of the global world, we can indeed relate to the puzzling state Latour describes as we recognize the mixed feelings © The Author(s) 2020 E. Durante, Air Travel Fiction and Film, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52651-1_7

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of disorientation to which he alludes. This vulnerability haunts us when we revert our gaze skyward to contemplate the future of air travel and imagine the day when we will tour outer space. This state of uncertainty is, indeed, not limited to the possible failure of our dream of globalization and our anxiety about the fate of planet Earth, but also reflects our unawareness of the place that we will occupy in the sky and in space. Indeed, the aerial environment continues to challenge us even as it escapes us, although we domesticate it and navigate through it daily using increasingly sophisticated aeronautic technology. The aerial milieu has been perceived since the onset of aviation as a space that leans toward the future, promises the expansion of humanity in alternative environments, and exposes us to the unpredictable. At present, we can only imagine future advancements of aircraft technology and speculate about future air journeys. We are confronted by the question of where to land; yet, we ignore where we are heading and how we will take off in the future. This projection into the future that characterizes the imaginary of air travel and the development of air mobility infrastructures is accompanied by a disturbing fear of obsolescence. We are confident that we have mastered virtually all the required knowledge about the Airworld. Nevertheless, despite our impressive command of nearly every gesture and behavior of the perfect traveler, the abrupt emergence of air routes, new control procedures, and innovative services cause us to feel “outdated” with respect to the relentless evolution of the Airworld. Air mobility tends to absorb and amplify unprecedented global circumstances. This is evident in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the collapse of air travel in the wake of the outbreak has brought with it the temporary fall of the Cloud People. The dramatic reality of this highly contagious disease reaffirms our inability to keep up with the Airworld. The provisional decline of air voyage inevitably amplifies the sense of obsolescence that defines air mobility as a whole and threatens our cultural imaginary of the Airworld. Airports and airplanes are pervaded with uncertainty and uncontrollable fear of contracting deadly infections. Consequently, they have also been deprived of those notions of leisure, luxury, connectivity and fluidity, inspiring nostalgia and regret. It is, however, possible and even likely that, as was the case after the devastation of 9/11, the Airworld will resume its supersonic spinning, will project the future onto the present state of the world, and will propel us far and fast into the time to come. Our

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superficial and short-term memory of the factual contingencies of the Airworld does not, however, prevent us from creating and setting new narratives in this environment that condenses all spaces and times at once. The Airworld is driven by the constant movement of a wide variety of individuals, and endowed with a creative and stimulating dimension in terms of the representations and artistic and cultural productions that it generates. This book explores the extraordinary and invigorating potential of this pivotal contemporary space. It analyzes international literature and film since the early 1980s, shedding new light on how air travel has become a defining paradigm of our symbolic and cultural imaginary and the way that we operate in the world. The immense number of narratives and characters set in the Airworld enlivens this space with innumerable manifestations of affectivity, sociability, and solidarity. Contemporary literary and cinematic fiction thus revise the paradigm of obsolescence, redeeming the Airworld from being a mere symbol of futuristic technological achievements of the aeronautic industry. The book covers numerous narratives, in a variety of formats and genres, lending shape and voice to the flow of human beings who crisscross the sky and turn it into a parallel space to earth in every dimension. Fiction populates aircraft, airports, and airport hotels with a multitude of lives and feelings, reversing the crystallized notion of “non-place” (Augé 1995) and rehabilitating the Airworld as an anthropological place, endowed with identity, relationship, and memory. With its focus on the human, social, and affective dimensions of the Airworld that transcend its primary function of mobility, the book further explores the rise of a global population of “Cloud People.” This term refers to the heterogeneous mass of individuals, ten million per day and over four billion per year (IATA 2018), who remain invisible behind the colorful global flight flows captured by flight trackers. Neither angelic representations nor anthropomorphic comparisons with migratory birds (“Bird People”) are sufficient to portray contemporary air travelers. The aerial milieu does not modify us anatomically, but rather allows us to maintain our human ontology as it empowers us with the opportunity of reaching the sky and flying across the world. Transformed by air travel into homines aerii, we can now locate ourselves in the air and experience states that would otherwise remain unknown to us. Paradoxically, these fictions of hypermobility condense time and space to give rise to narratives that reflect immobility. Instead of recounting the movement itself, and the discovery of the places it entails, the stories

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emerge from the inertia of the journey. Airworld fiction thus renews the traditional paradigms of travel literature, highlighting a clear rupture with this genre. The voyage is no longer recounted per se, since it takes place in the unaltered airport and airplane scenery, without any room for exoticism. Ordinary and trivialized air travel circumstances nevertheless infuse fluid and rapid momentum into the narrative, producing a truly global literature and film. These transindividual fictions, describing various intersections and interactions of this heterogeneous community of Cloud People, also highlight the tension between the globalized thinking of our society and the attachment to the local. These defining patterns of contemporary fiction also emerge in recent texts which this book—also a victim of obsolescence and the impossibility of exhaustiveness—has, unfortunately, been unable to examine. This uninterrupted flow of diverse creations that steadily nourish the contemporary imaginary of air travel includes Rodrigo Fresán’s La parte recordada (2019). In his most recent novel, Fresán strongly expresses the ephemeral condition of the journey, building a character and narrative that are not exhausted by the consumption of movement. The protagonist finally recovers his memory during a flight and resumes the writing of a book that he had never completed. This return to writing, stimulated by the state of being in the clouds, reminds him of the ancient writers who invented stories of gods ruling the world from the clouds, as well as more modern ones who abandoned the project of recounting the immensity of the cosmos. Unable to summarize the transcendence and ineffability of the air and the sky, these authors could only achieve “diluted beginnings and open endings,” as in Pink Floyd’s song “The Great Gig in the Big [sic] Sky,” which Fresán’s character resurrects from his memory. He realizes that the need for storytelling derives from the frustration caused by human inability to narrate the immensity of the sky. Thus, once again, the flow of airplanes and the flow of writing merge in fiction, as they have throughout this book.

References Essays Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe. London and New York: Verso. Latour, Bruno. 2018. Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity.

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Serres, Michel. 1995. Angels: A Modern Myth, trans. Francis Cowper. Paris: Flammarion.

Novels Fresán, Rodrigo. 2019. La parte recordada. Barcelona: Literatura Random House.

Songs Pink Floyd. 1973. The Great Gig in the Sky. In The Dark Side of the Moon. Manchester: Harvest Records.

Other References IATA—International Air Transport Association. 2018. Travelers Numbers Reach New Heights. https://www.iata.org/pressroom/pr/Pages/2018-09-06-01. aspx. Accessed 20 November 2019.

Index

A Adey, Peter, 5, 23, 130, 139, 155, 156, 162, 163 Adler, Sarah, 176 Affleck, Ben, 148, 174 Agier, Michel, 6, 156 Aguiar, Marian, 7 Allen, Woody, 168, 169 al-Madhoun, Raba’i, 166 Almodóvar, Pedro, 13, 43, 110, 111, 114, 121, 130, 131, 164 Aniston, Jennifer, 92 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 179 Appadurai, Arjun, 6–8 Arditi, Pierre, 169, 178 Augé, Marc, 6, 9, 12, 38, 108, 130, 135, 140–142, 187, 195 Azerrad, Lawrence, 97 Azúa, Félix de, 83

B Baas, Maarten, 57, 58

Bachelard, Gaston, 20 Balenciaga, Cristóbal, 113 Ballard, James Graham, 20, 21, 26 Balmain, Pierre, 114 Banderas, Antonio, 130 Barreto, Bruno, 116 Barthes, Roland, 187 Baudrillard, Jean, 110 Bauman, Zygmunt, 6, 146 Baxter, Greg, 13, 55, 56, 66–68, 91, 103, 104 Bean, Sean, 120 Becerra, Eduardo, 13 Bedos, Nicolas, 44 Bégout, Bruce, 6, 177 Bergen, Candice, 116 Bessière, Jean, 11 Binnun, Oded, 171, 176 Binoche, Juliette, 45, 185 Bissell, David, 6, 62, 102 Biyaoula, Daniel, 162, 163, 166 Blacklock, Mark, 52 Black, Prudence, 113, 116

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 E. Durante, Air Travel Fiction and Film, Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52651-1

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200

INDEX

Blanchett, Cate, 169 Blanc, Natalia, 12, 90 Blanco Gómez, María Luisa, 96 Bloom, Orlando, 133 Botton, Alain de, 6 Boucher, Phil, 146 Bouquet, Carole, 169, 178 Braff, Zach, 165, 167 Brezis, Mihal, 171, 176 Budd, Lucy, 10, 149 Builders Association, The, 76 Burke, Rob, 167, 182, 183 Burke, Ronan, 167, 182 Burman, Daniel, 132, 133 Burstein, Nanette, 165

C Calder, Alexander, 95 Caplan, Ralph, 143 Carmichael, Suzanne, 95 Carrey, Jim, 59 Carrión, Jorge, 61, 64, 65, 170 Carvalho, Bernardo, 170 Castagnetti, Alexandre, 44, 182, 183 Castells, Manuel, 6, 83 Cerda, Pablo, 23 Chadeau, Emmanuel, 89, 90 Charles, Josh, 41 Chaumette, Monique, 179 Chow, Valerie, 119 Church, Warren, 8 Cibic, Jasmina, 53 Cilleruelo, José Angel, 139 Clooney, George, 25, 185 Coldplay, 181 Connor, Steven, 8 Conventz, Sven, 42 Coppola, Sofia, 34 Costagliola, Maximiliano, 2 Crawshaw, Carol, 3 Cresswell, Tim, 5

Crowe, Cameron, 133 Cruz, Penélope, 130 Cuisset, Catherine, 144 Currie, Paul, 131 Curtis, Richard, 161 Cusk, Rachel, 91, 92, 170 Cwerner, Saulo, 5

D Dali, Salvador, 84 Dantzig, Charles, 91, 92, 107, 108, 142 Dasgupta, Rana, 13, 54, 72, 170, 174 Dawes, Birgit, 3 De Angelis, April, 73 De Cauter, Lieven, 94, 99, 101 Degoutin, Stéphane, 144 Demoustier, Anaïs, 41 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 110, 120 Diller, Elizabeth, 76 Dior, Christian, 113 Doremus, Drake, 165 Dorrian, Mark, 3 Dove, Jonathan, 73, 75, 174 D’Souza, Genelia, 59 Dunn, Katherine, 146 Dunst, Kirsten, 133 Durante, Erica, 70, 111, 142, 152

E Edwards, Brian, 6 Eisenbrand, Jochen, 6 Erisman, Fred, 113 Escobar, Iván, 108, 144, 145, 170, 172, 173 Esteban, Ángel, 13

F Falcus, Matt, 95

INDEX

Fall, Aminata Sow, 149–151, 154, 166 Farmiga, Vera, 186 Faulconbridge, James, 143 Fernández Mallo, Agustín, 108 Ferran, Pascale, 41, 42 Ferré, Juan Francisco, 147 Ferrier, Michaël, 142 Fincher, David, 171 Finger, Bobby, 162, 177 Foss, Richard, 91 Foucault, Michel, 146, 148 Frearson, Amy, 99 Frechette, Mark, 179 Freestone, Robert, 97 Fresán, Rodrigo, 60, 61, 66, 79, 90–92, 141, 196 Friedrich, Alexandre, 6, 93, 115 Fuguet, Alberto, 23, 24, 164 Fuller, Gillian, 6, 62, 99, 144, 145, 155

G Gafsou, Matthieu, 2 Galarza, Sergio, 37, 142 Gamboa, Santiago, 37, 69, 70, 118–120, 170 Game, Jérôme, 104–110, 137, 138 García Canclini, Néstor, 6 García Márquez, Gabriel, 98, 99, 170 Garcin, Christian, 12, 13 Gardner, John, 9, 22 Gershwin, George, 102 Gibson, William, 81, 83 Gleeson, Brian, 182 Godard, Jean-Luc, 179 Goetz, Andrew R., 10, 149 Goldwyn, Tony, 173 Gómez, José Pablo, 23 Gondry, Michel, 24 Gordon, Alastair, 6, 52

201

Gottdiener, Mark, 6, 30 Graham, Anne, 30 Grant, Hugh, 161 Grey, Eva, 31 Guadalupi, Gianni, 53 Guengerich, Anna, 8 Güller, Marc, 20 Güller, Mathis, 20

H Hailey, Arthur, 59 Halfon, Eduardo, 115, 134, 179–181 Hall, Rachel, 145, 148 Halpern, Nigel, 30 Halprin, Daria, 179 Hanks, Tom, 75, 120, 185 Harley, Ross, 6, 55, 99, 122, 144, 145, 155 Hartnett, Josh, 181 Henstridge, Natasha, 174 Hoffman, Dustin, 184 Hopkins, Joe, 182, 184 Houellebecq, Michel, 78, 91, 112 Huisman, Michiel, 131

I Iyer, Pico, 6, 20, 57, 63, 83–85, 104

J Jackson, Shannon, 77 Jaworski, Adam, 108 Jesus and Mary Chain, The, 35 Johansson, Scarlett, 34 Josten, Husch, 64, 71, 72

K Kaplan, James, 6 Katchadourian, Nina, 93 Kendrick, Anna, 143

202

INDEX

Khan, Imran, 59 King, Alasdair, 46 King, Stephen, 7 Kirn, Walter, 13, 20, 25, 26, 41, 44, 46, 47, 56, 57, 61, 101, 115, 121, 136 Kolm, Suzanne L., 113, 117 Kruger, Diane, 181 Kutcher, Ashton, 178 L Lab[au], 53 Lacroix, Christian, 114 Lagerfeld, Karl, 113 Lagier, Luc, 10 Laroui, Fouad, 38–41, 94, 98 Latour, Bruno, 53, 193 Levy, Shawn, 178 Litton Hauß, Barbara, 90 Löfgren, Orvan, 111 Lonsdale, Michael, 179 López, Guilied, 153 Luiselli, Valeria, 65, 66, 141 Luna, Diego, 135 Lyon, David, 146 M Manguel, Alberto, 53 Marivin, Anna, 178 Marston, Joshua, 152–154 Martin, Dean, 120 Mathieson, Charlotte, 7 Mazareanu, Elena, 8 McGuigan, Paul, 180, 181 McNeill, Peter, 95 Melville, Herman, 1 Merriman, Peter, 5, 12, 130 Mille, Patrick, 178 Miró, Joan, 95 Molano, Alfredo, 152–155 Montoya Juárez, Jésus, 13

Muñoz Molina, Antonio, 145 Murillo, Juan, 91, 114, 121, 122 Murphy, Brittany, 178 Murray, Bill, 34

N Neuman, Andrés, 30, 38, 77, 78, 80, 81, 140, 141, 143 Norton, Edward, 171

O Overath, Angelika, 53, 55, 69

P Paci, Adrian, 146, 147, 151 Padilla, Ignacio, 26–28, 100, 101 Palahniuk, Chuck, 140, 171 Pallana, Kumar, 135, 175 Paltrow, Gwyneth, 116, 174 Paré, Jessica, 182 Pascoe, David, 6, 179, 182 Pauls, Alan, 82, 164, 165 Paz Soldán, Edmundo, 12 Pearman, Hugh, 6 Petrie, Donald, 167 Picasso, Pablo, 95 Pierce, Lynne, 7, 62 Pina, Álex, 172 Pink Floyd, 196 Pitt, Brad, 171 Popcorn, Faith, 99–101, 104 Powell, Laura, 63 Puig, Manuel, 12

R Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R, 93 Ratner, Brett, 167 Régnier, Natacha, 46

INDEX

Reinoso Barzallo, Yolanda, 28–30, 47 Reitman, Jason, 25, 143, 185–187 Rembrandt, 96 Reno, Jean, 45, 185 Ricci, Nina, 113 Riello, Giorgio, 95 Roncagliolo, Santiago, 35, 36, 79, 80 Roos, Don, 53, 170, 173 Roosegaarde, Daan, 102 Roseau, Nathalie, 3, 6, 19, 20, 24, 31 Ross, Matt, 165 Rubio, Ingrid, 132 Rushdie, Salman, 170, 171

S Sagnier, Ludivine, 44 Saint Laurent, Yves, 114 Saldana, Zoe, 135 Salter, Mark B., 136, 145 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 32, 33 Sandino Moreno, Catalina, 152 Sanlıman, ¸ Kerem, 100 Saraceno, Tomás, 6, 8, 21, 129, 187 Satrapi, Marjane, 148 Schaberg, Christopher, 6, 7, 93, 171 Schanelec, Angela, 46, 169 Schweblin, Samantha, 12 Schwentke, Robert, 13 Scofidio, Ricardo, 76 Scorsese, Martin, 110, 111 Seaton, George, 59 Sebald, Winfried Georg, 62 Sedarat, Roger, 178 Serres, Michel, 6, 62, 129, 133, 136, 140, 141, 162, 187 Shadyac, Tom, 59 Sheller, Mimi, 5, 6 Shih Pearson, Justine, 96, 140 Simple Plan, 77 Sloterdijk, Peter, 8 Smith, Gary, 59

203

Spears, Britney, 120 Spears, Dorothy, 7 Spielberg, Steven, 13, 54, 75, 120, 134, 148, 174, 185, 186 Stadiem, William, 113, 117 Sthers, Amanda, 169, 178 Stone, Oliver, 148 Szekely, Ilona, 95 Szifrón, Damián, 170

T Tati, Jacques, 66 Thierstein, Alain, 42 Thompson, Danièle, 45, 53, 182, 185 Thompson, Emma, 184 Thomsen, Ulrich, 176 Thubert, Svetlana, 91 Thunberg, Greta, 13 Thurlow, Crispin, 108 Todeschini, Bruno, 46 Tokarczuk, Olga, 95, 96 Toledo, Willy, 43 Tony Leung, Chiu-Wai, 119 Torres Blandina, Alberto, 170, 174, 175 Toussaint, Jean-Philippe, 79 Truffaut, François, 179 Trump, Donald, 146 Tungate, Mark, 103, 118, 121 Tyrewala, Abbas, 59

U Uhart, Hebe, 47 Uribe, Kirmen, 91, 92, 108, 109 Urlberger, Andrea, 42 Urry, John, 3, 5, 6, 155

V Vantoch, Victoria, 113 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 12

204

INDEX

Vega, Paz, 43 Vegesack, Alexander von, 6 Venegas, Julieta, 156 Verbinski, Gore, 167 Verne, Jules, 2, 3, 27 Viel, Tanguy, 12, 13 Villoro, Juan, 21 Vincent, Bev, 7, 46 Virilio, Paul, 51 Vogel, Mike, 120 Vuitton, Louis, 111

W Waberi, Abdourahman A., 148, 149 Wagon, Gwenola, 144 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 83 Ward, Rachel K., 77

Wattanacharoensil, Walanchalee, 31, 32 Waugh, Natasha, 169 Weems, Marianne, 77 Wiesel, Ilan, 97 Winogrand, Garry, 36 Wong, Faye, 119 Wong, Kar-wai, 119 Y Yakich, Mark, 7 Yargekov, Nina, 105, 106 Z Zazie, 78 Zeta-Jones, Catherine, 135, 186 Zhu, Ally, 164, 167