Walter Mitty and Work and Play
There’s daydreaming, there’s dedication, there’s action, and there’s remembering to look up from the path.
The origional story of Walter Mitty, by James Thurber, is a simple story. There’s this guy who spends half his time in reality and half his time out of it—zoning out—goes the parlance of the day. And Thurber, to my knowledge, has just got no problem with it. The short story and the play begin and end with Walter Mitty daydreaming, waking up to reality, and walking away from both with no consequences. And I don’t think the movie version does anything more than stroll away without judgement either. But I’m writing this because the critics of the movie, aren’t getting the point.
As a card-carrying daydreamer, I like the short story, the one-act play, and the movie because they all state it’s fine to be a daydreamer. The daydreamer hero walks away with enlightenment about who is and who he can be—even if he doesn’t try. Even if you don’t try to attain the dream, look around for the dream. And, never be such an ass as a critic who falls for the false binary proposition that one or the other is the right path.
The win of the daydreamer is the means; the ends come later or not at all. I’ve dreamed of being in China and also accidentally ended up in Banff. One was a daydream; one was a surprise. Both experiences were valuable. There’s work and there’s play and you should have both in your life. There’s value in dedication and there’s value in daydreaming.
And the film makes this message really clear. There’s a little trick that the film plays—a kind of narrative loop that generates the message.
[Obligatory spoiler warning, although not really because this is an old, old story. Cheezits, read a book.]
Walter Mitty seems like a guy who has just done nothing. It seems like he’s spent a lifetime looking at photonegatives* and being an archivist for LIFE—no less—the magazine, no pun intended. And it seems like, to the audience, that this is not the best or most interesting life—at least Walter seems to be feeling that way. His mother loves him, his sister depends on him and he’s a stalwart worker. He’s a dependable guy. So, (cue the Arcade Fire soundtrack) Walter Mitty goes looking for something more real.
His daydreams become real perils. There are sharks and volcanoes. There is giving up on a quest—perhaps the most real peril faced in the movie. But, through luck and perseverance he finds the mysterious photographer. Through a series of spells and turns we find out that Walter Mitty, not in all his adventuring around the planet Earth, but in his job, in the midst of thought about the thing he was dedicated to doing, is the most important photograph—at least to the expert photographer, Sean.
At one point, when the Walter Mitty of the movie has caught up to the photographer and is finally able to ask about the mysterious negative #25, the photographer (Sean Penn) says, “Let’s call it a ghost cat.” The audience doesn’t know it, but the photographer is referring to both the illusive Snow Leopard and Walter Mitty.
Walter Mitty, in his office, in his dedication, in his desire to make the things he’s dedicated to bringing to light—negatives brought to light—never thinking that anyone is watching, is a ghost cat. He is unseen but special. In the search to find negative #25—a photograph that turns out to be a photograph of himself—Walter stumbles on the meaning of his life before he went and did crazy things. There’s nothing wrong with the crazy thing, but he didn’t know what he had until he went around the horn. And isn’t that the point of every daydream: to imagine a world in which we made the catch, enamored the girl/guy, got the promotion, had the comeback of the day, and just… won.
Thurber’s original story doesn’t do anything but give us a glimpse into the mind of the daydreamer—someone who, throughout history has been ostracized, at least in the West, by a work ethic driven society, where work matters more than play. But Walter is a great hero for these ages because he has worked and has been dedicated, and he cannot see himself for how valuable he is, except that he thinks that there must be more.
There is more than work. There is always more. If you neglect the challenge, is your Life meaningless? No it is not. You are where you need to be. But are you having fun? You do dream—as the mind is meant to. You possess better ideas of yourself. What accosts your ability to see those dreams come to reality is a dangerous wall that surounds you. Should you only be dedicated? Should you scribble? What is your precision? Are you awake in the moment? You’ve missed no moment if your dream projects you past some robotic motion. Your dream is your pulse.
Know this: Life happens every day. When you judge your own life, you are outside of it. Don’t take the photograph. Be the photograph. Know that you are staring in to the distance. Letting yourself live in a dream for a moment; that always makes an excellent photograph.
*Can I point out here that there is a huge proportion of the US population (maybe international) that won’t know what a negative is? Rather than explain it, thank God the movie decided to go with figure-it-out. The symbolism is better for it.
