Why on earth is the runaway groom reading The Velveteen Rabbit in Up in the Air? “Very powerful,” George Clooney comments sardonically, paying little attention to the picture book that is evidently proving supremely comforting to the fellow whose impending wedding has just provoked a mortality crisis. As the groom points out, once you get married, you also have kids and then they grow up—and you die.
Why The Velveteen Rabbit? Margery Williams used the subtitle: How Toys Become Real for the book that she published in 1922. And that’s what Up in the Air is all about: becoming real. Ryan Bingham, the slick corporate undertaker who crisscrosses the country collecting frequent flier miles and firing employees, discovers just what it means to become real. A man who is most at ease when packing his suitcase and figuring out how to game long security lines, Clooney is presented as a man of machine-like precision and perfection who is missing a soul. He could have saved himself a lot of trouble by taking a closer look at the book in the hands of the man who will become his brother-in-law.
I hardly remember The Velveteen Rabbit from my own childhood, but remember reading it to my daughter so well. I loved that it conveyed that the worn, torn “ugly” surface of those we love to death are badges of love, even honor.
I should see this movie.
By the way, our new online fairy tale magazine, EnchantedConversation.org is up. We’d love to have you take a look!
I ran into The Velveteen Rabbit in a completely new context recently: my big sister’s wedding. One of the readings was that lovely moment in which the Skin Horse tells the Rabbit about becoming Real. It had everyone in tears, including some of our stuffier relatives who’d said beforehand that they thought it had no place in the ceremony. It’s a lovely book; I need to revisit it! And, clearly, to see Up in the Air.
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”