Real to Reel

Jodie Foster in Flightplan

JODIE FOSTER OFFERS INSTRUCTIONS ON WHITE FLIGHT

The suspense-thriller Flightplan is just a movie, right? Wrong. See how “reel life” affects real life.

In Flightplan, Academy Award-winning actress Jodie Foster stars as Kyle Pratt, a “well-off,” confident businesswoman who discovers to her horror that her daughter has turned up missing during an international flight, despite being seated right next to her before dozing off for a nap.

In the course of piecing together the clues, Pratt discovers to her chagrin that her daughter has been kidnapped, with some of the flight attendants obstructing her ability to “get answers.” In the process of successfully saving her child, Pratt appears as an unflappable, determined and strong-minded woman who will not let anyone get in the way of her locating her “lost” child; not any flight attendants, not the Air Marshal nor the airline’s captain will stand in the way of finding her child.

Pratt’s character and characterization brings to mind the identification process. Specifically, the identification process is defined as the method and manner by which the moviegoer physically, emotionally and psychologically connects with a movie’s character that resembles the viewer’s physical, emotional and psychological profile. In this case, Hollywood is using the identification process in a manner that if internalized as inspirational to any “real” female audience member, is ultimately internalized as instructional.

Since mainstream movies both reflect and reinforce messages of minority marginalization at the expense of White glamorization, the message communicated by the visual imagery of Pratt solving her own problem can translate itself offscreen in many ways. Here, the identification process is more about a positive attitude in favor of something rather than a dislike for an alternative, much in the same way that being right-handed does not inherently suggest a disdain for one’s left hand (despite an acknowledged preference to use the right hand for “important” tasks and functions given the higher comfort level associated therewith). Thus, it is not wholly unreasonable for a White female in the real world to adopt the authoritative stance of the fictional character of Pratt, especially when said female has seen images similar to Pratt’s in similar settings on multiple occasions over the course of a viewing lifetime.

We conclude with an interesting anecdote that speaks to the propensity of some movie viewers to take the images in Flightplan seriously. Upon the movie’s release, three labor unions representing 80,000 flight attendants urged a boycott of the movie since it portrays a flight attendant as a terrorist. The Association of Flight Attendants stated that the movie falsely portrays flight attendants as “rude, unhelpful and uncaring.”( Micheline Maynard, “‘Flightplan’ Irks Flight Attendants,” The New York Times, 28 September 2005, pg. E2. ).