I recently saw Up in the Air, the much-praised movie in which George Clooney's character flies around the country to tell employees of cowardly companies that they've been fired. Anna Kendrick plays the role of a recent college graduate and co-worker of Clooney's who wants their company to save money by firing employees over streaming video; Clooney, who loves flying, is understandably opposed. Their boss decides that Kendrick should accompany Clooney on some trips so she understands how things work "in the field." (For the record, I enjoyed the movie but didn't think it deserved to be put on any "top 10 of 2009" lists.)
The relevance here is that Kendrick's character graduated from Cornell. For the moment, she joins Andy Bernard of The Office as the two most prominent fictional Cornell graduates in entertainment. The two characters are quite different; Kendrick's character is portrayed as super smart, while Bernard often plays the fool in the office. But there are certain similarities.
Both characters possess strong educational credentials, but their quality education is offset by glaring weaknesses. Kendrick's character seems strong on the outside but weak on the inside. After graduating college, she passed up a good job in California to "follow a boy" to Omaha. While Clooney is strong and steady, Kendrick breaks down while trying to fire someone and copes with a breakup by wandering naively into a stranger's arms. (There's more to her weakness, but I won't ruin it.) Throughout the movie, she's portrayed as out-of-touch; in effect, she's the typical book-smart-but-not-street-smart Ivy stereotype.
Andy Bernard's weaknesses are even more obvious. He's unable to think on the same level as someone like Jim Halpert, his lack of common sense gets him into trouble with females, and he's not even particularly good at his job (recall that he and Pam, as the two salespeople with the lowest numbers, had to make cold calls).
Have Cornell graduates, at least in entertainment, become known as people with good educations but little awareness of what goes on around them? They think they're bright and know what to do, but they need smarter-yet-worse-educated people to correct them.
This is an extremely small sample size, but maybe characters who are the complete package (brains and common sense) are scripted as Yale or Harvard graduates, and Cornell is the school for characters who have the first but not the second quality.
Bear with me on this slow Cornell news day.
Let's not overlook that Anna Kendrick was probably an ILR grad too.
ReplyDeleteThe main attorney of the John Travolta movie A CIVIL ACTION was a Cornell Law graduate and there's a scene where a bunch of Harvard grads look down at him for it. There's also a funny scene where his Cornell diploma falls off the wall and shatters -- I'm not kidding about this.
ReplyDeleteThe co-screenwriter of "Up in the Air", Sheldon Turner, is a Cornell graduate so it's probable that the Natalie character resembles someone he knew at Cornell. And only a Cornell graduate would react so strongly when someone mentions "jumping off the bridge", as Anna Kendrick did when the woman she was firing threatened to commit suicide (and did at the end jumped off the bridge).
ReplyDeleteI've been catching up on recent movies this summer and in a two-day span saw both this film and "The Informant." In the latter, Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, a Cornell grad who pretty closely matches the image you identified - book smart but totally, irredeemably, socially inept.
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