Pixar’s Up: Paradise Lost at Paradise Falls

“He caught him up, and, without wing
Of hippogrif, bore through the air sublime,
Over the wilderness and o’er the plain,
Till underneath them fair Jerusalem,
The Holy City, lifted high her towers . . .

. . . There, on the highest pinnacle, he set
The Son of God.”

– John Milton, Paradise Regained, Book IV

The kindness of the world toward your existence turns out to be an illusion of youth, and all love dies. Man must keep his faith and promises, even as he ages toward death — find a place to stand firm, even as he falls.

Pixar’s Up and John Milton’s great poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are about more than what they have in common. A laundry list of their similarities would hardly be interesting (especially if you haven’t read the poems). But they meet at a critical and compelling place in what I like to call the Artistic Project.

This balloon is about to get heavy, so if at any point you need a little extra lift, bookmark this.

Now, let us go, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, to find our solitary way —

I know I said no laundry list . . .

But I should take at least a few paragraphs to substantiate my claim that these works of art are cut from such similar cloth.

Paradise Lost tells the Adam and Eve story, with a lot added about the larger universe and what comes before and afterward — a lonely man finds his perfect woman, his inspiration, and the two fall in love against the backdrop of the immeasurable beauty of the world. Then, the pair fall, are cast out of Eden, and must come to terms with a life where, instead of laying by river banks of Paradise, shagging all day without consequence and gardening at their leisure, they must work for a living in a much more mundane sort of way, free to choose where they find “their place of rest,” but knowing that it’s on the way.

In Reel I of Up, little Carl Fredriksen is a lonely boy brimming with fantasies about adventuring in exotic lands. He meet Ellie – the love of his life, his inspiration – and together they share a passion for the immeasurable beauty of the world. The pair grow up, get married, and must come to terms with a life where, instead of building their house on the crest of a plateau next to exotic Paradises Fall in South America, they must work for a living in a much more mundane sort of way. The couple is childless and Ellie dies before Carl, leaving him little in life but to choose where he’s going to spend his final years.

(This decision is forced when an elderly Carl assaults a construction worker for damaging his mailbox and is remanded to a nursing home by the courts, since it is no longer safe for him to take care of himself, and since developers want his property. By the way, the first part of Up is one of the saddest, saddest things I’ve seen in movies. The Wrestler-caliber sad, except not just for dudes. Big Fish caliber sad, except a lot of people watched it. Everyone was crying.)

In Paradise Regained, a solitary Jesus wanders in the Wilderness, tempted by Satan. In the climactic moment, he is whisked through the air to the very top pinnacle on the temple mount in Jerusalem – a symbolic high point and symbol of divinity. To defy temptation, come into his own and redeem humanity, Jesus must stand on the pinnacle — find his spot high above the ground and remain there faithfully, despite Satan’s attempts to get him to give up or jump off. The standing itself is the fundamental action of the character and the plot – the gestus, if you will.

For the rest of Up, Carl lifts his house with balloons and is whisked away to the Paradise Falls plateau. Landing on the wrong side of it, he must move his house (which he pulls on a tether “like a parade balloon”) to the perfect spot right next to the falls to keep his promise to Ellie and redeem himself. All the while, he is stalked and tempted by his childhood hero, a long-forgotten explorer who casts himself as the adversary, using an army of minions and his own personal influence to try to get Carl to fail.

Then, the plot switches gears and starts closely resembling Pokemon the Movie 2000 (a movie I reference far too often on OTI). There’s a little Asian kid with a baseball cap who goes around collecting badges and talking about what an awesome so-and-so he is, and a really stupid yellow animal who has a lot of affection for our protagonists for no reason, and they need to fight an evil imperialistic guy in an airship because he is trying to steal this big, blue, oddly charismatic sort-of-flying creature – the rarest of all the Pokemon, er, birds.

So, yeah, laundry list plot comparisons leave something to be desired. Let’s leave that one where it lies. I’m not writing this just to talk about plot. The thematic and normative similarities between the works and the common purposes to which they speak are much more interesting.

I’m getting better! I think I’ll go for a walk!

“Why comes not Death,
Said hee, with one thrice acceptable stroke
To end me? Shall Truth fail to keep her word,
Justice Divine not hast’n to be just?
But Death comes not at call, Justice Divine
Mends not her slowest pace for prayers or cries.”

– John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX

It’s pretty clear that Carl Fredricksen flies to Paradise Falls to bury his wife and find his own grave. He has some food, sure, but no real plan to get more. He doesn’t even have a place set aside for pooping. He commits to this course of action thoroughly, and asks no one for pity. He never once bemoans being old. He never once in the movie expresses regret or frustration with his physical deterioration.

(Which, of course, turns out to have been less than complete – which I thought was pretty awesome. Old people are so often portrayed as frail – far more often and far more delicately than they are in real life. Of course, they no more have super powers than regular people do, but with cartoons, as with retirement planning, one must adjust for inflation).

What does he expect to have happen when he gets there? What happens in the picture, presumably – the house sits on the falls, and he gets to be with his wife.

But then, a funny thing happened. He didn’t die. More than his sense of righteousness, more than his fondness for Russell (on which more later), more than his love of adventure, and certainly more than his affection for birds or the environment, which he actively dislikes, Carl’s limited enthusiasm for doing things often seems to come from the fact that he is not yet dead.

Normally, that would be a pretty crappy motivation for a story that almost never gets used – and that’s deeply ironic, because it is one of the chief motivations that adults have for doing things in their actual lives. There is a huge gap here between what is good for stories and what is true about life, and I think one of Up’s chief virtues is that, like Paradise Lost, it doesn’t shirk away from facing this gap and traversing it – while remaining a good story.

What now?

You ever wonder why so many superhero movies are origin stories, or why so many good superhero origin story movies have awful sequels? You ever wonder why Labyrinth is so much more interesting than Fraggle Rock, despite sharing many superficial similarities?

Well, there are a lot of reasons for that last one (the relationship between Doozers and Fraggles is the creepiest thing I came across as a child, bar none), but growing-up stories are relatively easy to do well. They lean toward being insightful, funny, motivating, compassionate and inspiring.

There’s a natural narrative to it — a beginning, a middle and an end. There are changes, important choices, irony, setbacks, triumph, discovery, despair, sex, violence, conflict and even happy endings. Growing up brings with it all the elements of marketable drama.

Why do Can’t Hardly Wait or Fast Times at Ridgemont High end with those “This is what happens afterward” subtitles? If this information is important to the story, why do they tell us and not show us?

Well, what would be the point? Even if it’s important, why would you want to watch it?

Growing up stories (I love to use that word Bildungsroman for them) have points. Growing up itself has a point. Puberty has a point (as about 48% of Americans have found out awkwardly in math class). It’s never acceptable or desirable — or even really possible, provided you remain in decent health — to fail to transition from a child to an adult during a certain point in your life, whatever that means to you. It is a goal set for you, not something you must decide to do yourself.

Upon entering adulthood in earnest, perhaps after a brief respite, it is easy to become obsessed with the growing up of others — to dedicate yourself to helping others grow up, to live vicariously through others growing up, to lose your adult self in children and teenagers, to watch Gossip Girl.

This is also why so many good songs are written about drug addiction. Drug addiction has a point; you want/need more drugs. If you’re not addicted to drugs, that’s its own good news. But there’s also some bad news:

Because — and I hate to break it to you — after you grow up, barring kids, your life doesn’t really have a point anymore.

Not an inherent one anyway — not one that is manifest in great physical and emotional urgency. Not one that informs everything you do and every thought you have. Not one that brings its own screenwriting team. Your life’s easiest path to a readily narritivizable purpose is not to be walked by your feet, but by those of someone smaller.

This is not to say adult life has no meaning without children. Just that, if you don’t have kids, or after they grow up, the subjective adult life doesn’t come with a point that is obvious, consonant and mandatory, as much intrinsic as extrinsic, and as much provided to the one experiencing it as by it.

Nope, after you grow up, after you learn what you need to learn to be an adult, after you’ve gone through your sundry rites of passage and come to terms with the world, after you’ve beaten Valley, pranked the dean, succeeded in business without really trying and revealed your true gender to your best guy friend in the back room by pulling apart your ill-fitting man clothes and lambasting him with your late-night-cable femininity, there’s a block of time you get to use doing pretty much whatever you want before you die.

It tends to be pretty open-ended. It probably won’t have much of a plot unless you force it. Few people are going to want to make a movie about that when they can just tell the story of another teenager (or somebody somewhat older playing a teenager and doing all the same stuff, like Luke Perry in 90210 or Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men — prepare to have your mind blown: the half-man isn’t the chubby kid, it’s Charlie the Man-child).

I should clarify, this is no reason to be depressed. There is a lot to be said about the Good Life, and that it would make a Good Movie is perhaps not one of those things.

Still, especially for people hooked on narrative, the existential burden of not having a point in your life can be crushing, and the philosophical implications of it boggle the mind. The challenge it poses – not just to bemoan it, but to add something to supplant what is missing (other than heroin) – lead to our greatest and most difficult works of art. Here I am talking about the intrinsic pointlessness of adult life again, and looking to art in the source for meaning. Two and a Half Men isn’t that good.

After the voice cracks and the first kisses, after the thrown mortarboards and the sitting at the feet of the mentor and defeating David Bowie in a psychedelic stairway-off, there remains this paralyzing, paralyzing question.

It’s the question that Paradise Lost brings us to, and the question Carl Fredriksen confronts close to the beginning of Up. (my words, not words from the movie)

“What now?”

As the Ferrett pointed out in his great guest article, when Russell and Fredriksen set foot in South America, it is no forest primeval — Paradise Falls spills from a broad rock face, haunted by history and teeming with ravenous dogs.

The Limits of Common Sense, or, Why One Might Tie Ten Thousand Balloons to One’s House

“Therefore what he gives . . . to man in part
Spiritual, may of purest Spirits be found
No ingrateful food: and food alike those pure
Intelligential substances require
As doth your Rational; and both contain
Within them every lower facultie
Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste,
Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate,
And corporeal to incorporeal turn.
For know, whatever was created, needs
To be sustaind and fed.”

– John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book V

“What now?” is about where common sense breaks down. Once the point is gone, reason is often soon to follow. Fight Club hits that mark as well as anybody, when Tyler and the narrator discuss meeting their fathers and asking what they should do with their lives. But Fight Club is one of those pieces that offers problems, but not solutions. Pieces that really tackle “What now?” make progress – they manage to advance against that intractable question.

I’ve talked a lot recently on the blog about how art is about what things mean, and that no field but art gives meanings to things. Explanations, sure, analysis, sure, forecasts, hypotheses, classifications, terminologies, even values, granted. But meaning lives in the experiential, subjective space on both sides of our senses, and it is much easier to create it or demonstrate it – through art – than it is to discuss it systematically. Discuss meaning systematically without incorporating art, and you run into a lot of brick walls (See? “Brick Wall” means something, and that turn of phrase was more artsy than substantive).

A fancy way to talk about the limitations of common sense is to start talking about “dialectic.” Talk about the rules, restrictions and mutual assumptions that people share when they start arguing about things. Talk about how any framework for explaining something always suffers from internal interference, contradiction or limitation. If all your discourse comes in the form of argument between two viewpoints, you will have imported into your understanding of the world the idea that things have two sides, which is just an invention. It’s not true.

It’s like seeing the strings on the port nacelle of the Enterprise and assuming they’re “space wires” – or when a camera gets hit by the light just so that its own parts reflect on the film, creating a ghosted image that people assume is a UFO. It isn’t missing the forest for the trees, it’s missing the forest for the binoculars.

Epistemology stultifies discourse, and so many arguments devolve into semantic squabbles, that it often seems hopeless to try to make headway against the “What now?” question. Come up with an answer, somebody will shoot it down – or you’ll have to shoot it down yourself. If you think you have your handle on something that cracks it, you’re probably just either begging the question or falling for a trick of the light, because it isn’t really crackable. It’s not a problem to be solved – even saying that introduces confounding dialectical elements.

But art, art can attack it, because art gets to play with epistemological limits in ways that more strictly constrained dialectical discourse cannot – provided the artists have sufficient facility and skill, and, most importantly, the necessary subtlety and specificity. When wandering into this sort of territory, demanding easy or vague answers is a sure way to hold up any progress (and also to undermine the efforts of artists to broaden overall human experience, and also to miss out on a lot of cool stuff).

Milton was marvelous at this. Whenever I read Milton, I feel like I’m making progress against areas of ignorance. Not mapping them, mind you, but progressing. Once you get to a certain point in adult intellectual life, a lot of the best stuff gets stuck around the margins.

Up also does this well – and, again I want to resist laundry listing similarities, because I really think is essential to how the two pieces work, to understanding how Up functions as a piece of art, and to get the most out of watching Up. So perhaps I will pull in another work of art as contrast.

Up gets close to what I like to call (and/or just coined – you be the judge!) the “Theoden trap,” named after the King of Rohan in the Lord of the Rings.

The Theoden Trap

The Theoden Trap is a specific sort of question-begging related to the existential problem of aging. King Theoden has withered in his age into a pale remembrance of his former self, but it turns out his impotence, infirmity and depression have been reinforced by the presence of the scoundrel Gryma Wormtongue. When Gandalf dispels Gryma’s magic, Theoden rises from his throne and realizes that, through faith in himself, courage and the council of friends, he has regained enough strength and youthfulness that he can ride to war against Sauron and Saruman.

The problem with the Theoden Trap is that Theoden is not the victim of natural aging, he’s the victim of poor council and a lack of faith in himself, which he misinterprets. But it only addresses the existential problem if it has been falsely as aging. It is easy to extrapolate the revival of Theoden (and the archetypical plot point it exemplifies) in an Emersonian way to insist that “You are only as old as you feel.”

While this is true, valid and useful, and it helps frame for us what aging means in a positive and encouraging manner (and inspiring courage, as far as I’m concerned, is a worthy side goal for any piece of art) it only approaches the superficial drawbacks of aging, it doesn’t tackle the central existential questions of what it means to be moving through time (and not in an uber-cool gravity slingshot or wormhole, either).

In other words, it’s about morale and feelings. It’s about having the resources to cope, which is different from having the frame of mind to comprehend or the basis for difficult knowledge.

A very basic synopsis of Up sounds like a big Theoden Trap. An elderly shut-in decides to tie some crazy balloons to his house, and with the help of a young kid, he finds his confidence and realizes how fun it is to be alive!

While a little bit of this happens in Up, Carl is never shown as particularly incapable, just stubborn and stationary. He’s always vigorous – he’s an angry shut-in. That’s not his arc.

More immediately though, the Theoden Trap interpretation of Up ignores the whole “I’m going to metaphorically bury my wife and find my own grave” angle, which, after the tremendously sad first reel, is pretty hard to miss, at least in tone. The obvious symbol (the balloons on the house) does not go in the obvious direction (fancy and youthfulness), but is instead committed to something much more serious (faith, duty and loss).

The juxtaposition of the balloons and the grief – of escaping home and taking it along – the moment is deeply ironic, but also very sincere – not “Earonic,” as some of my colleagues would say. That terms shows such slavery to the dialectic, a mental hangup on the notion of argument and dichotomy – the notion that any two extremes must lie on a continuum, and that anything that has characteristics of both must be in the middle. I may be wrong or arrogant (or both), but I believe this is a big-time case of “seeing the strings on the Enterprise” – mistaking the conventions of talking about art for the qualities of the art itself. The balloons in Up are both deeply sincere and deeply ironic, and it is a challenging thing to talk about that in a common-sensical way.

But that’s okay, because they made a movie about it, and if you feel the need to revisit or understand the concept, you can watch the movie. It is easy to tell art is successful if the art itself is the best way to articulate its own purpose or qualities.

Milton deals with this challenge in many ways, most notably by the way his heavily enjambed form draws necessary comparisons across dialectical divides, poetically articulating logical impossibilities that are nevertheless meaningful thoughts. Milton loves “or.”

But the more direct way, the way that leads me on to further interpretation of Up, is his monistic theology and the way he models systems of mutual, voluntary dependence in his great works. The quotation that began this section, about how the angels and the cosmos feed off each other, and the incorporeal and corporeal become one another is a beautiful example of it (and the passage runs quite a bit longer than what I was willing to quote – I recommend checking it out).

Monism is, simply, that, where it looks like there may be many things, there is really just one thing – according to Milton’s de Doctrina Christiana (a long-lost personal tome of theological discourse written by Milton and found 150 years after his death) matter and spirit are one thing that has complex and mysterious interaction with itself. God is a physical being, though of mysterious position, form or substance.

From this foundation, Milton abandons certain polarizing notions that govern the common considerations of different ideas or abstractions (master/servant being the most notable) in his poetry and replaces them with the ideal of a natural, blessed, sinless knowledge unspoiled by human thought that has insisted on driving divisions into the natural order of things.
Carl loses the flesh of his flesh

“And mee with thee hath ruind, for with thee
Certain my resolution is to Die;
How can I live without thee, how forgoe
Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly joyn’d,
To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn?
Should God create another Eve, and I
Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no no, I feel
The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.”

– John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book VI

Just wanted to include that passage and once more recall how beautiful and sad the first reel or so of Up is. As I mentioned before, sometimes art is best at speaking for itself.

Cross your heart

“Die hee or Justice must; unless for him
Som other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.”

John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX

When Carl Fredrickson is about to be hauled away by the orderlies to the Shady Oaks retirement community (or whatever adjective/tree it was), it forces key questions in his life. He has delayed dealing with them for some time.

I was surprised by Up, because Carl didn’t turn out to have the values I assumed he would have. He didn’t turn out to be defined by his immediate level of whimsy (either as too serious or too silly). He didn’t turn out to particularly love flying or find it liberating in itself. In fact, he wasn’t really looking for freedom at all. He doesn’t particularly value youth, and he has spare few epiphanies in a picture you’d expect to be full of “I thought that was important, but really this is what’s important” Hallmark Channel speeches.

No, when asked “What now?” His answer is not “Be young, have fun, drink Pepsi,” as the marketing might lead you to believe. It is decidedly more old-fashioned.

When Carl is forced to take drastic action during a rather pointless time in his life, he decides to keep his word.

And later, when he agrees to help Russell save Kevin the bird, he really doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the bird. He hates the bird, and he doesn’t like Russell very much. But, in a moment of sympathy, he makes a promise, and he decides that this promise means something.

(Notably, he does not act on his promise to Russell until he has fulfilled his promise to Ellie. It seems terribly insensitive, but it makes sense in the context of how Carl operates. The house needs to stand next to Paradise Falls, as in Ellie’s picture, before Carl can serve any other promise. It’s almost a cosmic law to him.)

One of Carl’s most important personal moments is when he accepts Masterhood of Doug the dog (another callback to Adam – who was given dominion over the animals). Bonds and duties matter.

Later still, when Russell’s father does not show up to his Senior Wilderness Explorer ceremony, Carl goes – and I really think it is for a similar reason. Carl believes in promises. He believes in duty. He values loyalty and takes it almost as a natural law that certain people ought to be loyal to certain other people. He uses this truism, this thing he intuitively understands but which doesn’t entirely make sense discursively, to supplant the place of a “point” in his life.

And his attitude toward duty is Miltonic. When he does something in service to a promise or oath, it is not through subordination to a binding tie – trust for Carl is a monistic relationship, where the act of promising to do something for someone else and accepting someone else’s promise to do something for you (as Carl does when he lets Russell “assist the elderly” to get his merit badge) are the same sort of feeding.

The “up” in Up becomes an aspiration and drive toward this commitment, this trust, even when, in the larger context of his life, it is pretty pointless.

All because he crossed his heart.

But even that is too dialectical an explanation! Who is the giver of trust? Who is the receiver of trust? Why is the heart crossed – does this not run in the interests of the heart as well? Perhaps not. The moments are delicately and subtly handled – best to watch the movie again, and really listen and watch for the details, especially for what Carl does not say or do that would be clear givens for other characters.

And I would resist saying that Carl “makes it the point of his life” – supplant the place of,  sure, but in a different way. Carl doesn’t find meaning to fight the meaninglessness. This is too dialectical, at least within a certain common-sensical paradigm. As in the Milton quotation above, Justice is just something that needs to be done.

That Milton quotation at the top of the page, by the way, is about how even God the Father Himself observes the pressing necessity of Justice, without seeing it as a limitation or bind on Him. He does not observe those sorts of dialectical relationships and instead lives in a divine cycle of feeding and vaporizing, of spiritual physicality, of constant and cosmic mutuality, where something like Justice can just exist and be good without having to operate along a subject-object axis.

And by the way, if you have any doubt that the main reason Carl helps Russell is because he crossed his heart and promised to do it – or that this faithfulness is the primary virtue exhibited in the story, the screenwriters left you this fun bit of foreshadowing at the moment of Russell’s introduction:

Russell: [from trailer] Good afternoon. Are you in need of any assistance today, sir?
Carl Fredricksen: No.
Russell: I could help you cross the street.
Carl Fredricksen: No.
Russell: I could help you cross your yard?
Carl Fredricksen: No.
Russell: I could help you cross…
Carl Fredricksen: No!
[closes the door on Russell’s foot]
Russell: Ow.
He could help him cross his heart. He could assist him in making a promise to help him in return. If that isn’t a Miltonic act of benevolence, I don’t know what is.

The pinnacle

Which brings us back to the pinnacle. The first pinnacle is Paradise Falls, where Carl puts his marriage to rest, in the ultimate act of fidelity to the dreams and memory of his beloved wife and the meaning that adventuring had in their lives. It is a lovely touch that, even when he must leave, released from his oath by completion and by Ellie’s book, his and Ellie’s chairs spill out of the house and stand on the cliffside in tribute to the value of their loyalty and love for one another.

But there is a second pinnacle in the story – a second time that the ultimate Milton act of fidelity and consonance with the religious duty to our pre-lapsarian (before the Fall of Man) forebears: “They also serve who only stand and waite.” (Sonnet XVI)

There was a great quote, something really dramatic Carl said, or maybe it was Russell, when the two of them were on the pinnacle. Oh, right:

“Red car. Blue car.”

– Up

And the pinnacle was Russell’s favorite curb. The task of standing on that curb becomes a form of duty, gives Carl something to do in his waning years, and helps restore something Russell never knew he loved. From that pinnacle is where Carl and Russell, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, through that sort of Eden, took their solitary way.

Special bonus section

Tell me this doesn’t remind you of the (rather shocking) zeppelin-related death of Up antagonist Charles Muntz:

“Satan, smitten with amazement, fell.
As when Earth’s son, Antaeus (to compare
Small things with greatest), in Irassa strove
With Jove’s Alcides, and, oft foiled, still rose,
Receiving from his mother Earth new strength,
Fresh from his fall, and fiercer grapple joined,
Throttled at length in the air expired and fell,
So, after many a foil, the Tempter proud,
Renewing fresh assaults, amidst his pride
Fell whence he stood to see his victor fall;
And, as that Theban monster that proposed
Her riddle, and him who solved it not devoured,
That once found out and solved, for grief and spite
Cast herself headlong from the Ismenian steep,
So, strook with dread and anguish, fell the Fiend,
And to his crew, that sat consulting, brought
Joyless triumphals of his hoped success,
Ruin, and desperation, and dismay,”

– John Milton, Paradise Regained, Book IV

Okay. Maybe that last one was a stretch.

Special thanks to the Scholar’s Bank at the University of Oregon, who posted the excellent searchable PDFs of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained that helped me pepper this rambling with the illusory trappings of legitimacy.