If you’d asked me a year ago whether I liked flying, I probably would’ve said no. The hassle of TSA checkpoints, the constant hum of anxiety and restlessness permeating airports, the collective impatience generated by countless travelers who just want to get to their final destination already – no thank you. Airports are still the worst, but now that I’ve gone over a year without being in one I realize that what I really miss is what comes after you board a plane – the experience of being in the air, in transit. I miss the way it makes me feel weightless, like I’m watching reality and responsibility get smaller and smaller until they disappear and all that’s left is sky and sunlight and airline pretzels. From that high above the ground, my only role is to be a passenger.
Movies are like that, too. All they require is that you be receptive to the stories they tell and take the journey with them. Watching a movie or riding in a plane means ceding control and entering a liminal space, a pocket of time and sensation defined by the things you don’t know – what comes next, the transformation you’ll undergo in the process or what you might be leaving behind. This inscrutable alchemy of thresholds, of before and after, is where the magic lies.
In no particular order, here are some movies I’ve watched on airplanes:
Justin Bieber: Never Say Never
Remember Justin Bieber in 2011? That fresh-faced, sweetly non-threatening teen idol with a bowl cut feels like a relic of an entirely different lifetime. A little over a year after releasing “Baby” and gifting us with a Ludacris verse that I truly never saw coming, Justin Bieber, his family and his fans starred in the 3-D part-biopic, part-concert film Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, directed by Jon M. Chu. It’s a sleekly produced time capsule of his celebrity persona before the attitude controversies and apology tours came to define his album release cycles.
At 15, I thought of myself as a little too sophisticated to identify as a Belieber even though I listened to his music regularly. If I happened to see his documentary/concert film on a flight (and just, like, as a joke, duh) then it didn’t count, right? Something about watching the film on a plane felt less revealing or potentially embarrassing than paying for a ticket and sitting down in a theater to see it. I don’t remember much about Justin Bieber: Never Say Never other than the fact that his dad wasn’t around much (which made me feel softer and more charitable towards him), that he prayed with his dancers before his performances (which made me think my parents would like him) and that his hair did, indeed, look very soft (which I was determined not to feel anything about at all). Afterwards, my sister and I looked at each other, surprised at how likable we found him and blissfully unconcerned with the fact that this effect was the precise aim of the film. Simpler times.
Searching
By now, Searching’s gimmick is a familiar one: the action is set entirely within the confines of computer screens and smartphones. Unfriended (2015) and Host (2020) play with similar filming constraints but both take the idea of technology as a corrupting and corruptible force to its extreme – horror. In Unfriended and Host, groups of unsuspecting teenagers take the safety of their online spaces for granted and end up paying the price. The message is clear: violations of intimacy and trust abound even in the digital world. Beware. Searching, a 2018 film directed by Aneesh Chaganty, tells a different type of story.
Searching is about family – more specifically, about dads and daughters. David Kim (played by the always excellent John Cho) is a widowed father frantically trying to locate his missing 16-year-old daughter, Margot (Michelle La), by following any and all digital breadcrumbs left in the wake of her online activity and enlisting the help of a police detective (Debra Messing). Photos, videos and calendar entries also commemorate David’s deceased wife Pamela (Sara Sohn) and chronicle her ill-fated battle with cancer, wordlessly signaling that her loss has deeply fractured the family she left behind. David feels the impact of her absence anew when Margot goes missing and he begins to unravel the secrets she was hiding from him underneath the facade of a perfectly happy daughter.
If it wasn’t immediately obvious from the surname of John Cho’s character, Searching is about a Korean American family. As a Korean American daughter myself, I am intimately familiar with the types of evasions and half-truths Margot wielded to keep her dad at a familiar distance (just out of reach of being truly seen or known) as well as the intense online connections she cultivated in an attempt to exercise agency wherever she could. In high school, I wound up befriending two other teenage girls on Tumblr from California and Ukraine, respectively, based on our mutual love for BTS. We talked for hours at a time through messaging apps about new music and performances as well as fears and desires we felt too self-conscious to share with anyone who knew us in real life. I hid and guarded my friendships with both girls jealously – not out of any shame or embarrassment, but because they were wholly mine to experience and understand. A not inconsiderable part of their appeal was that I didn’t have to explain them to anyone else in my life. If I’d gone missing as a teenager and my parents had found the endless scrolls of correspondence with these people who were complete strangers to them, would they have felt betrayed by the separate life I’d conducted online without their knowledge or permission? Would they recognize the daughter they thought they had in the things I’d confessed, things I never told them I wanted or hated?
Searching may not be technically classified as a horror movie, but watching a Korean American dad excavate his daughter’s secrets one by one made for a uniquely harrowing experience (children of immigrant parents, make some noise!). The unspoken rule of Asian households – when in doubt, choose silence – is partly why David struggles so much to understand the basic outline of Margot’s life and how she went missing from it, but watching that silence be broken when he learns what she kept quiet was not a comfortable process for me as a viewer. Huddled in the window seat of a darkened aircraft cabin, I watched David’s face – lit with anxiety, rage, helplessness and the glow of an artificial screen – and reflected it all back at him as the pinprick lights of miniature cities passed underneath me.
Ultimately, the source of the suspense and dread that suffuses Searching is Margot’s disappearance. Technology itself doesn’t take on the outsized metaphorical danger that it tends to in films of a similar ilk. It’s shown instead as a tool by which we can escape and be found in equal measure. Still, it was a relief to see the screens go dark upon my flight’s landing and feel myself released from the film’s suffocating grip. I got off the plane, luggage in hand and my secrets still entirely my own – for now, at least.
Jackie
I never actually finished Jackie, but I did watch a good chunk of it on a flight. The 2016 biopic, directed by Pablo Larraín, stars Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s assassination as she reels from grief and tries to pull her life together so she can secure JFK’s legacy. If it sounds bleak, that’s because it is. As the titular Jackie, Natalie Portman does a lot of crying and drinking and staring steely-eyed into the distance while surrounded by men who try not to make direct eye contact with her. I typically enjoy all of the above, but for some reason I just couldn’t get through Jackie. Maybe I prefer my glamorously distraught and despicably rich period piece protagonists to be British, not American? That would explain my ability to sit through four seasons of The Crown but not Jackie’s one hour and 40 minute runtime.
It could also be that watching slow, quiet films on airplanes is almost always a mistake. There’s that feeling of having cotton balls stuffed into your ears that makes everything sound like you’re eavesdropping through a thick wooden door, no matter how hard you try to pop them by blowing your nose. And when there isn’t much action to distract you, all you can focus on is how small and blurry the airline screen is. No film is intended to be viewed on an airplane, of course, so these complaints about my experience with Jackie are of my own creation. If I’d seen it in theaters, with the details lushly rendered and each tremor in the score reverberating through my body, I might have a different relationship to it.
Here’s a not-so-fun fact about Jackie – its screenwriter is NBC News president Noah Oppenheim aka the guy who allegedly tried to cover up Ronan Farrow’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein while remaining buddy-buddy with predators like Weinstein and Matt Lauer. Fuck that guy. Not only for upholding systems of power that endanger and silence women but also for writing the scripts of disappointing YA novel adaptations such as The Maze Runner and The Divergent Series: Allegiant. Henceforth I will project all my feelings about Dylan O’Brien’s post-Teen Wolf career onto Oppenheim.
Coco
Less than a week after I graduated from college with a B.A. in English, no job and dread at the never-ending crawl of adulthood stretching out before me, my parents and I got on a plane bound for Seoul. It was only the second time I’d ever visited South Korea, the first being when I was too young to process anything beyond how much fancier the McDonalds were overseas. Perhaps it was this sense of cultural and ethnic homecoming, now that I could really appreciate it, that brought my emotions right to the surface and primed me to sob through the last ten minutes of Coco. I arrived on South Korean soil feeling like a sponge that had been wrung dry.
Coco, co-directed by Adrian Molina and Lee Unkrich, is a 2017 Pixar film about a 12-year-old boy named Miguel whose dream of becoming a musician is expressly banned by his family. Hijinks ensue and Miguel accidentally finds himself in the Land of the Dead, where he seeks out his great-great-grandfather (who his family believes deserted them in favor of pursuing his music career) to restore him to the living and reverse his family’s ban on music. Coco bursts with sounds, visuals and details specific to the Mexican family whose story it tells, but the ideas it explores – legacy, memory, passion – are universally felt. Watching Miguel and his family right the wrongs and misunderstandings of past generations was deeply moving to me, a fact to which the flight attendant who grabbed me some tissues can attest.
The music is great, the animation vibrant and the story achingly tender, but I think my reaction also had to do with the premise of Coco itself – being able to speak face-to-face (or face-to-skull, as it were) with your ancestors. I’d take that chance without any hesitation, though I’d probably need a translator to make up for the fact that my Korean speaking proficiency hovers around the elementary school level. As a second generation immigrant to the U.S., I often feel cut off from my own history – both familial and cultural – and unsure of where I stand without it. In the Black-white paradigm by which many understand race in America, Asian Americanness itself can feel liminal, a label whose meaning vacillates between perpetual foreigner and “white adjacent.” In America I’m not American enough, but in Korea I’m too American. If I could understand where I fit in the continuum of my family heritage – who came before me, what they wanted and how they stumbled – maybe the shifting sands below me would solidify into something easier to stand on, knees locked and back upright. Maybe I could move from a state of in between to something whole and new and entirely my own.