Looking for Bedford Falls ... in The Terminal

The Bedford Falls Trilogy

In a previous essay, I made the case that Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) is a dystopian reimagining of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). Christof, the show’s creator, tries and fails to make Truman Burbank a version of George Bailey and the town of Seahaven a version of Bedford Falls. Comparing the two films and understanding why Christof fails reveals some of the challenges that modern American life, represented in an extreme form by Seahaven, poses for genuine, flourishing community as represented by the Bedford Falls ideal. Toward the end of that article, I began to ponder how we could sustain community even in the midst of those challenges. To that end, I now propose looking to a third film, Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004). 

While there are many films that could give us insights on community, The Terminal is especially appropriate here because of its close affinities with both It’s a Wonderful Life and The Truman Show. I don’t think it’s coincidental that Andrew Niccol, who wrote the screenplay for The Truman Show, went on to develop the story for The Terminal with Sacha Gervasi. While it was Gervasi who ultimately wrote the script, in its simplest outline the film resembles Niccol’s earlier project: The protagonist is an amiable and idealistic everyman who is trapped within a man-made glass-and-metal world ruled by his antagonist, a balding bespectacled man who observes all through high windows and surveillance cameras. (An article by Sébastien Lefait also argues for watching the two Niccol films in parallel.) And while The Terminal doesn’t signal its debts to It’s a Wonderful Life as conspicuously as does The Truman Show, its populist message in praise of the little guy against the bureaucracy, its big-hearted earnestness, and its fantastical plot contrivances all make it feel like a Capra film for the twenty-first century. Moreover, there is a fascinating progression from one film to the other in this thematic trilogy: It’s a Wonderful Life is the story of a man who could leave his community, but shouldn’t; The Truman Show is the story of a man who can’t leave his community, but should; and The Terminal is the story of a man who can’t leave his community, legally speaking, and morally speaking, shouldn’t either. 

It is as if Niccol were using The Terminal to continue a critical conversation with It’s a Wonderful Life that he began with The Truman Show. If with The Truman Show Niccol asked what could go wrong if someone tried to use technocratic methods to realize the Bedford Falls ideal in a modern world, with The Terminal he seems to be asking how that ideal could still be achieved despite all the problems of modern life skewered by both films. To answer that question, The Terminal strands its protagonist in the most quintessentially twenty-first century setting imaginable, in the kind of place where we would least expect true community to take root: a heavily-surveilled international airport that was never intended for long-term belonging, and which doubles as a mall. Viktor Navorski’s situation in JFK is only slightly better than Truman’s in Seahaven. He is also detained against his will and spied on constantly, everyone around him is similarly absorbed in their own concerns, and as Thurman, the chief of airport police, tells Viktor, “the only thing you can do” in the terminal is “shop.” A person’s only function there, as in Seahaven, is to be a consumer. (Speaking of surveillance and consumerism, I wonder whether it was the guy who wrote The Truman Show or the guy who directed Minority Report who first got the idea to have the camera glide past a Verizon billboard “Introducing the camera phone.”)

And yet, somehow, Viktor makes himself at home in the terminal, and others with him. Because our own contexts are more likely to resemble Viktor’s than George Bailey’s, The Terminal has something to teach us about how to live in a Wonderful Life community even while remaining in a Truman Show world.

Mr. Navorski’s Neighborhood

It was supposed to be a short visit, just long enough to tour New York City and fulfill a vow he made to his late father: to collect a single signature. But while Viktor Navorski is flying to America from Krakozhia, his fictional Eastern European country, a military coup back home is rendering his government—and thus his passport and visa—defunct. As he is told upon landing by Dixon, the balding bespectacled antagonist and Acting Field Commissioner at John F. Kennedy Airport, Viktor is now “a citizen of nowhere.” Viktor is stuck, to quote Dixon again, “in a crack”—a void between spaces, a non-place, another nowhere. That crack is the international concourse at JFK, a no-man’s-land even though it rests on U.S. soil and is under U.S. jurisdiction. The circle holes of bureaucracy do not accommodate the square peg that is Viktor’s unique situation, so Dixon concludes that Viktor must wait in the terminal until Krakozhia becomes a somewhere again. To Dixon’s great annoyance—he expected Viktor to break the law anyway and get off his turf—Viktor does exactly what he told him to do, and waits. 

And waits, and waits some more. 

Viktor came to New York as a tourist, but he so reconciles himself to his circumstance that he does what an immigrant would do: he changes his address (to Gate 67), learns English, looks for work, and meets the neighbors. Far from treating the terminal as a crack or a nowhere, he makes the most of it. He makes it into a somewhere. 

The neighbors, meanwhile, have no idea what to make of Viktor. Amelia the flight attendant, Viktor’s love interest, thinks she keeps running into him because he must be a frequent flyer like herself. Gupta the janitor thinks he’s a spy. Dixon regards him as a threat to the airport’s order and decorum and therefore his own reputation. Viktor doesn’t use the space of the terminal the way they do, which is to say the way it was designed: get in, perform your occupation if you work there or occupy yourself somehow if you don’t, and get out. 

To be more specific, Viktor doesn’t interact with others the way that most are accustomed to doing while in an airport. Most travelers look for their gate, run to catch a flight, argue with the airline reps, wrangle bags or tantrum-tossing toddlers, scavenge for something to eat, call loved ones to say they’re on their way, or make good on a resolution to read more with a five-hundred page airport thriller and two hours to kill. Few of them strike up conversations with fellow travelers. Why bother getting acquainted with the people lounging nearby or standing next in line, when there’s so little time to make a meaningful connection? (This, I confess, is my own inclination.) But because he has the time and doesn’t understand the terminal’s unwritten rules, Viktor builds relationships. At the end of the film, when the war is over and Viktor can finally head for the exit, a crowd will celebrate with him and see him off with gifts (an echo of George Bailey’s generous community and a contrast to the coercive crowds that won’t let Truman leave).

This is not to say that airports need to be more like our everyday communities, as if we have to make new friends every time we pass through a TSA checkpoint. But for the central characters in the film, all of whom work at JFK or pass through it regularly, the airport is their everyday community, and yet they are no more involved and invested in each others’ lives than fellow travelers would be. No one shows any concern for Viktor when he calls out for help, runs around trying to catch glimpses of war-torn Krakozhia on the TV sets, or breaks down in tears. Dixon, who breaks the news to Viktor with zero tact, divulges nothing of his personal life to anyone—perhaps because he has none outside of taking fishing trips, presumably alone. Gupta prefers to “keep [his] head down” so he won’t be deported. Aside from the illegal poker nights held by Gupta, Mulroy, and Enrique, the interactions seen between employees are strictly work-related, and work-based departments are isolated from each other. Enrique works for an airline catering company and has feelings for Dolores, who works in Immigration, and he uses Viktor as his mouthpiece to communicate with her. Sure, this is because Enrique is afraid to approach Dolores directly—but really, how would a caterer and an immigration officer cross paths during shifts in such a large and compartmentalized workplace? The diverse crowd that gathers at the end is a testament to Viktor’s gift for demolishing barriers and building community. (He is a construction worker by trade, after all.) 

The crowd is also an explanation for why Dixon resents Viktor. Without any title or authority, Viktor has become the true leader of this community, a position that Dixon could or should fill but has refused or abdicated instead. Whereas Viktor is respected and loved, Dixon is distrusted and feared. That antipathy is mutual: for Dixon, the terminal really is a crack and a nowhere. He doesn’t want to be there, treating it only as a stepping stone to somewhere else. Although he has long coveted his boss Salchak’s job, what he covets even more is what Salchak is getting next: retirement on a yacht. While Dixon wants control over the airport through the strict imposition of protocols, he has no concern for the people within the airport who need help with problems that protocols don’t cover. In an exchange that recalls George Bailey’s impassioned speech to Mr. Potter about the “rabble” of “human beings” in Bedford Falls, Salchak has to remind Dixon, “Sometimes you have to ignore the rules, ignore the numbers, and concentrate on the people.” Dixon replies, “I know,” but he doesn’t. Neither does he heed Salchak’s counsel to “learn something from Navorski”—at least, not until the very end. 

After failing to get rid of Viktor, Dixon becomes so resentful that he vows to detain him instead. If Dixon can’t leave, neither can Viktor. Like Mr. Potter, he declares war on the advocate of the people. Then, like Christof, he watches in panic from his control room as his prisoner escapes. But after he runs outside and sees Viktor’s taxi drive away, Dixon has a moment of recognition. He smiles and tells his men they have work to do. There are dozens of inbound and outbound flights with hundreds of passengers to shepherd through the maze of security and immigration checkpoints. For once, Dixon isn’t obsessed with Viktor, with rules, or fishing. His attention is back on the people for whom he is responsible.   

Amelia is another character whose attention needs redirecting. As Viktor puts it, Amelia is “far-sighted.” Like Dixon, she struggles to see what’s in front of her. But while Dixon’s error is neglecting his place and community, Amelia is placeless and getting the community she wants involves destroying another. As a flight attendant, she is constantly airborne, touching down in one place only to take off for another hours later. She is tired of living like this, but she seeks rootedness in the wrong way, having an on-and-off affair with Max, a married man, and willing him to divorce so she can settle down with him. For a time, she sees a better choice in Viktor, who is fidelity and stability personified. But this is where the filmmakers depart sharply from the It’s a Wonderful Life template: Amelia will not become the Mary Hatch to Viktor’s George Bailey. Viktor builds a sparkling fountain for Amelia out of the shards of construction debris—a fitting metaphor for his life philosophy—and the next day she reciprocates the gift with a one-day visa. But it comes with a catch: the visa was procured by Max on the condition that Amelia return to him and stop seeing Viktor. Dixon’s path leads back toward community, but depending on how one reads the final wordless exchange between Viktor and Amelia outside the airport, Amelia is left at a crossroads.  

The Krakozhian Way

If both Dixon and Amelia are defined by their faulty perspectives, what accounts for the clarity of vision with which Viktor takes stock of his situation and sees potential where others don’t? I argue it’s because Viktor has been shaped by different influences. He has not been raised within an atomized modern American milieu. While we don’t learn much about the culture of Krakozhia, we can guess from Viktor’s actions that it has a value system resembling the one that George Bailey inherits from an earlier American era, a value system that strengthens rather than dissolves communal bonds.  

First, while the worlds of Seahaven and JFK are thoroughly secular, the world of Bedford Falls is explicitly religious, and I don’t think it is insignificant that Viktor, in The Terminal’s single reference to religion, is shown crossing himself before going to bed. He is a believer amidst a people who, functionally at least, live as atheists. True, Viktor’s piety may not extend beyond practicing the outward forms of a culturally Christianized Eastern-European nation, and for that matter George Bailey admits he isn’t “a praying man,” either. But both characters grew up in communities that retained some belief in a Creator who orders all things and who has expectations for how his creatures order their lives, particularly in the area of interpersonal morality.          

This leads to a second point: in contrast to lonely Dixon and lovelorn Amelia, Viktor is a family man. He obeys the commandment to honor his father by saving money to fly to America and waiting for months to leave the airport just so he can complete his father’s collection of signatures from famous jazz players. Just as George Bailey stays in Bedford Falls to carry on his father’s poverty-fighting work, Viktor leaves Krakozhia out of love for his father. Both are motivated by the awareness that their lives are bound up in communities that include even the dead. Viktor also believes in obeying the commandment against adultery. Observe his embarrassment when Amelia talks about her affair, and his warning to Enrique never to cheat on Dolores: “One man, two womans—crowded.” Marriage and the family are the smallest, most intimate, and most essential forms of community and the building blocks for larger ones. To undermine or neglect them is to put entire societies at risk by hollowing them out from the inside. But as a fruit of his commitment to the fundamental institution of the home, Viktor developed in Krakozhia the dispositions necessary to be a loyal friend to those he meets in America and a pillar of their airport community.

It would be a stretch to say that The Terminal is deliberately pro-God (let alone pro-Christian) or socially conservative. Even so, it is striking that the filmmakers made their countercultural hero so thoroughly traditional and decidedly un-progressive. Viktor may cut an odd and comic figure against the backdrop of the terminal, but it’s really the environment that is absurd—both the terminal and the contemporary America of which it is a microcosm. Viktor might seem fuddy-duddy, but he has something that this land of opportunity promised people like Dixon and Amelia but never delivered. We need only peek inside Dixon’s desk drawer full of pill bottles to know the filmmakers’ verdict as to which character grew up in a culture more conducive to human flourishing. The implication, however unintentional, is that if our world is increasingly like the terminal—impersonal, anonymous, fragmented, bureaucratic, materialistic, transactional—we shouldn’t have jettisoned faith and family. A Bedford Falls could not exist without them.    

Community Is Waiting

When The Terminal was released in 2004, the posters displayed the tag line, “Life is waiting.” There is much wisdom packed into these three words. In one sense, they mean that we shouldn’t be waiting on life, as if it won’t begin for real until we have obtained a certain object or passed a particular milestone. No, life is happening right here and now and is waiting for us to recognize and embrace it. The same can be said of community. We aren’t waiting for community to form; we already live in communities—not the communities we wanted, perhaps, but we can either invest in the real, imperfect communities we have or wait in vain for perfect ones that don’t exist. In this area of life as in so many others, we cannot let the perfect become the enemy of the good. (I am reminded of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer said in Life Together: “He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.”)

In another sense, “Life is waiting” means that life equals or consists of waiting. As Viktor tells Amelia, “We all wait.” We are always waiting for big things, small things, and many things at once—and once we get that one something we waited for with intense longing, we immediately shift to craving the next thing. Since perpetual waiting is an unavoidable reality of life, The Terminal encourages us to consider what we wait for, and how. 

The what can determine the how. Amelia and Dixon are waiting for the wrong things, and so they bide their time in ways that are wasteful and harmful both to themselves and others. But Viktor and Enrique set their sights on worthier subjects—a father worth honoring, a woman worth pursuing—and the worthiness of what they wait for inspires them to wait both patiently and actively. One of the things about Viktor that convicts me, a gentle rebuke to my own failures to wait well, is that he never once complains about his predicament. Instead of languishing in self-pity, he applies for permission to leave the terminal every day. Likewise, Enrique doesn’t pine away forever in the vain hope Dolores will notice him, but takes action to get her attention. 

Vice versa, how one waits can determine what one gets. The person who waits foolishly could still get the prize, but will not be able to enjoy it as deeply as the one who waited wisely. Unless Dixon changes his outlook on his job and community, he will be just as miserable in retirement as he is now. His rest will not be earned, and he will have no friends with whom to share it. Unless Amelia changes how she seeks a partner, she will be as lonely in domesticity as she is now. Whatever vow Max could make her would be as empty as the one she helped him break.          

This other way of thinking about the meaning of “Life is waiting”—that to live well we need to wait well—also has relevance for how we live in community. Something The Terminal contributes to the discussion of community that It’s a Wonderful Life does not is that some communities can be temporary, and this is not a bad thing. Not everyone has to be George Bailey, a cradle-to-grave resident of the same town. Viktor doesn’t have to stay at JFK permanently for the relationships he forms there to be meaningful, and forming meaningful relationships at JFK does not prevent him from preparing for his long-hoped-for departure. 

Again, what Viktor waits for determines how he waits. Because he is oriented toward serving and honoring others, he does not ignore those around him, regardless of how little time he may have with them. When we move to a new area while only planning to stay there a short time (to attend college, for example), we can be tempted to opt out of joining a local community and hold out for getting involved somewhere more permanent. Or, when our next move is imminent, we may distance ourselves from our almost-former neighbors prematurely. But how we wait for community can determine what kind of community we get. If we aren’t using even those transitional times to cultivate the virtues that are formed only through communal practices, not only are we depriving ourselves of the community we need here and now, we are also depriving that anticipated future community. We should be striving here and now to be and become the kinds of people who would be a blessing to those around us, whoever they are, wherever we are, and whatever the duration of our stay. 

In my essay on community in It’s a Wonderful Life and The Truman Show, I considered the conditions or environmental factors that make it more or less likely that communities will be healthy. The conditions of a Bedford Falls create possibilities for community that the conditions of a Seahaven cannot. But in studying The Terminal in comparison with these earlier films, my takeaway is that favorable conditions are not sufficient or even essential for community. Of course, it would be much better to live in a Bedford Falls than a Seahaven or an airport; that would make it a lot easier for strangers to become neighbors to become friends, and for residents to find a deep sense of belonging. But the conditions in the international concourse at JFK are not at all favorable, and that does not stop Viktor. What makes all the difference is Viktor’s character. Community formation depends on the moral formation of its members. 

Then again, it takes a village to form a person like Viktor Navorski. If Krakozhia were more like America, Viktor could not have brought about such a transformation in the terminal. So conditions do still matter. It’s a chicken-and-egg sort of paradox: What comes first, the individuals who have the virtues needed to nurse a community into health, or the community that has the health needed for raising virtuous individuals? Both are important, but Niccol’s two films suggest that, even if we don’t live in a Bedford Falls or a Krakozhia—even if modernity should wipe these kinds of places off the map—we shouldn’t despair. While we might be stuck like Truman or Viktor in a world that is designed to entrench individualism and isolate people from each other, we can still pursue true community—but not by trying like Christof or Dixon to micromanage the conditions. Instead, like Viktor, we can love the neighbors around us, and like Truman, even if we have never known a better way to live, we can insist it must exist. Resistance is not futile. Community is waiting.