Miss Flying? We Have the Book for You.

[MUSIC PLAYING] SARAH BALDWIN: From the Watson Institute at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Sarah Baldwin. We aren't flying much these days. Maybe you miss it. Maybe you don't.

Maybe, if you're like Erica Durante, Associate Professor at Watson, this break has made you realize just how strange air travel really is. Of course, Erica was thinking about this long before the pandemic. Her book, Air Travel Fiction and Film-- Cloud People, explores the role flying plays in modern storytelling and, by extension, in our culture. It's kind of ironic that it came out this summer, as the world was taking a giant pause from mass air travel, but, in some ways, that makes this the perfect time to reassess an activity that many humans have gotten oddly used to over the last century.

Erica unpacks the diverse and interconnected effects of air travel on modern life from how our economy works to our perception of time to, literally, the soundscape of our lives. By connecting these dots, Erica makes clear, whether you used to fly regularly or you've never gotten on a plane, we're all cloud people now. I started by asking her to define that intriguing new label, cloud people. Here's Erica.

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ERICA DURANTE: Cloud people are, in my definition, all of us because we are air travelers, air passengers, but, at the same time, we are exposed. We are observers of air travel as a practice of mobility, of transportation, of connection just by looking at the view of the sky above us. And, if you think about the fact that, many times, when you are in the city, when you are on the ground, you just hear the noise of a plane, and this is a sort of audio intrusion of air travel into daily life on Earth just by the sound.

SARAH BALDWIN: But don't you also include baggage handlers and duty free cashiers and people who are in service positions in the airport hotels and the people who maybe drive the trains that connect airports to cities?

ERICA DURANTE: For air crew and air personnel and airport hotels personnel, obviously, this is like a daily life location. They don't experience air travel in the same way as a passenger does. Many times, they've never even taken an airplane. They never flew in their life, but still they are the ones who are the most exposed, somehow, to the change of regulations, the mechanical problems of an airport or of an airplane. They are very much the main characters of all this air world infrastructure.

And, because of their work, we can become passengers. And, by saying we can become passengers, I'm, in fact, like pointing out this identity, somehow, challenge that we experience as soon as we get into the airport with our flight ticket, with our passport. And, by respecting all the protocols inside the airport, we embrace, somehow, embody another identity, which is not our common identity or not in our daily life and on Earth, but it's like a passenger identity.

We become someone else. We are entering into a new-- into a different world, right? And then this also brings us to relate to other individuals, passengers or airport personnel, somehow in a different way because we feel, at the same time, detached by our daily life on Earth, and then we get, somehow, freer in this space.

SARAH BALDWIN: Right, we're sort of, at the same time, very identifiable because we have documentation, and we have flight numbers, and we have tickets that correspond to who we are. And the name of our passport has to be the name on the ticket. And, yet, we're also entirely anonymous in some ways. And you have so many examples in your book, whether they're films or short stories, of people-- of these encounters that would never have happened and that are enablers of stories in a way or triggers for stories.

ERICA DURANTE: Yeah, indeed. And this is also how this project started. Everything started with a question, right? But how come there are so many novels, short stories, and films that always, somehow, were either entirely located in an airport, airplane, or airport hotel like, if you think about Up in the Air, obviously, or if you think about The Terminal by Spielberg? But, at the same time, also, many other movies in which you see that either the entire plot is really set within this space or, somehow, segments of the story imply that, suddenly, the character or characters will fly.

So there is a need for, somehow, to represent this displacement, displacement that is very common in today's world because of the globalized world in which we live. And, indeed, the kind of displacement we had in the 19th century or early 20th century didn't imply the need of airplanes, first of all, because, in the 19th century, there was no flight, no commercial flight, but, also, because the distances, usually, the destinations that you would need to reach, were reachable by train or by boat. So there was no need for this international and long-distance travel, right? So, today, because our globalized world exposes us to a need for fluidity, hyper-connectivity, and brings us to reach huge distances, this is why air travel is so much present and needed in fictions.

SARAH BALDWIN: Has the air world sort of replaced the seas and oceans that used to be sort of where we covered long distances?

ERICA DURANTE: I think it, somehow, yes, but the difference here between traveling by sea and traveling by air, I think, is a huge difference in the sense that the air is the element that, somehow, we know the least, that we master the least in terms of transportation. Think about ground transportation or sea transportation. Because of the long tradition for human beings of displacement through these locations, through the sea or the ground, we are very much accustomed, and we have anthropologically, somehow, integrated these spaces and our displacements through these spaces through time.

And, if we think about commercial aviation after World War II, the '50s, the '60s, it's a relatively recent practice of mobility. And this implies that there is still a certain knowledge missing that we are constantly building about air travel, learning how to be in the sky. At the same time, at every time that we take off and land, we experience this very strange feeling and sensation in our body, as well as in our minds, which shows that it's completely different from when you're like traveling by train or by car. I mean, you don't feel this same risk or fear or, somehow, being detached.

SARAH BALDWIN: It's a disconnection and a reconnection that happens, whereas it's much more continuous in ground travel, I guess.

ERICA DURANTE: Exactly, and then there is the question of speediness and the speediness of airplanes. This implies also jet lag because we are crossing several time zones in a very reduced amount of time. I mean, you don't experience jet lag in the same way if you are traveling by train or by car, right?

SARAH BALDWIN: Right, it compresses time and space in an utterly unnatural way. It's entirely possible to arrive at an airport, as destination, whereas, if you pull into a train station, you are naturally exposed to a city. You can know a city's airport without ever knowing the city. They're these in-between places, and they're separate from the city, but they're a gateway to the city. So they're really strange places.

ERICA DURANTE: Indeed, I mean, there is a strong paradox here that you're pointing out, somehow, this strange nexus between airport and then the geographical location of the airport itself, right? Usually, when you think about a place that you will-- like a potential destination for a travel, you will immediately think about, OK, how will I get there. Which airport is the closest one to this destination?

And then when you think also about the names of airports-- think about London Heathrow, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Tokyo Narita-- so, immediately, you associate a city to an airport, the name of an airport. Or, many times, there is also sort of substitution. The name of the airport is replacing the name of the city. There's no need to say Heathrow because, by definition, it's London.

SARAH BALDWIN: That's so true.

ERICA DURANTE: Usually, this question, by the way, of airport names is very, very interesting because, many times, the identity of the place is reflected by the name that has been chosen for an airport. So, coming back to the geographical location and this paradox of the in-between space, when we are also thinking about an airport or the connection between a city and an airport, we are always wishing, somehow, that the path, the distance from the airport to the city, will be like as short as possible, right? But, in many situations, it's not the case. Several airports are located several, several miles away from the city or downtown.

SARAH BALDWIN: Let's zero in on one major international airport. If you sort of close your eyes and look around, what are the things that most of us take for granted that you've been looking at through the lens of story that you can help us see?

ERICA DURANTE: So I would think about objects all around, OK? Many objects in the airport are there, mainly, to measure time and remind you distance and the urgency for a departure or an arrival. So think about all the monitors. Think about all the screens and reminders, like audio reminders, announcements.

So there are like actual objects, but, also, audio objects and then, also, way finding. Everything in an airport is very much regulated in terms of allowing passengers to reach the gate like in a safe way and as quickly as possible.

SARAH BALDWIN: You also mentioned the color blue.

ERICA DURANTE: I mean, I always felt that there was so much blue in airports, different gradations of blue, in addition to the blue of the sky and the fact that so many airports, like, particularly, like modern and contemporary airports, are built with glass and steel just to allow the daylight to come in and, again, to calm passengers before departure.

But then, when I started to look inside the airplane itself, airplane seats, airplane internal walls, and the lights and uniforms of flight attendants and the carpet, everything is also, usually, blue because of the power of this color to provide peace and quietness and relaxation. So it's all about comfort.

It's all about providing like a sort of cocoon for passengers and to make the flight pleasant, which was, certainly, not at the very beginning of commercial aviation where flight attendants were nurses, and they were there because people were feeling so sick because of air sickness, motion sickness, that there was even no possibility to serve meals because everyone was feeling very sick. And then, how much all the technology and the practices have evolved so far, there was, and I hope there will still be, the possibility of experiencing air like very pleasant environment.

SARAH BALDWIN: You don't include science fiction or disasters, which I think are interesting exclusions.

ERICA DURANTE: So the reason why I didn't explore science fiction or disaster-like fiction is because I feel that science fiction and disaster fiction have, mainly, emphasized like extreme situations of panic, fear, even terror in the air. Obviously, there is a very strong reference to the attacks of 9/11 and how deeply they really heated the air and our perception of air and gravity, but this is not science fiction, right? It is also why this is in the book. But I felt that I had already enough by observing reality and reality through fiction that I didn't want to add the layer of science fiction.

SARAH BALDWIN: So can you talk about what fiction-- how fiction sort of enhances our understanding of air travel culture?

ERICA DURANTE: Absolutely, well, first of all, I come from literary studies, and it's also like my field of expertise. So I feel like more comfortable at looking at this literary and cinematic production. What was interesting for me here is, usually, I think the way in which, in the media, we are accustomed to hear about airport and airplanes is more related to technological progress, aeronautics. And I felt that, in fact, what happens-- I mean, in the airports, in the air world, there are so many stories that take place among people working in the air world, among passengers, and different kinds of encounters, separations, and just the possibility of sharing a waiting time.

Since fiction, contemporary fiction, is so much inhabited by these kinds of scenes, I felt that this was a way to really observe another kind of aspect of the air world, which is much more humane and as a real anthropological place of our globalized world. Airports and airport hotels and airplanes are actual places because they define our global identity. They are defined by stories taking place in these settings.

We have memories of flights. We have memories of airplanes. We remember the smell. You remember a color. Maybe you will not remember the face of a flight attendant, but, yes, because of so many stereotypes, you will remember the permanent smiles, the smile on her lips.

And we can see that today, in times, of corona, in fact, we are somehow missing this air world, beyond the fact that, usually, we have like, somehow, some hostile views of the air world-- think about all the security controls, all the safety measures. I mean, no one is happy about going to an airport and all the lines and controls.

But, at the same time, today-- and I'm talking to different people because, sometimes, I felt that maybe I haven't chosen the right moment to publish this book. Although, I mean, I have been writing it for many years already. We feel, somehow, a sort of nostalgia about this place, right? We are missing the fact that we are very much restricted or forbidden, excluded from this place. So this shows how much cloud people we feel and we are.

SARAH BALDWIN: I'm glad you brought up our current situation with the COVID-19 pandemic because I was thinking about how our relationship to air itself has changed and to air travel over the past year. I mean, if you think about it, the coronavirus traveled by plane in many cases. And it travels through the air.

And this book is such an opportunity for us to sort of look at what we've been doing, look at what we've incorporated into our lives. Whether or not we fly, we all look up when there's a plane. And we accept that it's possible to look down on clouds, rather than just up at them, which is not a small thing. So I would argue that the timing of your book is, actually, fortuitous.

ERICA DURANTE: Well, that's encouraging, but, indeed, I mean, I think that the fact of being grounded, for us, today, more challenging that any potential fear that we may experience by traveling, right? We suffer from being grounded. We suffer from not being able to cross the sky and reach any destination that we would like to.

And, going back to the perception of air, I think that this is a major issue of the corona times because air is a very fluid element. Although, it's intangible, and, therefore, it's, somehow, difficult to talk about air. And so the corona is bringing a difference in our perception of air. Air becomes enemy. We are scared of air. We are scared of breathing.

And, obviously, we are scared of sharing the air in the same enclosed or even open environment. Commercial air travel is still going on. I mean, air traffic is not as dense as it used to be, and we cannot have any prediction about the future of air travel. But I think that, fundamentally, our relationship to air and to the sharing of air may be disrupted for a long time.

SARAH BALDWIN: Well, time will tell. Erica, it's been so interesting listening to you, having read your book, and hearing you reflect on what we're going through right now. Thank you so much for talking with us today.

ERICA DURANTE: Thank you so much, and thank you so much for your reading. It's really great.

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SARAH BALDWIN: This episode was produced by Dan Richards and Alina Kulman. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. I'm Sarah Baldwin. You can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

And, if you like the show, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It really helps others find us. For more information about this and other shows, go to watson.brown.edu. Thanks for listening, and tune in in two weeks for another episode of Trending Globally.

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