Why Steven Spielberg’s Underrated 2004 film The Terminal is Worth a Second Look

By John David Ebert

A recent viewing of Steven Spielberg’s 2004 comedy The Terminal with Tom Hanks inspired me to write a brief retroactive review, since I realized just how rich with significance this film is. At first glance, its premise of a man who falls through the bureacratic cracks to take up his residence at J.F.K. Airport in New York sounds as though it may have been vaguely inspired by J.G. Ballard’s 1974 novel Concrete Island, which retells the story of Robinson Crusoe as a man who drives his car off an overpass and becomes stranded in the midst of a clover leaf of expressways proceeds to make a living for himself as a refugee of post-industrial society. However, when one realizes that the film was actually (loosely) based on the real life story of an Iranian man (Mehran Karimi Nasseri) who lived in Terminal One at Charles De Gaulle Airport in France for nearly twenty years (1998-2006), one begins to realize that Ballard’s novel was actually prescient of a coming situation: the fate of a newly emerging class of post-industrial nomads who cannot find a suitable place for themselves in a world of airports, freeways and office buildings.However, Spielberg’s film is actually more universal in its implications than this narrow class of castaways would suggest, as is indicated by the film’s opening shot, which shows us a close up of a blue line of cloth with the words “US Border Patrol and Immigration” printed upon it. As Slavoj Zizek has pointed out, the shadow side of our era of globalization is that borders and walls are going up everywhere as a new anxiety regarding the status of immigrants settles over the world’s nations, as though haunted by fears of cultural erosion due to the influx of too many alien Others. Walls are presently going up along the U.S.-Mexico border, in the West Bank in Palestine and all around the European Union, while racial violence continues to plague Germany and France (and elsewhere). The ethnic cleansing that went on in the former Yugoslavia all throughout the 1990s was the prologue to these current developments.

Tom Hanks (who has become the modern equivalent of Jimmy Stewart) plays an Everyman named Viktor Navorski from the fictional country of Krakhozia who, upon discovering that his papers are no longer in order and that he cannot return to his country because it has erupted into civil war, makes himself at home in a terminal that is under construction at J.F.K. Airport. Post-modern castaway that he is, Navorski immediately proceeds to remake his environment through a series of acts of technological competence, just as Robinson Crusoe remakes a scale model of Western civilization upon his desert island.  

Navorski becomes an image of the post-industrial, late capitalist human being trapped in a global - electronic society: uprooted, decontextualized from any sort of historical circumstance whatsoever, he must simply become a society unto himself, a sort of tribe with a member of precisely one. He is a global nomad who has fallen through the cracks of electronic society and has no one to rely on but himself.

The airport, as Paul Virilio has pointed out, has become the new image of the City: at any given time there are over 100,000 people up in the air; enough to form the population of a small city. Airports, futhermore, are “worldless” places, like capitalism itself, for they are culturally neutral, historically denuded “non-places” where no one wants to be, but only to get away from as quickly as possible. And yet, more and more of us find ourselves spending a great deal of our lives essentially “living” in airports. It is as though they have become cloud cities which have turned the traditional idea of the metropolis upside down, actually shifting our axis of gravity from the earth into the heavens. 

Howard Hughes was the pioneer of this world.And as in the case of the life of Howard Hughes, who began as the most mobile human being on the planet and who ended his life bedridden with a codeine addiction and a staff of hangers on who essentially had to carry him about from place to place, so Viktor Navorsky becomes trapped, immobilized, in what has become for us post-moderns the symbol of the utmost mobility yet achieved by any civilization hitherto.

Thus, like the reversal of an overheated medium, speed in The Terminal has reversed into a state of total inertia and the film achieves the irony of showing us how the new castaway of post-industrial society is actually trapped within the concrete island of an airport.

Navorski eventually must do battle to reassert his humanity against the grave and solemn impersonality of the technospheric megamachine which our current civilization has constructed to belittle and intimidate the average human being, when he encounters Immigration Officer Frank Dixon, who vows at first to have Navorski removed from the airport so that he will become the problem of another bureaucrat somewhere down the line. Later in the film, however, Dixon changes his mind as Navorski’s increasing human three-dimensionaly and self-reliance becomes ever more apparent, and Dixon decides to become his enemy and secretly conspires to keep him from leaving the airport.

The film essentially operates out of the polar tension between these two extremes: the individuated and self-sufficient human being vs. the nameless, faceless bureaucrat who has forfeited his individuality by identifying with the mask of his role and taking it so seriously that no one can any longer relate to him in human terms at all, for he has become a mere function of a larger machine (and in his defense, the bureacrat, in his fear and angst has attempted to expand and protect his ego through inflation by identifying himself with a larger, corporate entity; this makes him feel more secure and less threatened, for he no longer has to act on his own moral cognizance as an individual, since his decisions have the weight and authority of the megamachine behind them). 

But this is no model for a human being, although half of our civilization has been haplessly kidnapped by precisely such ego inflation; the true human being is the one who can stand on his own, see with his own eyes, and come to his own moral conclusions on nobody else’s authority but his own.

Thus, the film belongs in that very great and vast genre of modern filmmaking that took its origins with Dave Bowman’s battle against HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, for it essentially replays that battle with Navorsky in the Bowman role and Dixon (as human symbol of the airport in general) in the role of HAL.

The film dramatizes in metaphoric language the daily battle which all of us now today, every single one of us, must face: how to be human in a world that cares nothing for human beings, how to be an individual in an age of gigantic impersonal technological megastructures. One can speak and act and think on behalf of the Machine as Frank Dixon does, but in doing so, one immediately forfeits the burden of the moral responsibility of one’s decisions onto an entity that is larger than oneself and which essentially does one’s thinking for one. It is an easier way to live, I suppose, having megasystems make your decisions for you and give you a sense of authority which you might not otherwise feel. This, after all, has always been the way with such larger organizations as armies, churches and universities. It is much more painful and difficult, however, and involves a far greater degree of suffering to follow the path exemplified by Viktor Navorsky, for in becoming a true individual one must assume the final responsibility for one’s acts on oneself. There is no one else to defer them to. It is just you against the Megamachine.

Who, do we suppose, is going to win?