If ever there were a movie lending itself to a discussion of its psychological journey, it's this one. In my view, the airplane crash and subsequent investigation, even the notion that Whip is a 'pilot' are all metaphors for the Protagonist's transformation journey. I'd like to use Michael Waters' excellent breakdown of the script's major plot points and combine them with my take on the transformation archetype typical of most Hollywood movies. There are four movements: Disunity Deconstruction Reconstruction Unity This is not the ONLY transformation archetype, there are others. However we see this over and over and over again. In Flight, the filmmakers have both used it in a traditional sense, but also spun it in some intriguing ways. The first three plot points represent the key events in Act One: Opening – Protagonist Pilot Whip is a drug user. Following divorce, has a poor relationship with teenage son Knuckles. His life is worse than finding vomit in your oatmeal. Hook – The plane crashes. Whip saves all but a few souls with the outrageous manoeuvre to fly the plane up side down. (subtext begins of who could think of such a thing / only a coked up pilot). Lock – Whip decides to play the hero or at least let the media play him up as hero. The crash investigation begins. Whip gets ‘locked in’ to the lie. Whip is a character deep in Disunity: * He is an addict. * He is divorced. * He has a terrible relationship with his ex-wife. * He has a poor relationship with his son. The turbulent flight itself is symbolic of the 'storm' in his own life. The fact he can even conceive of flying upside down also suggests his default mode of living is itself 'upside down'. His priorities are all screwed up. Again Disunity. Capped off by the fact he comes out of the crash looking like a hero. In one respect, he is. He saved a bunch of peoples' lives. However since he was both drunk and high while piloting the aircraft means he was derelict in his duties. The disconnect between the immediate public response (Hero) and the reality of his life (anything but a hero) is yet one more example of the Disunity dynamic at play here. You want to see the poster child for Disunity? Whip Whitaker fits the bill. The first half of Act Two are anchored by these two major plot points: Deconstruction – Whip meets junkie Nicole and begins a relationship with her. Whip struggles with the lie of his alcoholism, sees others ‘fessing up’ at AA meetings but can’t unburden. Midpoint/Transition – The union rep and slick lawyer know Whip is a junkie. Disaster for the Union and Airline beckon if they admit he is a villain not the hero. They set about killing Whip’s tox report. The Deconstruction dynamic is at work here in several ways: * Whip can no longer fly while the crash is under investigation. * He starts to attend AA meetings, at least making a move, albeit with false starts, toward admitting his problems as an addict. * He meets Nicole and begins a relationship with her. That's Deconstruction related to his own personal metamorphosis. Then there is Deconstruction in terms of his sudden public persona as a hero: Once airline officials learn Whip is a living lie -- an addict pilot -- the hero myth is destroyed. At least with people in the know. Out of fear for what could happen to the company if this news got out, their reps determine to squash the truth. In the first half of Act Two, things are shifting under Whip's feet. He could choose to go public and confess the truth about himself. However he is not there yet. Not nearly. He has to go through more of a personal transformation to end up in an authentic place in his psychological journey. The second half of Act Two has these two plot points as its pillars: Reconstruction – Nicole leaves Whip. Whip stays sober and is prepped for the showdown hearing with Crash Investigation Committee. All is Lost – Whip falls off the wagon the night before the hearing when the drinks cabinet whispers ‘come hither’. Only one outrageous manoeuvre left – Harling revives him with a shot of coke. Even the slick lawyer and union rep become accomplices. Here is where the story does a nifty twist on the Protagonist's transformation arc. Normally this is a period wherein the P has shed much of their Old Ways of Being, gotten in touch with their Authentic Self, and start to embrace that aspect of their psyche, moving toward their New Self. [Yes, lots of psychological jargon, I know, but believe me, we see this all the time in movies.] Indeed, Whip DOES try to stay sober, but primarily because he knows he has to appear in front of the Crash Investigation Committee. His motivation is not pure, not driven by a genuine desire to embrace an authentic way of being. Rather he continues to lie to himself, trying with minimum effort to escape this situation in which he finds himself. One could argue that from a meta narrative perspective, that's why Nicole leaves him. She is genuinely trying to get her shit together. She senses that Whip is not. When Whip goes on a bender the night before the committee hearing, this suggests two things. First, how shallow his commitment to sobriety is. Second, I suspect this is his subconscious Need emerging into the light, his Need to come clean and get clean. He literally has ONE MORE DAY to go without drinking, do the committee session, rely on the company men scrubbing his record, and he can go back to his Old Way of Being. No. He falls off the wagon in a most dramatic and over the top way. It is an All Is Lost moment in terms of him beating the rap. However as it turns out, it represents his Need taking charge, sending him into a crash-and-burn out of which he will be hard pressed to steer. [By the way, if you track the events of Act Two through the lens of 'pilot,' the irony of how out of control this character is is profound. He is not in control. His addiction is. His underlying Disunity state is. So there is Reconstruction going on, but at two levels. On the one hand, there are the attempts - by Whip and his handlers - to prop him up for the hearing. On the other hand, he falls off the wagon in a big way. This seems to be a negative. In the end, it is a net positive as it helps Whip finally understand how far removed he is from the life he should be leading. Act Three has these two key plot points at its foundation: Final Battle – In a will he/won’t he scene Whip can’t handle one more lie (the obvious escape route of the deceased Katerina, his occasional girlfriend, that no one cared enough about to kill her tox report). He cracks and tells the truth in a very public hearing of the crash investigation. Denouement – Whip is in jail but unburdened by being able to tell the truth about his own alcoholism. Closes with him re-establishing relationship with Knuckles. Finally Unity. Whip doesn't get to the typical Hero wins the day and reward business. Nope. His final struggle is an internal one: To tell the truth or not. In confessing his 'sins,' he doesn't achieve Unity, but he takes a very tentative step toward it, confessing his addiction here (where he couldn't do it before in AA meetings). The Denouement visualizes this. A prisoner now, he is 'paying' for his 'sins'. But that is something he deserves. Meeting with his son, we get the sense that now - finally - he is living an authentic life. He is meeting his son as a flawed human being attempting to redeem himself. So here again, unlike many positive transformation arc stories, Whip is not a victor in the traditional sense. Yet in this nuanced type of story, he IS a hero. He has faced the dragon - his addiction - and he has defeated it, at least enough to call it out by confessing it when he was literally a minute's worth of silence away from getting off Scott free. There you go. My take on Whip's psychological journey. Final thought: Flight as a theme? Getting high. Flying above it all. Whip is a kindred spirit with another flyer: Ryan Bingham in Up in the Air. Both need to be 'grounded' in order to confront their inauthentic lives. With Whip, we get a sense he has found a path toward Unity. With Ryan at the end, he is still pretty much clueless. What did you think of Whip's psychological journey in Flight?

Good take Scott The other thing that struck me about this script is it's take on 'living a lie' and the transformation needed to undo the lie. The nature of the lie that Whip has been living often leads to negatives being viewed as positives: killing the tox report, persuading co-workers to lie for Whip, holding it together at the family home when the press show up. It also leads to positives being seen, on the top surface at least, as negatives: Nicole leaving, getting drunk the night before the hearing. Whip's task - before final transformation - is to work out the truth about theses events, and in his final struggle before the Crash Investigation Committee, Whip is still keeping up his lie. The 'truth seeker' - Chairwoman of the Committee - knows he can get away with it by 'denying' (biblical reference if you like) the dead Katerina and letting her take the wrap for the consumed alcoholic drinks. It's one lie Whip can't live with and the one that causes him to 'crack'. Good scripts often indicate the psychological journey ahead for the Protagonist. In this script it's the scene where Whip attends the AA meeting with Nicole and sees all the other souls who have funny stories about the lie they lived. He makes his excuses to leave as he's not yet ready for transformation.

A bit late to the table here, but I wanted to add two small points. First, in AA the belief is that you can't become a recovering alcoholic until you've hit rock bottom. So any recovering alcoholic would know that Whip wasn't ready until after he goes on the bender - he still fundamentally has his life. The AA journey (if you want to call it that) parallels this dramatic paradigm. It's not good enough to want to become a recovering alcoholic, you have to go through your all is lost moment, your dark night of the soul. And like characters in a script like this (without wanting in any way to trivialize the experience of alcoholism) all is lost has to be as bad as humanly possible in order to work. It's not enough to lose your job. It's not enough to get busted for drunk driving. It's got to be something you can't imagine ever recovering from. And maybe part of you never does recover, but you get to come back to be among the living. In my view too many stories ignore this last aspect. They find their all is lost moment, and then from the ashes of defeat the hero finds victory. But to me, in a fully realized story, the hero is not only changed, s/he is scarred. The hero is a better person for it, but they left something behind. In Whip's case, he's going to be ok, and he's conquered his demons. But in order to get there he killed some people. That's never going away. What's interesting about Flight is that internally he hits rock bottom when he goes on that bender - and he comes out of it with the knowledge that truth will be his salvation. But externally he hits rock bottom AFTER he tells the truth: he's going to jail, and he's never going to fly again. The difference is that he can now see the way out. That's what I think, anyway. The second point is something that Michael Waters alluded to. The movie doesn't hit this on the nose, but the implication is there: Whip saved the plane not in spite of being coked up, he saved it because he was coked up. ("That was some move you pulled up there" etc.) Obviously the logical conclusion isn't that pilots should do a couple of lines before flying. But the arguable conclusion is that if he had gone by the rules there wouldn't have been a hearing because they'd all be dead. As I said, the screenplay doesn't ask that question head on, but it's always there in the background. And there is no resolution to it, because it's a paradox. And to me that's one of the many things that makes this a rewarding script - the admission that there isn't always an answer, that not everything is black and white. There's complexity in life. Deal with it.

Terrific stuff, Michael. When a character is in denial of their underlying Disunity, the ensuing dynamics can switch. In Flight, Deconstruction has a 'positive' feel as Whip is extolled as a hero, disassembling his life as an addict. Reconstruction is a 'negative' as the truth seeps out and the inevitability of the hearing looms on the horizon. Likewise a movie like Shakespeare in Love. The first half of Act Two - Deconstruction - Will experiences as a positive, falling in love with Viola. Second half - Reconstruction - he experiences as a negative, thinking he's responsible for Marlowe's death and losing Viola to her marriage. In both cases, while the inauthentic existence may flourish for awhile, it proves to be false and eventually is revealed as such. There are endless ways to manage a Protagonist's transformation. This is one of them.

Excellent analysis, Markham. I believe the nuanced take on Whip's character -- an addict manages to save the lives of hundreds of passengers via a coked up response to an emergency -- is one of the things that drew Denzel Washington and Robert Zemeckis to the project. Denzel Washington is one of those few A list actors - like Michael Douglas was in his prime - who is willing to taken on deeply flawed Protagonists. Many do not because it flies against their public image. Re your first point: The fact is Whip COULD get away with it. Indeed, that is one of the underlying tensions of the story. With the airline reps on his side, all he has to do is lay the booze at the doorstep of his deceased lover and fellow worker. He can't. That is the stopping point. Even he, who has lied to himself and others about everything, can't spit on the Nicole's grave. That is his authentic self speaking up and confessing the truth. The thing is, if he had lied and gotten away with it, even if he hadn't been able to pilot an aircraft again, my guess is Whip would have gotten bombed at a bar one night, gotten behind the wheel of his car, and killed himself on the highway. His destiny is to either die or save himself. Flight opts for the latter. Good stuff and thanks!