The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
Do you get lost in your thought often?
Start daydreaming to pass the time?
Do you ever ponder the “what if’s” in a situation out of curiously?
Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Everyone has those wandering moments, those times where you let your imagination run wild and simple live in the thoughts you have instead of in the reality we exist in. It is something that tends to fade over time with imagination being at its apex in youth and diminishing over years of reality and just general life. In some cases, you may find yourself daydreaming until the day you move on from this world and have nothing but endless dreaming. One can only hope to maintain their childlike wonder and curiosity all throughout life, as is human nature. As said for years; curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back. I can only hope to maintain my mindset and ever wandering mind well into my life, because life would be dull without it.
The same is the case of our protagonist in this story. Walter Mitty is a 42 year old man, who goes through his day to day working at a magazine publisher “Life” as the manager of the section of magazine collecting and producing pictures from the negatives of film rolls. Walter’s life is a world filled with “what if’s” and he is constantly daydreaming of a life more exciting than his own. He saves puppies from exploding buildings, he fights upper corporate in a battle rivaling superheroes, and he professes love to a woman who barely knows him to much success. These events all happen inside the wonderful world that is Walter’s imagination. His life is so monotonous, so empty, that he fills it with exciting daydreams and events that would probably never happen. He gets lost in these daydreams so often that it leads him to confuse reality and imagination often. He often “zones out” and looks to be lost to people he is with. Walter shows interest in a woman named, Cheryl Melhoff, who just started at the company about a month prior. Walter tries to meet with this woman in a sort of “Pina Colada” way as stated by Walter, meaning he wants to start a romance with this person in a cute sort of way as if the long of her life was right under her nose. What he does is start up an “eHarmonry” account which is a popular dating site, and attempts to reach her through there cause an error on the system as he did not complete any information on the application. His issue, they figure out, was that he never filled out a “Been there, Done that” section in his profile because he skipped it, saying that he’s never been or done anything of note. His monotonous, boring life was just that. Monotonous and boring, and had nothing really exciting to share as a possible interest. Making it hard to be interesting to anyone, let alone Cheryl.
As a new company purchases the magazine company Cheryl and Walter work at, it is decided to go with the modern route and digitalize “Life”, meaning most of the company will now downsize and no longer have a need for the same amount of writers and workers that currently are employed there. Walter receives a roll of negatives from an apparently very famous photographer, Sean O’Connell, stating one particular photograph on the roll contains the “quintessence of life” and will be possibly greatest cover the magazine has ever seen. The only problem being, the roll is missing that particular photograph. Walter has to try and track down Sean, going to Sheryl for the first time as an introduction and a ways to meet Sean.
No one has any contact information on Sean. He has no address, no contact info and no way of being contacted. Thus no way of calling and asking what that infamous photo was that was supposed to be the “quintessence of life”. The only clues had, were the other photos in the negatives roll which, out of 24 remaining, three were usable in any sort of way. A photo of a thumb, a water photo, and some curved line of building with a chip in it. Walter asks for help from Sheryl and they find out there were some words in the water photo, the words being the name of a ship located in Greenland. Sheryl jokingly says he should follow up and go there to investigate. After long consideration and issues at work (which I won’t explain here so you can enjoy the movie) he decides to go to Greenland and track down Sean.
Now this is as far as I will go with explaining the movie, as to not spoil anything. In summation, he starts to mix his worlds of reality and imagination together. Actually acting upon those thoughts without much thought or hesitation. The more he does, the less he imagines. He starts to fill up that void that was in his boring life. He has no need to imagine if he actually does it.
Actions speak louder than words.
Everyone has their thoughts and their actions. What they say they would do and what they would actually do. Actions speak louder than words. It means the difference of apologizing for spilling someone’s drink and buying them a new one. All of Walter’s thoughts, his dreams and his imaginations were great in his head, but as reality snapped back in he was back to that content life that was that of a background character. No one should be the background of their own life. We should all be the protagonist in our own stories. A strong imagination is a wonderful thing but the need for daydreams diminishes when filled with actual excitement and adventure.
This movie was a good example of how actually living your life can be the world. Living your life can be the difference between content and fulfilled. I love a good daydream as much as the next person but if you had the choice between thinking of flying and actually flying, what would you pick?
