Vincent, the protagonist in "Time Out," when finally fired from his abstracting, jaded job in high finance, hops in his car and hits the open road, hoping to buy time and locate better work. But we soon learn that he himself is not without his own ability to abstract, fictionalize, and compartmentalize. For, to avoid informing his family, he devises an investment scheme--the making of something out of nothing, to finance and cover his absences. In so doing, he self-imposes a new identity which is even less noble from what his miserable employment imposed on him. He still seeks money--and status; still employs savvy and ballsy manipulation; and is as cut off from the real world as his former work demanded. Thus, the impossible contradictions of his exit.
I mean hell it's cute to be out on the road, experiencing timelessness, low end adventure, having fun racing trains, practicing impersonations; but not when your depression-recovering wife is at home raising three young children, teaching school, and constantly worrying about her seemingly unhinged husband. To Muriel, his choice is a luxury, but even her queries must be followed with her apology: "I didn't mean to complain as if my life is hell." "Did you think you had lost me" she says to him provocatively as they descend from his snow-bound mountain cabin. So Vincent's liberation, meditative depth, and playful human-ness is small change to his wife. But it isn't just Muriel who suffers his unraveling persona, his absences, his suspect life, and his snaps, but also his father, his kids, and their dearest friend Jeffrey. Add on the victims of his fraudulent investment scheme, each address-book buddy selected for being easy marks. The thing is it may be okay for Vincent to be a nobody to himself, but he can't be that or less than that to his family or pals.
The most interesting question that "Time Out" seems to raise is: should a fundamental personal decision be made unconsciously? That is, is Vincent by not taking those exits to his business appointments, but driving on into the air of freedom, embracing the road and driving, absorbing life though his windshield, and alone with his thoughts, answering his demoralizing work, or is he just damn escaping it? Since he's clearly blanked out on the personal sphere, it follows that he's also split off from the public dimension. Just as his profession exists outside of the material world in an amoral, vision-less vacuum of economic abstractions, maps, graphs, glossy catalogs, in which human resources and natural resources are interchangeable, so too is his life on the road too soon becoming a mini mock-up of this. Even his pragmatic father, who has zip patience for the fake and airy market culture, not only cannot shake him, but is called a simpleton and an "old ass," by his own son for trying.
If Vincent is stalled with no place to go, Jean-Michel, trafficker in fake brand-name merchandise, and a career hoodlum, not only sizes Vincent up, and bluntly and accurately states his dilemma, but jump starts his way out of it. In recruiting him, he lays bare his new accomplice's lazy ethics, and the pretense and betrayals of his scheming. Only then do Muriel's and Jeffrey's confrontations with Vincent kick in. To her husband's insistence that she seems strange (her bolting from the dinner scene), she can only reply "I seem strange!!" as in who in god's name are you kidding! It's her confessed turning to Jeffrey for help, however, and Vincent's subsequent confrontations with both, that acts as the ultimatum. In the very end, Vincent has made no spirited move. He hasn't found answers to the inner force that drove him from his job. But he has faced his family, lifted himself out of his individuated resolve, dispelled some illusions, and perhaps taken his first step outside the corporate monolith. The only question that remains is: how will his exit from his new anonymous high rise post be any different from the old one? Indeed, alienation/globalization doles out untenable situations to all of us.
I mean hell it's cute to be out on the road, experiencing timelessness, low end adventure, having fun racing trains, practicing impersonations; but not when your depression-recovering wife is at home raising three young children, teaching school, and constantly worrying about her seemingly unhinged husband. To Muriel, his choice is a luxury, but even her queries must be followed with her apology: "I didn't mean to complain as if my life is hell." "Did you think you had lost me" she says to him provocatively as they descend from his snow-bound mountain cabin. So Vincent's liberation, meditative depth, and playful human-ness is small change to his wife. But it isn't just Muriel who suffers his unraveling persona, his absences, his suspect life, and his snaps, but also his father, his kids, and their dearest friend Jeffrey. Add on the victims of his fraudulent investment scheme, each address-book buddy selected for being easy marks. The thing is it may be okay for Vincent to be a nobody to himself, but he can't be that or less than that to his family or pals.
The most interesting question that "Time Out" seems to raise is: should a fundamental personal decision be made unconsciously? That is, is Vincent by not taking those exits to his business appointments, but driving on into the air of freedom, embracing the road and driving, absorbing life though his windshield, and alone with his thoughts, answering his demoralizing work, or is he just damn escaping it? Since he's clearly blanked out on the personal sphere, it follows that he's also split off from the public dimension. Just as his profession exists outside of the material world in an amoral, vision-less vacuum of economic abstractions, maps, graphs, glossy catalogs, in which human resources and natural resources are interchangeable, so too is his life on the road too soon becoming a mini mock-up of this. Even his pragmatic father, who has zip patience for the fake and airy market culture, not only cannot shake him, but is called a simpleton and an "old ass," by his own son for trying.
If Vincent is stalled with no place to go, Jean-Michel, trafficker in fake brand-name merchandise, and a career hoodlum, not only sizes Vincent up, and bluntly and accurately states his dilemma, but jump starts his way out of it. In recruiting him, he lays bare his new accomplice's lazy ethics, and the pretense and betrayals of his scheming. Only then do Muriel's and Jeffrey's confrontations with Vincent kick in. To her husband's insistence that she seems strange (her bolting from the dinner scene), she can only reply "I seem strange!!" as in who in god's name are you kidding! It's her confessed turning to Jeffrey for help, however, and Vincent's subsequent confrontations with both, that acts as the ultimatum. In the very end, Vincent has made no spirited move. He hasn't found answers to the inner force that drove him from his job. But he has faced his family, lifted himself out of his individuated resolve, dispelled some illusions, and perhaps taken his first step outside the corporate monolith. The only question that remains is: how will his exit from his new anonymous high rise post be any different from the old one? Indeed, alienation/globalization doles out untenable situations to all of us.