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"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," focuses on Walter and his daydreams of
The secret life of walter mitty critical analysis new yorker
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In both James Thurber’s short story, Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Ben Stiller’s adaptation, Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the main character is depicted day dreaming in a fantasy land to escape from his own mundane reality. The two pieces have different portrayals of the main character, Walter Mitty, but both utilized his background, behavior, traits, thoughts, and development in revealing a deeper meaning. The movie’s characters inspire the message of changing dreams into action, while the stories’ characters hold a darker message of failing to live life as you dream.
The movie, Secret Life of Walter Mitty provides a deeper background of the main character, than in the story. In the movie, Walter was very adventurous as a kid. There is
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a picture shown of him with a mohawk and skateboard in hand next to his late father. Then the mom reveals that when his dad died, Walter had to shave his head and go to work and didn’t have the freedom to be adventurous. The viewer can perceive from this information that Walter’s inclination to daydream as an adult was caused by his childhood trauma. Though, in the short story, there is no background information given to what caused Walter to daydream all the time. The reader is given information on his present circumstance, but none on a past background that could have potentially affected his personality Stiller diverges from the original story with the physical characteristics of Walter Mitty. In the short story, Walter is illustrated as an elderly man. While in town, his wife reminds him to buy overshoes; he argues “I don’t need overshoes” and she replies, “We’ve been all through that,” “You’re not a young man any longer” (Thurber 1). He is shown to have started to succumbing to his own body weakening of old age and needs overshoes to help prevent a life threatening fall. In contrast, the movie shows Walter as a healthy and active forty-two-year-old man. When Walter decides to start taking action in his own life, he is seen jumping onto a helicopter, jumping off of a helicopter, and biking, running, and longboarding long distances. The difference in the main character’s age highlights the difference in tone. The youth and energy in the movie represents hope whereas the old age and lethargy in the story signifies loss of hope. Walter’s attitude toward life is a key difference between the two pieces.
In the movie his character longs to one-day live life to the fullest but is scared. In one of the scenes his sister, Odessa finds a travel journal and a backpack that his late father had gifted him, he looks at it wistfully, and then later on in the story he uses the same backpack and travel journal on his own journey to find a missing photo for work. In the movie, Walter is also pushed into positive direction from his accused failures. When a photo goes missing at work and his condescending boss blames him, instead of being down on himself, he goes immediately into action. He investigates for further evidence of what could have happened and then later travels to find the lost photo. The missing photo also gave him the chance to step out of his comfort zone and talk to his crush Cheryl, as she helps him find clues of the photos whereabouts. His failure at work was a major turning point in his life. However, the Walter described in the story is not positively influenced by failure. When trying to park the car, he zones out during a daydream and accidentally drives up the exit only lane for the parking garage. The attendant yells at him and tells him to “Leave her sit there,” “I’ll put her away” (Thurber 2) Instead of brushing it off Walter thinks “they’re so damn cocky,” “they think they know everything” (Thurber 3). He then remembers another time he made a mistake with a chain and how a garage man had …show more content…
to help him then too and thinks to himself “next time, I’ll wear my right arm in a sling; they won’t grin at me then. I’ll have my right arm in a sling and they’ll see I couldn’t possibly take the chains off myself” as he kicks “at the slush on the sidewalk” (Thurber 3). When Walter fails in the story he is mad at himself and the world. Instead of taking action, he pouts angrily and daydreams to get away. Walter in the movie though, takes his potential failure and turns it into an even greater success. The two creators’ choice of companionship for Walter also differ.
Thurber gave Walter an overbearing wife in Secret Life of Walter Mitty who serves as another reminder of how he is a failure. After running one of the errands his wife had asked him to do in town he “began to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told him to get. She had told him, twice, before they set out from their house for Waterbury. In a way he hated these weekly trips to town – he was always getting something wrong” (Thurber 3). Walter already feels as though he has failed himself and who he should be as a man, and his wife’s consistent reprimanding only adds to his negativity. On the other hand, Stiller chose Walter to have no wife or girlfriend. Instead in the movie, he pines after Cheryl, a woman he works with. Unlike Walter’s wife in the story, in the movie Cheryl acts as a catalyst that sparks him to take action. When Cheryl and Walter find out the man who shot the photo is in Greenland and Walter is hesitant towards going, she says, “Yeah. Why not? Go! Crack the case” (Stiller). That same day he leaves on a flight for Greenland. Then in Greenland when he is about to give up the chase for the missing photo from fear of getting into a helicopter with a drunk pilot, he imagines her singing lyrics from David Bowie’s Song, Space Oddity, which prompts him to run out to the helicopter and jump. Throughout the movie Cheryl ignites Walter to take action, and is a positive influence. The characters
who are alongside Walter help to illuminate the message he already brings forth. Walter Mitty has unrealistic and extravagant daydreams in both the story and the movie. However, the motivation behind the daydreams are dissimilar. In the movie, Walter’s dreams revolve around what he wishes would actually happen. He wants to win over Cheryl and dreams about saving her dog from a burning building. He wants to stand up to his boss, and dreams about physically fighting in the streets of the city over a stretchy doll figure. In the short story, Walter’s dreams revolve around him being a masculine hero. He dreams he is a pilot and “the crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. “The Old Man’ll get us through,” they said to one another. “The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!” (Thurber 1). In another dream he is in an operating room where a man named “Pritchard-Mitford” tells him he has “read” his “book on streptothricosis,” and that it was “a brilliant performance” (Thurber 2). They both dream to escape, but in the movie Walter hopes to actually break out of his routine in reality, while in the story Walter has no hope of that. In the very end of Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Walter actually dreams about facing “the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful,” with a “faint fleeting smile playing about his lips” (Thurber 5). Again helping to elucidate Walter’s loss of hope from failure in the short story. Character Development is stagnant in the story, but is a crucial part of the movie. In the story Walter stays negative and doesn’t change his attitude or behavior. In complete contrast, Walter changes drastically. He flips from just living his routine life to traveling the world. He started out scared to go after a girl, and scared to stand up to his boss, then progressed to telling his boss “you don’t have to be such a dick” and holding Cheryl’s hand in the last scene (Stiller). The main character’s progression in the movie amplifies the positivity that the movie represents. The main character Walter Mitty, as well as the wife in James Thurber’s short story, and Cheryl in Ben Stiller’s adaptation demonstrate how important characters are to understanding the deeper meaning behind these two pieces. The wife is important because she acts as an oppressor in the story helping the reader to understand Walter’s feeling of failure, while Cheryl is significant as she supports Walter in the movie, helping the viewer to comprehend Walter’s own motivations. Walter is irreplaceable in importance. Walter is the story, so without him there would be no greater message to understand. The story eludes to a dark path you go on when you give up, but the movie shows that life isn’t about the destination but the journey along the way and encourages the viewer to get up and go live their journey.
that a discontented individual is often unable to take ownership of his life until he realizes that he must set a good example for his children. Walter is a protagonist who seems to only care about himself. He is really dependent on his mama's huge insurance check. Walter wants his mama's check so he and Willy Harris can open up a bar. This character continues to go down the wrong path until something tragic happens.
In the story of Walter Mitty by James Thurber, Walter Mitty is a static character and in the movie Walter Mitty by Ben Stiller, Walter is made a dynamic character so that the movies is more exciting than the book. In the story Walter stays a boring character who doesn’t do much at all, while in the movie he becomes the adventurous character he has dreamed about. In the end of the story Walter was happy about “facing the firing squad”. Since Walter never had the life he wanted he just wanted to die, unlike the movie where he had done so many things that he got himself a date when he was the most happy. In the story Walter kept dreaming throughout the day being triggered by little things to go off into his own world, but in the movie Walter
The weekly trips into town are somewhat of a disaster each time. Once, he had tried to take the chains off of his tires and they got them "wound around the axle" and had to have a man come from a garage to unwind them. Mrs. Mitty leaves Walter on his own so that he can run errands, while she goes to the beauty parlor to get her hair done. Because of his daydreaming, he ends up losing himself in a court battle in his head. How can anyone expect to remember to buy puppy biscuits when something like that happens?
Walter wants financial freedom, he doesn't want just enough money to provide for his family, but rather he tells his mother "I want so many things. " Walter is materialistic and greedy, corrupted by a superficial “American dream”. Walter has no desire to find out about himself through his African American heritage. He believes he can define himself through money, money is everything to this man.
In the short story, “ The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty” written by James Thurber, it describes a man who while in the midst of everyday life, floats off into daydream that often cause him more trouble than it is worth. His wife, Mrs. Mitty, on the surface does not seem like a well-rounded character. It always seems her life’s mission is to demean Walter and to always use her overbearing nature to nag him. However, there may be more to this character than what meets the eye. I believe that Mrs. Mitty is actually a well-rounded character in the fact that she only acts the way she does only for her husband and his well-being.
After Walter foolishly loses all of his mother's money to his friend, he begins to hate himself, the only emotion that allows him to consider selling out his race and accepting Lindner's offer. It is a good moment for Walter, because Travis is watching him. Walter cannot bring himself to except.
The film The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, directed by Ben Stiller, thoughtfully explores the timeless theme of identity: through Walter (played by Stiller), Stiller reminds that adversity is necessary in one’s life in order to bring about growth and change. Through the detailed presentation of the minutiae of Walter Mitty’s day, the viewer understands that he is a man stuck in a rut of existing rather than living. The film opens with images of Walter’s apartment: nothing out of place, nothing with colour, even Walter, himself, is dressed in black and white. Despite this mundane opening, there are elements of humor (an error sending a wink on a dating site and dreams of super-human rescue missions), and this accurately depicts Walter’s internal
What would be the consequences of living vicariously through another person? The life of an individual who does not live every day to his or her fullest extent is a restricting one. Humorous author, James Thurber, in his short story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” shares the tale of Walter Mitty, a man who lives an unhappy life in the city obeying his wife’s every wish and command, daydreams to escape the sad constricting reality of his life. In Ben Stiller’s story-based film, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, Walter Mitty takes real-life action to find love, adventure, and respect from a demeaning boss who takes the lead position of remodeling Life Magazine from a physical to an online magazine. Ben Stiller and James Thurber utilize allusion,
Walter has an interesting turn of events towards the end of the book. He is forced to abandon his quest to the North Pole, he is faced with the monster and must hear the monster's plans for self-destruction, he has to watch idly as his new friend, Victor, passes from this world. He has such noble dreams and aspirations, but they are all brought to a halt because of his chance meeting with Frankenstein. Or, was his expedition doom from the start because of the nature of wanting to do what no other man had done? Was it his ambition that led him to untimely failure? The evidence from the text proves that possibly he was never meant to surpass his peers and obtain the glory that he pursued.
Have you ever wanted to learn about an interesting short story? Then I have the perfect short story for you. You could think of possibly anything and Walter Mitty would dream about it and make it seem special. The short story is called “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”by James Thurber, it is an interesting story about a guy named Walter Mitty, who has a nagging wife constantly on him, but he goes through his boring life imagining about all the cool stuff he could do. A dominant theme in James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is Imagery. He shows imagery in his short story by making his character, Walter Mitty, imagine he's in these obstacles, which he pretends he's something he's not. Throughout the story, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” James Thurber uses literary elements like imagery and allusion to get his theme across to the readers.
The movie, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, starring Ben Stiller, conveys a daydreamer escaping his typical life by disappearing into a realm of fantasies filled with heroism, romance and action. In both the movie and the book, the title character retreats into fantasy as an escape from his mundane reality because in the real world, he is ordinary, insecure, and passive. In the short story, Walter simply retreats into his daydreams and tolerates his domineering wife, while in the movie he actively pursues finding himself. Walter Mitty, a timid, passive, henpecked husband, embarrassingly incompetent at ordinary tasks, constantly falls into daydreams in which he assumes such heroic roles as flying through a storm, shooting down German aircraft, and performing delicate surgery.
The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty - Character Study of Walter Mitty & nbsp; In the short story, "The secret life of Walter Mitty," a man by the Walter Mitty goes into town with his wife to get some things done. Throughout this story Walter Mitty shows that he is very forgetful and a a really stubborn man with a vivid imagination. He is constantly being distracted, and starts to day dream often. & nbsp; There are a few hints in this story that show Walter Mitty is very forgetful. Most of this is probably caused by his constant day dreaming.
“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” expresses the theme that satisfaction is harder for those who are not normal. With all of Walter Mitty’s daydreams in between everything that he does, it shows that his actual life is lacking something that he desires.
Walter attempts to reinvent himself through his work and relationships to try and provide for his wife and family. Walter is fighting a battle within his household because he believes that Ruth, his wife, “couldn’t be on [his] side that long for nothing,” even though she is just trying to do what is best for everyone involved (Hansberry 32). Walter cannot see past his dream to realize the impact it would have on everyone else if it failed, so he drowns his sorrows in alcohol. Although “he knows the possibility of failure is also a vital part of the American success story” Walter is not just risking his own future, he is risking his child’s, mother’s and sister’s and without a second thought to his personal relationships, he blindly makes an investment on the chance of having the wealth and house he desires for everyone (Washington 98). Walter is so focused on reinventing his work life and having money that he loses sight of his family’s values and ideas. He does not care about Ruth being pregnant and the possibility of aborting their child as long as he can achieve his goals. Walter is living in a dream where he believes that “anyone can become anything he wants to be,” and that is not true in his case with the social and racial standards that are set against him (Washington 95). Walter sees wealth as ensuring happiness and having everything he desires, which is why he is pushing his family so hard for the money, causing issues. Even though all the odds are set against him in this time period, Walter cannot see past being able to provide for his family and having the American Dream that he most
‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ is about a boring man who has a lot of daydreams. It was originally a short story by James Thurber, but was also made into a movie. The way that the story is presented in both is a key factor in either’s success, and when compared, the two are very different. For example, in the short story, Walter has little to no character development, but in the movie, nearly the entire production is him being put through a lot of situations that let us see more of the true character of Walter Mitty. This example and others is what makes the movie adaptation of ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ better than that of the short story.