Reality vs Desire In 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty'

Everyday a regular person finds themself daydreaming, pulling there imagination out to escape the real world to pass time. Daydreaming is the stream of consciousness that detaches from current external tasks when attention drifts to a more personal and internal direction. This phenomenon is common in people's daily life shown by a large-scale study in which participants spend forty seven percent of their waking time on average on daydreaming. In the short story and movie, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, written by James Thurber, the protagonist Walter Mitty is a daydreamer who goes through a day of ordinary tasks and errands, and he escapes into a series of romantic fantasies, each spurred on by some mundane reality. As both of the movie and story are different with extra parts, missing parts, and other elements of course, both seem to partially make one of the themes stand out. James Thurber shows the reader that fantasies and daydreams are a way to escape from reality has to bring you as a coping mechanism through success and failure. In 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,' the main conflict is that of the individual desires against reality; the main theme is a person's dreams for life vs. society. Walter Mitty is neither exciting nor successful in his everyday life. In fact, the world Mitty lives in seems hellish to him. Walter finds himself stuck daydreaming continuously throughout the day making conflict in his everyday life. However, his journey became easier as he changed his attitude. His choice of attitude influenced his actions. Supporting the conclusion that happiness is a choice of attitude more than a choice of action.

Short Story

Very little actually happens in Thurber’s story. Mrs. Mitty has an appointment at the hairdresser's; Mitty himself buys a pair of overshoes. While trying to remember what his wife has asked him to buy, he becomes a cocky defendant in a murder case. He manages to buy some dog food and sinks into a chair in a convenient hotel lobby and imagines himself a bomber pilot under fierce attack. His returning wife wakes him with the admonition that she is going to take his temperature when they get home. At the end of the story, Mrs. Mitty goes into a drugstore, and he becomes a “proud and disdainful” man facing a firing squad. Part of Thurber’s technique is to present Mitty as a man who fails even as a dreamer. His daydreams are cluttered with clichés. Whether he is a murder defendant or an Army officer, he bears the same “Webley-Vickers automatic.” In both of his military dreams he is an officer who can lead his men “through hell.” In reality, he is a man trying to deal with the fears and difficulties of a drab and disappointing life. As such, he is only an exaggerated version of a person whom everyone will recognize.

Walter Mitty is a daydreamer. The opening line of Thurber’s short story places the reader directly into the middle of an action scene. No context is provided to indicate that the action is anything but the opening line of a story having something to do with the military. WE'RE going through!' The Commander's voice was like thin ice breaking. We begin the story in Walter's mind. This is good evidence for the argument that dreams and not reality dominate the plotline. As Mitty and his wife are on their way to do some errands, he indulges in a daydream in which he is a brave military commander piloting a hydroplane, but his wife interrupts by exclaiming that he is driving too fast. This pattern is repeated several times. When she urges him to make an appointment with his physician, he becomes an eminent surgeon at work, until a parking-lot attendant’s contemptuous commands call him back temporarily to reality. 'You're tensed up again,' said Mrs. Mitty. 'It's one of your days. I wish you'd let Dr. Renshaw look you over.' After this line, readers might suspect that Walter Mitty is mentally unstable. Or, it could just be that his wife is overreacting. In reality, Mitty does not do anything very well. For Walter, there really is no dividing line; the life inside his head is every bit as real as life taking place around him outside his imagination at any given point. By withholding context, this first line gives the reader an experience of this same thrill. Walter's fantasies are just coping mechanisms that help him get through the day, yet because of this he was a very forgetful man, “When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box under his arm, Walter Mitty 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 away he hated these weekly trips to town he was always getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb’s, razor blades? No. Toothpaste, toothbrush, bicarbonate, carborundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up.” He rambles on how his wife won't forget and how he will hear about it when he gets home expressing his unhappiness. Then right after starts daydreaming again. The author shows the reader how unhappy the protagonist is with his life and how he uses daydreaming as a coping mechanism when realizing reality.

Movie

In 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,' the main conflict is that of the Individual's Desires against Reality; the main theme is A Person's Dreams for Life vs. Society. Although Walter Mitty’s daydream life has much exciting action, his waking life, as recounted in the movie, is routine, uneventful, and, at a deep subconscious level, unsatisfying. Director Ben Stiller did an incredible job showing the protagonist large imagination and daydreaming. Just like how the short story started with jumping right in the actions so did the movie jumped right into one of Walter's daydreams of his saving a dog from an exploding building. Unlike the short story more events and details are different in the movie. Walter Mitty, an employee at Life magazine, spends day after monotonous day developing photos for the publication. A middle-aged man trapped by financial responsibility, Walter is a photo archivist at the dwindling Life magazine, a job that is being replaced by machines. Shy, sheltered and reserved, he is isolated from the environment around him. To escape the tedium, Walter inhabits a world of exciting daydreams in which he is the undeniable hero. Walter fancies a fellow employee named Cheryl and would love to date her, but he feels unworthy. However, he gets a chance to have a real adventure when Life's new owners send him on a mission to obtain the perfect photo for the final print issue.

The movie blurs in and out of Walter's imagination as his daydreams take him into new worlds and personas, be it the rugged explorer seducing his crush Cheryl. She always seems to be there for Walter, 'That song is about courage and going into the unknown.' One of her famous lines in the movie. The song in question is David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and Walter has just been on the receiving end of an insult, when their new boss, Ted, calls him 'Major Tom' as a way of insulting his tendency to space out. Cheryl kindly reminds Walter that the song is actually about someone who is brave, and should not be interpreted as an insult. Walter is not one to confront people or cause conflict, we see this when his boss is walking away when confronting Walter with an issue. Walter imagines a comeback as he walks away, “I was saying you know who looks good in a beard? Dumbledore. Not you' (0:58). In a fantasy of himself talking back to the mean spirited Ted, Walter imagines himself making fun of Ted's beard, much to his coworkers' delight.

Walter Mitty, he can balance a checkbook, but not his imagination. Walter is in danger of being downsized out of a job as the magazine prepares its final print edition. His desperate efforts to locate a missing negative and a mysterious photographer played by Sean Penn lead him on a caper much wilder than any thing he had dreamed up. Following cryptic clues (which Cheryl helps him decode), he travels to Iceland, Afghanistan and other far-flung places, and the movie becomes a lavish, surreal travelogue, blending digital effects with stunning landscape montages. Walter when confronted towards the end of the movie says, “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life”(1:36). That little moment in Walter Mitty made me reevaluate the way I was living my life. It reminded me that not all moments have to be recorded in order for them to be meaningful. The most powerful memories can only happen when you are fully present. This is the motto of Life magazine, the publication where Walter works. It is about taking risks, seeing the world, and being involved with the world. It serves as an inspiration not only to the employees of the magazine, but to Walter in particular, who takes its message to heart.

Conclusion

James Thurber shows the reader that fantasies and daydreams are a way to escape from reality has to bring you as a coping mechanism through success and failure. In The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the main conflict is that of the individual desires against reality; the main theme is a person's dreams for life vs. society. Although Walter Mitty’s daydream life has much exciting action, his waking life, as recounted in the story, is routine, uneventful, and, at a deep subconscious level, unsatisfying, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is full of messages like this one. It's a movie about going into the unknown and facing your fears. It's about living life to the fullest and not letting yourself fall into the trap of dreaming but never doing. In a world where everything is vying for our attention, I think we could all learn to be a little bit more choosy about what we let ourselves get distracted by, and inevitably, what we're missing. Ben Stiller’s version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a beautifully subtle analysis of finding self-confidence and happiness. His argument is made through veils of quirky comedy and many emotionally connecting strategies. Overall The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a great argument for finding happiness in your attitude towards life. Self-identity and purpose lead to happiness more than any extravagant adventure in itself could even if daydreams may play a little part in that.