Negotiating difference and co-existence in Milos Forman’s Taking Off
For all their unsettledness, cosmopolites do at least learn about the larger world and may become more sensitive to cultural diversity than does the person who refuses to leave the hearth (Yi-Fu Tuan, 1996).
The absconding teenagers in Milos Forman’s Taking Off (1971) are determined to leave the hearth to explore the larger world. Their bewildered parents are determinedthey should stay put and, as they frantically search for their offspring, encounter strangers to whom they offer kindnesses. The film’s journeyings to and from the hearth in this intergenerational battle suggest cosmopolitanism as a valuable framework to explore openness and reticence to difference, and consciousness and oblivion to worldliness. They further offer a means to explore cosmopolitan exchanges beyond the film’s formal properties and production processes. A recent migrant to the US from Czechoslovakia, in his first English-language film Forman hoped to offer an outsider’s view of his new homeland. Traces of other foreigners with similar aspirations are also present: Kafka, whose novella Amerika (original title: The Missing Person) Forman had previously contemplated adapting; Tocqueville whose Democracy in America likened democratic government to a protective parent keeping citizens as perpetual children. This paper discusses how Taking Off illuminates a fundamental cosmopolitan willingness to make the effort to negotiate difference and co-existence with others when there appear to be no common values, only mutual incomprehension and suspicion.