Harrison Ford: American Anti-Hero

Lessons on fighting FOMO

I’d settle for ‘Was Useful’… there’s not a lot of space on a tombstone.

-Harrison Ford

Interviews with actors are disappointing when we find that the face behind the mask is emptier than the mask. This is professionally intentional: actors with opinions are liabilities to the box office. Occasionally, however, actors do offer insight to a lucky handful of interviewers.

I was reminded of this in reading The Hollywood Reporter’s most recent interview with Harrison Ford, now eighty years old, in a discussion that covered Ford’s latest projects: Apple TV+’s comedy series “Shrinking” and an upcoming Indiana Jones film. Ford, America’s favorite anti-hero since becoming Han Solo in 1977. In real life, whatever that is, Ford is the anti-hero of the American Dream: he achieves it by knowing and embracing his own limits. Or, as the headline of The Hollywood Reporter interview by James Hibberd puts it: “Harrison Ford: “I Know Who the F*** I Am.”

Not since Brad Pitt’s post-divorce photo-shoot with GQ had a Hollywood interview reminded me that, from the sidelines of the red carpet, actors are artists expressing a multitude of lives lived to help us find parts of ourselves, briefly, in another world.

Source: GQ

While Brad Pitt spent the interview in a search for himself in the sandswept dunes of his divorce, Harrison Ford’s conversation with The Hollywood Reporter is a showcase in how to sidestep the trapdoors of sociopathy that come with success and, in doing so, having the power of knowing who the f*** you are.

The Cage of Conviction

Americans don’t like to be told we can’t do something. Our destiny must be infinite at all times. The sky is the limit because to be limitless is our natural state. All limits are tyranny. Doubt is a sin. Potential is our religion.

At least until get older and wiser, like Harrison Ford when he became a Hollywood star after a decade of indignities in his twenties. As Wikpedia reflects:

In 1964, after a season of summer stock with the Belfry Players in Wisconsin, Ford traveled to Los Angeles to apply for a job in radio voice-overs. He did not get it… Ford was at the bottom of the hiring list, having offended producer Jerry Tokofsky after he played a bellboy in the feature. He was told by Tokovsky that when actor Tony Curtis delivered a bag of groceries, he did it like a movie star; Ford felt his job was to act like a bellboy.

Harrison Ford, American anti-hero, was told, at 31, he had no future in the film business.

French filmmaker Jacques Demy chose Ford for the lead role of his first American film, Model Shop (1969), but the head of Columbia Pictures thought Ford had "no future" in the film business.

To support his two children and his wife, Ford became a self-taught carpenter instead. He decided he needed to do what made him feel most useful. A track record of bit parts and star roles led him to American Graffiti (1973), where he caught the attention of director George Lucas, age 33, who wanted Ford to read lines to actors auditioning for his upcoming film Star Wars (1977).

In Ford’s mind - or the anti-hero he plays even in interviews - this fortune is functional. As interviewer James Hibberd recollects:

That reminds me of your casting for Han Solo, a tale that’s been told many times. You were merely helping George Lucas during the casting process, running lines with actors who were auditioning for the leads, and he eventually realized you were right for Han. Wasn’t there a point during that process, when you’re sitting there reading Han’s lines, where you started to think: “Hey, I could do this”?

No. Never thought about it.

Ford even lobbied Lucas to kill off Han Solo at the end of Return of the Jedi (1983), explaining: “That would have given the whole film a bottom.” Han Solo’s use had come to an end. As Harrison Ford reminds us in the interview: to reach your potential is to feel useful.

That’s it.

Are you surprised to still be doing this, acting?

I think it’s the place I feel most useful. It’s what I know the most about. I lost my chops as a carpenter. I haven’t ever played fiddle. But I feel comfortable wrestling with how to make behavior out of words on a page and tell a story, and I’m still excited about the prospect of telling a story. I think this is a service occupation — telling stories. We need it. Whether it’s drawing on caves or religious tenets, we love telling stories.

If we can settle for being useful, then we can settle for being happy.

Elementally emerging from the sea of youth requires exploration and expression until, suddenly, one day, predictability becomes purpose. We see this transformation in Portrait of a Lady (1881), where Henry James tells the story of Isabel Archer, a woman who refuses to marry and chooses instead to live life on her own terms. James, an iconic author with a certain noblesse oblige genre of Romanticism, describes the theme of Portrait of a Lady as a “young American woman affronting her destiny.” It’s a beautifully written story of the American Dream with a shocking ending: Archer gets married.

Ralph Touchette, Isabel’s cosmopolitan cousin, recoils at this destiny in a typically Jamesian confrontation where the dialogue is soundtrack-ready for the playful muzak of a reality TV show when he says of her pending marriage:

“You’re going to be put in a cage.”

“If I like my cage, that needn’t trouble you.”

“You wanted only to see life.”

“I’ve seen it. It doesn’t feel to me now, I admit, such an inviting expanse.”

In life, what first looks like a cage can become a sanctuary. After drifting through the aimless infinite, Isabel finds only a hostile and empty “expanse.” In a cage of her own conviction, she finds peace. Fulfillment is found in the finite. This reflects Harrison Ford’s philosophy of the anti-infinite that focuses on turning talents into tools.

In February’s “Defense of Repression” series, Litverse covered repression as a method of finding meaning. Cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker, in 1973’s The Denial of Death, contends that a secular society’s biggest problem is that we face too many possibilities and not enough guidance. Unburdened by religion or nationalism or shared values, we place the ultimate value on the completion of individual goals without pondering how those goals have been crafted by the clay of the culture we choose.

We live in an age where every new trend is a gold rush whether one attempts to become a travel influencer on Instagram, a direct-to-consumer entrepreneur, an at-home exercise pioneer, Bitcoin millionaire, or a streamer of video games, body parts, or commerce. Everything missed, the thinking of an infinite culture seems to go, is a missed opportunity. As surveys have found:

• Nearly 7 in 10 (69%) of millennials experience FOMO, the most of any age group.

• Millennials are the most likely to purposely try to create FOMO among their peers, with 33% saying they have done so compared to 12% of those in other age groups.

• Those with household incomes above $75,000 a year were not only the most likely to experience FOMO but also the most likely to share their experiences on social media with the intent of creating the sensation in others.

Defining ourselves on distraction rather than discipline and dedication, we watch the lucky few rewarded by a moody algorithm that spins time and dignity and money on a roulette wheel. The rest of us are left empty-handed and alert for the next chime of cheap choices without wondering what makes us happy as we’re doing it, not desiring it. Without limits, we expand as a thin liminal layer and, ghost-like, hover and haunt the expectations we inherit from an eternal ecosystem of envy. We become desperate to control our fortune, rather than own our function.

Become an anti-hero of the American Dream by finding joy in the work, not the product or the promise. This is Harrison Ford’s secret.

As Hibberd notes:

Another way Ford is unique among the A-listers: He’s never expressed a Hollywood ambition beyond being a working actor. He’s one of the industry’s most powerful talents (his films have collectively grossed nearly $10 billion worldwide and he has regularly commanded upward of $20 million per film), yet he’s never directed a movie, or wanted to. He doesn’t have a vanity production company. He’s only taken three producer credits across more than 45 films.

“I don’t even know what a fucking producer does anymore,” Ford gripes. “Or why we need 36 of them around.”

In that guarded garden, growing a silence of self, Ford has been able to choose a life more consciously than most celebrities. Always humble in the craft, the interview ends on the fun fact that Harrison Ford was a philosophy major in college and our nature, he believes, is what makes us divine.

There’s a Protestant theologian named Paul Tillich who wrote that if you have trouble with the word “God,” take whatever is central and most meaningful to your life and call that God. My mother was Jewish, my father was Catholic, and I was raised Democrat — my moral purpose was being a Democrat with the big D. But it didn’t apply to a political point of view so much as it applied to nature. I didn’t have any religious construct, but I think nature and God are the same thing. The mysterious origin of life — science tells us how it happened, prophecy tells us another story. I found that everything in nature — the complexity, the biodiversity, the symbiotic relationships — is the same thing other people attribute to God. … Now aren’t you glad you asked that question? You want to get back to the funny shit?

Nature, which limits us all with the fragility of our humanity, is destiny.

Suffering from FOMO?

Limit yourself to what makes you feel useful and everything else will follow. Don’t get greedy or guilty about everything flashing past the periphery of your potential. Your passion is your nature and nature, when accepted instead of denied, can’t help but show the truth, because truth is instinct.