Poésie du départ: the airport on film

Sydney International Airport, 11am. Early morning travellers have boarded their flights and the long queues have subsided. Travelators run without any sign of human life. Beaming lights overhead refract off the floor. Bright signs distend themselves from the ceiling. A series of arrows. Arrivals, departures, food court, carpark.

Airports are the quintessential liminal space. As two intrepid student journalists, we found that going to the airport without a plane ticket makes for an odd experience. There’s a comfort here, a feeling of nostalgic reverie — memories of arriving early at the behest of fathers worrying we’d run late, or the ritualistic consumption of McDonald's breakfast. It’s a place defined by movement — extended families in slow lines, travelators propelling bulging suitcases and occupied seats quickly displaced. Even people there who aren’t strictly in motion aren’t quite ‘there.’ Those slouched on the leather seats enjoying a moment of respite, or people fuelling up at the food court are there only to move on with the calling of their flight. Built in 1920, Sydney International Airport is one of the longest-running airports in the world. For us there with no real aim, we were suspended in time and space. We were certainly in motion, moving from terminal to terminal, but by virtue of having no destination we were essentially stationery.

French postmodernist Michel Foucault coined these liminal spaces as “heterotopias”. Literally meaning an “other space,” heterotopias refer to cultural sites and institutional locations which have an off-kilter, unsettling quality to them. Though difficult to precisely articulate, United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s iconic one-liner in defining what constitutes pornography is apt: “I know it when I see it.” They are places of constant change and frenetic movement but,equally, are eternal totems of transit — a still, unchanging “non-place” perpetually facilitating moving people and planes.

Film and media reflect this strange heterotopic reality of the airport. Brian Eno dedicated an album to the ambient sounds of the airport. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York sees protagonist, Kevin, get lost in the hustle and bustle of the airport. The world around him changes as he boards a flight in Chicago and ends up in New York, the airport serving as the border between two worlds and a place of departure. In La Jetee and its remake 12 Monkeys, the airport becomes a space of temporal disequilibrium. In Orly, the film jumps between various narratives of individuals and their minute interactions, all from different countries. In the film’s climax, the airport is emptied and the camera remains fixated on the abandoned, hollowed-out halls. Here, the airport becomes a nationless zone, a space devoid of borders.

Heterotopias are also constituted by seemingly incongruous elements which make it distinctly whole. Under neoliberal capitalism, airports are a kaleidoscope of commerce, glittering with duty-free stores, food outlets, casinos, hotels, and movie theatres. These quotidian opportunities for fun are a stark contrast against stringent border control measures. Hence, the airport can be seen as an amalgamation of multiple modes of power — the coercive enforcement of state power embellished with the shiny exterior of consumerist choice.

The notion of airports as zones of political control is reflected in Catch Me if You Can, which follows Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Abagnale on the run from Tom Hanks as FBI agent Carl Hanratty. In the film, Abagnale travels in and out of airports freely, flaunting this fact through various comedic montages of him in disguises. However, Abagnale’s ability to go about undetected is a privilege afforded to him by his inherent whiteness. He doesn’t face the same scrutiny that a racial or ethnic minority may face in these spaces. In 2004, we saw Tom Hanks feature again in the hustle and bustle of an airport. The Terminal sees an Eastern European refugee named Viktor forced to live in Kennedy International airport after a coup in his fictional home country of Krakozhia renders his passport invalid. Unlike Frank Abagnale, Viktor, as a non-English speaker, finds it difficult to navigate a space where he cannot speak the language. With his unwavering charm, Viktor makes the airport his home and finds comfort in the furniture of fast food chains, miscellaneous retail stores, and a dozen other product placements. By the end of the film, Viktor is able to go free and enter the US after only nine months. Though entering America is seen as a victorious and happy ending, this is not the reality for many refugees hoping to enter other countries. The film is loosely based on Iranian refugee Mehran Karimi Nasseri, who spent 18 years in the departure lounge of Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, until he was hospitalised in 2006. In 2018, an event reminiscent of this occurred when a Syrian refugee spent seven months in a Canadian airport.

For people of colour and ethnic minorities, the airport can be a hostile and stressful environment. Since the September 11th attacks, airport security tightened all over the world. Border police patrol the area and there are security check ups at every corner. We hear accounts of people being taken aside, interrogated, scrutinised, searched more thoroughly — even imprisoned — all based on their racial or ethnic identity. During our expedition, we saw firsthand police patrolling around, pestering people in lines with bulky weapons at the ready.

Racial profiling is a huge issue in airports, but this is not a recent phenomenon. Global border checking has its roots in early 20th-century South Africa, with laws designed to appear fair which in reality made it possible to restrict entry to Indians, poor white people, and Jewish folk. The US has infamous ‘language tests’, and we remember the White Australia Policy on our own shores. These practices did not go away after aeroplane travel became more commonplace post-World War 2. Proof of biases, racism and xenophobia exist among the staff and systems in place with airports today. A racist display was discovered by TSA officers in the communal workplace of the Miami International Airport in 2019. The previous year, air marshals went public that TSA supervisors were pressuring them to put African American and Hispanic travellers wearing certain types of clothing through additional screenings. 2019 saw ProPublica release an article pointing out how TSA body scanners discriminated against black women and women of colour based on their hair. This isn’t even pointing out how facial recognition softwares in airports already have difficulty reading the faces of racial and ethnic minorities.

Besides heightened security, the airport can also be generally unaccommodating and unwelcoming. Following signs to a supposed prayer room at Sydney Airport, we decided to see where non-Christian travellers could be made to feel they can practise their religion in peace and we found ourselves walking down a labyrinthine maze of carpeted tunnels. We passed by employees on our way past grey anonymised doors and offices.

We finally came across the prayer room. Pushing past a heavy glass door that scraped along the ground, we found ourselves in a dishevelled room that, by the looks of things, had not been maintained by the airport staff. Shelving units stood broken and mouldy. Coffee cups, banana skins, and all sorts of rubbish littered the area. There were a couple of books for different religious groups, along with an inconspicuous Clive Cussler novel sitting alongside them. The room was dark and uninhabitable, a testament to the airport’s lack of consideration for those of differing religious backgrounds.

The experience of going through customs felt like its own process of religious confession and ritualistic cleansing. There are certain unspoken rules when talking to officers. You need to keep it brief, don’t joke, don’t say too much, don’t say too little. It’s less a process of saying where you’re going and who you are, and more a process of proving that you belong, proving that you are a traveller, a tourist, a citizen rather than a foreigner, a refugee, or a terrorist. If you aren’t considered to belong according to certain people, then you are immediately considered suspicious — God may be fair and just, but the State certainly is not. In Other Spaces, Foucault explains how heterotopias are spaces which open and close where, unless one is already compelled to enter, ‘‘the individual has to submit to rites and purifications [. . .] to get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures.’’

At their core, airports are a limbo on Earth. In this fraught yet unmoving heterotopic space, sovereign power plays on the maybe-logic of an infinite number of potential future occurrences. The idea that something might happen, that there may be a threat coming into the country, that someone could be hidden among the rest, creates a system where everyone is guilty until proven innocent. In this space, we are political subjects who become acutely aware of the ways in which we are surveilled and, more importantly, the way we police ourselves. It's poignant that the liminal appeal of airports is a result of the same structure which excludes certain people from comfortable travel — and often travel altogether.

Our visit reminded us that perhaps the greatest appeal of airports is that they are a concrete space which materialises many parts of our large experience of Life. The anxiety we have about where we are headed, the strict confines of time, and the looming head of authority are all things which abound beyond the four walls of airports. Some of us are the bright-eyed travellers excited to explore after the claustrophobia of the pandemic while others sit at home watching planes fly. Some of us are sitting at Departures and just want to go home. For every passenger on a landing plane, there is one waiting to take flight.