Have you ever watched a movie you really liked for the third or fourth time and all of a sudden seen something there you never saw before? It happened to me the other night watching The Insider.
On previous viewings, I’d been so caught up in the drama I didn’t realize that The Insider is really about a man in a career transition—abrupt and brutal, to be sure, but also transformational.
The Insider is based on true incidents in the life of a Ph.D. chemist named Jeffrey Wigand who worked as vice-president of R&D for Brown & Williamson tobacco company and was fired by them because he knew that the company was adding carcinogenic substances to the nicotine in their cigarettes. The action of the film is driven by Wigand’s decision to go public with first-hand knowledge of how the tobacco industry uses chemical compounds to promote addiction.
How far will Big Tobacco go to shut him up? Will this bright, responsible, somewhat confused, man be able to hold up under intimidation by his former employer, on the one hand, and, on the other, pressure from a 60 Minutes producer to blow the whistle by doing an interview on national television?
In personal challenges, it takes real vigilance to acknowledge there are things we are doing that are heroic. Our own sense of panic causes us to discount the courageous actions we take, especially if they do not produce immediate results.
When we first meet Wigand he is packing up his files and leaving the corporate headquarters of the company who has just let him go. As the story unfolds, we witness his whole world being turned upside down as his financial well-being and the safety of his family are threatened.
The same is happening to many people right now, not with an email death threat or a bullet in the mailbox, as it did for Wigand, but with the less dramatic kind of despair that comes from seeing a stack of bills they can’t pay.
What is so powerful about Russell Crowe’s performance as Wigand is that we experience through him what it feels like to be a man who has hit the wall professionally and is desperately trying to find himself.
And he does.
During the course of the film, he takes a job teaching high school, and, by the end, we learn that he has been named Teacher of the Year. He is able to recreate himself by executing a successful transition, and we are left with the sense that he finds teaching far more satisfying than being a tobacco company executive.
If such a happy ending could happen under the harrowing circumstances portrayed in the movie, maybe there are clues there for others who find themselves in the chaos and fear of a painful ending.
In transition:
Seek a return to your authentic self
Early on, when Wigand has not yet made the decision to expose his former employer, we hear him say that before he signed on to do the tobacco industry’s bidding he had always thought of himself as a “man of science.” It is our first hint that on some level he had known for a long time that the work he was doing did not match his vision of his highest self.
It is clear from the deep sadness we see in him as he talks about losing his way as a scientist, using his talents to promote addiction, not health, that an authentic connection to his work had left him long before he was force leave it.
Being fired frees him to reclaim what he has lost, and as the story progresses we see him begin to shape a new vision of his work life at the same time he is experiencing loss.
“Can you imagine me coming home from some job feeling good at the end of the day,” he says to his wife as they downsize.
Expect valleys of despair
Our culture is so oriented to feeling good that we devalue the opportunity being vulnerable offers for learning. I am not suggesting that it is easy to be ripped apart emotionally, like Wigand, rather that it is in these places in our life that we have the potential to become open to learning more about ourselves.
As Wigand begins to verbalize the anguish he felt while working for the tobacco company, he starts the process of sorting through the conflict within him caused by his decision to leave the scientific community to work in an aggressive sales culture. His awareness that he has traded off something very important to him for a high-paying job becomes a gravitational pull back to his core values, even while all hell is breaking loose around him.
It is also worth noting that throughout the film it is in the moments after scenes of personal anguish where we see him reclaim his voice and his priorities.
Watch for moments of courage
The Insider focuses on Wigand’s physical and moral courage (e.g. chasing off a stalker with a golf club, entering a courthouse to give a deposition surrounded by bodyguards), but less obvious is his display of what I like to call career courage.
Two scenes in particular come to mind. The first takes place in a noisy high school cafeteria, a stark contrast to the world he formerly inhabited, where we watch the very overqualified Dr. Wigand talk the principal into hiring him as a chemistry teacher. He presents himself authentically (“I believe I can be a good teacher”) and neither minimizes nor apologizes for his credentials. He is real in the moment and gets the job.
In the second scene he is in a lab surrounded by high school students. “How many of you have taken chemistry before?” he asks, and when no hands go up, he wins them over by saying, “Well, I’ve never taught it before, so we’re going to be fine.” He gives them a vision of chemistry as something “magical” which comes from his own passion for the subject, and what we as viewers witness is also magical—a man coming home to himself.
In personal challenges, it takes real vigilance to acknowledge there are things we are doing that are heroic. Our own sense of panic causes us to discount the courageous actions we take, especially if they do not produce immediate results.
Anything you do that requires digging a little deeper into yourself, whether it’s to make a phone call or sign up for a course, is courageous. Real bravery comes from doing these things without yet being able to see how they may come together as stepping stones to a new beginning.
