Chili Palmer in Get Shorty and Navigating
John Travolta plays loan shark Chili Palmer in the entertaining 1996 movie Get Shorty. The character embodies the Navigating Instinctual Bias beautifully.
What do we mean by “Navigating Instinctual Bias”? This refers to a set of adaptations that predisposes some people to notice what’s happening within groups of people: hierarchy, roles, who’s who, what’s what, who can be trusted. All of this provides information a person needs to survive in a social environment.
In Get Shorty, Chili goes to Hollywood in pursuit of a debtor and stumbles into the movie industry, which seems to be populated by people who are really bad at Navigating; they’re focused on self-promotion and standing out. In Enneagram terms, they’re Transmitters, which is a set of adaptations that inclines someone to want to make their mark on the world. Unsurprisingly the entertainment industry abounds with such people, each elbowing each other out of the way as they try to grab the spotlight.
The movie is based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, whose protagonists are practically always Navigating types. Many of his books have been made into movies, and it’s not a big leap to see Get Shorty as an analogy for all of the empty peacocking he probably witnessed as studio executives, agents, directors, and actors made grandiose promises they didn’t keep.
So Chili Palmer, being good at Navigating, plays all of these characters masterfully. Watch Get Shorty to see how someone really good at Navigating deftly weaves through and around people who are clueless at Navigating in order to come out on top.