Worth asking if this year's Oscar winning docu, Free Solo, is about suicidal (behaviour), (endurance) sport, or plain metaphor for life
Free Solo, at its core, is a deeply personal film, patiently following a celebrated/rock-star climber, Alex Honnold, lithe champion of an extreme sport, as he plans to scale El Capitan, a granite monolith
Sport, I reckon, is life, experienced in a laboratory condition. What's true for one then is also true for the other--albeit in a controlled environment. Is that why we unconditionally applaud sporting achievements the most? Possibly. And that stories about sport--inevitably dealing with triumph, of both will and the underdog--especially told visually (therefore more viscerally), inspires us, instantly? Yup.
Okay, in the same vein, let's suppose I excel in binge-drinking! Which is to say, I, or you, can carry on guzzling vodka/gin/beer/whatever non-stop for 24 hours flat, without legs wobbling, tongue slurring, eyes shutting, while the brain functions fine enough to make absolutely lucid conversations up until the twenty-fourth hour, and beyond. Would you consider it an achievement? Probably not, although you may be silently impressed (come on, admit it!).
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Similarly, isn't rock-climbing thousands of feet up, steeply vertical from the ground--aiming for high of a physical kind--but totally unhinged; that is, without any support/rope/harness/parachute, better known as free-solo, simply more suicidal (behaviour), than (endurance) sport?
One could certainly argue so. As does absolutely no one in Free Solo, this year's Academy Award winning documentary feature, directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, starring/profiling rock-climber Alex Honnold.
It's currently playing in select (PVR) theatres, soon to premiere on Star TV, and possibly on Hotstar. I watched it on my laptop. Which, no doubt, would've deprived me of the big-screen splendour that the film is--shot with drone-cameras, sharp zoom lenses, perhaps even photographed hanging on to rocks to get the absolute close-up, along with wide-angle view of a natural monstrosity being mounted. Unsure if the experience is at par with Greg MacGillivray and David Breasher's doc Everest (1998) that had completely blown us away at the time, being one of the first films we watched at an IMAX screen in India!
But Free Solo, at its core, is a deeply personal film, patiently following a celebrated/rock-star climber, lithe champion of an extreme sport, as he plans to scale El Capitan, a granite monolith, about a kilometre up from the ground, making him feel "kinda rad--doing something first time in human history!"
Let alone conquer that frighteningly massive rock at Yosemite National Park, California, only one in 10 people who climb ever attempt the sport without any support. Far too many experts have died in the process. Athletes are known to get into a mental 'zone' while at play, that wholly drowns out expectantly cheering stadium crowds, while the eye and the body is aligned to singularly address, say, a tiny red/white ball, charging towards the bat, in that split second.
Multiple-cameras as spectators are in fact an intrusion to Honnold's impossibly vertical challenge. For, if he gets conscious, in less than a heart-beat, "a li'l slip, you fall, and die." There is no margin for error. The consequences, Honnold admits, are huge, but the chances are very low, letting you in to the sort of confidence--derived from either feeling supremely fit or well-prepared--that you need, in order to stare down death itself.
While walking up a wall, you can tell, Honnold is essentially concerned with his next as the only move, rather than ever looking back, which could be overwhelming, or ahead, perhaps scarier still. He breathes and focuses on that moment alone. Now while this might sound like an apt analogy for life (and probably is), there's absolutely nothing regular-life about Honnold as a person.
If anything he comes across as rather awkward; almost emotionally dead, if not desperately weak. He has a girlfriend, but this attachment, it appears, might be an unnecessary impediment to his potentially fatal goals. He is diagnosed with unresponsive amygdala in the brain, faulty connections of which creates psychopaths--an aspect about certain humans I've been obsessed with lately.
Honnold was taught to hug at 23--totally immune to this basic human response to love, affection and care, up until that age, and he's been hug-happy ever since, which does draw suspicions.
But, no, that's being unfair to Honnold or his film that examines his sport and his fearless mind, without favour, sure; but with a lot of awe that he inspires, sensing free-solo as being closest to "warrior culture," exhibiting determination, grit, single-mindedness towards a battle (of the mind, in this case), as if your life depends on it. It does.
The star climber's scaled all sorts of tall structures, risking his life, for the love of adventure, without once resting on his laurels. And then he has to start all over again still, since no one ever gets air-lifted to the top--no matter how many times you've made it there before. That's another metaphor for life that we inevitably imbibe from sport!
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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