Go see Touching the Void. This documentary about a 1985 climbing expedition to Peru made me squirm in my seat. Since this is non-fiction, everyone in the theater must know the basic story. Basically, things go horribly wrong after the pair of Brits reach the summit of a never-before climbed ridge. Everyone survives, but only after enduring… well, too much.
For one of the pair, Joe, “too much” would include:
- breaking your right leg so badly the lower leg bones drive through the knee joint
- then being lowered down several thousand feet, 300 feet at a time, banging the broken leg repeatedly
- then hanging helplessly in the air after being lowered off a too-steep incline
- then falling 80-100 feet into a crevasse when your partner, Simon, cuts the rope (a desparate attempt to save his own life, which Joe has, for 20 years, defended)
- then lowering yourself further into a crevasse in the hope there’s an outlet
- then climbing out of the bottom of the crevasse (remember the leg? hard to forget)
- then spending three (!) more days sliding, crawling, dragging yourself down the mountain, glacier, and moraine
- then yearning for water to quench your thirst, but unable to eat enough snow to avoid being dangerously dehydrated
- then losing 1/3 of your body weight during the ordeal
- then making it back to the base camp and being hustled onto a donkey for a two-day ride back to the road, and a doctor
Sounds like a blast.
For the audience’s sake, the donkey ride isn’t in the movie. But everything else is, and while it was re-created, it sure felt real. Every time Joe falls during his final stumble/roll down the moraine, you cringe. And that’s without really having any conception of just how painful it must have been. How do you empathize with a near-death experience? I couldn’t… but I still squirmed.
A lot of the power of the film comes from the present-day, first-person accounts from Simon, Joe, and a third traveller who happens to stay at base camp for them. Joe obviously has the most to share, but Simon’s journey wasn’t easy, and he had to deal with the death of his friend. When the pair returned to England, other climbers pilloried Simon for cutting the rope to save his own life, but Joe defended the decision. The movie shows that Simon’s decision to lower Joe down the mountain in the first place was courageous.
The interview technique reminds me a bit of The Fog of War. All close-ups, straight on to the camera. Sometimes the voices and descriptions carried over the images, sometimes you watched their faces. It’s been 20 years, and the telling of it is quite matter of fact (“we were stuffed” seems to be a favorite expression). But the relatively quiet tone just underlines what a frozen, jarring hell it must have been, for Joe especially.
Now I have to decide whether to read the book from which the movie was made and try once more to understand and appreciate the extreme.