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Touching the Void
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The
makers of the best action-adventure movies have always known that moral
problems in a story amount to little unless they can be dramatised in a
breathless moment that combines great danger with the necessity of making a
split-second decision.
Think
of Cary Grant hanging off a cliff face at Mt Rushmore in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest (1959). He appeals to the enigmatic villain played by Martin Landau to clasp
his hand and help him up. After a moment’s thought plays itself out in his
steely eyes, Landau applies his shoe to the hero’s hand …
Reality
provides a turning-point which is every bit as spectacular and complex in Kevin
Macdonald’s dramatic documentary Touching the Void.
In the Peruvian Andes, mountaineer Joe Simpson broke a leg. His partner, Simon
Yates, decided to lower him down, a section at a time, by rope.
But
when Simpson found himself dangling in mid-air, with some frightening crevices
far below him, and the fierce, snowy weather ruling out any possibility of
communication between the men, Yates had to make a life-and-death choice. He
cut the rope and made his own way safely down the mountain, assuming that
Simpson had died.
This
is exciting stuff, but the best part of the story is yet to come. In enormous
pain and with a determination that beggars belief,
Simpson crawled across ice, slid down snow and fell over rocks to make his way
back to camp. His written account of this descent into hell forms the basis of
the film.
As
a movie, it is an odd and not altogether satisfying project. There is, of
course, no actual footage of the expedition, so Macdonald alternates between
close-ups of the participants telling their tale and ‘dramatic re-creations’
featuring Nicholas Aaron as Yates and Brendan Mackey as Simpson. The only thing
that separates this technique from the hackneyed, sensationalist re-creations
we see on current affairs TV is the scale of the landscape and the grandeur of
the cinematography.
The
most intriguing aspect of the film is its refusal to gloss over the less
palatable aspects of the participants’ personalities. There is resolutely
nothing feel-good or warm-and-fuzzy about this story. There is only an
individual’s capacity to endure and survive.
One
gets little sense of friendship between Simpson and Yates. Their stoic,
unspoken bond as they scale the mountain rests on a code of professionalism and
teamwork that makes the male heroes of Howard Hawks’ adventure movies look like
chatterbox sissies.
Nor
is there any sense of any ties to family, friends or intimate partners back
home. When Simpson matter-of-factly states that, in the depths and of his
physical and emotional anguish, he “did not think about loved ones or anything
like that”, viewers laugh nervously – no doubt wondering if there was indeed
ever any room for loved ones in his obsessed, mountain-climbing existence.
Audiences
will also laugh at the testimony of the third wheel in this tale, Richard
Hawking, a ring-in who sat at camp and waited while the others went on their
expedition. Hawking comes over as an affably daft guy, rather useless in a
crisis. His first reaction when he hears Simpson’s ghostly cry for help is
basically to lie there and hope it will go away.
The
net effect of Touching the Void is
curious: it extols heroism, but it is a kind of heroism that exists in a
value-free, snow-filled vacuum. It will leave many viewers (myself included)
wondering about the futility of mountain-climbing as an endeavour. Even
Simpson's existential encounter with the void comes down to something that
Macdonald can only render comically: as he grapples with unconsciousness, the
wounded climber is haunted by the memory of a typically garish ‘80s disco tune
by Boney M.
MORE mountain climbing: Cliffhanger, Vertical Limit ©
Adrian Martin June 2004
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