Free Solo

Free Solo

Outside Cinema City in Norwich, there is numerical proof that Norfolk has a proper climbing community.  Climbers are scruffy fuckers as a rule, and there a load of people with messy hair and down jackets milling around.  Some people I recognise walk in to the Box Office, and the powerful smell of weed like smoky bonfires wafts in with them.

In the full cinema I look around I know three quarters of the people in here by sight, and when I wave - as an experiment - at least a third wave back.  We are here to watch Free Solo, the new film with Alex Honnold, in which he climbs El Cap without ropes and doesn't die, similar to my own short film from earlier this year.

Free Solo Movie Poster.

I sit there in the dark surrounded by friends. The seats are comfy, but some of the viewing isn't.  Not necessarily the bits climbing either - they're tense enough as he pastes a toe onto a crisp-sized slope of granite above three hundred metres of drop.

No.  The hard bits are about Alex's motivation.  The way he slips at a question in a psychological test about depression.  A casual reference to the 'bottomless well of self-hatred'.  Alex teaching himself how to hug, because it wasn't something he grew up with - 'Now, I'm pretty good at it."    

Its a great piece of film, a genuine achievement.  Not just all the difficult bits- filming while tied to a rope a kilometre off the ground, wrestling with the ethics of potentially watching your friend slip into an unsurviveable fall - but the much trickier part.  It explains to normal people what motivates climbers, not the normal 'adrenalin junky' bullshit.

Climbers will copy things from this film, hoping a bit of the magic rubs off on them.  Van sales might go up.  I expect to hear "I eat the same food every day, because I'm eliminating variables" more often.  The meal of choice will be sweet potato, spinach and tinned chilli.  This will be served as a 'Climber's Lunch' or a 'Honnold' at crag cafes.  Climbers will eat straight from the pan, and pretend they don't know how to make coffee.

"There'll be a lot more deaths." my mate Garry says after the film.  "Next ten years, death rate'll go right up, people going soloing."

I'm not so sure, I don't want to believe that.  He's probably right, people ignoring the preparation that Alex went through, and believing that easy ground well within their normal capability is always safe.  

 

M. John Harrison wrote that climbing's 'dangers were artificial but perfectly real.  The hinge between the game and its consequences were an act of choice."  As climbers we need make choices honestly, and don't lie to ourselves about why we are doing it.  

The bit I hope climbers copy from this film is being honest about their mental health.  Or at least talking about the darker motivations that pull us up there onto the wall.