Man on Wire

Odysseus in Modern Cinema Adele Tutter, M.D., Ph.D.

Grizzly Man, directed by Werner Herzog, 2005 Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn, 2007 Man on Wire, directed by James Marsh, 2008 127 Hours, directed by Danny Boyle, 2010

The ageless story of a young man’s solo quest is retold in four films released in the past decade. With varying degrees of alienation and rebellion, each of these films’ subjects reject the quotidian material world and embark on a journey in search of something greater, via communion with nature and the challenge to conquer danger. Two, Into the Wild (Sean Penn, 2007) and 127 Hours (Danny Boyle, 2010), are theatrical versions of the lives of Christopher McCandless and Aron Ralston, whose adventures in the wilderness meet with the loss of life (McCandless) and limb (Ralston). The other two, Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005) and Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008), are documentary films that use historical footage and contemporary interviews to narrate the unique vocations of Phillip Petit and Timothy Treadwell, resulting in triumph (Petit) and disaster (Treadwell).

Timothy Treadwell spent thirteen summers camping in Katmai National Park, Alaska, videotaping himself living in close proximity to grizzly bears. Although confident he had won the bears’ trust, he and his girlfriend are ultimately mauled and eaten by them. In Grizzly Man, director Werner Herzog reconstructs Treadwell’s life with the bears from the many hours of video footage he left: even his death, and that of his girlfriend, was recorded in sound. While do not hear this, we do see Herzog’s emotional response on film as he listens to it on headphones.

Danny Boyle, director of 127 Hours, collaborated with his subject, Aron Ralston, whose memoir 127 Hours: Between a Rock and a Hard Place was published in 2004. Together, they worked closely to recreate in minute detail five fateful days of Ralston’s life. Hiking in the desert, a falling boulder pins Ralston’s right arm, immobilizing him; with no prospects for rescue, he can save his life only by first breaking, and then amputating his own arm.

With far less material to work with, director Sean Penn had to fictionalize much of Into the Wild. Christopher McCandless severs ties with his family, gives himself a new, exalted name—“Alexander Supertramp”—and journeys out West, ending up in Alaska. After a four-month attempt to survive on his

1 own in the wilderness near Denali National Park, he starves to death in an abandoned bus. Into the Wild takes its name from the 1996 book by Jon Krakauer, who meticulously pieces together the story from fragmentary recovered diaries. The result may contain a correct record of his subject’s movements, but his inner world remains a matter of mystery; McCandless documented his own demise far less thoroughly than Treaderwell. The few photos he took of himself show an emaciated yet still handsome young man posing triumphantly with game.

Man on Wire tells the story of Phillipe Petit, who travels from France to the USA, illegally strings a cable between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, and, with no safeguards whatsoever, crosses it eight times, gaining instant fame as the man who walked the highest wire. Petit is the outlier in this group; he is the only non-American, he is the only one with a crew behind him, and he alone anticipates an audience, and his adventure is the most explicitly risky. Director James Marsh’s film, based on Petit’s eponymous memoir, also serves as somewhat of a correction to this hagiography, wherein he minimizes his support team’s material contributions.

Hollywood has long mined the theme of “The Hero’s Journey,” manualized by Joseph Campbell in his best-selling 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell’s reductive codification of world mythology into a template he terms the “monomyth” details the three major stages of the archetypal hero’s mythic journey—Departure, Initiation, and Return. Thus homogenized, the stories of Prometheus, Aeneas, Odysseus, Buddha, and Jesus gave rise to The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Avatar, countless lone cowboy stories, and many others, generations of screenwriters dutifully adhering to Campbell’s schema in the hopes of selling the next blockbuster script. But even though the four films under discussion largely follow the iconic storyline of the man who steps out of this world and into another in the solo search for wisdom, truth and glory, their plots are not based on fantasy or fiction, but of actual occurrences: these are stories not of mythic heroes, but of people of flesh and blood. Petit is able to realize what seems like an impossible dream; Ralston improbably escapes what seems like certain death. McCandless and Treadwell are less fortunate. It might be argued that the directors of the cinematic interpretation of these subjects and their stories artificially shaped them to fit the structure of “The Hero’s Journey.” Alternatively, and more likely, I think, the course of their lives was influenced and inspired by ubiquitous cultural mythology.

The endurance of Homer’s celebrated epics reflects the broad appeal of the myth of the solitary man and his quest; box-office returns confirm the interest in those real-life stories that realize it. In one, and by no means the only psychoanalytic interpretation, this mythology symbolizes and renders heroic the universal

2 struggle for individuation, while at the same time neatly tapping into archaic fantasies of omnipotence that support the child’s self-sufficiency as they separate from their parents and begin to explore of the world. Apropos, 127 Hours opens with scenes of the stunning petroglyphs of giant men in Horseshoe Canyon, Utah.

Ritualistic solo journeys into the wild, such as the Aboriginal Australian walkabout and the American Indian vision quest, respectively are rites of passage that symbolize and mark the coming of age of young men seeking the powerful wisdom and guidance imparted by ancestors and nature. Closer to home, adolescents in American summer camps typically take at least one solo overnight trip outside camp limits with a minimum of supplies, a growth experience often described as transformative. But rather than safely enacting ritualized or otherwise modified mythology—or vicariously enjoying it in a comfortable movie theatre—McCandless, Ralston, Petit, and Treadwell, concretely actualize it. Taking a privileged look into their protagonists’ minds, 127 Hours and Grizzly Man suggest some reasons why.

In the cinematic version of Ralston’s memoir—in which we explicitly identifies with Christopher McCandless—the actor playing Ralston (James Franco) is alone on a weekend canyoneering trip in Utah’s Blue John Canyon. Breaking a cardinal rule of wilderness exploration, he pointedly avoids telling anyone about his plans, not even when, at work, he is asked about them. Before he leaves, he listens to his mother leaving a message on the answering machine but does not pick up, nor does he return a call from his father. In the wilderness, Ralston encounters some fellow hikers; swimming in a secluded water hole, they enjoy a moment of transcendence, but Ralston once more sets out alone, implicating a purposeful detachment from social and familial connections. Adding to the sense of estrangement later, when in extremis, Ralston records a good-bye message to his sister: “I didn't get to hear firsthand how the national championships went, but I heard from Mom that you were tenth overall in speech and debate in the nation... I’m very proud of you.” His trek was not that inherently risky—the accident that imprisoned him was a freak occurrence, rendered life threatening only by his determinedly secret solitude. Nevertheless, his brave means of rescue makes him a hero. Freed, Ralston staggers back to open land, where a hiking family bring him to safety: the true danger for this apparently normal and well-adjusted individual lies in self-imposed isolation.

Like McCandless, the protagonist of Grizzly Man is less able to maneuver within society. In fact, he eschews it almost completely, camping in grizzly territory (accessible only by helicopter) as much as possible, sometimes with his girlfriend, and often alone. Also like McCandless, he changes his name: reborn as Timothy Treadwell, this bitter failed actor is now the self-appointed savior of the grizzly bear

3 and zealous guardian of its shrinking habitat. Treadwell admires the power and dignity of these wonders of nature, and he empathizes with them, perceiving them as similarly misunderstood and underappreciated. As suggested by the very name Grizzly Man, Treadwell’s excessive identification verges on the psychotic fusion—believing, contrary to all knowledge and evidence, that he (alone) can relate to them as a fellow bear, friend and not foe. He thus repudiates not only society, but also his own lowly and disappointing humanity, along with critical reality factors. Treadwell’s unmitigated grandiosity drives him to compensate for professional failure with glorious, quasi-suicidal isolation: his claim to a unique rapport with the bears ends when he becomes their prey.

If a child must individuate not only to become his own person, individuation also allows for the development of mature object relations—the vital connections that nourish and sustain adult life. In myth, if one must leave society to become a hero, he must rejoin society in order to be recognized and celebrated as such. Petit returns from the heavens to gain the glory he sought; Ralston returns less an arm, but no less a hero. But McCandless and Treadwell never return; like the mortals the Greek gods punished for their hubris, their outcomes correlate with their relative inability to tolerate, navigate, and function within their social matrix, resorting neither to omnipotent fantasy or schizoid remove.

These films elaborate the tension between the grandiose, omnipotent fantasies that propel us out from our parents’ arms and into the world of risk and danger, on the one hand; and on the other, our all-too-human need for others, which, while potential threatening our cherished omnipotence and hard-won autonomy, brings us back from the heavens and down to earth. This is a tension normally confronted and largely resolved in adolescence, and yet remains active to some extent throughout life—whether tested in weekend adventures, or in the wilds of our imagination.