Touching the Void
Last night, we saw Touching the VoidâJoe Simpson and Simon Yatesâ attempt on the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. Iâm sitting now, with my hands on the keyboard, wondering if itâs possible to compress down and reduce the story and the impression it had on me into words. I donât think it is, but Iâll do my best.
When most of us make decisions, then tendâin the mainâto be of the âorange juice with bits or withoutâ or âIndian food or Chineseâ type. Simon Yates had a decision so far from this triviality that itâs impossible to think what you might do in the same circumstances. After Joe fell awkwardly and broke his leg[1] when they were starting to descend from the summit, Simon grimly tried to lower him down the mountain, 300ft at a time. Unknowingly, he lowered Joe over an ice overhang, which itself was above a crevasse. Now they were stuck; Joeâs full weight was on the rope but he couldnât climb up, and Simon couldnât pull him back up or maintain his position, as there was nothing to anchor to and he was gradually slipping down the slope himself. So his choice was this: did he stay in this impasse (in which case they would both eventually die), or did he cut the rope and stand some chance of surviving himself?
He cut the rope. Both men tell their stories quite calmly and impassively for the most part, but you still get a glimpse of the psychological impact that decision must have had on Simon, and how it must haunt him even now. The rest of the film documents the hellish things that both men (but particularly Joe) had to endure to make their separate journeys back down the mountain.
In a way, the film has a built in spoiler. Right from the start, we see both men recounting the story today so we know that they must have got down, but I donât think that Iâve ever seen a more gripping film. I think that this might be because the conditions you see them survive are so outside the realm of anything you might reasonably expect a human being to endure, that you canât believe the evidence of your eyes that they are still alive and well.
It really is an extraordinary film, and testament to the stubborn tenacity of life against all the odds. There was one particularly harrowing scene, in which Joe was dragging himself inch by inch along the ground using his ice axes, which reminded me of a wildlife film I saw several years ago. This showed flamingos breeding in the middle of a vast soda lake. The caustic soda combined with sediment to form something like concrete, which formed heavy anklets around the flamingo chicksâ legs. The adults migrated as soon as the lake started drying up, leaving any unfledged chicks to walk across the lake to escape. There was one shot of a chick, exhausted and weighed down by the anklets, lying on the ground and using its beak to haul itself along. It was heart-breaking and inspiring at the same time, and I thought that it showed how our survival instincts donât let us give up until the very last spark is gone, no matter how hopeless it may seem. The way Joe put it was that you have to go on making decisions, even if they are stupid ones; you canât just sit down and wait to die. I love life with a passion, and would give it up very reluctantly, but even so I fear that I would just have given up.
There was one funny scene in all the grimness. A few months ago, I wrote a post about songs going around in my brain, and the bad taste my brain showed in selecting material. Vanessa suggested that these are called âsoundwormsâ. It seems that Iâm not the only one with such experiences. Right at the end of his odyssey, Joe really thought that he was going to die. Rather than selecting some suitably sombre and funereal music, his brain started playing the chorus of Brown Girl in the Ring by Boney M on a continuous loopâmuch to his disgust. As he put it, âBloody hell! Iâm going to die to Boney Mâ. Thank goodness he didnâtâafter all he had been through, it would have been a very ignominious end.
Itâs a remarkable film, with beautiful photography. It must be hard to convey the sense of scale and remoteness to people who arenât mountaineers, but I think that they did a very good job.
1 â¦in a really excruciating way. Rather than any common or garden fracture, the impact forced his tibia and fibula through his knee and split the end of his femur. Some people in the audience actually gasped in empathic pain when he described this.
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Your best is great: I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes. They started the kind that go with a lump in the throat, and turned into tears of laughter with the Boney M bit. Thank you.----- Thank you. Posts like this are a treasure ...
by Julie @ 06/02/2004 1:02 pm • Permalink •
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now i'm scared to walk to the grocery store... split the femur... euw...
by stacy @ 06/02/2004 4:02 pm • Permalink •
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Fabulous post!
by David (TEFL Smiler) @ 06/02/2004 7:02 pm • Permalink •
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p. Thanks, folks. But go and see the film if you can--it's really special. I completely forgot to mention something else which struck me about the climbers; they were incredibly hard on themselves when they described their thoughts and feelings at the time. They were brutally honest; Simon said that when he first found that Joe had broken his leg, he half hoped that Joe would just slip quietly off the mountain so that he didn't have to deal with the situation. They also made no attempt to make themselves seem more sympathetic by putting their feelings into the context of the situation. I'm sure that most people would have been tempted to add after the kind of statement Simon made, "...but of course I didn't really want that to happen, it was just the difficulty of the situation". That really was how they felt at the time, and they didn't try to dress it up at all. I don't think that many people have that kind of self-honesty.
by bsag @ 06/02/2004 8:02 pm • Permalink •
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I've been debating with myself about whether or not I want to see the movie. I read the book when it first came out in paperback, and it was the single most intense and overwhelming reading experience of my life. I could only read a few pages at a time before I had to put the book down and get up and pace around. I've read a lot, including a lot of "true adventure stories," and Touching the Void beat all of them (the only things even remotely comparable were Edward Abbey's description of getting trapped near Havasu Canyon in Desert Solitaire and Rob Schultheis' Bone Games. I don't know if I could make it through the movie.
by Rich @ 07/02/2004 4:03 pm • Permalink •
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great film...i watched it our local independant film cinema in Derby ('local independant film cinema and Derby not usually going together..if you have ever been to Derby you'll understand why not!) - the cinema was packed! - all 125 seats! - the film was incredible...i don't think i've ever sat through a film and never figited...i was aware that my jaw was dropping all the time. What i can't forget is when Joe deliberately lowered himself down in into the cravass knowing that there was a good possibility that there would be no escape...he might have been lowering himself into a deep black hole...and then what would he have done...hung on that rope for a week until he died? how he had the courage to do that is beyond me.
Great site by the way!
by Jane Cooper @ 26/02/2004 9:03 pm • Permalink •
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I just saw the film tonight. I highly recommend seeing this one on the big screen. Donât wait for the video, that would be a travesty,
by Doug Brenner @ 10/03/2004 5:03 am • Permalink •
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Is this film appropriate for our children to see...they are 9, 12 and 13?
by Joni @ 19/03/2004 5:04 am • Permalink •
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