One of the main questions I want to ask myself after being told a story, either from an individual or through a mediated technology, is: What am I to take from this, How does this transcend the feelings and emotions I experience in the moment I receive it and has it left me with something to chew on afterward. However let me be clear -not every story needs to be be laden with meaning, I mean, I'm a great fan of sugar and that makes up too big a part of my diet- and this is also true of my taste in entertainments. I love spectacle, and envisioned worlds, many of which do not bear scrutiny. However if this sugar diet goes too far there will be a far greater cost than just the spare tyre I wear around my middle.
Thus a wonderful night might include Doctor Who, Cirque du Soliel or even Top Gear (though lately I prefer Grand Designs). It might include The Hangover or even some roller derby. But all too soon these experiences, just as sugar does, leave me with an urgent desire for something a little more nuanced, a little more full of nourishing calories.
And recently, because of a return to university, I have been seeking some calories with particular flavour. I am beginning a journey through cultural theory which began in Phenomenology, which offered me a name for the times I can get lost in the moment of an experience, the feeling, the emotion, in the moment and ended at the Post-Modern which seems to draw in all those little signifiers both experienced in the moment and those carried with our collected experiences and ricocheted them off the experiences and knowledges of other to further expand the euphoria of reception.
Last year I saw a film called monsters which through a clever use of Conrad's Heart of Darkness had some clear criticism of modern America embedded in it, nothing foul but none the less worth thinking about.
Over the weekend I saw Oscar contender 127 Hours and have been chewing it over ever since. Danny Boyle has brought us some very clever films throughout his career and recently the Journal I work for has published an article about how Zombies might be used to teach international Relations. Boyle's zombie films were particularly mentioned. Boyle's Sunshine is clearly an argument about hubris, flying too near the sun and how we are our own worse enemies. In Slumdog Millionaire he champions values over money and takes a swipe at so called enlightened India. So what was I to make of 127 Hours.
This "true" story tells us of a courageous young man surviving a terrible accident in the desert canyons of America. He is all alone yet populates his environment with people and places from his memory. The film runs at a shattering pace with the screen often splintered into two or three points of view. But these are not all the protagonist, Aaron's POV. Rather Boyle chooses views of modern day America's pace and noise and isolation within crowds. He seems to invite his audience to view America through the analogy of Aaron's fate in the wilderness.
And this set me thinking about how the fate of this young man might reflect where a post 9/11 and recession hit America might intersect. Certainly Aaron reflects the flush of American youth, in control, able to do anything, beholden to no-one. He seeks out his adventure with considerable arrogance not even bothering to tell anyone where he is going. He offers aid and amusement to a couple of women he meets but as they part one of the girls offers that they may not have even figured in his day at all. Aaron runs off to find his buzz taking a false step which lands him with his hand jammed between a rock and a hard place. And here I began vamping my own, possibly erroneous reading of the film. He appears to have his hand stuck in the cookie jar.
Is Boyle really inviting us to draw a comparison of America with this afflicted boy- I felt the ghost of Forrest Gump sweeping past me, one analogy to another. Aaron's subsequent hours are then placed before us. James Franco offers a picture of youth and vitality which does honour to the spirit of America even in its gentle criticism of the place it now finds itself. I see an America that feels it can go it alone, who uses words like exceptional to distance itself from the rest of the world. An America who ran into its own doom either by alienating those it proposed to help or by not noticing that its attention was fleeting. An America that felt no obligation not only to those without its borders but tellingly to those closest to it. An America whose own high self esteem and confidence blinded itself to the peril it was so quickly walking into.
Who can not see that Aaron's hand might represent the devil may care financial practises of wall street or the sudden aloneness and realisation of mortality he must face as a cry from the people of a post 9/11 country. Should I not read Aaron's pleas to his family and friends as a caution that we live in one world which requires a certain responsibility to be shared if we wish to survive the next generation or two. and is there not a lesson to be learned as Aaron cuts his own hand off in order to make a break for safety. If thy hand offend thee, strike it off? is there not a lesson in this?
Maybe Boyle would say not, at least not intentionally, and yet I consider that the thoughts I as receptor have are not within his control and that what I see can be just as valid as any other reading of the film. I can not guarantee that anyone else will see what I see. But then I was introduced in honours year to a pro-Nazi reading of Disney's Pinocchio and I remember how potent that reading was, at least to that reader.
Whether or not Boyle intended or in fact you read the things that I see in 127 hours it still makes for the kind of potent cinema I love, I hope your own experience is similarly deep and thought provoking. I know I continue to try to determine what it is that Boyle suggests America must sacrifice in order to survive and return to the sharing member of his society that Aaron returns to. These thoughts are as much about being human as they are about being right.
I love some of the provocations these calories turn up, real or not, the world is just too interesting a place not to consider those things that are not just the things that mean we eat for one more day or the entertainments that take us away from such closures as necessity may bring. To be fully engaged beyond oneself is to really expose the best of what we can be, beyond an addiction to sugar, towards as wide an understanding as each of us can reach.
