Danny Boyle has made a good film.
127 Hours is the story of Aron Ralston, an accidental mystic who sought high adventure in the canyons of Utah and wound up amputating his own right arm below the elbow...with a five-in-one tool made in China.
Ralston was traversing a canyon millions of years in the making when his body moved the wrong loose-fitting boulder. He and the boulder slipped and tumbled to the canyon base. The elemental forces of the universe carried the boulder to a halt at precisely that spacetime coordinate whence Aron placed his right hand, instinctively, against the canyon.
This business with the boulder is very interesting. What director Danny Boyle makes clear is the accidental quality of Aron's slip. Contingency is a consistent theme in the history of thought that has become something of a wedge issue in current affairs. The deep history of the cosmos and of the earth are seen as proceeding through improbable leaps, from beginning to end. The sheer contingency of Aron Ralston's undeniably gnarly situation seems to elucidate the Wow Factor of life in general. That we are able to face our situation with a sense of humor and the lion's share of ingenuity is perhaps the most endearing quality of our humanity. Aron Ralston in this sense is the ultimate hero, and he graces the silver screen at a time when questions about Deep History and the nature of human behavior in extremis are at the forefront of artistic endeavor. That the story is true and cannot be overstated in its gnarliness makes Danny Boyle a visionary director.
Now, back to this boulder. For those viewers interested in the history of philosophy and of religious mysticism, like myself, Aron's interaction with this boulder comes to embody the quest of mankind, intellect and imagination. Picture this man, stuck literally between a rock and a hard place, piling his gadgets on top of this boulder to assess the likelihood of his survival: camera, video recorder, digital watch, ropes, caribiners, water bottle, energy bars, and a cheaply made five-in-one knife. As he piles these things atop his boulder -- and I say the boulder can rightly be called Aron's boulder -- one gets the sense that here is mankind caught in a vicious moment in history with only the tools at hand. We certainly do not have the privilege of working with the mythical philosopher's stone.
The philosopher's stone was an object imagined from at least the time of medieval alchemy, and perhaps from antiquity. Once the intellect had hacked into the elemental structure of God's mind, indeed, once the intellect had mastered the mixture of elements associated with the experience of a world, it was thought that a substance could be refined that would fulfill every need. Perhaps through intense heat, perhaps through tremendous intuitive insight, in any case, the philosopher's stone would instantly transmute in a moment of contingent necessity into whatever functional shape was required. Need a magic carpet of some kind? No problem! Need a rock to turn into water? The completion of mankind's intellectual quest would yield this transformation, guaranteed.
As I said, Aron Ralston's experience with this boulder amounts to the Artistic Genius of William Blake calling the philosopher's bluff.
The brute fact of the matter is that Aron doesn't have a philosopher's stone. You can say what you will about this state of affairs, but it won't change the facts. His soul hasn't been through the fires. The God of the world hasn't made good on his promise to mankind. Whatever! Aron's gadgets are piled on the boulder and his arm isn't budging.
Fortunately, he has a sense of humor. I cannot emphasize this enough. Any less of a hero would crack and crumble. It would not be a film worth watching, really, if Aron weren't such a truly remarkable instance of what America has to offer these days. I mean, we really raised this kid to be a strong example of our species! Hooray, Aron! This dude opens up his video camera and describes his situation in the coldest detail, so whoever finds his body will know what happened and inform his loved ones. He apologizes to his family for taking life for granted. Beyond this, he utilizes the video camera uncannily to maintain a well-mannered vision of his own social self. The stark representation of his own moving image in the camera monitor seems to enforce Aron's resolve not to burst to pieces in a sad display of cosmic self-pity. His capacity to pause and reverse this video also seems to function as a motivator in Aron's psyche, providing an analogical distance to assist in coping with the detailed assessment of the kind of action required in order for his life to continue. In any case, Aron's well-adjusted personality render him capable of heroic mental gymnastics of the cinematic sort we typically associate with soldiers and horrified victims of catastrophe. Mr. Ralston dramatizes himself in a variety of ways, both in daydream fantasies and through his own video camera, that sublimate his deepest sorrow and allow his spirit the momentum necessary for the decisive amputation that will set him free.
I could see clearly through Aron's struggle that the invisible action of our minds in coping with the world are no less technologies than the inventions we use to amuse ourselves. Literally, our personalities are technological devices. This seems less exotic of a claim since Kevin Kelly has published his latest book on The Technium, but really this is a realization I am pointing to. Danny Boyle's film 127 Hours literally shows how artistic our ordinary minds are. We are the most creative objects in the universe. It's really a joy to behold, and we owe hero-idiots like Aron Ralston a debt of gratitude for contributing to the causes and conditions for our reconfigured appreciation of Life as Art.
