Category: Introspection

Into the Void

Well, I just finished watching Into the Void: Death on Everest. It followed me watching Into the Wild.

Into the Void, I didn’t really like. Part of it was that the movie was kinda cut and dried. They hiked up to the summit of Everest, and along the way, people died. Yes, it’s tragic, but what do you expect? And with a title like that, you’re just waiting to see who’d next. It’s terrible, especially knowing it’s a documentary, so these things, in general, really happened. In and of itself gut-wrenching.

Into the Wild, on the other hand, was really good (not touch me deeply good, but good). It was written by the same guy who wrote Into the Void. *spoiler alert* I knew, before I watched it, that the protagonist dies. And even if I hadn’t you could kind of see it coming. But I can empathize with him, a young man trying to find his place. Enough so that I paperback swap’d for the book, and read it this weekend as well. Surprisingly like the book, with a lot more of the details and other anecdotes of others with the same sense for exploration (also with tragic results). But watching (and reading) about his exploits I can see that he was trying to find what in himself was missing. And perhaps, by the end, he’d found it and just couldn’t come back from the place he’d gone to.

“In reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future” – Alexander Supertramp.

Things to say

Well, I’ve never really been a big fan of blogs. Reading or writing. Reading blogs seems more like living life vicariously through others, and I tend to think I’d rather live things myself. And because of that, I tend to think that others probably wouldn’t care much to hear what I have to say, for the same reasons.

But today has been one of those days where, perhaps, I need to write a blog to hear about my own life. Who knows?

I’ve just watched one of the most horrifying movies I’ve ever seen: Touching the Void. It’s a documentary of two friends who climb together, only to try to climb something that no one has ever done, but has been tried, so they think it’s worth the challenge.

It reminds me of other movies I find equally horrifying/fascinating. Yesterday, while transcoding some of my old VHS tapes to mpg, I stumbled across something I recorded years ago from the TV about 4 Olympic-caliber kayakers who attempted to descend a section of the Tsang Po River that had never been run before, and chronicles what was, in effect, their failure. (The second attempt is documented as well).

Then there’s The Same River Twice (2003) and a very similar movie Same River Twice (1996) which the author of one insists that while he’d heard of the other one, he’d never seen it. The first (fiction) chroniclers a group of friends who return to a river they used to guide on in their youth, and how they come to terms with events form their past. The second is a documentary about the lives of a group of friends who take a month-long trip down the Colorado.

Open Water would be another of those stories, the story of two divers who are with a diving group, and then get left behind by accident.

I had Touching the Void recommended to my during my Swift Water kayaking class, along with Into the Wild and Into Thin Air. Touching the Void was just the first one to show up from Netflix.

And now, while writing this and finding the links, I’ve added Deep Water to my queue.

It clearly says something about me that all of these movies touch me deeply.