24 December 2003
It’s hard to explain to non-climbers just why climbers do what they do. I know this because I am a non-climber. I can get a handle on sports that are games, where fitness and finesse are required in equal measure. Even with athletics, swimming, and the like — ‘pure’ sport, if you will — there’s the competetive element there. No need to find an angle to add human interest, for me at any rate, because it’s a competition. It’s what we do, compete.
Climbers don’t. Or they do, but not in the same way. Early on in Touching the Void we learn that the prime reason Joe Simpson and Simon Yates, at the time 21 and 25 respectively, wanted to climb Peru’s Siula Grande…was that no-one else had. It wasn’t, in the Hollywood tradition, the mountain that took their fathers. It wasn’t that they’d done everything else. It wasn’t even that they were desperate for fame and fortune. They just wanted to do it first. They wanted to test themselves against the mountain: go up it and back down again. And then go home.
What happened was terrifying and unexpected. They got to the top fine (albeit a little low on gas for the stove), but on the way back, Simpson broke his leg. With storms coming in, Yates set himself to lower Simpson down in 300ft increments. It very nearly worked, but the Siula Grande wasn’t previously unclimbed for a reason. Yates had lowered Simpson over an overhang, quite unintentionally and without either of them having any foreknowledge. He’d only used 150ft of rope at this stage, but the reason for the 300ft increments was that he’d knotted two 150ft ropes together.
To lower Simpson further to ground (which Yates couldn’t see, being some way above the overhang on a dark and stormy night) he would need to get the knot through the metal clips. Which he couldn’t do, because to do that Simpson needed to have something supporting his weight — the ground, for instance.
Simpson tried to climb back up the rope. He notes that this isn’t done hand over hand, especially not with climbing rope, in the dark, in the cold, and with a broken leg. Instead he had to use two metal clips with cord on to pull himself up. These are fiddly things, and in the cold Simpson could only use his thumbs. He dropped one.
Can’t go up, can’t go down. Even worse, as the hours pass, Yates is slipping on the powder, and his arms are getting tired. It’s a climbing taboo to cut the rope on your partner, but that’s what Yates did. (Simpson defends this action; others in ‘the community’ were less sympathetic.) Simpson fell almost 200ft into an icy crevasse, still with the broken leg.
That, believe it or not, is the set-up. From there they both somehow survived and got down the mountain. Perhaps more remarkably, Simpson wrote a book about it. If that wasn’t enough, they both appear in this film as talking heads. It’s a docu-drama, interspersing commentary from Simpson, Yates, and the other one — a third Englishman they found in Lima whom they’d left at base camp — with re-enactments from the Siula Grande itself.
It’s hard to make a film like this workable. In Return to the Siula Grande, the director Kevin Macdonald notes that it had passed through a number of hands: ‘Tom Cruise’s company, Cruise-Wagner, had the option to adapt the book for a few years, as did the BBC. Werner Herzog tried to get it, Frank Marshall, the director of Alive and producer of numerous Steven Spielberg films, wanted it…and yet it had never been made.’
But work it does. Interspersing talking heads with re-enactments was the right thing to do, and it’s interesting to see the differences in approach taken by the three men who were there that day. Simpson’s an engaging speaker, capable of explaining technical bits simply and clearly. Yates is rather chirpy, in delivery if not in content, and The Other One is rather charming and — comparatively — naive. Not only are their accounts interesting in and of themselves, but in reference to Return to the Siula Grande: ‘Simpson saw an early cut of the film and liked it. He feels that it is a true representation of what he went through. Yates, on the other hand, still hasn’t spoken to me since we returned from Peru. I hear he doesn’t like it.’
The actors also put in some sterling performances. As the two players in this drama spent much of their time hundres of feet apart focusing entirely on self-preservation, there isn’t a great deal being said. But the constant cries of pain from a crawling Simpson are deeply affecting, as is Yates’s hollow-eyed demeanour when back at base camp, convinced that Simpson is dead.
Touching the Void is excellent. Go watch it.
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Touching The Void was directed by my co-worker's brother, so our christmas do was to go see it. You're right, it's fantastic, and everyone should see it.
Posted by Aquarion on 25 December 2003 at 9:25:49.