If "127 Hours" Moved You

After watching 127 Hours, the true story of canyoneer Aron Ralston, I stayed up half the night rapelling into the Google abyss. I had fallen in love with Ralston, who got trapped under a boulder in the wilds of Utah and then escaped by amputating his own arm with a pocket knife. Or perhaps I loved James Franco, who plays him in the movie. It was 2010. The world didn’t yet know about Franco’s affinity for teenage girls, Ralston’s alleged assaulting of his partner. Both men were unproblematic heartthrobs.

Because the film concludes with Ralston's escape, viewers get to land on a note of relief, but I needed more assurance that he was ok. According to Google, he was thriving: A father, motivational speaker, and memoirist, he still enjoyed hiking and biking. He even championed nature conservation, despite how royally nature had screwed him. But I guess I wasn’t sold because I’ve never stopped wondering: What is it like to be Aron Ralston, to remember those long days of entrapment, the approach of certain death? What is it like to live with the reminder that you sliced through your own nerve, sawed off your own limb? What is the mental toll?

These days, I think too much about mental tolls, specifically the toll of the Covid era—all the worrying, all the grieving, all the touch deprivation and masked smiles and rampant food insecurity—the toll of knowing that “getting back to normal” won’t reverse climate change, rid us of QAnon, or resurrect George Floyd.

What does it really take to heal—personally, nationally, globally? What happens when pain gets stuck, when pain is a part of us we can’t carve away?

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In I May Destroy You, the semi-autobiographical HBO series that Michaela Coel wrote and starred in last year, Coel’s character Arabella is drugged and raped in the bathroom of a bar. She remembers it only in fragments that she fixates on piecing together. She keeps going back to the bar, searching for clues. In episode 10, her best friend Terry expresses impatience: “It’s one thing going on an, I don’t know, hiatus,” Terry says, “and another thing returning to the scene of the crime.” She wants Arabella to get over it, move on. Appealing to their other friend, she asks, “Ben, does that seem normal in any way?”

Ben shrugs. Then he watches Arabella, who’s vaping. He says, “You know there’s nothing coming out of that thing, right?”

“There’s not, is there,” Arabella says.

“No,” Ben says, and they laugh.

What a nod to the reality of trauma and the futility of escape hatches: there’s nothing coming out of that thing. There’s no quick fix for post-traumatic hell. No “hiatus” will offer a respite from it; there will be no moving on. As Coel explained to British GQ last year, “The past isn't ever really past. You have to learn to manage it. And it stays with you.”

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The genius of 127 Hours is that it never lacks tension, despite the glaring reason it should lack tension: The story centers one character stuck in one place. No one executes a bank heist, or saves the world, or steps into the boxing ring. Franco never so much as rounds the corner, knocking books from the arms of a future love interest. By contrast, in I May Destroy You, Arabella enjoys plenty of company—friends, family, lovers, fans. And yet she, too, is stuck and alone. The difference is, she’s stuck long-term. The other difference is the invisibilty of her boulder.

Perhaps I’m romanticizing the Obama years, but in 2010 I could get behind the takeaway from 127 Hours, the idea that five days of hell would yield lifelong liberation. As I googled Aron Ralston that night, my then-boyfriend slept beside me. Thanks to a deviated septum, he snored like a cartoon drunk. He hadn’t been as impressed by the movie as I had. Plus, he was a jealous type, who resented my crush on the world’s manliest man. Back then, I believed the message that pain could be shaken off like a heavy coat and forgotten: Break up with your boyfriend if you no longer love him. Cut off your arm if you have to. Learn your lesson. Start fresh. Become an inspiration! In 2020, we needed something deeper, more nuanced—recognition that healing is slow, that our problems weren’t going to magically vanish come January 1, or Inauguration Day, or two weeks after our second Pfizer shot.

Arabella only restores her mental health by dismantling everything she knows: She questions the quality of her friendships, the integrity of her friends. She interrogates her own accountability. Burned by the system, she seeks her own justice. She makes the art she wants to make, despite a contract to make different art. Her road to wholeness is brutal and long. That resonated with me; victorious arm-severing no longer could. In 2020, I needed to see a character destroyed. And then watch her live in the ruins. And then do the work of rebuilding.