"Wild,” directed by John Marc Vallee, 2014
This film is hard to watch.
Even with Reese Witherspoon as ‘eye’ candy for male viewers, the dangers
women face are only highlighted by being out in the woods or deserts or
mountains alone. It relates to the film
“Into the Wild,” about a young man who camped out alone in the Alaskan semi-wilderness,
only to die in a wrecked bus due to several small miscalculations. (Reviewed
below. Use blog search box, upper left.)
Yet here we have more vulnerability and the chances of a small
miscalculation are greater. Witherspoon
plays Cheryl Strayed, who wrote a memoir about hiking most of the length of the Pacific Crest Trail,
("PCT") from the Sonora desert near Mexico to a bridge on the Columbia River gorge
in Oregon.
This film is not merely
a travelogue of beautiful vistas, quirky characters, cold, heat and grueling trails, full of hunger, thirst, being lost and falling. Strayed is fucked up due to her recent
divorce because of her own behavior, her mother’s death from cancer, abuse concerning her father who she never sees, and her
own inability to create a real life in Minneapolis. Instead sex and heroin fill in the gap. Between the bad boots, over-filled pack,
inadequate preparation, over-determination and naiveté - plowing through
mountain meadows of heavy snow with only a compass - this hike was a bold but
also potentially suicidal move on her part.
Yet it is as a woman that this hike resonates. Strayed (her ironic made-up name) has no
protection – no gun, hatchet, not even pepper spray. No skill in self defense. She is wary of men on the trail – and while
friendly, always suspects something of them.
In one case, she is almost raped by a bow hunter packing a knife, but he
is fortunately called away by his buddy.
She also takes advantage of being a ‘poor’ woman on the trail. Some guys she meet call her the “Queen of
the PCT” because many people go out of their way to help her – mostly men. So it cuts both ways. Beauty can be a disability - or a help. She meets only one other woman on the trail,
but does not hike with her. She prefers
to do it alone, and quite clearly it is a tremendous achievement to finish the
trail, especially as a woman.
Women are many times not taught wood's skills, survival skills, physical toughness or being
on their own. This film proves that to
be a form of chauvinist social and class conditioning that can be overcome.
Is Reese Witherspoon a good choice for this part? Given her past performances as a chirpy,
comedic light-weight, I’d have to say no.
To me it was always Reese Witherspoon on that trail, not Cheryl Strayed. And nothing bad can ever happen to Reese
Witherspoon.
Memoirs have been called the ‘neo-liberal’ format of choice,
as they revolve around individuals, and usually involve personal addictions or
disfunctionality of some kind. The
memoir format is especially pitched to American women by the ‘literary’ schools, I think as a way to short-change their experience and writing skills. This
film partially recreates the memoir format, writ large. Yet because it takes
place along a physical trail greater than any individual, it allowed Strayed
to extract herself from her own self-misery. If it had only been a memoir, few would care as much.
After all, we all experience death and many of us experience
divorce and some experience family abuse. Loss is essential to the
experience of living, intrinsic to understanding reality. Even addicts can recover. Most of us go on, no matter what. But few of us hike the PCT.
Books about survival issues – “Deep Survival,” “Into
the Wild,” “All is Lost,” and “Five Stages of Collapse.” Also recommended, though not reviewed, is the hilarious book, "A Walk in the Woods," by Bill Bryson, about walking the Appalachian Trail.
Red Frog
January 3, 2015
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