Free Solo (2018)

directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin

Lena Moses-Schmitt

Alex Honnold is climbing. Alex Honnold is climbing the sheer rock face of El Capitan. Alex Honnold is climbing the sheer rock face of El Capitan without ropes. Alex Honnold is climbing the sheer rock face of El Capitan without ropes and no matter how many times I repeat this to myself, the image I see on the screen still won’t cohere inside my mind. Language is of no use here. He is an ant in his red shirt, tracing his way up a crack on a gigantic rock face. The juxtaposition between what Alex Honnold is doing and what Brad and I are doing—sitting motionless in a dark theater—is dizzying. Oh look, my brain says, a human where one does not belong.

I don’t remember what my day was like before going to the theater that evening to see Free Solo, the documentary following Alex Honnold as he prepares to become the first climber to ascend all three thousand feet of El Capitan, the vertical granite formation in Yosemite, sans ropes or gear—a form of climbing known as free soloing, which less than 1% of rock climbers attempt. My day was probably composed of a lot of sitting at a computer. Writing at a computer, sending emails at a computer, walking from my apartment to work and back again. Staring at the palm-sized computer in my hand. Eating a salad at my desk. Not exactly the kind of life that screams risk, that reminds me you could die at any moment!, though I’ve always been someone who carries that base knowledge around with me, can spot—or perhaps more accurately, hallucinate—risk in the smallest of circumstances: a glass of water near a power cord, a strange smell of gas lingering outside the apartment, a car accelerating near a crosswalk. Being in my brain can sometimes be like living in hypothetical Final Destination movies. In this way, Free Solo was strangely calming.

Free Solo is not your traditional man-triumphs-over-nature narrative. I mean, it is, but it’s also a somewhat dubious love story, and it’s about the responsibility of the artist, as well as the responsibilities we owe to the people we love, and of course, as many of these man vs. nature narratives are, albeit less explicitly, it’s also about the hubris of white men. But for me, overwhelmingly, it’s a documentary about our attitudes around death.

“Anyone could just conceivably die on any given day—soloing just makes it feel more immediate and much more present,” Honnold says. I find this an interesting choice of words. It’s not just that soloing makes dying more present—it also makes it more likely. He thinks of death as something that just happens, no big deal: rationality taken to its wildest, most logical possible conclusion. To me—someone who goes through great pains to never place herself in a situation where she could conceivably die—it’s a notion as foreign as the idea of climbing El Capitan, with or without ropes. His friend and mentor, the climber Tommy Caldwell, describes Honnold’s desire to free solo El Cap thusly: “Imagine an Olympic gold medal level achievement, where if you don’t get that medal, you’re gonna die.” As Caldwell points out, every person who has made free soloing a big part of their lives is now dead. To free solo is to intentionally raise the stakes the highest they can go. What kind of person does that?

Alex Honnold does. Let’s dive in. Here is Alex Honnold, making dinner in the van where he lives, shoveling potatoes straight from the skillet into his mouth with a spatula. (“I love being in the van,” he intones, with the same emotional frequency as “I love lamp.”) Here is Alex Honnold, telling the film crew that he had to teach himself how to hug when he was in college. Here is Alex Honnold, explaining to his friends, who are carving pumpkins, that he doesn’t like Halloween because he resents being commanded to have fun. Here is Alex Honnold, a mere three days after spraining his ankle, navigating his way up a rock wall in the gym with a clunky plastic medical boot on his foot. He isn’t a brave person, exactly—an MRI confirms that his amygdala, where fear is stored in the brain, just doesn’t activate in the way it’s supposed to, and can you really be brave if you don’t have fear?—but he is certainly an extremely rational person. In the leadup to his historic climb, he mentions being spooked by the idea of soloing El Cap, and where most people might use that apprehension as a sign to pivot away, he drills down through it: “When people talk about suppressing fear, I expand my comfort zone by practicing the moves over and over—I work through the fear until it’s just not there anymore,” he says. As he prepares for the MRI, he takes a personality test where he has to agree/disagree with certain statements. He reads them out loud and zips through them: “‘Emotionally stable?’ Agree. ‘Ingenious, a deep thinker?’ Disagree.” Then: “‘Is depressed?’ Hmm.” He pauses for a few long seconds. The scene cuts before we hear his answer.

He is often ungenerous to the people who love him most. His relationship with Sanni, his new-ish girlfriend with whom he’s falling in love, is the prime vehicle the film uses to highlight this trait. He doesn’t understand, or refuses to understand, why people want him to stay alive. He knows that if he dies, his friends and family will be sad, but he thinks they’ll eventually just get over it. When Sanni asks him if putting her into the equation would ever change how he approached free soloing, he says, “If I had some obligation to maximize my lifespan, then, like, yeah, I’d have to give up soloing.” “Was me asking you—do you see that as an obligation now?” she asks. “Uh, no, no,” he says. “But I appreciate your concerns.”

The most fascinating and alarming thing to me about Honnold is not his disregard for his life, but the combination of carelessness and the absurd amount of preparation this particular feat requires. I had no idea climbing was so heavily choreographed—I assumed there must be routes, like established hiking trails, that you could take up El Capitan, but I didn’t realize they were so detailed. It’s like an intricate, death-defying dance performance.

In one section of the climb beautifully called the Boulder Problem, the ascent is choreographed down to the placement of individual fingers. Honnold must pinch a part of the rock between the index and thumb of his left hand, almost like he’s holding a joint, and switch his thumbs so that he’s holding his body up by his right thumb as he reaches out with his left hand to grab a “bead-loaf type hold which feels kinda grainy”; he must then karate kick his left foot out to an edge on the opposite corner, and if he doesn’t do it all exactly in this order and with the right amount of energy and focus, if he gets distracted by the producers or a bird or makes one mistake, he will die. As I watch Alex’s hands perform these ironically dainty movements, his life dependent on rock variations so minuscule it’s as if they’ve been fantasized into existence, I’m reminded of the weird (and often unsettling) determination of humans to find ways to survive where they don’t need to. 

One of the most mesmerizing scenes in the documentary is Alex, in voiceover, going over his chronological notes of the entire climb—mostly body positions, but also reminders to himself during certain pitches, like “trust the right foot” and “go fast”— spliced over a montage of him throughout a normal day: climbing, eating, doing pull ups in his van. His voice is quick, almost robotic—he’s reading from his notebook, but you can tell that he’s pretty much memorized the climb, and that this recitation is a form of visualization, that magical connection between imagination and reality. My favorite note to himself is the last: “Autopilot. Period.” All the thinking and preparation that is required so that one can, at last, not think.

Watching this, I experienced a heady, disorienting cocktail of recognition and disbelief. All my life, I’ve been a classic overpreparer. I used to do the same kind of visualization of my programs when I was a figure skater, to prepare for competitions. It became a kind of compulsion, imagining the launch, takeoff, and landing of a double toe loop in my head over and over like a stutter. Maybe this is why, as an adult, I don’t trust myself to improvise. If I have to give a presentation or reading, I practice it hundreds of times first, making notes in the margins where I should go slower, where I should pause for emphasis, or where I need to insert emotion. Sometimes I feel as if I’m treating myself like a robot so I can act like a human. Once, embarrassingly, the week before I had to escort an author around a large city, I practiced the hour-long drive, memorized the exits off the highway, scoped out where I could park. If I’m afraid of making mistakes, it’s because I’m afraid of two things: dying via freak accident, or a vulnerability that feels, irrationally, like the emotional equivalent to dying.

To watch Free Solo is to grope for all these footholds of relatability with Honnold, even if any grounds for comparison is laughable. We are not at all similar. I don’t even like roller coasters. I don’t even like driving. But as I sat there in the theater, I realized that I had been putting the same level of stakes on myself, for no reason. I have lived so much of my life with fear and caution. I was always so careful. I always thought that if I took one wrong step in the choreography I’d constructed for my life, I’d lose everything. Only now do I see how pliable living is, when not climbing sheer rock. There is so much room.

As I watched him free solo the Boulder Problem and then reach the top, very final bit of the climb where he’s just dangling, his back nearly parallel to the ground three thousand feet below him, totally exposed, my eyes could barely even understand what I was watching—whatever regulates and controls the flow of perception in my mind was quaking and expanding like a black hole. It feels entirely possible he will fall, even though you know he doesn’t—it’s that multiverse kind of sensation. The frames alternate between tight, zoomed-in shots of his body—his fingers perched on a centimeter of rock, his feet barely touching the wall—and wide, sweeping shots of El Capitan, Honnold registering as a blip, a taillight in his red shirt, with the dark-green sea of trees below. The combination of tight and wide shots perfectly underscores the importance of what he’s doing while signifying that it ultimately doesn’t matter. The earth he is scaling doesn’t care or even know that he’s the first person to do this.

The unsung hero of the movie is actually Sanni, who over the course of the documentary embarks on her own mental climbing project. The night before Alex climbs El Cap, Sanni hugs and kisses him goodbye. “Ciao! See you later,” she says with forced casualness as she slides the van door closed, kind of an earth-shattering thing to say if you literally don’t know if you’ll ever see that person again. She’s saying it for him, so that she doesn’t show him how freaked out she is. She’s saying it for him so that she can keep him alive. 

She holds it together until she’s driving away, at which point she starts crying. “I mean, you know, there’s just that weird thought of like, don’t freaking let that be our last hug, or whatever... I shouldn’t be having that thought of, like, what if something happens? What if I don’t see him again?” Maybe Sanni is more brave than Alex. She actually understands, on an emotional level, the meaning of what could happen. It affects her more than it affects him. She is terrified. And still she stays.

I know we’re supposed to view Honnold as somewhat delusional, and to take delight in that. But the documentary also points at us as the semi-delusional ones. Sanni says that she shouldn’t be having the thought that a hug could be their last, but part of me thinks...isn’t it better to live as if it could be? The disconnect is that while Sanni understands their hug could be their last, Alex won’t allow himself to feel that way. His mental armor, understandably, is thick. “I’ll see her in like five days or something, so it’s not really goodbye,” he says after she leaves. It seems as though he has to literally dangle by a thumb off a rock in order to understand he could die. Maybe that’s why he does it. When Brad leaves for work some mornings, I try to hug him like his car will overturn on the freeway. I inhale his shirt-smell. I let my whole face sink into it. I memorize the weight of his arms. I want to be as present as Alex Honnold climbing a fucking mountain.

I worry that I’m glorifying Alex, that I’m implicitly building an argument for unnecessary, almost luxurious acts of endangerment for the sake of enlightenment. I’m aware that I can easily puncture and deflate this entire line of thought by reminding myself that Alex is a white man. Bum amygdala or not, his relationship to risk will always be contextually different. Josephine Livingstone, in her review of Free Solo in The New Republic, quotes climber Simon Yates, from the documentary Touching the Void: “The world has become so safe, he explains. Tough mountain climbing is risky. It makes you feel ‘more alive.’” Touching the Void was made in 2003, a much different year than 2019, and I wonder if Yates still feels the same way about this supposedly safe world. But maybe it’s just that for most white men the world is always safe. Is climbing the only way some men can understand true danger?

I want to go back to the line Alex says in the beginning. “Anyone could just conceivably die on any given day—soloing just makes it feel more immediate and much more present.” I wish that didn’t have to be the case. I think there are other ways, but what do I know? I’ve never soloed, have never climbed. All I have are the trees. All I have is the sky. Brad’s shirt. I think, sometimes, that these can be enough. To realize, I mean. I’m reminded of “Door to the River,” a poem by Mark Doty that always makes my chest hurt, as if I’m experiencing a sharp increase in elevation. It’s about—what else?—realizing you will die. It doesn’t take scaling 3,000 feet of sheer cliff. He’s just sitting in the grass, listening to a woman call after her dog. 

“Door to the River” is titled after a painting by Willem De Koonig, a painter famous for his abstract expressionism, famous for those kinds of paintings that no one understands. Doty attempts to try: “He means, I think, there’s an out,” he begins, “built of these fistfuls of yellows. / Means, I think, there’s a door, in this passionate and hard won / approximation, in this rough push / and lemon smear.” Then, he scolds those who demand some sort of higher meaning out of such a painting—out of life itself: “The trees only seem still, / fixed their hour in the rush // and suction from that gate: / can’t you just walk between the yellow // word field and the green word door / and not demand to penetrate // the primed and stubborn scrim / toward some clarity beyond forms?”  Later: “Listen, / there’s a door in these yellow handfuls, these wild strokes. / Haven’t you walked // into something like happiness, but larger?” Later still: 

I pressed my stomach against 
the warm surface of the field, 

sunlight drowsing and slanting  
toward us while the dogs and I 

lay easy and with no need to be 
anywhere. We heard a woman calling, 

in a European accent, German maybe, her dog…

calling Jackie, Jackie without urgency 
because she knew that Jackie would come. 

That’s when I went through 
the door.

(This is where I always start to cry.)

It was her voice, 
the name pronounced softly 
over and over above the tender

yellow scent of the grass and the hurry 

of intimately related and endlessly 
varied yellows, the sunflowers’

golden insistences…

an instant when the whole ceaseless 

push and tumble arrived at some 
balance and there was no lack, 

nothing missing, and for the duration 
of that sheen

—during which you know
this moment of equipoise

is one more movement of light

and flesh and grass passing through 
the corridor, the world’s wild maw

of dynamic motion—
Jackie, she said, Jackie, yellow word

and for that astonished instant

hung on the other side, permitted
entrance to the steep

core of things you think 
of course this is what death 

will be. Fine.

The poem is long, five pages. It’s a patient and deliberate buildup. Doty works himself up, with language, willingly guiding himself into the door, the black hole—”the corridor, the world’s wild maw // of dynamic motion”—where reality breaks down and, in the presence of “the steep core of things,” he can see he is totally inconsequential. It’s fine in both senses of the word: okay, and exquisite. “Of course.” He’s known it all along.

For me, Free Solo’s “Door in the River” scene takes place one morning in late autumn. Alex wakes up at 3:30 am, thinking that this is it—this is the day he will do it. He will chicken out after starting—it doesn’t feel right—and wait another nine months, but you don’t know this then. It’s dark outside. In the van, he hunches over the wheel, eating breakfast out of a bowl as he drives, such a mundane and human thing to do. He looks, for a moment, just like Brad. He gets out, slams the door. Four AM and foggy, early enough that the grass still sings with crickets, and I’m thinking, oh my god, this could be his last morning on earth. It’s not a wide, dizzying shot of him hanging from the cliff face that causes the full weight of this to bear down on me. It’s the crickets. It’s the eating oatmeal. It’s the dark. As he walks to the base of El Cap, he startles in the beam of his headlamp two deer, the entire screen black except for a bright halo holding their bodies. They look up and bolt away as he brushes by. An exchange in such close quarters, it’s as intimate as breathing, as knowing you will die.

Lena Moses-Schmitt's work appears in Best New Poets 2015 and 2019, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Cincinnati Review, The Normal School, Terrain.org, Devil’s Lake, and elsewhere. She lives in Berkeley, California, where she is a publicist at Catapult, Soft Skull, and Counterpoint Press.