Free Solo: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Wonders What It Would Mean to Live Life Without a Net

Climbing, Oscar Winning, documentary, psychoanalysis.

When we saw the trailer for this documentary film about an individual, Alex Honnold, who decides to climb El Capitan without ropes – an even bigger and more imposing rock face than Half Dome, also in Yosemite National Park, and which Honnold has previously climbed without a rope – I expected a film about a daredevil – a swashbuckler who was interested in cheating death in a variety of ways – by climbing – but maybe by drinking or doing drugs – and I certainly think that I would have expected that he would have been a womanizer.  But this film is about a person and an undertaking that has daredevil qualities that are inherent in what is being done, but there is an odd aesthetic that is at the core of this film, this person and this quest that is much quieter, but certainly every bit as tension filled and vertigo inducing as the swashbuckling film I anticipated.

There are a number of themes that overlap and interweave in this film.  The first is the role of the filming of the undertaking.  Free soloing is the art of making difficult climbs – life threatening climbs – without any aids or ropes.  It is man or woman against the mountain.  Or more properly – against the rock face.  Not just getting to the top of the mountain, but doing it on the most inhospitable face.  Filming what is essentially a solo undertaking makes it public in a way that violates part of the freedom inherent in the name.  It also yokes the filmmaker to the climber – if the climber should fall to his death, is that partially the fault of the person who films him?  What role does the filmmaking play in the climb itself - including the potential to fatally distract the climber?

The second yoke that keeps this from being a free solo is the relationship between Alex and his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, a woman he met when on a book tour describing his climbing and she, who had no interest in climbing at the time, on a lark, gave him her phone number when she got his autograph, and we are not told about the ensuing courtship, though we get to see them developing a relationship in the shadow of his attempt to engage in a solitary and dangerous activity that might rob her of him – and she has some thoughts about that.

The third yoke is the tie between this kid – it is hard to think of Alex as a grown man – partly because of his relatively slight stature, but mostly because of his gee-shucks approach to the world - and the mountain on one hand, and the need to keep body and soul together on the other.  He is living in a marginal world where his only home is his van and his only food is stuff he cooks on the burner in the van – and a real shower is a huge luxury.  Because of his accomplishments, he now has a reasonable income, but he is still incredibly uninterested in earthly goods that are unrelated to climbing.

But the center of the film is the technical, emotional, and physical challenge of making a 3,000 foot vertical climb with thousands of moves – each of which could prove fatal if not done correctly – and some of the moves are simply incredibly technically challenging under the best of circumstances.  How does one prepare for and undertake such an endeavor?

These elements, interestingly, overshadow the final climb – so that by the time it takes place, as thrilling and crazy as it is, it is no longer what it might have been – something overwhelming and poorly understood – instead it is, for the viewer as for the climber – the thing that has been pointed to since the beginning of the film and it seems somehow, oddly, destined to be occurring – and it is only through the cut-aways to one of the cameramen who can’t watch, who is afraid of what it is that Alex is doing and unwilling to watch him fall to his death – that we, oddly, become aware of the gravity (as it were) of what is occurring on the screen before us.

I did a little rock climbing in high school – mostly as part of a counseling experience that would ultimately lead me into the therapeutic profession.  This was the infancy of what would one day become ROPES courses that all kinds of people would engage in to learn team building skills and to learn to rely on their buddies.  We did that – holding the rope for each other while we engaged in scrambling up the sides of buildings and walls of rock cut by creeks in the middle of mostly pancake flat Columbus Ohio.  We learned to use carabineers and to belay down, which was great fun.  But we also learned something of the power of concentration – as we paid attention to each foot and hand hold and tested them before trusting our weight to them – not wanting to fall even if the rope would ultimately hold us.

Alex didn’t want to fall either, but he did.  He fell before this project began and his girlfriend was responsible for the rope that was to hold him, but she didn’t pay attention to how much had been played out and his fall led to compromising two of his vertebrae.  It was almost the end of the relationship, but she convinced him that he would not be better off for not having her.  He fell multiple times attempting the most difficult part of the climb up El Capitan while trying each of the two moves to get across a particularly tricky spot – he was in harness and practicing.  On another practice climb, near the bottom in a part of the climb that he found very challenging because of a lack of purchase on what he described as a glass-like wall, he fell, and, though Sanni had the rope, he sprained his ankle.

The ankle sprain occurred about a month before the end of the climbing season.  The camera crew was prepared to film the climb.  They followed him to the local gym where he climbed the rock wall with his boot on.  Other climbers told him it would be a six month recovery arc.  He thought he could climb again in a month.  When he started out to do free solo El Capitan a month after the injury – on a climb that, because of the time of year – had to start at four in the morning and he sported a headlamp to climb in the dark – he seemed as foolhardy as I imagined him to be.  What a relief when he – spoiler alert – aborted and decided to come back and do it the following year.

That winter, he and his girlfriend bought a condo together in Las Vegas and their relationship developed on screen.  He had been coy with her about when he would attempt the solo climb in the fall – and they began to play back and forth about how much he was allowed to know how much he meant to her as he prepared to attempt it again the next summer.  But it was also important that she knew that his primary interest was in the climb.  During the interlude, he also did some psychological testing on an fMRI scan to ascertain what was going on with him.  Looking at images that would cause distress and therefore brain activity in the amygdala to others, his amygdala was non-reactive.  He was essentially not anxious about things others would be anxious or aroused by.

I think there are two diametrically opposed but perhaps related constructs that might help with this.  One is the idea of Obsessive Compulsive functioning.  In this approach to the world, an anxious person defends against their anxiety by organizing their world so that the likelihood of something bad happening is greatly minimized.  This can be a very effective means of isolating anxiety, and if that is what has happened in this case, Alex has so effectively managed to distance himself from his fear reaction that he has interfered with it pre-emptively.  He no longer fears because of the disciplined way that he has managed fear.  Another component of that is that he has exposed himself over and over to the feared stimulus to the point where he is inured to it.

The explanation that requires less mental gymnastics is one that comes from the literature on thrill seeking.  Individuals who qualify as thrill seekers seem to have a lower base rate of arousal and need to engage in thrilling activity to, on some level, feel alive – to feel the adrenaline rush of knowing that this life really matters.  These individuals have been studied clinically as having more difficulty connecting with others – primarily in terms of being antisocial or sociopathic – though Alex’s mother refers to Alex’s father as having been on the Asperger’s spectrum – and this might be another expression of this fundamental lack of arousal.

What is interesting is that the other climbers and the film crew (who are all climbers) talk about not knowing Alex and what drives him – they don’t seem to have a sense of him as a person.  He is personable – charming even – both in his public interactions, for instance with students at his high school, but also in his interactions with his girlfriend – where he is, as I have said, coy.  He also talks with climbers from the generation before him and clearly venerates them – but his conversations are generally technical and when he is goofing around and responding to them about his girlfriend, again he is coy.  That said, there are cameras on for all of these interactions and, just as they, by their very presence, alter the climb, so they alter the person they are observing.

After the sprained ankle, we are treated to the preparation for the climb.  How many times does Alex climb El Capitan with ropes?  We don’t know.  He talks with another climber who prepped for a different free solo climb by doing the route he would solo forty or fifty times.  I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Alex made the El Capitan climb at least that many times – and that he practiced the difficult bits many more times than that.  By the time of the solo climb, I think he knew essentially every step that he would take – each handhold – and how he would navigate the whole thing.  It reminded me of Scott Hamilton’s commentary on a beautiful Olympic skating routine when asked what was going on in the skater’s mind at that moment and he replied that skater was thinking outside blade, inside blade, crouch, lift, turn, etc. – focusing on the elements of the routine – and not, as we the audience were, on the beauty of what was occurring.   In the final climb when Alex seemingly effortlessly handles on of the technically challenging bits we know the five or six step routine that we see him doing, he grins for the camera – clearly having enjoyed pulling that off – but he is also headed forward into the next challenge at the same moment.

Whether because of nature – an amygdala that is under-responsive so that Alex has to manufacture extreme ways of exciting himself – or because of nurture – anxiety that he manages by over-preparing to do what he does, this film is a record of single mindedness.  It portrays the discipline and isolation that is necessary for the arduous but ultimately gratifying work of free soloing.  

What does Alex do when he is done?  He looks oddly fresh – as if he has just been for a brisk walk in the park rather than having completed a grueling and harrowing four hour test that has taken him to the limits of what man can accomplish.  He celebrates with the crew at the top of the mountain and then calls his girlfriend – and, as we listen in on the conversation, he is clearly pleased with what he has accomplished and pleased that she gets what it is that he has accomplished – and then he goes back to his van and spends the afternoon working out – preparing for the next climb.

While it is possible for me to admire this singlemindedness, it is impossible for me to imagine engaging in any activity with this kind of relentless focus.  My mind reels at the paradoxical loss of freedom to achieve a free solo.

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