post- 11/02/18

Issue

In This Holly Zheng 4

4

Miranda Grundy

Caroline Ribet

2

Thoughts in the Clouds

In the Wake of Kavanaugh

My Code is Bigger than Your Code Josh Wartel 5

He was a Skater Boy James Feinberg 6

He's So High

postCover by Stephanie Wu

NOV 2

VOL 23 —

ISSUE 8

FEATURE

My Code Is Bigger than Your Code Tales of a History Major Lost in the CIT

By Caroline Ribet

d

Illustrated by Monika Hedman ef overheard_at_the_CIT(): quote1 = “Even people who study English go to the career fair.” quote2 = “I haven’t read things in a long

time.” quote3 = "Yeah, I mean, she's getting that amount. And so I negotiated to try and get it too, but the recruiter isn't budging. I think they pay women more upon entry because they cost more to find." return quote1, quote2, quote3

I have never felt more out of place than when I showed up for the Brown University computer science (CS) teaching assistant (TA) camp that the department holds in August just before classes begin. This semester, I’m TAing CSCI0030: Introduction to Computation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, so I’ve been hanging around the Center for Information and Technology (CIT) a little more than a humanities concentrator might otherwise.

From what I saw, TA camp partly serves as an opportunity for CS concentrators to one-up each

other. The internship alums compared amenities: whether their summer employer provided organic Californian farm-to-table lunches or a gym or a decked-out bus between Silicon Valley and South San Francisco. They talked about big salaries, fancy apartments, and return offers. They chatted about whether they worked on software engineering or user interfaces. “My code,” they seemed to say, “is bigger than your code.”

This is definitely true in my case—their code is bigger. Even though I’ve taken a few CS classes, I’m a history concentrator, and I feel like

Letter from the Editor Before our next issue comes out,

Reasons to Vote

vids for you to watch if you need to rev up

the general election will have come and

for these tasks—if some dude can climb a

gone. Narrative this week implores you to

mountain without rope, you can mail in

reflect, remember the events of this past

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local happenings either—do as our Feature writer has this week and probe the culture of your department or other spaces on campus; make your voice heard. A&C can recommend some peppy, inspirational

2. Free sticker 3. Use a Midterm to distract from midterm studying

year, and vote to support the changes you want to see. Don’t be complacent about

1. Save democracy

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Jennifer

editor-in-chief of post-

4. Answer some questions with no wrong answer 5. Because Taylor Swift told you to 6. Voting is hot 7. Someone actually asked for your opinion 8. Public approval—brag about it on Twitter 9. Keep the existential dread at bay 10. It’s pretty easy

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an impostor every time I set foot in the CIT. The entire department is shrouded in mystique and reputation. The concentrators use acronyms like “API” and English-sounding words like library or object or clean that I think I understand but really don’t in the context of programming. The students complain publicly about how time-consuming their work is, referencing their 40-hour-per-week “algos” class. They call their professors by their first names and refer to each other by their computer logins.

At least in some circles, the department has a stereotype of attracting really hardworking and intelligent students who accomplish almost unthinkable feats. One CS concentrator I spoke with described the culture as “very competitive,” attributing it “to the nature of CS itself. It’s very cut and dry if you understand something or you don’t, and it’s very evident in coding interviews and classes with strict collaboration policies. There’s that culture around the industry and the academics here that promotes the feeling of helplessness.” I spoke to another student who associates the department with “a culture of always having to work without a break” and a “glorification” of people who work longer, later nights.

One major aspect of computer science at Brown that contributes to the department’s largerthan-life reputation of competition is the intensity of tech recruiting culture. Early each fall, tech companies come to Brown to entice computer scientists with applications for internships and entry-level positions. CS concentrators compete for jobs at Google and Twitter and Facebook and the next Silicon Valley startup that’s going to matter. It’s brutal—applicants experience many rounds of difficult technical interviews where they battle it out for the best-paying, most prestigious internships.

From my limited understanding of this highly stressful process, it is in the students’ best interests to boast knowledge of as many languages, algorithms, and ways of approaching problems as possible—just as I declare on my resume that I have, uh, working proficiency in Excel. Is the competitive spirit within the walls of the CIT a way to cope with the culture of incredibly high-pressure interviews?

One CS concentrator I talked to, an alum of Twitter’s internship program, pointed out that “people use what internship someone got as a measure of their ability in CS.” Someone eavesdropping nearby nodded vigorously.

“Perceived competition and seeing internships as a limited resource does [sic] lead to forms of competitive behavior,” the eavesdropper chimed in.

But the Twitter alum also pointed out that, before interviews, “I’ll prep with friends who have the same interview, and we share strategies. There’s a lot of spots, so me getting a spot has no impact on if someone else gets a job.” This conversation showed me that some of the competitive culture belongs more to the department’s grand stature than the students themselves, who are totally reliant on working together.

Secretly, and despite its scary reputation, I actually love the CIT. In the building’s drab, poorlydecorated, and oddly-shaped ground floor foyer, there is often a spirit of positivity and collaboration.

Even though the students have to readjust their eyes to natural light when they leave the CIT after countless hours of coding, programming can be really fun. In my experience, the dopamine rush of having something work after days of designing, redesigning, and debugging is unparalleled by other schoolwork. Plus, you get to build functional programs that do all kinds of cool things—a breath of fresh air from my norm of slaving over a research paper on a niche topic that will only ever be read carefully by my mom and skimmed once by a professor.

Even though the students have to readjust their eyes to natural light when they leave the CIT after countless hours of coding, programming can be really fun. In my experience, the dopamine rush of having something work after days of designing, redesigning, and debugging is unparalleled by other schoolwork.

The CS department gets its reputation of a cultish, insular community at least in part from all of the bonding that occurs over the late nights of problems, stolen food from tech events, and time-consuming projects in rooms that lack both sunlight and any sense of work-life balance. Even in the notoriously long lines for TA hours, people seem to be having fun working on their projects and chatting. There’s good spirit and humor even in the little aspects of CS, like how the department computers have hidden jokes: If you mistype a common terminal command, an animation of a train runs across your screen.

In the CS classes that allow collaboration (some courses are notorious for their very strict no-collaboration policies), students eagerly team up to approach problems. If you observe the thirdfloor atrium, you’ll see students drawing diagrams on whiteboards for each other or huddling over laptops. I asked one of my fellow TAs what she thought about the department. “It’s fun,” she said immediately. “I like how everyone works together.”

Undergraduate students, professors, and graduate

“Chicken is the goat.”

“He really pulled off his Sriracha costume.”

students enjoy mutual intellectual respect and approach computational problems with the kind of collaborative creativity any department should strive for. That everyone is on a first-name basis only serves to reinforce this level playing field. Furthermore, the community is bolstered by the fact that the department needs undergraduate TAs to run its classes. Peers teach peers, so the entire university's teaching hierarchy is flipped on its head within the walls of the CIT. In my experience, it is much less intimidating to approach a TA than it is to attend a professor’s office hours—the stakes feel lower. Other students know just how frustrating the process of designing, writing, and debugging code can be. TAs get it.

Partaking in this community, even in a peripheral way, has been wonderful for me as a person straddling the insider/outsider line of computer science. The CS Department is so different from the History Department (my real home), and yet, there are striking similarities between the two. For example, history is equally easy to make fun of. We all have the image of the theory-loving, turtleneck-wearing undergraduate who quotes pretentious philosophers unprompted in discussion sections. In my first history classes at Brown, those people intimidated me out of speaking in class. Now, I wonder if I’ve become one of them (because after all, I really do love European intellectual history, and I’m completely convinced that Walter Benjamin’s theoretical texts apply to every situation). Tribalism is everywhere—people like groups because it feels good to be an insider somewhere, whether that be in the History or the Computer Science Department.

The archival research I do for history and the programming I do for computer science also have a lot in common. They are both time-consuming, allconsuming, completely solitary activities where I have to concentrate for long periods of time. The rush I feel finding an amazing quotation in a stack of old documents is similar to how I feel when my code finally compiles and my computer’s terminal stops printing error messages.

In the non-concentrator CS class I am TAing, sometimes I get the feeling that students who are more than capable of learning all of the concepts feel that programming is so foreign that they will not be able to understand the logical frameworks behind what we are teaching. That’s how I felt during my first few months in the CIT. But one freshman I talked to who is taking one of the introductory classes summed it up nicely: “I think that in the CS department, you can get very lost, and you can get really behind. It’s also very easy to get help. But I feel that’s the case with all of college. You have to do your share of getting help.”

My advice to you, humanities concentrators: Don’t get scared by people talking about allnighters and learning six coding languages in classes that are supposed to be akin to a full-time job. Take a CS class. Once your code compiles for the first time, you’ll understand what makes it all worth it.

“My body now only knows hunger at 2 a.m.”

“Flowers are really erotic.”

November 2, 2018!3

NARRATIVE

In the Wake of Kavanaugh

Speaking Up about Sexual Assault

A

By Miranda Grundy Image from public domain

s a woman in America, the past weeks have been heavy and tiring. Some days, it feels like our own government, supposedly based in ideals of equality and opportunity for all, repeatedly tells specific groups of people that their basic rights, self-worth, and even survival do not matter.

Governmental policies have shown blatant, even forceful disregard for citizens, especially in their policing of women’s bodies. However, to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, a man accused on multiple accounts of sexual assault, to the Supreme Court, the highest and most influential of all decisionmaking platforms, crosses a new line.

Surprise was not my first reaction to the confirmation. Disgust? Disillusionment? Yes. But surprise? No. This gut-punch feeling is nothing new to marginalized groups of Americans.

However, this one did hit me harder than most.

As a female college student determined to earn an education and reach my goals, it makes my skin crawl to think that any student should have to deal with the burden of sexual assault, only to be ignored in a very public manner when trying to speak their truth later in life.

Last fall, I came to Brown University as a transfer student from a school I won’t name. I quickly realized that my old school wasn’t right for me. Among other factors like closed-minded people and those with conservative beliefs, sexual assault and rape culture were my biggest motivators for leaving. That’s a truth I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to admit to myself, never mind articulate aloud.

Coming to Brown was an opportunity for a new start that I’m forever grateful for.

I’ve witnessed firsthand and through the perspectives of my friends what sexual assault can do to a college student, especially one trying to adjust to what feels like a new and overwhelming world. It’s easy to get lost. You’re out one night, and everyone’s drinking. You, maybe a little too much to compensate for the way your knees are shaking and your hands are sweating from nerves.

Degrading song lyrics blaring through the speakers overwhelm you, but you try not to show it. You came out with some friends, or people you guess you would call friends after knowing them for three weeks, but you didn’t think they’d leave you alone here... You look around. Where’d they go?

Where are the few familiar faces in this massive

4!post–

crowd?

Then, someone taps your shoulder, a guy.

Cute. Friendly. He offers you a drink and a dance.

You accept because maybe it’ll help you relax. But from that point on, your recollection gets fuzzier.

Maybe you stayed at that party longer. Maybe your friends watched you leave with him. Maybe you just sat in his room, watched a movie, ate some food.

Maybe. You hope. But as you wake up the next day, confused about how you even made it back to your room and whose t-shirt you’re wearing, something deep inside you says it was much more.

As soon as alcohol enters the equation, some college kids seem to think they’re invincible.

Anything goes. It’s all in good fun. He hopes. She hopes… But when she wakes up in the morning, she hurts. She looks at herself in the mirror and feels that the reflection staring back at her is unrecognizable.

The experience and events leading up to my sexual assault robbed me of autonomy. My actions were not of my own volition, but the trauma is now mine—my reality to live with. The impacts of it will never leave me; the hurt doesn’t go away and hide even when I try to have a loving relationship with someone who really cares about me, and it rears its ugly head at the most inconvenient times. In many ways, it’s robbed me of the ability to see a positive future for myself, in which I’m truly loved and feel like I have a purpose. Trust is something that will never come easily to me again, and this severely hurts the people I care about most. Sometimes it feels like I’ll always carry this guilt, heavy and impossible for anyone else to understand.

It’s so easy to feel helpless, especially as a college student just trying to gain social and academic footing. The process of turning to authorities or campus resources can be scary and emotionally draining, but it’s important not to let social stigma keep one from healing however one must.

There is no guarantee that justice or speaking out will make things feel okay or end your cycle of self-doubt, but it’s bold to be brave enough to try. As Dr. Christine Ford demonstrated, you never know who it could help.

America has told its people, its sexual assault victims and survivors, and anyone who’s been threatened by the power dynamics that make such assaults possible, that his word, his life, is more important than hers. Even though it hurts like a blow to the face, we can’t let it silence us. The dialogue and resources around sexual assault must be made more accessible. I’ve gone too long without the words to speak about such a thing, without a space to feel comfortable sharing it. Maybe we can’t change the final say that stands this time, but I, for one, know that I won’t stop talking until I’m heard.

Thoughts in the Clouds Retrieving Memories from Airports

By Holly Zheng Illustrated by Molly Young

A

irports make me feel a whirlwind of emotions.

After flying around thirty flights within the past four years, mostly between my home city, Beijing, and my boarding high school near Boston, I have come to recognize airports as places for reflection.

Since I traveled alone on most of these trips, I hatched my thoughts while sitting at boarding gates, my little free time combining with an underlying sense of loneliness. As I sat by the large windows, many things crossed my mind: the place that I was leaving and might never return to, the people I should call before boarding, the destination.

After hours of unfinished dreams on the flight, however, I left most of these thoughts in the clouds. They disappeared along with the pain in my eardrums as soon as the jet touched the ground again. A few of these thoughts, nevertheless, remained a little longer. They trickled like drops of nostalgia and inspiration that sometimes still unexpectedly flow through me.

Guatemala City to Boston Someone from the group suggested that we play Mafia, but the idea quickly dissolved as most of us were too sleepy. Waiting for our 5 a.m. flight, I would have been tired, too, had the bathroom in my hotel room not magically had hot water that morning— allowing me to take a revitalizing shower.

That was my first hot shower in two weeks, during which I was on a service trip in Guatemala with a group of students from my high school.

Before spending our final day touring Guatemala City, we worked with a local organization in the city of Antigua to support local social workers. Every day I interviewed locals who lived in houses made out of steel pieces. I listened, with curiosity and mediocre Spanish fluency, to their stories.

Sitting next to the boarding gate, I found that my mind was still operating in Spanish, but I knew that as soon as I stepped onto the plane, the crew members’ English would immediately transport me back to an American mindset. The comfortable hot shower from that morning was the first step in this process. By the time the blue strip of the customs form arrived in my hands during the flight, the world that confronted and challenged me here in Antigua was thousands of miles away. My heart grew heavier.

Looking through the window, I saw that the dark night was about to break into dawn. I promised myself that someday I would be able to articulate the reason behind my reluctance to leave this place.

Until then, I would keep this world somewhere safe within myself.

Boston to Beijing I had already texted my parents to ensure them that I was boarding the plane, and I had scrolled through every new post on Instagram—my preboarding social media check was complete.

Just the day before, I was at a conference in Boston. After attending this conference for three years, I had begun to see many regular faces that I could match with the names on their name tags. I got to chat with some of them during lunch breaks, but our conversations never went beyond small talk.

I knew, though, that each person at this conference had fascinating interests or talents that were unseen

ARTS&CULTURE II, and learn to smoke cigarettes, Stevie thinks he can be just as cool as his brother. But then Stevie realizes that all the neighborhood boys have moved on to the another fad: skateboarding.

It’s been over 20 years since the mid-1990s, which is more than enough time for nostalgia to set in. Last year, we got Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, a coming-of-age film that basked in Dave Matthews Band songs and 2002 Sacramento. No one attracts teenage viewers like Netflix, whose Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Riverdale are both revivals of shows that premiered in 1996 and 1997.

In other words, Jonah Hill knows that borrowing from the not-so-distant past is a low-risk strategy.

When his youthful protagonists sprinkle their conversations with Simpsons references (“You look like fucking Mr. Burns”), wear D.A.R.E. shirts, and the slurs that society has since banished, older viewers will engage in instant fact-checking.

For those born after the mid-1990s, however, the moment unfolds for the first time.

during the five days that we spent together.

On my way to the airport, I decided to friend some of them on social media and write a message to remind them of who I was.

The boarding line I stood in progressed slowly, so I decided to check my Messenger app one last time.

One new message: “Hey! Are you flying back home soon?” Her profile picture reminded me of the laughs we shared over turkey sandwiches at the conference.

I was about to get my boarding pass checked and would inevitably leave some of my memories of this year’s conference behind at the Boston airport, but I now had this chance to start forming connections with the people I'd met. I thought this could be the start of conversations where I shared a bit about my life and hopefully caught a glimpse into theirs, too. I breathed heavily, quickly typing something before I had to turn on airplane mode: “Yep! I’m actually boarding the plane right now.

Talk to you when I get there?”

Beijing to Boston A little girl was taking a nap on the seat next to me, the rise and fall of her chest reflecting the slow pace of time. Our flight had been delayed, and the time of departure remained as “until further notice” on the screen near the boarding gate. Because of this delay, I was definitely going to miss my bus from the Boston airport to Providence.

I stopped staring at the screen and looked around the crowd to distract myself. Many people who flew overseas in late August were students with a new school year ahead of them. The various college names printed on their sweatshirts already transported me to the new life that I was about to embark on. I would be flying the same Beijingto-Boston flight that I took during my high school years—only this time, I wouldn’t know what awaited.

After landing in Boston, I would be heading south on Highway I-95 instead of north.

One of the things I was looking forward to after landing was meeting her again, the girl I met at the conference in our junior year of high school. When responding to her on Messenger at the Boston airport that year, I didn’t imagine that we would someday end up being classmates at the same university. She texted me the other day that she was leaving home for move-in today, too. I hoped her travels had been smoother than mine.

I looked at the boarding gate that had become so

familiar to me. As much as I wanted to be used to the overwhelming feelings that came with traveling, I wasn’t. I was still learning how to center myself, but I had come to believe that, no matter how nostalgic, unprepared, or anxious I felt every time I stood in front of any airport boarding gate, life had its own way of surprising me. The uncertainties about the future that brewed inside me while traveling would dissipate once I embarked on my new journeys after landing. The knots of feeling would stay with the clouds, leaving only optimistic traces that might revisit me in the future.

He was a Skater Boy At the movies: Mid90s

by Josh Wartel Illustrated By Lauren Marin

I

t could have been us, if we had been a halfgeneration older. In the first scene of the Jonah Hill-directed film, Mid90s, 13-year-old Stevie breaks into his brother Ian’s room. With his stack of issues of The Source, his collection of Air Jordans, his long shelves of CDs organized alphabetically, and the Wu-Tang poster on his wall, Ian is Stevie’s closest approximation of cool. If he can just listen to the right bands, get really good at Street Fighter

And when [Scottie] grows up, he will learn that skateboarding trends fade, but history, it’s never over.

True to the spirit of skateboarding, Mid90s is mostly a hang-out film. The plot, however, proceeds on two tracks around the baby-faced Stevie (Sunny Suljic). On one hand, Stevie has his home life split between violent disagreements with Ian (Lucas Hedges) and his caring, but oftabsent single mother (Katherine Waterson). On another hand, Stevie’s days are spent with a group of teenage boys he befriends in the film’s opening.

The group’s base is the local skate shop and their leader is the affable and extremely talented Ray, who gifts Stevie a new skateboard. The remaining crew members include the braggart, Rueben, the hard-partier, Fuckshit (named for his reaction to sick tricks), and the aspiring documentarian, Fourth Grade (named for his assumed stupidity).

Together, they skate through abandoned parking lots, the tops of buildings, and two-way turn lanes.

No one seems to go school, but given the weather of Los Angeles, it might just be summer.

Barely uttering a word in the first few scenes, Scottie eventually grows into his role with the skating crew. After a long evening spent mastering a kickflip, he wins the group’s respect when he tries a jump that ends in disaster. Blood gushing from his forehead, Scottie doesn’t cry. “I’m alright, I’m alright,” he tells his increasingly concerned friends. At a house party, one of the few scenes where the skaters mix with girls, Scottie hooks up with an older teen, Estee. Hill takes advantage of the tight frame (he shoots the film in the boxlike Academy ratio) to show Estee and Scottie’s faces merging until they are indistinguishable.

When they move apart after the kiss, Scottie’s first, backlight saturates the screen.

This is just one of the impressive touches that shows Hill has been paying attention since his acting career began 15 years ago, with his stoner classic, Superbad. Claiming Spike Jonze’s music videos and Larry Clark’s anarchic Kids as influences, Hill mostly lets the unknown cast of Mid90s improvise. Na-Kel Smith as Ray, the dreamer of the group (“We used to have all dreams.

Now it’s sad.”) is the standout find. Hill also strikes a nice balance between the spare piano score November 2, 2018!5

ARTS&CULTURE composed by Trent Rezner and Atticus Ross and the soundtrack (highlighted by the Pixies and the booming intro of Omega’s "Gyonghaju Iany").

Even with its brief 85-minute runtime, Mid90s finds itself running on fumes by the end. The unexplained traumas that keep Stevie’s brother Ian friendless and angry lurk beneath the surface.

But while the film’s tensions often boil over with frightening intensity, they don’t build toward any subjectivity or thematic significance. Although she shouts from time to time, Stevie’s mom is never enough of a force to threaten Stevie or his skating crew. This paper-tin family plot may be Hill’s way of showing how skateboarding is Stevie’s “real” family or community. But Mid90s’ skater boys are mostly just skater boys; they hang out, they flee from the police, and then they run it all back the next day. It isn’t the stuff of legend.

What is so special about the mid-1990s? The youthfulness of Scottie begins to look less like a deliberate choice and more like an excuse for Hill to escape responsibility for the past. No, Hill doesn’t have to include legislative battles of the Clinton Administration, or even the aftermath of the Rodney King riots, which transformed Los Angeles. But Mid90s does need to justify the relationship between its present-day release and its title.

The philosopher Stanley Cavell once defined nostalgia as “an inability to open the past to the future.” If Jonah Hill ultimately falls victim to nostalgia in his directing debut, it is because he worries about remembering the past more than imagining the future. Scottie won’t stay a kid forever. And when he grows up, he will learn that skateboarding trends fade, but history, it’s never over.

He's So High

At the movies: Free Solo

By James Feinberg illustrated by Halle Krieger

T

he first time Alex Honnold set out, without ropes or harnesses (what climbers call a “free solo”), to climb the sheer granite face of El Capitan, a 3,000foot rock formation in Yosemite Valley, it was four in the morning on a fall day in 2016. Directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi were there too, filming a documentary about Honnold. We see Chin struggle for an inspirational soundbite as he watches Honnold begin his ascent, an attempt at perhaps the most difficult athletic feat in human history. After a moment, Chin says, “Let’s hope it’s a low-gravity day.”

Yikes.

That stark scene, the beginning of a climb Honnold eventually abandons (he “just wasn’t feeling it” that day), serves as a microcosm of the rest of this stunning, perceptive documentary about the now thirty-three-year-old climbing superstar.

Throughout, his girlfriend, Sanni McCandless, his childhood idol-turned-trainer, Tommy Caldwell, and the filmmakers themselves, his longtime friends, alternate between terrified bafflement and total confidence as Honnold recedes behind a wall of single-mindedness and what he calls “warrior spirit.”

(The film offers a possible clinical explanation, when a trip to an MRI machine proves his fear center is almost totally inactive). Sanni, especially, continually tries to reach him, and he continually retreats. Her desperation is well-founded as the threat of tragedy is ever-present in this story. Caldwell matter-of-factly informs Honnold that all who have dedicated their life to free soloing is now dead. During Honnold’s

“Regardless of whether you believe in spirits, nude dance parties, or chicken sacrifice, the Biltmore is an undeniably intriguing part of Providence lore.”

Anna Harvey, Dead Time

second try at El Cap, Sanni tearfully confides that “it’s really hard to understand why he wants this.” Ditto.

Though his semi-unfeeling reticence frustrates his friends, Honnold is a fascinating and even closeto-likeable figure. Chin compares him to Dr. Spock, but he reminded me of Mark Zuckerberg by way of the Addams Family. Mocking his previous girlfriends’ concern for his safety, he lisps, “We really care about you,” then scoffs, “No, you don’t. If I perish (he actually says “perish”), you’ll find somebody else.”

Maybe so, but nobody like Alex Honnold—with his mop of dark hair, jet-black eyes and what looks to be an eighteen-pack, the climber could pass for Kylo Ren with a carabiner. In other words, he's made for the movies.

And this is a great one. Free Solo manages to have its cake and eat it too in almost every respect; it’s a fair, complete, clear-eyed portrait of a man who in his circles has inspired a kind of messianic obsession, but it’s also a diagram of a sport-cum-death-wish and a near-impossible climb. The pieces fall into place perfectly. It’s the kind of structurally ambitious reallife story that lures feature producers to the door. Its intimacy is balanced with some of the most sweeping, heart-in-your-mouth visuals on this side of the Mission: Impossible franchise. (Honnold, for what it’s worth, does his own stunts without even being a Scientologist.)

But the film’s greatest strength is that it interrogates its very existence. A cameraman worries that the crew will dislodge a rock and send Honnold free-falling to his death. Talking with another of his idols, the free soloer Peter Croft, Honnold swallows hard when Croft tells him it’s alright to make the climb, as long as you’re doing it “for the right reasons.”

Cue a pointed look at the camera crew. Like Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s 2016 documentary Weiner, Free Solo eviscerates high-minded rhetoric about flies on walls. When that “wall” is a precipitous monolith twice the height of the Empire State Building, objectivity kind of falls away.

But Honnold doesn’t—in spring 2017, with remarkable speed and nary a hiccup, he completes a three-hour-and-fifty-six minute ascent (he’s since set three further speed records on El Cap with equipment, and made it up in an hour and fifty-eight minutes this June). In the movie’s final scenes, it’s his staggering, unshakeable professionalism that comes through, perhaps even more than his athleticism.

After the climb, he heads down to do some pull-ups in his van. No use losing daylight.

Perhaps the most piercing insight of Free Solo is its refusal to pretend achievements change achievers; the next hurdle is always more enticing than the last one was satisfying. In the final scene of the film, Honnold reflects smilingly that his actions may inspire “some kid” to find the bigger, more terrifying mountain to climb. But whoever it is, it won’t be him, right? “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe.” Cut to Sanni, halfway between shock and dismay. What next?

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Jennifer Osborne

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a

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FEATURE

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11.2.17

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