Thirteen (Real) Lives: Trauma in Film

A t the end of 13 lives (2022) gruelling two-hourthirty-seven -minute running time, we watch the worried parents of the boys who spent thirteen days trapped in a Thai cave, look in on their kids lying safe in the ER and begin to weep with joy. As a viewer, your insides can’t help but swell with optimism; people are pretty fucking tough. But as someone who’s dealt with recovering from physical trauma, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the film was closing out on what was really only the beginning of these kids’ story.

The film follows the near two-week pursuit in 2018, to figure out how this group of boys could be evacuated underwater through six miles of cramped and unmapped territory of the Doi Nang Non cave, and make it out alive. Early on in the film, sceptical John Volanthen (Colin Farrell) tells his fellow diver Richard Stanton (Viggo Mortensen), “You try to dive those kids the whole way, all you’ll be bringing out is dead bodies.” The world watched on with morbid curiosity, hoping against hope for a deus ex-machina plan that could save the children. While Elon Musk willed it to be his feeble contraption, ultimately it was the coordination of the international divers with the help of the Thai Navy Seals, that brought all the boys home, safe and sound.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this real-life tale of determination, resilience and a happy ending against all odds was plucked straight out of a Hollywood producer’s wildest box-office fantasy. And that’s just it: the problem with a Hollywood story is that it’s predicated on having a polished, Hollywood ending. While the film does address the high-adrenalin, confined pursuit of the international rescue mission, it shies away from looking beyond the same simplistic narratives that piqued the world’s interest in the initial news cycle. In the end, this potentially huge life event for the young boys was reduced to a feel-good fluff piece for an ambivalent audience.

Because of this, the stimulating shift in perspective that the film induces starts to feel cheap. Its story stops at exactly the same point that international interest did. The world spent a couple weeks chattering about the news and saying isn’t it awful as they made small talk at the office. But once the chase for a binary outcome had been resolved (the boys were rescued), the international psyche snapped right back into believing that the world will always right its unspeakable wrongs.

This makes for a worrying cinematic void in instructing us how to deal with trauma when it comes. As it stands, these stories tend to play out as either a closedloop of inspiration porn, or they’re the most depressing shit you’ve ever seen. After I sustained a permanent injury from a road accident as a teenager, one of the hardest facts to reckon with was that the experience would have no clear endpoint. Growing up in a reality where becoming sick always meant being well again and getting back to normal after being injured was a given, having no cultural reference point to contest that against my current reality was dispiriting at best and completely isolating at worst.