It sounds like a very pretentious kind of title for a blog entry, but I just cried my ass of after having watched the docudrama Touching the Void on DVD. Partly, of course, because it’s an incredibly human story with so many levels of humanity, and partly because it’s about heroism in a way different from what is often showed in movies. It’s about pain, sacrifice, friendship, shame, love, life and what have you not.
But what also made me cry about it was the realization that we humans are stunningly complex and beautiful beings, and still we so rarely ARE these things. I’m thinking about every sad fucking thing humans do, like the Abu Ghraïb degradation scenes. The contrast of these things against this little story about 2 people in the Andes, struggling to survive, is staggering. I know it might be a childish thought, but to me it was an extremely emotional point.