Making It Out Alive
Conflict. Resolution. Roll credits. Avoid eye contact with the mint holding teen who has to pick up the extra buttery popcorn you spilled.
Is that overly simplistic? Too obtuse? Well, yeah- of course it is. But why does it feel wrong to boil a movie down to simple conflict and resolution? It is after all, the basic plot of every noir film; mystery arises, mystery gets solved. You could describe the contemporary blockbuster action series this way; the bad guy’s being bad, we defeated the bad guy! Sports movies, comedies (romantic and otherwise), most thrillers, heist movies, and traditional dramas all follow this basic tenet of storytelling, a sort of watered down Hero’s Journey master narrative.
But obviously, not every film works this way. Often the resolution of the plot isn’t very clear. Some times a film ends ambiguously, left for the viewer to interpret. Sometimes the conflict doesn’t get resolved at all. The protagonists don’t win, and you actually grab a mint this time just to cleanse your palette after a bummer ending. It points a divide between the cinema intelligentsia and the mainstream audience, with some of film’s most lauded entries having incredibly ambiguous endings. Kubrick’s major horror and sci-fi entries, 2001 and The Shining both leave the viewer scratching their heads, Roger Ebert’s “best film of the decade”, Synecdoche, New York, is perhaps even more cryptic. But the biggest box office hits are explicitly exercises in triumph: the Emperor is defeated, Iron Man punches the purple guy or whatever.
So why do some filmmakers choose not to resolve their conflicts? When the majority of people go out to see a movie, they’re expecting a somewhat happy ending. If the movie’s done it’s job, it’s gotten the viewer invested in the fate of its characters, the audience should be rooting for them to make it through whatever the particular conflict is. What is the thought process of a director who flouts this convention, and how do they adapt the audience’s preconceptions when crafting a film? Today we’ll be looking at four films that do this within a certain genre — that of the survival film.
1960’s Letter Never Sent, directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, is a Soviet survival film centered around a team of geologists searching for diamonds in the Siberian wilderness. Young lovers and fellow geologists Andrei and Tonya, aided by guides Sergei and Sabinin, find the precious gems, but when a forest fire breaks out, they’re forced to fight for survival. It’s a great starting point for discussion about this genre, as it prominently features most of the typical survival conventions. A small group out in the wilderness, trying to hold on to their humanity in desperate times and primitive conditions. Interpersonal melodrama abounds, and gets heightened by the life or death circumstances.
The survival film is an exercise in the human condition. By stripping it’s characters of technology, it allows for reflection on simpler times, and the way modern comforts have changed society, for good or ill. In the late 50s when Kalatozov was filming Letter Never Sent, the perils of technological advancement were surely on the minds of the world at large, but especially for those in Soviet Russia. Nuclear proliferation, the space race, even new advancements in filmmaking and communications were driving competition between the capitalist west and communist Russia.
Letter Never Sent is full of visual representations of the anxieties caused by technology, and especially the looming threat of nuclear war. Even before the fire breaks out in the film, Kalatozov makes sure to include the campfire looming in the background of scenes, and gives us some serious foreshadowing as Sabinin pens a letter to his love back home, Vera. The shot above is taken from that scene, and the imagery of the silhouetted Soviets breaking their backs as superimposed fire engulfs the screen is palpable. It’s almost a wonder that Russian censors let some of this through — as it’s hard not to read a shot like this as an allusion to the Soviet labor camps, where dissidents were worked to death all the while under threat of a nuclear holocaust. Sabinin has a line shortly after, “They won’t send me here a fourth time. They won’t send anyone.” sounds more like a man trying to convince himself of his words than a sober evaluation of the Soviet command’s wisdom. For a Western audience inundated with anti-Soviet propaganda, to see these subtle cultural criticisms of the totalitarian government is a pretty jarring experience. It appears the censorship was not as restrictive as once thought.
Other lines in the film point to the theme of technology. Andrei suggests to Tonya that he might like to move out to the beautiful Siberian landscape that surrounds them. He “dislikes the hustle and bustle of the big city,” but Tonya shoots down the idea, too attached to the company and the dancing. The two city dwellers represent a new breed of people produced by industrial society. Their counterpoint is Sergei Stepanovich, who upon being told that a man should keep his primal urges under control, lashes out in violent rage against the “insect” Andrei. Sergei’s anger is representative of the disdain traditionalists have for the new ways, and this plays out in interesting ways once they’re forced back into primitivism, radio broken and Cognac ingested.
An area of allegorical importance is Diamond City, the city that will be built on the wilderness where our characters reside. Sabinin declares this future solemnly, but Andrei responds with a genuine “Splenid.” After our adventurers find their treasure, they’re giddy with the thought of the accolades they’ll receive. “Without them, modern industry would have been impossible” Tonya muses. She and her love Andrei see the desolation of nature at the hands of industry as a monument to progress, something to be celebrated. Sergei is their thematic counterpart, valuing beauty, and the love of beauty above all else. This beauty is seen in the Siberian landscape and in Tatiana Samoilova’s Tonya. Thus, when the beauty of nature is destroyed around them, and with Tonya’s love already taken, Sergei charges into the flames, killed by the ruins of the natural beauty he represents. In this brave new world, there’s no room for a man like Sergei.
The film’s ending is akin to that of many survival films. Sabinin, our lone survivor, is barely alive at the film’s close. The camera lingers on his frost covered face, eyes slowly flittering open. He’s alive, but there is little triumph in this ending. The diamonds were recovered, and for what? So the U.S.S.R. can flatten the ecosystem and drain it’s resources? And at what cost? Were the lives lost worth it? This finale in Letter Never Sent is a perfect example of the survival film ethos. They’re microcosms of the human experience. They invite the viewer to reflect on loss, on progress, and their endings often remind us that life isn’t a movie — Sabinin will go back to his wife, Diamond City will be built, life will go on.
Kalatozov was directing during the 50s in Soviet, so his survival story focused on themes of nuclear anxiety, totalitarianism, and industrialization. But in Sergei and Andrei’s interactions, and Sabinin’s unrelenting resolve, he touches on a theme shared more broadly by survival films: masculinity. The Grey, released in 2012 and directed by Joe Carnahan, is another unflinching story of survival that more directly tackles modern masculinity.
The Grey follows the seven male survivors of a plane crash, all oil men, as they endure the harsh elements and dangerous predators of the remote Alaskan wilderness. Our male lead and leader of men is John Ottway, portrayed by none other than Liam Neeson, who had become a sort of icon of American masculinity after his performance in Taken (Morel 2008). Carnahan, right out of the gate, attacks the audience’s preconceptions of what a Neeson character will be, opening the film with Ottway nearly taking his own life, before deciding against it at the last second. Marketed as a more straightforward action adventure film, Carnahan immediately takes us out of our comfort zone, much like what will shortly be forced upon our characters.
From the moment the plane crashes, our protagonists are forced into the same survival mode that the geologists of Letter Never Sent were. There is an additional element in The Grey though, that of the eponymous grey wolves that stalk our heroes through the tundra. The antagonistic wolf pack mirrors our gang of oil men, with their own hierarchy and character traits that differentiate them as individuals in a group. And The Grey has much to say about individual men in groups. Many survival films take on this topic, mirroring aspects of war films, and one of the most iconic stylistic techniques used to further our understanding of the group is the campfire scene. Carnahan deploys the campfire scenes liberally, using them to establish a pecking order in the group, and flesh out character’s backstories and motivations. In the scene pictured above, we get a clear sense of the group dynamic, and the way that it mirrors those of the grey wolves.
The scene starts around the campfire, where the cynical Diaz is complaining to the group about their “rules and their orders and bullshit”. He questions the legitimacy of Ottway’s leadership, threatening the alpha in an attempt to shake up the hierarchy, presumably with himself on top. Diaz is an outsider, he refuses to follow the mandates of the rest of the group. Fittingly, immediately as his unsuccessful attempt to climb the ranks of the group ends, he’s attacked by his wolf counterpart — the omega. The encounter puts Diaz back in his place, and as the film progresses, his shell softens and his character arc actually has a very dignified ending. But the catalyst for his scrap with Ottway speaks to the film’s dissection of masculinity. “I’m terrified, and not an ounce of shame in saying it” Ottway says. Diaz’s refusal to accept his own fear, his insistence on machismo arrogance in a life or death scenario is what almost gets him killed. In many ways, Carnahan shows us that a marriage to masculine ideals are downright killing the men who subscribe to them.
Neeson’s Ottway is a subversion of the masculine caricature he’s become in the popular perception. He not only admits his emotions, he embraces them. He is haunted by the pain in his life, like so many men are. Though he embodies morality and strong values like leadership and courage, he also allows for a feminine acceptance of his feelings. Synthesis, I suppose. Ottway is of course the last survivor left of the pack, and the film’s ending is ambiguous as it comes. We’re left on an incredible close up of Neeson staring down the alpha wolf, the score building to a crescendo and then a sudden close. We’re not sure if man or beast walks away from the clash. Unless you stayed for the post-credits scene. One final shot of Neeson’s head resting on the wolf. It implies Ottway’s survival, but the wolf’s growl leaves things just vague enough.
If The Grey showed how a survival film can speak to the masculine experience, how about we examine an entry to the genre that couldn’t be further from the themes Carnahan explored? Wild, released in 2014 and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée is a feminine twist on the survival movie formula, but it bends more than just the protagonist’s gender. Vallée uses the feminine virtue of emotional openness to explore a truly moving story about loss, trauma, and ultimately, survival.
We follow Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed, in an adaptation of the real life Cheryl Strayed’s nonfiction memoir. Divorced, recently clean from a heroin addiction, grieving after the death of her mother from cancer and a recent abortion, Cheryl sets out to hike over a 1000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. Though the movie is directed by a man, the film has strong female sensibilities, driven entirely by Cheryl’s story of self-discovery and growth.
So what does Vallée have to say about femininity and survival, and how does he say it? Take a look at the still from above. It’s taken from the scene that provides the most genuine danger for Cheryl, besides maybe the encounter with a rattlesnake towards the film’s beginning. After a display of competence in her filtering of dirty water with iodine pills, she’s immediately stopped by two bow hunters who convince her to share her valuable resource. One returns, left in frame here. He threatens her verbally, calling her a “girl alone in the woods”. In frame, Cheryl sticks out like a sore thumb, an object out of place compared to the hunter’s camouflage, a bright blue cornflower begging to be picked. Nothing happens thankfully, but it’s exemplary of the rest of the film, which is filled with men trying to help Cheryl, presumably expecting a sexual favor in return for their “generosity”.
But not all the encounters with men are so tense. Cheryl’s first run in with a man she needs assistance from seems destined to turn out like the one with the hunter, but subverts expectations. The farmer is far from a predator, he’s got a sweet tooth and a hospitable wife, and the two happily help Cheryl get what she needs, fuel for fire (which we’ll discuss more later). Contrast this with her run in with the rattlesnake the next day. The snake announces itself as a threat as soon as Cheryl sees it. She gives it a wide berth and goes on her way. The difference between her fear of the farmer and her fear of the snake couldn’t be greater. With the kind hearted farmer, things are ambiguous, human intentions too hard to parse until it’s too late. Snakes tell you they’re a threat, humans are more complex. Cheryl’s retreat to the wilderness is a flight to something simpler, something easy. No fluorescent lights, no questions from therapists. Follow the path, keep moving forward.
Cheryl’s story ends on a hopeful note, more so than our other two films so far. She dreams of a better future for herself, after so many years of despair. Though her survival story in this film has much lower stakes than the circumstances of The Grey or Letter Never Sent, I would wholeheartedly classify it as a survival movie. Her story is about surviving the elements, to a small extent, but in a more meaningful way it’s about surviving life. Through near constant flashbacks, we learn about the baggage Cheryl carries with her, beyond just that great big blue backpack. She’s survived addiction, divorce, tremendous loss, things that in the real world, many don’t survive. Vallée manages to adapt the normally metaphorical themes of a survival movie and bring them back to society, while utilizing the techniques that have become conventions of the genre.
Speaking of genre conventions, let’s talk about our last survival film, Lord of the Flies. Written and directed by Peter Brook, and based on the famous William Golding novel of the same name, this 1963 release follows a group of British schoolchildren after they crash land on an abandoned island. The film manages to marry many of the prior film’s themes and concepts, which follows given it’s source material. Golding’s book would essentially lay the groundwork for later survival stories. At some level, they all retread some of the thematic aspects of the Lord of the Flies allegory.
Lord of the Flies is, at it’s core, a story about civilization, morality, and hierarchy. Jack and his tribe of hunters realize the power they have in their monopoly on the island’s food resources, and their sadistic leader leverages this into complete dominance of the schoolboys. Ralph and Piggy try desperately to restore order and civility to the group, but are nonetheless defeated. The story ends moments before Ralph is hunted down and killed, saved at the last minute by a naval officer who restores sanity to the now savage school children. It’s an ending that feels so much like the final moments of Letter Never Sent — help has arrived, the day is saved, but it’s no triumph, there’s nothing to celebrate about being saved now. Lives were lost. Humanity was lost.
Shots like this reflect themes of male group hierarchy found in The Grey, Brooks films from a low angle that highlights the three boys’ place in the group’s structure. Jack is highest in frame, Ralph in the middle, and Piggy occupies the lowest link in this great chain of being. The jostling for power in this survival story takes on a new context with the introduction of the conch, a symbol for the rule of law. When Jack makes his power play to become the alpha, or chief in this case, he defies the conch’s authority, rejecting procedure and precedent. He displays the primal, unhinged side of masculinity, embodying a Nietzschean will to power that civilization is meant to keep in check. Putting male characters in a survival situation strips away the mores of a civilized society, and begs the grim question of how far we would take things if we were in a true state of nature.
Lord of the Flies also intersects with elements of Letter Never Sent. The two films debuted only a few years apart, and both grapple with the post-war landscape of a nuclear society. While the Soviet drama makes no overt references to the nuclear anxiety of the 50s, Flies suggests as much in it’s opening credits, an important departure from Golding’s original work. While fidelity discussion is largely useless, this is a revealing choice for a film that largely stays true to it’s source material. Clearly, Brooks is inserting either his own interpretation of the novel into his adaptation, or adding his own thematic spin on to Golding’s story. Certainly it’s a valid reading of a novel released in 1954, but the contents of the plot have more in common with Andrei and Sergei than Letter Never Sent’s fire, which I at least interpreted as metaphorical for nuclear war. It goes to show that with every story, with every person who reads it, or watches it, or listens to it, another adaptation is created in the head of each audience member.
Even Wild, a film that on it’s surface couldn’t be more different from Lord of the Flies, feels the reverberations of Golding’s story. Namely, the elemental themes established in Flies. The first roadblock in Cheryl’s path is an inability to start fire; it’s similarly the first concern of the boys once they get organized. For Cheryl and the schoolboys, and Ottway’s men as well, fire is survival. For Cheryl, it’s a vital resource, Ottway turns it into a weapon, and for the boys it’s their only hope of a return to civilization. In a sense, fire functions this way for all of these survival films, except of course in Kalatozov’s film, where he turns the symbol on it’s head. Water, too, is a recurring element of these survival films. In Wild, it’s a resource even more necessary than fire given the sweltering setting, and Cheryl’s use of the iodine pill to secure clean drinking water is a major step in her becoming more self-reliant. Here in Flies, the coastline of the island functions like barbed water on a prison fence. Water is a constant danger to the boys, the only thing keeping them stuck on the island. It becomes Piggy’s final resting place as well, a grave for the character who most represented innocence and equality. A battle against the dangers of the natural world is the basic conceit of any survival movie, and how the characters interact with the elements is often how a filmmaker can make a larger point without spelling things out.
The survival film is a unique genre in cinema, filled with stories that put characters through the gravest of scenarios. And these grave scenarios often produce expectedly grave results. People die in the wilderness. Not everyone can survive a plane crash. Surviving something like that isn’t going to be easy, and it’s not going to be fun. Even if a character survives, it’s all but guaranteed they lost someone along the way. One lives, one dies, the difference is one of them has to live with that death. There’s an inescapable tragedy in a survival film’s resolution.
That’s why the cold blue eyes of John Ottway, living and dying on that day, pierce through through the camera, through the viewer, right into the eyes of Death itself. That’s why even in the hopeful final moments of Wild, your eyes start watering when you remember what Cheryl had to go through to find closure. That’s why when Sabinin opens his eyes on the ice, you’re praying that Kalatozov let at least one of our heroes survive, Pavlov trained neural pathways telling your mouth to water for a table scrap of a happy ending. But it’s not happy. Not at all. That’s why when the lights come up after Lord of the Flies, your gut feels like it’s somewhere by your feet.
And you know it’s not the popcorn.
