Mount Impossible
October 30, 2015 11:40 AM   Subscribe

The Shark's Fin on Meru is a 1500-foot sheet of smooth, featureless granite with few pre-existing fissures, cracks or footwalls. In September 2011, Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and Renan Ozturk climbed the Shark's Fin and made Meru, a film about the first successful climb of the most difficult peak in the world.
posted by mattdidthat (10 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- frimble



 
This is a great film with such a great narrative arc beyond "can they climb the mountain?" with all these amazing layers. One of the principal characters in it - who even shows up briefly in the trailer - but doesn't get much play when people have been writing about this is Jennifer Anker-Lowe, wife of Conrad Anker. Anker-Lowe (a western painter) lost her climbing husband Alex Lowe after 15? years of marriage and 3 sons, and then later married Conrad Anker (Lowe's best friend and climbing partner).

So Jennifer Anker-Lowe is both a symbol of the ultimate consequences of climbing, of friendships and relationships, and a representative of the responsibilities and tug of love, and thus she introduces a key component of conflict and tension in the documentary - and in this wonderful opposition to the climbers' conflict with nature. A lovely result is that the ultimate conflict is the climbers versus themselves - which of course it usually is in films like this, but the underlying foundation is well-built. (Having Krakaeur - also a symbol of consequence, drive, friendship, and relationships - narrate is a brilliant touch. He's not there to lend his name to the film.) Intertwined into the idea of relationships is also the idea of mentorship, and what it means in an extreme sport like alpinism and big wall climbing. One could argue the movie is actually about relationships (including the climbers' relationships with nature).

This aspect drives a key component of the narrative, because inside most good climbing documentaries is not just the can they but also the why. I don't understand what drives climbers like them, but IMHO this film ranks up there to getting as close as one could get to understanding it. It's funny, Meru came out after this HUGE Red Bull financed documentary about climbing Cerro Torre (autoplay), another difficult mountain. There's no doubt which was the better movie; the narrative pins and layers of Meru stand in sharp contrast to Cerro Torre in such a way that makes Cerro Torre seem strictly about ego.

--Jennifer Anker-Lowe wrote a wonderful memoir about her life, Alex Lowe, and climbing, which won the National Outdoor Book Award, called Forget-Me-Not. I heartily recommend it as a supplement to the film.
posted by barchan at 12:27 PM on October 30, 2015 [5 favorites]


(note: spoiler on the film in this comment, but no more spoilers than what you'd probably read in the NY Times review)

I saw this film a month and a half ago when it was making its rounds in the arthouse circuit. I thought it was one of the more mature films about climbing and mountaineering that I've seen. The adventure sports documentary genre definitely has its share of tropes and cliches around making hard things look effortless, overusing terms like 'epic', and glossing over the sort of fear and misery that can come with the lifestyle. Meru definitely shows a way that genre has grown up, but doesn't quite depart from a lot of the conventions of the trope.

There's definitely a lot of soul-searching on display from Conrad, Jimmy and Renan. The first half is focused on this really grueling, abortive attempt to get to the peak that is its own really great story about how not every expedition on film ends in victory, and how every climber has to make their own calculations about when to quit.

I don't know, I still came away from that movie being a bit unsatisfied about the inner journeys of each member of that climbing team, which is a bit of praising with faint damns. Meru does a lot more to show that struggle than others, but it doesn't quite carry it all the way. Basically, everyone in that film has some super-significant near death experience that brings them to the edge of quitting the lifestyle, but they don't; and when asked for a reason why they go back to the mountain, it still falls back on"well, because it's there."

If it wasn't so much better, I wouldn't have that demand of it, but because it is better, I had so many more hopes.
posted by bl1nk at 12:35 PM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


oh, and barchan, I totally saw that David Lama Cerro Torre movie too when it was touring as part of the Banff Film Festival World Tour, and came away with a similar comparison after watching Meru. Though, favorably, another movie that I saw in a recent Banff that is worth watching as a companion to this is Cold by Cory Richards.

I also thought that a particularly unheralded contributor to this film was Jimmy Chin's wife, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and it was interesting to see how she was instrumental in bringing out the more human side of the film, and prompted him to recut and redo footage to focus more on the people than strictly on the climbing.
posted by bl1nk at 12:46 PM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


It's interesting you say that, bl1nk, because one of the things I left the film pondering is the question that those tropes aren't enough to explain things - as you said, because" it's there" isn't enough - but that resorting to those tropes is sometimes all they can do because they simply can't/are unable to explain it? Which made me wonder about the more fundamental question of how tropes drive climbers (or any other extreme archetype), if there's some kind of external pressure that is hard to resist to be a certain way despite how artificial those tropes may be, especially in this media and sponsorship driven age.

I did not know that about Vasarhelyi. Obviously the presence of all the women in this film stands as a good testament how these mostly male, testosterone driven extreme sports films benefit from more women, haha!
posted by barchan at 12:55 PM on October 30, 2015


Can't wait to see this film. Though, checking iTunes, it looks like it won't be available to rent.
posted by persona au gratin at 1:08 PM on October 30, 2015


Thanks for reminder -- I'm gonna have to invite my climbing buddies over to watch this thing.

I saw this movie a few months ago in Berkeley... it, along with Valley Uprising, are probably the best climbing movies ever released.
posted by ph00dz at 1:15 PM on October 30, 2015


(Having Krakaeur - also a symbol of consequence, drive, friendship, and relationships - narrate is a brilliant touch. He's not there to lend his name to the film.)

A brief reading of MeTa threads around Everest can get you a synopsis of Krakauer's slightly...nuanced status in the climbing world. I'd agree with the "symbol of consequence" but that's about as far as I'd go. Dude has a serious chip on his shoulder, even if he's a great writer.
posted by allkindsoftime at 3:34 PM on October 30, 2015


I'm well aware of Krakauer's standing in the climbing world - his friendship with Anker and also Jenni Lowe is part of the film, as Anker and Lowe were friends and the ones who encouraged him to go climbing again after Everest; there's also a relationship among all of them about the kind of drive it takes to be a climber as well as an understanding about things like survivors' guilt and the impact climbing has on families. There's more to it than Krakauer and Everest.
posted by barchan at 3:53 PM on October 30, 2015


I've done just a tiny bit of very easy mountain climbing (like, less than a thousandth as difficult or risky as what they were documenting) but that was enough for me to know that I just don't have that drive. The "well, because it's there" thinking just isn't something that resonates for me, though that is precisely what drives some friends and people in my family to climb mountains. I especially don't understand people continuing to do the riskiest climbs once they have partners and/or children, but obviously that drive is so central for them that denying it would be like denying a part of themselves.

I heard about this from the New Yorker article linked above, and I hope I have a chance to watch the movie at some point. The clips look well done, and the people involved seem more thoughtful than many of the climbing films I have seen.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:52 AM on October 31, 2015


Reading the FPP, I was wondering why someone would name a cliff "Shark's Fin On Menu."



Been working on getting an eye-exam (thanks for the hassle, US healthcare!).
posted by Kirth Gerson at 9:40 AM on October 31, 2015


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