Alex Honnold and Netflix Team Up for a Corporatized “Free Solo”
In Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Oscar-winning 2018 documentary, “Free Solo,” the world-class rock climber Alex Honnold expresses reservations about being shot by a film crew while he attempts to become the first person ever to scale Yosemite’s El Capitan monolith without ropes or a harness. “The idea of falling off . . . It’s, like, kind of O.K. if it’s just by myself, but, like, I wouldn’t want to fall off right in front of my friends,” he says, explaining that usually, when he free-solos—the high-risk practice of no-supports climbing—he tends not to tell anyone he’s doing it. “The fewer people know anything, the better, really.” For Honnold, the documentary suggests, free soloing isn’t about fame or attention or money. Instead, it’s about the climber’s own need to prove to himself that he can overcome mortal risk as well as his own fears. To bring cameras into the equation might mar the authenticity of this pursuit.
If being watched is portrayed as a tricky proposition in “Free Solo,” watching, too, is shown to be fraught. The animating drama of the documentary doesn’t hinge just on whether Honnold will emerge from climbing El Cap with life and limb intact but, also, on whether documenting his ascent is even appropriate—a question that members of the film crew, who are all climbers themselves, grapple with onscreen. “I’ve always been conflicted about doing a movie about free soloing because it’s so dangerous,” Chin says. “It’s hard to not imagine your friend, Alex, soloing . . . and you’re making a film about it, which might put undue pressure on him to do something and him falling through the frame to his death.” At the movie’s climax, as we see Honnold finally ascending to El Cap’s peak, hanging on the wall’s granite surface by his fingertips or balancing on a slim ridge with his toes, the shot occasionally pans to one of the cameramen, Mikey Schaefer, who keeps turning away from his lens. “I can’t believe you guys actually can watch,” he says to his colleagues at one point.
How far we’ve come. On Saturday night, Alex Honnold was back, but this time the whole world was invited to watch as he climbed not a natural wonder but a man-made one—the Taipei 101, one of the tallest buildings in the world—as part of a special Netflix streaming event, “Skyscraper Live.” The name of the broadcast called to mind one of those nineteen-seventies disaster movies, like “The Towering Inferno” or “Airport,” in which a catastrophe befalls a built environment to harrowing effect. But if part of the pleasure of those films is watching their protagonists’ struggle to just barely escape whatever outlandish calamity has been thrust upon them, in Honnold’s case, the calamity, were it to come, would be self-inflicted. It would also be streamed globally, and in real time, to millions of Netflix subscribers.
“It’s really just sensationalism for the sake of shock and awe, like verging awfully close to Colosseum type entertainment,” a user wrote in a much liked comment on a Reddit climbing thread, and when I watched the special’s promotional trailer, which leaned hard on the event’s critical stakes, I worried that this take wasn’t wrong. (“If you fall,” Honnold says in the promo, as the camera rushes at a dizzying clip down the length of the nearly seventeen-hundred-foot building, “you’re going to die.”) The fact that “Skyscraper Live” was supposed to take place on Friday night but, at the last minute, got postponed because of rainfall in Taipei, was, on the one hand, reassuring, since it indicated that Honnold and Netflix were being at least somewhat sensible by not taking on more risk than they had already signed up for. On the other hand, it reminded me that there was only so much they could control. What if it started to rain while Honnold was climbing? What if the wind picked up? What if there was seismic activity?
Around 8 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on Saturday, with the ascent up Taipei 101 about to commence, these possibilities were all raised by Mark Rober, a popular science YouTuber and one of the special’s presenters. Rober’s peppy manner—“finally, believe it or not, we’re monitoring earthquakes!”—was echoed by the event’s team of commentators, among them the Netflix sports anchor Elle Duncan, the celebrated rock climber Emily Harrington, and the man-bun- and undercut-sporting W.W.E. fighter Seth (Freakin’) Rollins. The trio’s bland, affable chatter—“the goosebumps are goosebumping,” Duncan offered at one point, perkily—reminded me a bit of watching one of the sleepier Olympic sports (dressage? archery?) rather than a harrowing life-and-death event.
