Review of 127 Hours (2010) by Shiira — 08 Dec 2010

Aron Ralston(James Franco) wasn't always a loner, the anomic man we see shouting "me, the music, and the night" as he rides toward the Utah mountains, on a bike, all by his lonesome and loving it.

Aron's solitary trek to Bluejohn is juxtaposed against shots that depict large masses of people which preceded his frenzied peddling into oblivion. He's running away from something. But what? The free spirit can't hardly wait to leave civilization behind, preferring the outback to the city, and the people who reside there, and possibly, the people who don't reside there anymore.

How Aron got to this extremity is a mystery. That's the heart of "127 Hours", which is adapted from his 2004 memoir "A Rock and a Hard Place". The flashbacks that the film provides calculatingly leaves out the particulars which would account for his solitary ways.

Aron is avoiding something painful. The narrative that his reflections form leaves a lot to the imagination. When the self-proclaimed superhero isn't musing over the mother he ignores, interspersed with fantasies about food and drink, and, of course, escape, the suddenly thoughtful man reminisces about the relationship he had carelessly abdicated from.

Aron fixates on the moment after sex, not the sex itself, since by all appearances, sex no longer interests him(the two hikers, played by Amber Tamblyn and Kate Mara, go unmolested), but perhaps, intimacy does, in which he remembers a woman's touch at the same time an ant traverses over the same cheek as that fingertip.

As Aron brushes off the offending insect, perhaps, the error of his ways(loving nature more than people) finally dawns on him, realizing too late that this love for the outdoors can't be reciprocated.

The dismissal of the ant is representational of the way he brushed aside his college girlfriend, who he first locked eyes with, ironically enough, in an area dense with warm bodies, a car crammed full of young libertines, stripping down to nothing with the snow falling just outside their fogged-up windows.

Aron's memories are selective ones, but the moviegoer can hazard a guess as to to how this seemingly normal man, so at ease in mixed company, packed like sardines, could end up feeling estranged from the crowd at a basketball game.

Aron entered that arena as part of a couple, but he left alone, and presumably, has been single from that moment on. What happened? Although the father is referred to at the outset of "The King of Comedy"-inspired interview that Aron conducts with himself, the elder Ralston is, more than likely, dead, since the father figures only in his childhood reflections, and ultimately, gets no final "I love you" from the prodigal son during that last entry in his video log.

Something changed the trajectory of Aron's life, a galvanizing event that led him to the outback, but the filmmaker shrewdly withholds the particulars behind this fundamental transmutation in the man through omission.

Like Scooby-Doo(seen twice in the film), the moviegoer is confronted with a mystery, a solvable one, because the clues provided by Aron's psyche indicates a familial tragedy. Quite pointedly, he tells the girls, "Can't take off my face," like all those Scooby-Doo villains who were unmasked at the end of every episode.

They weren't monsters, after all, but Aron is, that's how he feels. When he leaves the two hikers, one of them says, "I don't think we figured in his day at all," and she's probably right. Aron is f*cking the pain away.

In a sense, he's f*cking the rock formation. Penetrating the cut, Aron runs his hand across the flat surfaces as if he was caressing skin. All that touching, though, comes back to bite him. Arguably, the boulder that traps his hand can be construed as a metaphor for "vagina dentata", the toothed vagina myth.

Humiliated by the rock formation's rebuffing of his overtures, Aron gets ready to utilize the free hand on himself as revenge sex against nature, but because he's a gentleman at heart, the spurned lover turns off the video camera, in which a freeze-frame of some prime cleavage would have served as his inspiration.

This lust, however, makes him human again. Aron is over the mountain. She's a biter.