Heroine … no sooner settled in one country or Europe than they [Antigone-like heroine has father in tow] are necessitated to quit it … always making new acquaintance & always obliged to leave them … the scene will be for ever shifting from one Set of People to another … At last, hunted down … quite worn down … crawls back towards her former country … in the very nick of time, turning a corner … — Austen, Plan of a Novel
A walk is like a life in miniature … a pilgrimage, Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust
Dear friends and readers,
Twas the season of two hour and more movies.
This is to recommend not missing a powerful film based on a trope familiar to anyone who has read women’s narratives: Wild, based on a memoir by Cheryl Strayed, and starring Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl and Laura Dern as her mother, Bobbie (directed by Jean-Marc Vallee, screenplay Nick Hornby). I’ve come across telling complaints about it: it lacks a story-line, is told in fragments, gets nowhere (she does walk over 1000 miles in natural that is mostly deserted and therefore risky landscape) and is of course tedious, i.e., no climaxes where one would expect (see “1st user review”).
The long walk as an escape, a refuge, a refusal to be coopted by a society, and what outcasts often have to live with, as a quest to achieve something by reaching a powerful person, or more simply a journey where you are by yourself and can think, remember, achieve some perspective while keeping yourself intensely busy trying to survive: eating, drinking, shelter, sleeping, going to the bathroom, each of these supposed diurnal and uninteresting activities present which even in ordinary travel assume more central attention become arduous problems for Cheryl as she carries all that she needs on her back — this trope goes back to classical literature with Antigone leading her blind father, Oedipus, wandering (and there are many closet plays in imitation), but the first modern version I know of was a tremendous hit in its time, Sophie Cottin’s Elisabeth, ou les Exiles de Siberie, which Austen parodied in one of her last fragments, The Plan of a Novel (see etext from Republic of Pemberley)). Scott’s Jeanie Dean walking from Edinburgh to London to save her sister Effie, accused of infanticide, from hanging, consolidated Scott’s reputation and Heart of Mid-lothian is one of Scott’s novels still read. Fast forward: who has not read Rebecca Solnit? Wanderlust? Solnit says the walk is under assault and tells of 19th century women (from memoirs) who walked.
The movie is done through what makes movies movies: audio-visual experience, the camera moving from panorama, to juxtaposed vignettes (sometimes ironic), and montage. The essence of film art, what differentiates it from novels, theatre, capturing birds in flight, weather patterns, hand-held, and of course the close-up. Cheryl has hit an anguished nadir before she sets off on her journey.
Slowly it’s revealed as her memories come and go (flashbacks with voice-over) her single-mother was diagnosed with spinal cancer at age 45 and within a month was dead. Less time to experience the indifference of the medical establishment, but she was told she had a year. She was someone who tried hard to go through life with cheer and hope and we first see her dancing by the kitchen sink as the young child Cheryl looks on, then going to the same high school Cheryl is in; dialogues of them going into bad debt and trying to pay for their loans as waitresses; she serves her son when she should be doing her homeback; moving back in time, we see her violent husband, how she fled him with her children when young and lived in a car for a time. The desperate straits of the 75% we might call this. (Movies have been reflecting the condition of a huge number of people in the US since 2004/5, three years before the financial crash.)
They go in for painful tattooes together
Another set of memories is Cheryl’s as a waitress in a diner. To make ends meet she prostitutes herself, allows men to bugger, rape, whatever her. How she descends into smoking heroin, then shooting it, then ending up on the sidewalks of a filthy alley. These are woven in with present and past time scene with an ex-husband, Paul. Paul remains important to Cheryl: it is he whose residence she writes down on registers when she stays in motels; it is he whom she phones when she reaches this or that spot on her trip (she needs to feel someone somewhere knows her and might be concerned if she stopped phoning). It’s not clear how the marriage failed, but it included violence on his part, and on hers an inexplicable self-destructive and hostilely reactive behavior she cannot explain to him. Now he is with another girlfriend.
The scary-near rape has the moral “no good deed goes [nearly] unpunished.” She has run out of water in the desert and finally come upon a vile puddle which she had equipment to filter and make two large bottles of water for herself. Two young man with backpacks like hers come along, and she shares. One of them attempts an attack a short time later. She is unusual as a woman. It’s remarked upon more than once. One night she is the only woman among five people, all of whom have her sort of tent.
Nonetheless, the movie is not pessimistic (as I assume the memoir is not). Cheryl’s encounters on the road reminded me of Darwin’s paragraph at the end of his Voyage of the Beagle: it’s not the people who turned from him, but the large number of people who were friendly, courteous and occasionally went out of their way to help him that would stay in his mind. She fears rape and her first encounter with an older man driving a tractor as she asked him to drive her to somewhere she could get the right gas for her stove and supplies made me nervous. But in fact he drove her to an isolated poor looking house which in the inside was comfortably appointed, with lots of plants, a kindly wife who said she would like to accompany Cheryl but no she didn’t think she was up to it. Heavy, older, inclined to watch TV all day. They give her a splendid meal and she showers. There are rests along the way for hikers like herself; places for her to receive packages and mail. Set in 1995 we have some Bohemian-hippy scenes which seemed to me more like a 1960s amibiance, when she reaches California she goes to a concert and has a casual encounter in bed with a young man seemingly like herself.
I was deeply moved by her mother’s death — this is yet another story from the omnipresent epidemic we are experiencing and no one does anything about fundamentally. Her wild cry as she brings her brother to see her mother at long last (he has apparently been keeping away from the hospital) and is told her mother’s eyes are iced as she wanted to donate them, and realizes he is too late. Her mother is a corpse. She rocks and rocks with her mother’s body in her arms.
She needed to get over all she has experienced in this life of ours for a young women, circa later 20th early 21st century. The credits included photos the real Cheryl on the various stages of her journey.
Most touching to me were her encounters with small creatures. Margaret Anne Doody has identified women’s poets’ identification with small animals as a hallmark of women’s poetry as by women, in the 18th century and elsewhere. A hissing rattlesnake rightly terrifies her. She tries to get a fox which improbably keeps turning up at points in her journey to come to her. He or she looks hurt — his eyes are bloodshot, he looks wounded; Cheryl has on her body numerous sores and wounds we see when she showers or undresses. Terrible the moment where her brother shoots to death with a rifle the horse her mother loved and who has sickened and they can no longer afford to keep. Her mother asked her to protect the horse as best she could from cruelty.
Her mother had some original background which taught her to ride and riding when Cheryl was young was a something her mother actually enjoyed — there are close-ups of the horse’s face
She is said to stink when she gets to various stopping points. One woman who sells her a lipstick says she needs to address “more fundamental problems.” But she meets another woman walker taking the same trail and they spend an evening staring out at the sky talking to one another.
At last she reaches the bridge we have been told will be the end of her journey. The film-makers probably were somewhat forced into having the voice-over tell us 9 years from then she would marry and would eventually have two children. For me this information was somewhat meretricious — happy and sad endings depend on where you pull down the curtain. For me it was enough that she had made it. She looks out at the waters below. I could not do what she did but metaphorically she was telling of the journey I’ve known. And where I am now.
Women’s art, women’s lives. Even if Austen made fun of this trope, she recognized its importance.
Cheryl Strayed
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
I was moved to see the movie due to Diane Reynolds’ posting on my WWTTA listserv at Yahoo:
Wild, in contrast (to Mud) is very much a woman’s film. I knew so little about it that I thought it was set in Australia (it’s actually set on the Pacific Crest trail in Calif. and Oregon). I did not know it was centrally a movie about grieving. I have to say my take on it is not wholly objective, as I identified powerfully on an emotional level with the main character, played by Reese Witherspoon, who lost her mother about the same age I lost mine (23). My mother died of cancer; the very strong suggestion is that the mother in this movie died of cancer, but the word is never said–we hear the word tumors, radiation and then the daughter screaming, as her mother is dying, you said one year and it’s been one month!. All of that resonates with my own experience of my mother’s cancer, especially being told at the end that she had six weeks when she had one (doctors, of course, don’t know).
In any case, the young woman deals with her grief through sex and heroin (not my methods!), ruins her marriage and takes a 1000 mile hike to deal with her issues. The film uses flashbacks that emerge as she hikes and tell her story. I identified most strongly with the bouts of almost unbearable grief that hit the young woman as memories overcome her, and I remembered the way my body, my physicality, could simply be overcome at odd moments. So that part of the movie seemed very real.
The film also showed the raw vulnerability of a woman hiking alone. In several instances, she is faced with very real possibility of rape and–to me, this shows what a woman’s film it is is–the reaction we feel as one man says, “I’m just playing with you” when he tells her what pretty legs and “butt” she has, is visceral. To a vulnerable woman alone in the woods and us as an audience on her side, these words are not play, but terrifying. The numbing, stomach wrenching fear they engender is acute. We also see that her fear of rape is a fear of being murdered–the same raw power that enables a man to force sexual penetration on a woman is the force that enables murder–we understand rape as proxy murder.
On the downside, without the intense central grief of the movie, it could have become cloying. The woman tries to connect with what might be a phantom wolf ( her inner wolf?) It’s a misfire, and the poetry she records as she travels does work, but I was uneasily aware of how quoting Adrienne Rich and Robert Frost can quickly become phony. At the end, despite her mother’s grief that she will die having only been defined as a mother and wife and despite the young woman’s own rejection of redemption, it is her second marriage and two children that represent her redemption, reminding me of Jane Austen.
Overall, however, I found it a riveting film and one of a woman’s journey, inner and outer, a rare enough occurrence. It reminded me too of A Winter’s Bones, if not as good, and I thought it a good companion to Into the Wild.
Finally, Mud (also discussed) and Wild speak, if obliquely, to the new class divide in the US. Both are underclass films. The people in mud are on the edge or in poverty–living in shacks or trailers, having very little (arguably, it’s always been that way in the Arkansas swamps) and the woman in Wild is raised in poverty by a single mother (after they flee an abusive father). The daughter is groping to climb into the middle class through education–we see, though, that she too, like her mother, becomes a waitress and falls into behaviors we associate with the underclass, fairly or not (eg, heroin use). I wonder if modern movies are echoing the 1930s/40s films, where we find a divide between tales about the very wealthy and of people in economic struggle.
Diane
Before seeing the movie: The trailer told nothing of Wild — as is so common for trailers — and it is playing in a local art-movie house near me. So I will try it tomorrow or maybe today. I started noticing that films depict centrally the desperately poor where there is no hope of a good middle class job around 2004-5, before the crash of the banks.
I can contribute two kinds of thoughts: note the different paradigms in the woman’s and the man’s film. The woman wants to show us an inner journey, uses flashbacks so is circular, is about a person trying to survive against a socially hostile environment that is indifferent to her as an individual utterly –and was to her mother. This is what women’s novels even when set in a more middling habitas show us. If we know that men experience this kind of niche too, when they tell a story of it it’s not from this perspective usually. It can be found in male gothics (the wanderer type, the outcast) …
Lisa: “Great post; thanks!”
Diane K: “I did not see how they could make a movie of this, so much is internalized in the book. But they did and it’s great. Nick Hornby is a very excellent writer of everything. That said, the book is still worth reading too because not everything got externalized in the movie. And Stayed is SUCH a good writer.”
Me: Thank you for the recommendation. I think I might love this book.