9.23b

[I just watched Arctic with Mads Mikkelssen. It joins All is Lost with Robert Redford in a list of grueling survival procedurals that hold a very special place in my heart (not least because I love polar exploration stories and thinking about sailing).]

But I want a grueling survival procedural about a woman, please, and don't feed me any of that Hunger Games trash, please. And I've already heard Adrift isn't up to snuff, The Shallows misses on all my favorite silent procedural nonsense, and Wild . . . I don't know, friend. I may give it a shot.

I'll tell you what I want.

A frontier family. The last wagon out of the high mountain valley before the fall snows close up the pass, and the visitor says "I'll be back come June." Maybe she sends them away with a big jar of peaches from the orchard that has shown its first fruit this summer.

Fire.

I picture that she spends the first night maybe hunched over in the burned up husk of their house, curled up with her head on her knees. I imagine that she claws through the ash for the shovel and has to make a crude handle just to bury whoever was taken by the fire. I imagine that she takes the horse up to the ridge where she can see the pass, maybe she even tries to ride through, and she has to turn back. She has a month, maybe, before the snows will kill her.

I imagine that she slowly reassembles a life, buoyed by little bits of her old life that she finds in the charcoal, and sometimes she'll pull out something simple and inexplicable like a big jar of peaches and she'll just weep. I picture her meticulously setting snares in the woods and felling trees and learning how to build a fire with nothing.

I see her losing the horse.

I want a story that drives her just exactly to the brink and then tips her over it again and again, just like these stories should, and she reacts in exactly the way she would—not masculine, exactly, but a sort of feminine strength that usually plays badly in films because the person writing has no idea what they're doing, or perhaps they think that being strong also means being an asshole, or maybe because they don't let the actor have space to actually be strong. I want the actress in the situation with the solution and to let the actress play how she would play it. Not strident and soricine. Not standoffish and mean. Not an asshole. Who would she be these things to? There is only her. Hollywood can't ruin her by making her an uncomfortable send-up of herself. But we would see something distinctly feminine, perhaps, in actions that are taken for necessity because they are the only actions to take, even though they are the actions that anybody would take to survive, whatever their gender presentation or identity, in such a situation. I want to see it because I wonder what the actress would do. I want to see, isolated, idealized and impossible, strength on a feminine palette.

I see her giving up, starving to death, laying down to die, and seeing that jar of peaches again where it rolled back into the corner of her rough shelter, and she eats them, the whole jar, with her hands, the juice running down her elbows and freezing on the floor, and she's shaking and her eyes are deep in her gaunt cheeks.

The peaches are the turning point she needed.

I believe that when the spring roars back to her valley, she hears three gunshots from up in the pass shouting welcome back, and she just sprints. She drops the adze she fashioned from a piece of the old sink or whatever and she just runs pell-mell up the trail towards the returning visitors. She rounds a bend and just collapses in the road, and she says something courageous and expansive and overwhelmed as their wagon rolls around the corner ahead of her. Something breathed, something from an unfamiliar voice that hasn't heard human speech in seven months, something like

I lived.

And maybe, if we're very unlucky, the visitors will bundle her up into their wagon and place her again firmly in her role as the feminine, and we will be left with a scene of her being laced into a borrowed dress in the house she built with her own hands while the male visitor takes all the credit for emptying her snares and the female visitor degrades what she's accomplished with her stark disbelief. And our hero will cry, and the female visitor will grasp her hand and say "I know, dear, I know." And she won't, not at all, but we will, and we will cry, and nothing we can do will fix it because catharsis belongs to the author and he has withheld it from us and he is a vicious beast who wants to make us suffer even in the heart of salvation. He wants us to taste the bitter ash of living.

That's all I want. Is it too much to ask?