People have fainted at the sight of Aron Ralston’s famously grisly self-liberation during early screenings of the upcoming biopic “127 Hours.”
The first time Ralston saw his onscreen avatar break free from his entrapment was in July with a test audience in a New Jersey theater. Wearing sunglasses and a hat pulled down, he had been spirited into the multiplex by Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle.
When the graphic, triumphant scene of Ralston cutting off his own arm arrived, people all around him fell into silence.
“There I am sitting, eating popcorn and munching loudly,” Ralston said. “And I’m like crunch, crunch, crunch. I’m thinking, ‘Why am I making so much noise?’ ”
It’s just one of the questions Ralston hashes over these days as his public persona moves into a different realm of public lore — from that of folk hero to celluloid icon — the sort of transition that can happen only when your story is perpetually retold by a major Hollywood movie.
It is a few hours before an Aspen Filmfest screening of “127 Hours” and Ralston, 34, sits in the lobby of the mountain town’s Jerome Hotel. His left hand covers the gently rounded stump where his right hand once was. But he’s a gesturer, and soon both arms take flight as he talks about life lived after a crucible. About the fresh lessons of an old wound. About the trickiness of forging ahead as his 7-year-old tale gets told again and again when he’s embarked on a different kind of adventure. Three years ago he got involved with Jessica Trusty. A year ago they married. They live in Boulder with their 8-month-old son, Leo.
Life-changing lessons
But his story is, as they say, unforgettable. In May 2003, he became famous when he saved his life by amputating his lower arm with a dull utility knife. An avid wilderness adventurer, Ralston, then 27, was making his way alone through Blue John Canyon in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park when a boulder slipped, pinning his right hand and wrist to a slot-canyon wall. The title of his best-selling 2004 memoir about the six-day ordeal? “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.”
His story exerted a vise grip on the imaginations of millions. Hundreds camped outside the hospital. There were, he recalls, thousands of e-mails and phone calls, some well-wishing, some angling to tell his story. Over time there were appearances on “Late Show With David Letterman,” an NBC news documentary and many more stops on the media circuit.
Ralston’s 15 minutes of fame should have run out roughly 56,000 hours ago. But “127 Hours” may reignite some resentment over the media attention. Mention his name around town and, even now, the word “reckless” comes up.
Ralston famously did not leave a note about his weekend plans. He had been a wilderness guide and former mountain rescuer. He should have known better.
Ralston understands the sentiment. He’s wrestled with what in his makeup led him into the canyon solo.
“I had a major realization in the canyon. Then you go back to living,” he says with a brief laugh. “How do I do this and not be so arrogant? I get to address this with my wife and our baby. This is my practice now.”
It is also the material he hopes to shape into a second book. “I know where it all comes from. I’ve done a lot of counseling in my life. And I can look and see I was this ostracized kid who had the esteem beaten out of him by bullies and unfriendly cohorts.
“It’s me trying to build my esteem up and in a lot of ways be better than everybody. Because if I’m not better than everybody, then what the kids told me in third and fifth and eighth grade — that I was worthless, that I wasn’t good enough to play with them, that I wasn’t good enough to hang out with them — is true. Elitism became my salvation.”
Boyle thinks the reason Ralston’s story remains so gripping is because it is not about the feats — or ego — of a superman but about the epiphany of an everyman. Ralston escaped by realizing he had a human obligation to stay alive.
“His superhuman status is not going to get him out of there. He can’t move that rock. His skills have gone, have been used up,” says Boyle on the phone. The director of such varied and visceral films as “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Trainspotting” and “28 Days Later” will be in Denver on Nov. 6 to receive the Mayor’s Career Achievement Award at the 33rd Starz Denver Film Festival.
On Day Five of Ralston’s tribulation in a Utah canyon, a young boy arrives. He’s a hallucination, a promise, a guide.
“It’s only when he sees that child, that he sees he has a part to play amongst people,” Boyle says.
“Having a kid is not an achievement like climbing a 14,000-foot peak. It’s actually an obligation and a duty. There’s a modesty to it. And that to me was always what the story was about. It was a movement back to people.”
Sitting in Aspen, the town he had lived in for only six months when the incident happened, Ralston concurs.
“It’s one of those cliches that they teach you more than you teach them,” he says of son Leo.
“He’s teaching me, ironically, about being in the outdoors. I find myself making better decisions than I probably ever have before. He’s teaching me, as difficult a lesson as it is, that there is something, someone more important in my life than me.”
“Someone else’s version of you”
The release of “127 Hours” in theaters next month is likely to cement Ralston’s place in American pop culture, in our national tales about the call of the wild and the rough pragmatism survival can demand. It also ensures a fresh cycle of media attention, which Ralston now seems better prepared to weather, Boyle says.
“When I met him in 2006, I’ll be honest, I didn’t warm to him a lot. I thought, despite what he’d been through, he was the same guy in many ways.
“And, I say this with the knowledge of hindsight, that the media circus, the extraordinary celebrity and opportunity it gave him, delayed his journey. It was only when he met his Jessica that he moved forward. When I met him again in 2009, he was a very different kind of guy, and I warmed to him enormously.”
Of course, few people have to reckon with such a peculiar clash of selves: the one re-created for mass consumption and the other lived day to day.
Though there are many more of them this movie season.
Ralston joins Boulder’s Penny Chenery in “Secretariat,” former CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson in the upcoming feature “Fair Game,” Betty Anne Waters — a waitress who went to law school to free her imprisoned brother — in “Conviction” and Mark Zuckerberg in the not-s0-flattering “The Social Network,” in a parade of real-life people grappling with onscreen incarnations. Or as 84-year-old Chenery says, coming to terms with “someone else’s version of you.”
In his memoir, Ralston writes that before he cut through the gristle of his forearm, he felt that he was “drawing power from every memory of my life, and all those possibilities for the future those memories represent.”
A half an hour before he goes onstage to introduce “127 Hours” to the Aspen audience, to the friends and community that rallied round him, Ralston arrives at the Wheeler Opera House greenroom. In a stroller is a wriggling, watchful Leo.
This is the little boy in the canyon come to life. This is the child Ralston, full of gratitude, says “literally helped save my life.”
“127 Hours”
The movie starring James Franco (“Milk,” “Spider-Man”) and directed by Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “Trainspotting”) opens nationally Nov. 12.
See it first: 8 p.m. Nov. 5, Starz Denver Film Festival, Ellie Caulkins Opera House. Go to denverfilm.org for details.
Lisa Kennedy’s take: Her review will be in the Nov. 12 Entertainment section.
