20 Seconds of Joy -- But Who Pays?

"I don’t want to die, I want to live. I’m pretty good at running away, and this is my escape!” So says Karina Hollekim in 20 Seconds of Joy, the hour-long documentary about her life, and near death, as a BASE jumper. Unfortunately, even those who are good at running away could not possibly escape fast enough from this tedious yet offensive film.


Inexplicably, 20 Seconds of Joy won the award for best film on mountain sports, plus a people's choice award, at the 32nd annual Banff Mountain Film Festival. The festival bills itself as an opportunity to "experience the adventure of climbing, mountain expeditions, remote cultures, and the world’s last great wild places." And if you don't happen to be hanging around the Canadian Rockies in the autumn, a selection of films and film excerpts from the festival tours North America each year.



So it was that I found myself at the Lebanon Opera House on February 8, in the company of a theatre-full of trust-fund hippies from Dartmouth whose idea of being at one with Planet Earth is the kind of resource-intensive, self-indulgent outdoor sport that is epitomized by BASE jumping. BASE, by the way, is an acronym for the kinds of perches from which these people leap -- buildings, antennae, spans (as in bridges or arches) and earth (i.e., cliffs or other natural formations). Don't these people have an exam to study for?



For five long years, documentary filmmaker Jens Hoffman followed Hollekim around from leap to leap and recorded her tiresome, hackneyed justifications for such reckless thrill-seeking. The film even stoops as low as to show an interview with Hollekim's mother, who suffered a debilitating brain injury when the family car got into an accident when Karina was just a little kid. Is Karina avenging her mother's tragedy? Fleeing from it? Subconsciously reenacting it?

We never find out, because this film has nothing to say beyond the obvious. Five minutes into the hour, it is perfectly obvious that this story is going to end badly, given the ceaseless repetition of the notion that death and crippling injury perpetually stalk BASE jumpers. Hollekim brashly states, over and over again, that she accepts her fate without fear or regret.

Thus, at approximately 45 minutes: Splat!

Ironically, Hollekim doesn't cripple herself by jumping off a building, an antenna, a span or some piece of earth. She leaps out of an airplane over Switzerland and, while the movie certainly has footage of the mishap, there is never really an explanation of precisely how Hollekim's fate caught up with her. Instead, we watch as she undergoes surgery after surgery, and endures month after month of rehab, in order to regain the use of her shattered legs.

By the end of the film, it is not clear whether she will succeed. I personally was indifferent to the medical outcome, obsessing instead over the question of who is paying what was obviously hundreds and thousands of dollars in medical expenses necessary for the repair of more than 25 open fractures. Like other European countries, Norway has a system of universal healthcare, which means that Norwegians with real jobs, in dangerous places like mines and mills, are paying for all those operations and all that rehabilitation. These people will likely labor for entire lifetimes without ever standing at any of the breathtakingly beautiful precipices one sees in 20 Seconds of Joy -- and if they ever got to such a place, leaping would likely be the last thing on their minds.

Likewise, leaping was probably the last thing on the minds of all those World Trade Center office workers as they arrived at their cubicles on the sunny morning of September 11, 2001. Maybe you have to have had the actual experience of standing atop one of those towers, on an observation platform deliberately set back from the edge to discourage vertigo, to understand viscerally what it must have taken to have forced all those involuntary BASE jumps one sees in footage of that horrible day. Maybe an ability to imagine what that must have felt like -- choosing free-fall over inferno a thousand feet above Greenwich Street -- is all it takes to dismiss Katrina Hollekim as an irksome character and any movie about her a waste of celluloid.

I get it that people like Katrina Hollekim are out there -- folks whose greatest joy lies in confronting and overcoming what would be, to anyone, the most fearsome of possibilities. To those people I say: Next time, try standing in front of an advancing tank in an effort to stop tyranny or genocide. Offer yourself up to a medical experiment calculated to cure the heretofore uncurable. Or rescue a child from a burning building.

Or go land on the moon like Neil Armstrong did. I learned today that Neil Armstrong never grants interviews to discuss his experiences as the first person to stand upon a different celestial object than Earth. Would that Katrina Hollekim had cultivated such laudable reticence. Even 20 seconds of silence would be better than 20 Seconds of Joy.