"Once More into the Fray" (Review of "The Grey")

“The Grey” is an ambiguous title. Neither black nor white, it would seem to signify an intermediate state, one that escapes easy characterization. Such was not my initial preconception of this movie, one that was marketed as an action thriller when it was released several years ago.

My first impression of the movie, based as this was on the publicity material that was circulated, was that it was an action-oriented film that would take a fairly predictable course of action. I thought that we had already seen this type of movie, after all; a band of misfits, lost in the jungle, or the desert, or the ocean, forced to rely on each other in order to survive. Had we not seen this premise in movies such as “The Three Kings”, or the recent movie series “Lost”?

This film is premised on an ordeal that involves a plane crash in the arctic north under forbidding circumstances. We are introduced to an assorted group of characters that seem to be memorable, a motley assorted group of braggarts, vagabonds and anti-social types who seem to comprise a catalogue of the walking wounded. They are uncouth by and large, given to violence and hard-drinking, to bravado and to power plays, and they resemble much more a group of convicts on parole than the hard-working proletarian society they represent. There is no idealization of the working stiff.

After a horrific crash in which most of the passengers perish, and in which the lead character, an emotionally moribund man by the name of John, is seemingly reborn on an expansive white glacier, the few survivors are forced to confront the dire nature of their predicament. They are wounded, they are facing a storm, and there is little immediate prospect of rescue. The mental fog in which they and most of modern humanity lives, the “grey” of the title, is temporarily dispelled, and everything assumes a much starker and clear contour. They probably will not survive, barring a miracle.

I have to admit, I tend to be very mistrustful of Hollywood formulas. It seems I am regularly disappointed because, like many of the fairy tales that we grew up reading, these stories tend to be highly moralizing products that do just that, affirm the ideological values of the societies of which they represent the cultural capital that is most readily accessible and available. If the movies inevitably have happy ending, then they affirm the moral clarity of these societies and their respective institutions, even though, as we well know, in real life this is overwhelmingly not the case.

Instead of relying on the familiar formulas of typical action thrillers, this movie presents a sequence of encounters which become progressively more deadly. There is no modern Robinsinade here, no fable of political economy in which an individual or a group of individuals is stranded in the wilderness, only to impose order on their circumstances and build up capital (construct houses, exploit natural and human resources, etc.) in order to reconstitute the model of social capital that had prevailed in the societies they had left behind. it is instead a much bleaker film, with no celebratory reaffirmation of the illusions (the “grey”) that are so necessary to build hegemony, the willing acceptance of a power structure as a natural “order” that seems logical even if it works against the interests of so many, and for the benefit of so few. Why should we root for the underdogs, when it is the Alpha dog who we so idealize?

These men, then, all work for an energy concern up in Alaska, and they can all be characterized as underdogs.  Yes, we have a vocabulary of primate society that is already very familiar to us, and it will be accentuated during the course of this film, as we see the parallels between human and lupine society. These workers don’t lead, they follow, even if they resent having to follow, and snap at each other continually. They are the outcasts of society, not the model citizens who are obedient and who lead humdrum existences. They live in harsh conditions, working in a desolate energy facility in the tundra, not because they crave the comforts of  human society, but because they need the isolation, they need the intensity of the experience, and because they are outcasts. (Yes, one may argue they might do it because of the pay as well, but for these characters, they seem not to conform to the model of prudent capitalists who gather and exploit their resources wisely, but are instead, impudent in their lavish expenditures.) They are lone wolves, and as affirmed above, they are the human analogue for the society of predatory wolves they will encounter in the wild.

But the film is more than about establishing parallels between these two societies. The wolves, after all, are never fully individuated, and always seem much more eerie because they are characterized by more coordination and ruthlessness (they aren’t blinded by the illusions of civilization, by the “grey”). The pack of wolves seems to embody a much more symbolic function, for on a deeper level they point to a desolate private landscape, to psychosocial processes at work, and not just to the rapacity of a modern industrial economy that ruthlessly exploits workers. These wolves symbolize in a real way the fears and failures of each and one of the men in this group. They are the big bad wolves of our fairytales, but ones that eat away at them from the inside, knowing their frailties well and being able to exploit them. They gather in the gloom, keeping them under surveillance, following and provoking them. They are more than just elements of an evolutionary landscape that is dictated on hunting, they paralyze the men because they dissolve the illusions under which they live.

Thus, as it becomes more and more evident that the band of survivors will not prevail, the movie assumes a darker and darker undertone. Rescue will not be forthcoming, for they are injured, they lack food, and there is little chance of surviving the cold and the increasing boldness of the wolves that test their defenses, ambushing them one by one. There is no refuge, and their circumstances become increasingly desperate. Their only hope is to move away from the wreckage, and to find a more easily defended location. This is one of the truest insights they have gained, for as a few of the characters come to realize it, they are the fabricators of their own reality.

There is a gradual attrition that winnows their group until we move from eight to seven to six to, finally, one individual. This is, then, not a formulaic Hollywood epic in which the band  of men struggles and survives. It is, then, a hunt in which there is no last-minute salvation. It is more of a process of resignation, one in which the men are forced to acknowledge their fears and face them fully, all of this contributing to a dispiriting acceptance of the fact that they won’t win.

The wolves are merciless in their attacks, and they surround the men and torment them with their howling. Western civilization will not save them; it already had abandoned them, so to speak. The GPS beacon found on one of the wristwatches worn by one of the dead men will also, similarly, not save them, for there is no rescue operation that could effectively be mounted that could hone in on the signal broadcast by this device, and limited resources available to mount such an expedition. In addition, the conditions (a blizzard) work against their favor. And finally, their mutual cooperation is also a frail endeavor, given the burden of mutual distrust that they all carry, and their need to challenge their leader, for it was a given that the misfits of society are surly lot, and that as the “grey” is slowly dispelled and clarity imposes itself like a bracing baptism in ice-cold water, they (and we) become aware that we are all misfits. The band of men will lose almost every encounter with the wolves, while also similarly succumbing to the hazards offered by nature, with the men freezing to death, drowning or succumbing to terrible falls.

The film offers what might seem to be a pessimistic vision, but like the famous poem by Dylan Thomas (“Do not go gently, into the good night”), perhaps it does succumb to a Hollywood formula. I would like to view it, however, as a humanistic one, for it resides in the idea that there is one last hope. Perhaps we need to affirm once again that struggle itself is an affirming action that gives values to human existence. “Once more into the fray”, is one of the lines memorized by the protagonist, the last man left during the course of this harrowing ordeal.

It is a movie that leaves one in a pensive mood, but hardly embittered. It certainly shines with an honesty that is brutal but also clear, dispelling the gloom of the “grey” (the fog, the blizzard, the unconsciousness of modern day life) that blinds us ordinarily.

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013