What Survival Stories Tell Us (and Should We Listen?)

24:30Naomi Fry:So tell me about Rescue Dawn because I haven't watched it, I must admit. Well, Rescue Dawn is a movie starring Christian Bale. It's a fiction based on a documentary that Werner Herzog made called Little Dieter Needs to Fly about a German-American pilot in the Vietnam War who shot down, goes to a prisoner of war camp, and then escapes and has to survive in the Vietnamese jungle. Screw up our release. Look, I don't give a shit about our release or whatever you think is going to happen. But without water, you won't survive more than two days out there. Without water, your tracks will be visible for even more.

25:09The jungle is the prison. Don't you get it? It focuses on that, on the pure skill of survival and the intensity and the gritty details of how you get through this kind of thing. Which, if you can pace your movie right and can focus your camera on the cruel, unforgiving majesty of nature as only Werner Herzog can do, this is a subject he returns to again and again and again how indifferent to humans nature is and how absolutely immoral. It's a very satisfying and exciting movie. Mm-hmm. Also, there's a really fun New Yorker profile by Daniel Zaleski of Werner Herzog around the making of this movie where you see in true Herzogian style his own film set descend to a kind of madness, survivalist madness, as we know has happened many times, like in Aguirre, The Wrath of God.

26:01Yeah. Yeah. If these stories are well told, I do find them riveting, I have to say. Yeah. This idea, this thing that we've discussed a couple times in passing that like it's especially a mainstay of literature for the young. I mean, it always makes me think of, you know, in, you know, civilization after civilization, there are these coming of age rituals that, you know, young men, you know, they're thrown out by the tribe or the group and say, survive for a little bit and then come back. And that's how you come of age. I do think that we just have an obsession with our ancestors, you know, early humans, for whom this was just life.

26:41Not even that long ago. Not even crazily long ago. Yeah. And that this was just how you had to live if you wanted to be alive as a human being.

26:50Naomi Fry:Right. And that I think one of the growing difficulties of contemporary life is that you are born already atop so much achievement and it's like it all kind of passed you by. And this idea that, you know, even in the worst parts, not to go back to Heart of the Beast too much, you know. Listen, I welcome it. There is a sort of, you can't help but when you see someone, you know, pitch a tent just so or make a decision. You can't help but sort of moralize it, that there is like a, it is offering you some kind of pure or more human way to be. The whole thing about Hatchet is that when the kid gets back home, he's better.

27:34He's, you know, this time, I think it's 50 something days when he's lost in the Canadian wilds. it has had a kind of curative effect on him.

27:44Naomi Fry:I mean, it's about independence. It's about mastery. You know, it's about becoming often a man, we should say, you know, it's like oftentimes not only, but a lot of these examples of survival tales have to do with the kind of like either burgeoning masculinity or like, you know, in the case of Brad and the dog, a sunsetting kind of masculinity or whatever, you know, but one last fight. I still got one last fight in me, you know? And I, yeah, I mean, for me, these stories, I mean, when I was in grad school, I remember reading Ian Watts' The Rise of the Novel. And the novel is a genre that became, in the 18th century, and Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, was, according to Watts, the first novel.

28:31Naomi Fry:And part of that was about realism, right? It was about, this is not myth. I mean, it is in the sense that it's a mythical situation. Situation, yeah. It could be put in mythical terms, but what Defoe did was talk about the details of survival. Like, how is this actually happening? What are the factual or quasi-factual events on the ground that are being described in minute detail in the pages of this book that create the reality of this individual that we're reading about? And as a lover of realism, I'm all about realism. I'm not about, like, fantasy. I'm not about like reading about outer space or about dragons or, you know, or about myth, really.

29:17Naomi Fry:But it's kind of like a semi-outlier to read these tales of survival, which do take place in unfamiliar terrain. But for me, it's because these are realist fictions. They detail the how and the what of what these characters are going through. And to me, that's absolutely fascinating. I think that's a great point, Nomi. Yeah, I think this boundary between fantasy and the real is fascinating in the genre, especially as the world continues, as the human world continues to attempt its domination of the natural world in every conceivable way. Vincent, you were saying that there's this kind of fantasy about the past that comes into play when we deal with these survivalist stories.

30:05And in many cases, I think really the recent past. Like I'm thinking here of The Revenant, which takes place in the early 19th century and is about, I think, a fur trapper and conflicts with the Native Americans and conflicts with the other whites in his group and all of this. It's so built into the mythos of the creation of the United States from the not at all distant past about encountering this Louisiana Purchase Wilderness and trying to discover what's there and conquering the land and taking it over. I'm even thinking of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, Little House in the Big Woods. It's exactly that.

30:42Little House on the Prairie. So much of the American mythos, which is based in the reality of the American domination of the continent, is about that kind of survivalism. Yes, and absolutely the harshness of the land, trying to dominate both the land and its people. And one thing that I think is really interesting about some of the newer entries to the genre, particularly the reality show entries, is this both trying to recreate those elemental conditions but also strip away so many of those realities. is also the History Channel show Alone, which has 13 seasons and a very devoted following of viewers.

31:26And the distinctive thing about this show is that there is no camera crew or producing crew with the participants. Each participant is alone, as you might guess from the title. And they get cameras that they record their own activities with, that they give testimonials to directly. and then they're sent alone to see who can survive for the longest, which creates a kind of shipwreck type condition. But of course, if you were trying to create this more fundamental early human experience, you'd be trying to work together or trying to figure out some kind of way to collaborate as a group or use skills.

32:04Regardless, this craving among some to live this earlier experience is so strong. and the craving among the rest of us to watch the person do it so that we don't have to do it.

32:18Naomi Fry:Yeah, I absolutely have no interest in living it, but I absolutely love watching it. And I love Alone. I love it. It's, for me, the difference between Alone and Survivor is that Survivor, of course, there are a lot of similar elements. But Survivor, I mean, I watched the first couple seasons when it started, you know, A generation ago, a generation ago. But I tapered off on it because it simply stressed me out because it's about strategy, right? And it's about alliances and double crossings. And it kind of takes away from the pleasure of just watching a person interact with nature. And so for me alone is like completely pleasurable and Survivor is not really.

33:09I find Alone fascinating, but I do not find it pleasurable. And I think I'm, I know a lot of people really love this show, and I have only recently dipped into it. And I have found a stark, harsh coldness that is mesmerizing in a way. So I watched a good section of the most recent season of Alone, which aired this past summer. And it takes place in the Arctic wilderness, very far north, as winter is coming. So you have one guy, Will, who is from Alaska, who has not pooped in two weeks. I don't know if that means I'm clogged up or what, but I'm getting kind of worried. I have a fear that my stomach can tear open, my intestine can tear open.

34:08Naomi Fry:That's often a problem. It's a huge problem. For contestants and often why they have to be airlifted out of there, like, ship lifted. No pooping. And indeed, by the end of this episode, Will is tapped out because he has four children at home, and he doesn't want to, like, have a perforated bowel. and leave them without a father. He becomes listless and kind of can't get up anymore. Then there's Jax. Jax is telling the story of surviving a horrific rape when she was younger and how going to nature and learning these survival skills has helped reconnect her to her body and make her aware of what her body can do.

34:43Very moving, very powerful. She has a delicious meal of roasted rabbit. Everything is great. She's feeling happy. And then preview the next episode, Jax is saying, I can't take it anymore. The pain is too bad. Ah! So I really thought, can I take much more of this? It's rough.

34:59Naomi Fry:I don't know. No, it's rough. It's rough. But I think it's about psychological resilience. Yes. Because a lot of the people go into their own head. They don't have a trusty dog to talk to. They only have themselves to talk to. They don't even have Wilson. And that is also really seeing like a kind of a close to the bone psychic event happening, which is, yeah, I agree, it's harrowing. It's harrowing. But it's also kind of an interesting thing to see.

35:39Naomi Fry:After the break, is the need to survive as remote as it might seem? This is Critics At Large from The New Yorker.

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37:26Naomi Fry:One day last year, police entered a mansion in L.A. County and discovered the couple that lived there had almost two dozen children, nearly every one of them born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived. I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into? I'm Ava Kaufman. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark podcast feed.

38:05Okay, guys, we have been talking about survival.

38:10Naomi Fry:How about some recent examples? Like, is the genre at a different place today, would you say? Like, are we someplace new with it? Or are we simply just continuing on with where we were? I saw some of the first episode of the new season of Survivor. We just started. Sailing through the waters of the South Pacific Ocean, These 21 people are beginning the adventure of a lifetime. You know, Survivor's been out for so long. I guess this is season 51 or something. 51. They start, you know, they just have to jump off a boat, and suddenly they're putting together rafts to bring themselves to shore, not unlike Brad Pitt, who in the Heart of the Beast at one point drags two heavy suitcases from the floor of a body of water and drags them to shore underwater.

39:02water. Anyway, and one of the contestants, and this is what I mean to say about Survivor, one of the contestants cries out in an attitude of total glee. I haven't remembered a game start like this in eons. I mean, you got to kick it back, I think, almost to the single digits. Yeah, I'm good. A season of Survivor hasn't started like this since maybe, I don't know, like the single digits. As if, you know, at this point, surviving is more a reference to the show than it is about nature and humankind itself. You know, all of them are like, oh, man, this is like old school Survivor. They've all clearly grown up on the show.

39:38And I just, I thought that was so interesting. Alex, I know you also watched The New Survivor. So I have never seen Survivor before. Can you believe it?

39:51Naomi Fry:Ever? Like not even? I can believe it. I've only really seen a couple of episodes like by accident at somebody else's house. I've never really been like, I'm watching Survivor now. I've never watched Survivor before. Totally charmed by Survivor season 51, 90-minute premiere. Okay. Charmed. Okay. Charmed, I'm sure. Charmed, I'm sure. What I think, I may stick with it. Very surprising. Look at these sun-kissed, mostly American children. So they're surviving. They're starting to survive. They're building fires. One of them is going out and trying to spear a fish. And then suddenly they get to this obstacle course that looks like something from summer camp.

40:30It reminded me of Nickelodeon shows from the 90s, like Legend of the Hidden Temple. Yes. Where suddenly there's a time everyone's screaming and trying to push like a fuchsia padded box through a net for some reason and build a puzzle at the end. Nothing could be cheesier. That plus American Ninja Warriors. Or like the gauntlet. American Gladiators. American Gladiators. It's beyond corny. And then they have their ceremony at the end and it's all about social dynamics. and totally into it, adorable and cute. Contrast that with apocalypse. Right. Let me tell you that nothing could be more sinister than apocalypse.

41:05If the world as we know it ended, I think half the population would die within a month. No offense if you're sitting on a computer, but that ain't going to help you. What's apocalypse all about? Yes, it does. Apocalypse is about two groups of British slash Australian people who were dropped into an American hellscape in Indiana of some kind of town that's been totally abandoned and are left to fend for themselves.

41:34Naomi Fry:Yeah, and it's about, just to go back to Heart of the Beast, this is about war, right? Because where these two teams of survivors are plonked down in apocalypse is in this kind of like base, abandoned, literal U.S. military base in Indiana meant for urban warfare practice. Oh my God. Kira and Laura. A grocery shop. have made a discovery.

42:07It's been 45 minutes and my tanks are low. Right, this has got a chain on it.

42:14Naomi Fry:Maybe there's a back door. Surely there's a weak point. This is where I think we get into, like Vincent, you were talking about ideas of the past coming into survivalism. Now, of course, we have many ideas of the future when our world is overtaken by climate change and AI robots kill us all in the next five years. And all the billionaires are in bunkers. And the billionaires are in their bunkers with their wine collections. And Apocalypse is that, like, these people are not cute and fit. They're not sun-kissed. The landscape is not beautiful. Nice. No, and they're delighted when they find, like, an abandoned school that they can shelter in.

42:57Mm-hmm. So it seems a much harsher look at some of this stuff than fantasies of fishing and starting fires. What you said, Nomi, about the novel, and especially like the novel of survival being a kind of, you know, exemplar of realism, I think part of what that does for us, it does have a kind of like didactic edge. You know, part of the thrill of watching somebody do survival stuff, whether it's in a feature film like Heart of the Beast or somebody in real life, is that if you watch for long enough, you could actually learn something. Yeah. It's like, I'm going to put that in my, you know. Pouch.

43:33My little prepper part of my mind is like, you know, okay, that's how you start a fire? You know, like you could, there is some verisimilitude there that could like one day save you in a pinch or something like that. Sure. And I think that, too, that it's like it is in some way preparing you for a future that may or may not arrive, I think, is another reason why this, you know, I want to watch Apocalypse. I want to see this one. I mean, Vincent, I think you're bringing up such an interesting thing, which is, of course, the empathy response when we watch something or read something and we consciously or otherwise imagine ourselves into the experience.

44:13And that can be part of the thrill of it. And you can be very comfortable to be watching these things happen from your own couch. But also it can be exciting and tickling to imagine them actually happening to you. And the very uncertainty of the world means that there isn't such a strong barrier between this kind of fantasy and reality. You know, reality is just a question of who is living what when. When I think of Survivor, I, of course, think of the canonical scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm where a Holocaust survivor and a contestant on Survivor pair off at Larry David's dinner table. I was in a concentration camp.

44:52You never even suffered one minute in your life compared to what I went through. Look, I'm saying we spent 42 days trying to survive. We had very little rations, no snacks. Snacks? What are you talking snacks? We didn't eat sometimes for a week, for a month. Do you guys know this thing I'm referring to? I'm a survivor. No, I'm a survivor. And they go back and forth. And it is so sick and so funny. Yeah, like this word survivors for survivors of the Holocaust or people who are surviving any numbers of hideous catastrophes now. You know, we're 25 years since 9-11. And I've been thinking about that a lot.

45:32But I always to bring things back to The New Yorker, this response written by the novelist Dennis Johnson has been circulating something because The New Yorker after 9-11 asked a number of writers, thinkers to reflect on what had just happened. And he wrote,

46:18All of a sudden, the reality that there is war, devastation, survival happening somewhere else and suddenly it comes to you. It made me think about the ways that that's very much going on in our world now. And one example in art from recently that came to mind was the Polish director Agnieszka Holland's movie Green Border, which is from 2023 and is about migrants, many of them from Syria but not exclusively, crossing from Belarus, which is encouraging migrants and telling them, come here, come here. It was a scheme of Vladimir Putin's to ignite conflict with the EU. And Poland, which has a right-wing government at the time, is ejecting them and kicking them out.

46:55and people who had already been living a war-torn life are suddenly in a different kind of horror survival. They're in an unforgiving Eastern European freezing forest. Of course, I think about migrants crossing into the United States who've crossed the Darien Gap and so on. So it is so fascinating that for our pleasure, we watch invented scenarios that for other people is very real.

47:19Naomi Fry:Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely. That's such a good point. I mean, and what you said, Alex, about how permeable the border is between our lives and situations of utter, you know, apocalypse and survival and how the panic of that is kind of like rising. And, you know, I'm wondering, like, as we're talking about these shows and books and movies and so on, that kind of, I don't know, show us what it's like to survive in a catastrophe. Like, are they teaching us the right lessons? Yeah. Yeah. On the one hand, I think it is, like, salutary to be reminded that all of us are in our way of, you know, surviving.

48:06And it takes a lot of individual acquisition of skill. It takes a lot of sort of strength and agility and things like that. But, to your point, they don't really describe our condition. No matter what part of time that you live in, unless you are, in fact, marooned somewhere, there are other people, you know. And I think it is harder to think about and harder to dramatize surviving together than it is surviving alone, you know? Yeah. And so maybe like, you know, going back to the one or the one-to-one relationship between, you know, person and nature is a way of maybe sort of imagining how we might build back up to the problem that we all have like right now, which is how do we live together, you know?

48:51Naomi Fry:Absolutely, and I think that's why maybe you're kind of putting your finger on why Brad and the dog didn't really do it for me. Because this is not the problem, right? I mean, this is not, yeah, the issue is not like surviving with your dog, you know? Would that it were. It's surviving to, would that it were, you know? Might be easier. Alex, what do you think? I think you guys are totally right. Clearly survival and survivalism and gimmicky forms of it and some forms that try to approach a more naturalistic take on it are such a staple of our contemporary entertainment and we know that. But I really think like when something happens in reality, when a survival story comes in the news, like the 2018 cave rescue of the Thai kids soccer team, it's riveting.

49:48It's totally riveting to all of us on the planet. And we can understand why. This is the elemental human homo sapien struggle. There they are. They were just a bunch of boys going to play soccer, 12 boys, and suddenly they're in this cave and people from all over the world, the Thai Navy SEALs, military teams, the British divers are all teaming up, showing the ability of humans on Earth to join forces to try to get them out of there. Like the indomitability of the human spirit is there. It's beautiful. We are often drawn to the darker cannibalistic sides of these stories, Yellow Jackets, et cetera.

50:28But then you get the rescue of the soccer team.

50:33Naomi Fry:Okay, you guys, one last question. Assuming that the three of us were stranded somewhere in the wilderness, which wilderness would we pick? Don't you guys want to be in a forest that's close to a lake? I definitely wouldn't want a jungle. Say more about that, Vincent. I want there to be a shore, but I don't want it to be salt water, and I don't want it to be water all around. So we need, you know, drinking water, bathing water. I will say that I definitely wouldn't want a jungle. I don't think I do. Can't handle a jungle. Can't handle a jungle. I don't deal well with heat. And I don't deal. I don't do well with extreme cold either.

51:12So where does that leave us? Oh, yeah, well, I mean, sure. Where does that leave us? I'll take a summer tundra. Wait, summer tundra, say more. I can't do it in the winter, but I could try in the summer. What exactly is summer tundra? It's a tundra in the summer. What more is there to say? Yeah, yeah. I could also, I mean, I was thinking more like, you know, the outskirts of Cold Spring, New York or, you know, somewhere. Where you can just go into town, have a coffee and then go back to your surviving. I really need some aspirin. My heart attack is acting up again. Crunch, crunch. Yeah, bring back some macchiatos for the team and let's keep going.

51:47That's right.

51:48Naomi Fry:Guys, I think we're going to just stay around this round desk in this little room at One World Trade. Definitely. Yeah.

51:59Naomi Fry:This has been Critics at Large. Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our show is mixed by Mike Kuchman, and we had engineering help today from James Yost, with music by Alexis Quadrato. And as always, you can find all of our episodes at newyorker.com slash critics.

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