The scariest thing today is not being heard. After all, who are you when you’re plucked from consciousness, thrown into a wooden coffin, and placed several feet beneath the topsoil? You are practically dead to the world.
If you hadn’t squirmed through it during its theatric run, bewildered at first by a full-length film shot entirely within a box, then know that this is the premise of Buried, starring Ryan Reynolds as a man prematurely trapped six feet under.
Reynolds’s Paul Conroy is a truck delivery guy in Iraq who experiences the reality of the region by way of a terrorist ambush on his entourage. Consequently, Conroy awakens to pitch-black darkness and the obscurity of his whereabouts. Through the illumination of his Zippo lighter, he realizes that he is living an already assumed death: being buried alive.
Still, Conroy finds that among his possessions is a BlackBerry. Trust me, you haven’t been this ecstatic at discovering a phone signal in a while. Immediately, even despite the language settings of Conroy’s phone having been set to Arabic, you are hopeful because a world this connected and an existence so accountable to modern communication shouldn’t be far from rectification. Ironically, this is where the suspense comes in. As Conroy attempts to make contact with his world’s structure of safeties — the FBI, his job’s central office, his own wife — what becomes exposed is its cynicism.
Conroy’s attempt at sending an S.O.S. is met with skepticism or the tune of call waiting that is especially grating during such an ordeal. Watching him explain his situation is disheartening; the people on the other end of the line are so wrapped up in the safety blanket of urban modernity that they can’t even begin to conceive of an atrocity like his, or of how their swivel chair existence could come so close to that of a man buried several feet beneath Middle Eastern ground.
What’s more ludicrous is the concept of the “safety number” he is equipped with. Upon Conroy’s dispatch to Iraq, his company had given him a hotline he could call if he ever found himself in danger. However, no matter his urgent, expletive-ridden cries when he finally takes this offer up, he is met with cold HR rhetoric, the company’s so-called safety measure being just a cover for its foremost objective to safeguard only its interests. And while Conroy’s struggle intensifies and your only means to cope is to shake your head at what could probably vie for the title of Worst Employee Benefits in history, you can only blame the situation. More so, the situation guys like Conroy put themselves in.
How does one feel safe at the prospect of a number as a means to protect a life? It’s clearly a symptom of today’s e-entitlement: of a world that takes its access for granted and thinks that, through the invincibility of communication, connection should follow.
At The Mercy of The Man-Made
While Paul Conroy assumed he was exempt from human nature because of an intangible number, James Franco’s character in the more recently released 127 Hours underestimated nature itself. The movie is based on the memoir of mountaineer Aron Ralston, who, during a hiking trip in 2003, chose to sever his own forearm after five days of being unable to free it from underneath a boulder.
What is evident once more is man’s doing himself in because of the hubris he’s acquired thanks to high-tech modernity. Ralston is an example of the latter, being pushed by a tech-constricted society into the wilderness with perhaps only an inkling of the impunity it fostered — his mind still tethered to its many conveniences. After all, why else did he bring a video camera if not to document his triumphs and relive them? Scaling a canyon in middle-of-nowhere Utah, the modern device he lugged with him could be the crucial breadcrumb representing a subliminal way back to civilization. Ironically, the video camera was what Ralston would use to film his goodbyes to his family right before he’d considered animalistic self-amputation — a truly manifest letting go of worldly things.
The succession of displaced lone men in Buried and 127 Hours has led me to classify such films under a new category: the Solitary Suspense thriller. Although two movies don’t count for much to proclaim new trends or phenomena in film, the emergence of this classification is timely as it coincides with — maybe even comes as a reaction to — romanticized depictions of the world’s over-integration (a.k.a. a film like The Social Network). Numerous critics had lauded David Fincher’s film as “generation-defining,” especially since it visually candied the reigning notion of today: that the world wide web isn’t just a means to stay in touch — it can be inherited, cultivated, monetized.
Which is what makes the Solitary Suspense flick even more terrifying: the protagonist isn’t just ripped out of a familiar environment but made to endure a trivializing of the familiar or real human experience — through technology, naturally. Like Ralston and his camera in 127 Hours, the BlackBerry Paul Conroy is armed with acts as both omniscient unifier, as we’ve often seen in ads, and heartless bystander. Exhibiting this dichotomy, Conroy uses the Blackberry to upload a video of his lopped-off finger as a means to appease his captor, but he also uses it to reach his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother and his wife.
As Conroy crams as many “I Love You”s and “I’m Sorry”s into his conversations before his phone battery dies and his last possible resting place runs out of air, you can sense that his physical absence and auditory closeness to his family has tortured him further. If he wasn’t so goddamn self-assured by the world’s artificial connectedness, by the great marketing of the job he’d come to Iraq for, by the salary that lured him in the first place, he could have said those words to them in person. It’s scary not to be heard, yes, but you could tell that, at that moment, Paul Conroy wished his means of communication weren’t quite so high-tech — as though his phone, a bridge to so many things, had become a barrier.