ABSTRACT
Climbing has entered the mainstream in the United States with the robust news coverage surrounding two remarkable feats: Alex Honnold’s free solo (sans rope) of Yosemite National Park’s El Capitan and Tommy Caldwell’s and Kevin Jorgeson’s free ascent (climbing with a rope, but only to protect a fall) of the most difficult free climb on El Capitan. Amplifying the place of these historic climbs in mainstream America, the Oscar-winning Free Solo (2018) and award-winning The Dawn Wall (2017) fashion compelling stories to chronicle these feats, joining an earlier feted climbing film, Valley Uprising (2014), to form a cultural narrative that is both shaped by, and responds to, white masculinist, imperial ideologies that have forged the national imaginary of the American West, and in this case, Yosemite National Park itself, a supposed ahistorical, blank canvas on which to fulfill perpetual settler colonialist fantasies. These films are important because they reflect how popular culture still absorbs deeply entrenched imperial ideologies that have shaped the national imaginary vis-à-vis the American West, and depending on the film these ideologies are perpetuated, or at best to a limited extent destabilized, leaving the national imaginary largely intact. Valley Uprising—a cultural history of Yosemite climbing from the 1950s to the 2010s—unflinchingly reinforces tropes of white masculine desire. At first glance Free Solo participates in this master narrative; however, the film complicates toxic masculinity—and implicitly frontier ideologies. Finally, The Dawn Wall destabilizes hegemonic tropes of toxic white masculinity that have shaped white male fantasies of the natural environment of the American West.
