Snapshot from Ten Thousand Feet

A moment of perspective

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[NOTE: This post contains spoilers for a movie—although as a documentary, it isn’t a particularly “spoilable” one.]

Recently, on a multi-hour flight, I watched David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived. The film chronicles the life of Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double for the first six movies of the Harry Potter franchise. While working on the set of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, David suffered a tragic accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down.

I found The Boy Who Lived to be a very compelling film—one which, for the most part, avoided the pitfalls of reducing its subject’s story to one of simple tragedy or uplift. Inevitably, one is left with a sense that the film captures only a faint shadow of David’s real experience—the depths of fear and resilience for which we can never truly find the words. And watching as I was on a small rectangle on the seat back in front of me, I probably didn’t get the full cinematic experience I otherwise could have. (Between the roar of the jet engine and the toddler crying intermittently in front of me, I had to turn on subtitles about ten minutes in.) Still, I found it a moving meditation on how quickly, and randomly, a person’s life can change forever; on the guilt and anguish of those who bear witness; on the thousand creeping, small goodbyes that come after the first great loss.

As the film goes on, David experiences further decline beyond his initial paralysis. While he had initially retained control of his upper body after the accident, he begins to lose mobility in his arms due to a cyst, a rare complication from surgery. He undergoes additional surgeries which seem for a time to slow the decline—but still the fear lurks: What will happen if he loses the ability to lift both arms, or grasp; to nod and shake his head; to move his jaw enough to chew and speak? David describes his condition, fairly matter-of-factly, as a kind of prison cell. (Eventually, he adds, it may be more of a coffin.) In some scenes, he seems upbeat about his fate. In others, he is haunted.

In one shot toward the end—before the film ties a loose bow on David’s journey—we see a nurse testing the extent to which he can feel sensations in his arms. She brushes a Q-tip on his shoulder, and asks if he can feel the touch. “Yes,” says David. She brushes his upper arm. “Yes,” he says. She brushes his hand once with no reaction, then a second time.

“No?” says the nurse.

“No,” he says sadly, “nothing.

For a moment, the camera holds David’s face.

“Sorry,” says the nurse’s voice, sounding far away.

Out the window to my right, wisps of clouds were streaking beneath the wings of the plane, and on the screen in front of me, the nurse was moving on to other tests. She asks David to distinguish between blunt and sharp stimuli—a task he fails when he identifies a pinhead as “blunt.” She asks him to try and spread apart the fingers of his right hand. This hand, I knew from the film thus far, was the weaker of the two after David’s accident: the one he could no longer lift more than a few inches; a hand which, not so long ago, had borne his weight through flips and falls, hours on a mechanical broomstick. Now it lay immobile in the nurse’s latex palms, raised up from the armrest of his wheelchair.

His fingers would not move.

At this moment, I happened to glance at the gap of the seat in front of me. There, reaching toward the window shade on the rounded plane wall, was the arm of a child too young to speak. Her little fingers gripped the plastic handle, then flipped it up and down repeatedly. Over and over, the ten-thousand-foot shutter rose and fell, rose and fell: such sudden light and darkness.