“Fear is Good”: My terrifying journey into Underland, the film of Robert MacFarlane’s dazzling book | film

CUst off the B3134 in Somerset is a gateway to the underworld. The smaller of the two openings leading into Goatchurch Cavern is called the Merchant’s Entrance – and I squeeze through. After tripping on my butt over a soft, wet rock, tearing my wetsuit in the process, I venture down and down, sometimes crawling, sometimes standing upright, trying to find my footing in the dark.

I’m here with filmmaker Robert Beatty, so he can show me something of what he’s been experiencing over the past five years, on his way to making an endearingly poetic documentary called Underland, which adapts nature writer Robert MacFarlane’s best-selling 2019 subterranean travel book of the same name. We head 100 feet underground to the Boulder Room, where I’ll ask him about his sugary snack obsession.

“Some fear is good,” Beatty says as we travel down below. But not much. “Hyperventilation takes away oxygen.” What if I panic? Or sprain my ankle? Or join Ice Age mammoths and lions in the fossil record? I’m not terrified yet but I long to be on the slopes above this pockmarked landscape with mountain goats munching on the grass and looking down on the foolish humans below.

However, many, including Beatty’s three protagonists, feel otherwise. The upside down position is where they feel, existentially, that they are on the right path upward, free from the constraints of the surface world. One of them, urban explorer and geographer Bradley Garrett, who we see in the film enjoying the smell of feces and abandoned car debris in Las Vegas storm drains, says he experiences the smell there that he “most associates with freedom.”

Petty also feels free underground. “And it’s not just because there’s no Wi-Fi,” he laughs. “Time is changing here, it is condensing and slowing down.” True enough, but he alerted Mendip Cave Rescue to send a team if we didn’t surface by 3.30pm so as not to be completely cut off from normal clock time.

As I stumbled and fell, Beatty, 41, swayed and weaved around me like a gentle buttered otter, attaching ropes and lifting a Guardian photographer’s kit, shouting instructions that might save our lives. “Don’t go down the coal chute!” He says, pointing his headlamp at a yawning abyss. “Stay away from Jacob’s Ladder!” Every feature here has been poorly named by cynical explorers, from Desolation Row to Abandon Hope (my least favorite). “It’s like Alice in Wonderland,” Beatty says. But I feel like Winnie the Pooh, worrying that I’ll get stuck between narrow rocks until rescuers pull me out.

The idea of ​​Beatty’s film is that at the beginning his camera goes underground through a crack in an old ash tree, and does not emerge again until the end. As a result, there are no talking heads in hotel rooms, no birds singing and no traces of daylight. As artistic self-denial goes, Beatty’s style reminds me of Lars von Trier’s “Dugme” manifesto. But for MacFarlane – whom I speak to via Zoom the day after surviving my descent – ​​he remembers the strict formal restrictions imposed by the French novelist Georges Perec and the rest of the Oulibou literary group (who can forget Perec’s 1969 novel La Disparition, which he wrote without the letter e?).

MacFarlane admired Beatty’s approach to the original text. While the book consists of 13 chapters in which Don Cambridge descends into the netherlands beneath Slovenia, Yorkshire, London (Epping Forest), Paris and more, Beatty’s film selects three subterranean denizens whose origins intertwine with each other as the film progresses. As we sat in the Boulder room, the filmmaker sketched for me a diagram of the story’s interweaving. It’s like Dante’s descent into Hell.

There was a bidding war for the film rights to the book, but MacFarlane was happy that Beatty won it. “I’d give him the right to a penny and a pint of beer, frankly. I’m immeasurably interested in people who will take creative risks and try to find new forms. I sometimes think about the difference between Newtonian collaboration and quantum collaboration. Newtonian collaboration is the systematic, causal kind. I bring my skill and you bring yours and we build those on each other and create something hybrid and interesting. Quantum collaboration is where you trust someone else with the work you’ve done. They’ve made it and they’ve turned it into something completely different for me. This is where the excitement lies – in watching this transformation.

Although MacFarlane gave Beatty freedom and did not appear on camera, he collaborated on the script. Their lyrics are narrated by Sandra Holler, the Oscar-nominated star of Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, often accompanied by a stunning score by Hannah Bell, who wrote the score for Game of Thrones.

One thread follows Garrett’s exploration of a storm drain in Las Vegas, a place inhabited by the most dangerous humans as well as the detritus from Sin City above. Another follows Baraka Fatima Tek, who descends into the Yucatan caves in Mexico, to find fossil traces of her Mayan ancestors. The third track follows Mariangela Lisanti, a pioneering dark matter physicist whose work seeks to unravel some of the universe’s greatest mysteries using scanners miles beneath the surface of Canada.

Beatty – the son of avant-garde film director Chris “Radio On” Beatty – cites Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as influences. But instead of documenting the extraordinary journey of one human being, Beatty’s camera actually resembles the protagonist.

This isn’t the first time Roberts has collaborated. They met as almost contemporaries in Cambridge when Beatty made an introductory video of the young nature writer for Granta magazine. A few years later, his kind uncle gave Betty a drone which he immediately used to film tracking footage of the River Dee, starting at its source deep in the Cairngorms. He sent it to MacFarlane, who was so impressed that he responded by saying they should make a movie. The result was a 27-minute short film called Upstream.

“The camera will always move downstream, and the river will always move downstream, leading to this weird kind of dialectical friction process,” MacFarlane says. “The limitation here is similar, which is to have a storytelling voice that is not connected to anyone in particular.”

MacFarlane insists that “Underland” is not one of those travelogues in which some man wanders alone like a cloud in the wilderness and messes with what he sees. In the book, MacFarlane writes about the three characteristics of what the Underground means to us humans:

Shelter (memories, valuables, letters, fragile lives)
Return (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions)
Getting rid of (waste, trauma, toxins, secrets).
At the bottomand We have long ago established what we fear and hope for To lose it, and what we love and want to save.

All of this resonated with Beatty when he read Underland, but there was something more personal. “There is a section on archaeological excavations that relates to loss.” This resonated with Betty as he mourned the recent death of his beloved aunt and uncle. The film’s companion book, Under the Old Ash Tree: The Making of Underland, includes a letter from one Robert to another while Beatty was staying in the Poconos with his family. “It helped me to come across Fossil Traces today when I felt its absence,” Beatty wrote. “This house is full of these things: the missing varnish on the floorboards in the office, the grooves in the cushions of their favorite chairs, the irregularities of the wood shed.”

The inspiring passage he refers to in MacFarlane’s book says: “We all carry with us traces of fossils – the marks that the dead and the missing leave behind. The handwriting on an envelope, the wear on a wooden step left by feet, the memory of a familiar gesture from someone gone. . . .”

Reading this, I think of the Fátima Tec Pool in Betty’s film. His camera follows her through very narrow caves, and as she dives into groundwater, until she finds handprints left on the cave walls. Across the millennia, in the film’s critical shot, she presses with her open hand the handprints left by her ancestors. We live in deep time, not in the geological sense, but in the ancient human sense.

Macfarlane believes that we are always drawn to the lower ground. He cites the Epic of Gilgamesh. “It is the first great story about mortality. It is also the story of the underworld. The question of the world beneath our feet is used to make sense of metaphysics for us. It has always been so and always will be so.”

We’ve always looked into the abyss, but, as Nietzsche reminded us (in words that Beatty initially thought of as an idea for his film), if you do that long enough, he’ll start looking back at you. This means that we may think in our arrogance that our view is all-consuming, but in fact we can become consumed by what we look at. Especially if the abyss is as dark and unfathomable as what lies beneath Somerset.

My photographer Betty and I returned to the surface, muddy, wet and refreshed. Never have the birdsong sounded so beautiful, the yellow daffodils so colorful, and the smells of early spring in Somerset so sweet.

But this is not the end of our journey. We drive a few miles, stop at the village of Brede and head across the fields to the tree where the book and film begin. “The old mother ash tree is dying,” says a worried Betty. I had seen the crack in the tree from photographs in MacFarlane’s book and from footage in Beatty’s film, but when we arrived the scene was very different. Ash had recently collapsed, its crack broken, and its strength seemed to have been drained. “It was like it was holding together until we finished the movie,” Beatty says sadly. maybe. But, even though the trunk is broken, there are shoots growing from the broken branch. Death and life are not so far apart.

I lay down to look across what was left of the tree hole that had fired my Roberts imagination: down there flowed an underground stream that might head toward the village of Wooky Hole.

Next to the tree is a human-style hole that leads to the roaring torrent below. Betty jumps into this to explore the entrance to the Underground from below. Seconds later, the photographer and I peered through the crack of the elm tree to see Betty’s beaming face looking up from below. A moment later, he was back on land, emptying his bowls of cool spring water, beaming with enthusiasm for the world below.