(2 of 3)
There is only one point to these trials: to humble. The imposed, often improbable ordeal is a form of payment, dues demanded of people who are about to be rewarded with high position. It is a form of democratic practice, laying low the mighty before we bestow upon them prestige and power. It is, as an Icelandic peasant might see it, poetic justice.
But what of the ordeal not mandated by others? How to understand the current passion for the self-imposed, the recreational ordeal? A marathon, after all, is a voluntary thing, and for 99.9% of the 95,000 Americans who run marathons every year, there is nothing awaiting them at the finish line except a blanket and bottled oxygen. Yet the marathon has become so commonplace that a new sport had to be created: the triathlon, a monstrous composite of three consecutive marathons (swimming, biking and running a total of often a hundred miles or more). And now the upper classes have taken the fun indoors. A few years ago the rage was Napoleon, a silent film 4½ hours long. Then came the stage production of Nicholas Nickleby, 9½ hours, including snack-and-comfort breaks. Now we're up to 15½ hours with Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz, shown in either five, two or occasionally one grand sitting of "sheer exhilarating length" (Vincent Canby, New York Times)—and subtitles.
To be sure, the self-inflicted ordeal was not invented yesterday. The 1920s had marathon dancing, and the Guinness Book of World Records is full of champion oyster eaters and Hula-Hoopers. But such activities used to be recognized as exotic, the province of the down-and-out or the eccentric. The 24-hour underwater Parcheesi game was for slightly nutty college freshmen. Running 26 miles at a shot was for the most hardened athlete, preferably a barefoot Ethiopian. Nowadays, a 26-mile run is Sunday afternoon recreation, an alternative to a day at the beach or on the lawn mower. As for evening recreation, Fassbinder's epic is so popular that the Wall Street Journal dubbed it "the Flashdance of the intelligentsia."
What's new is not the odd individual who rows the Atlantic lefthanded while eating only salted peanuts, nor the collegians perched atop flagpoles for reasons still unknown. It is the midday, mainstream, Main Street marathoner. The modern wonder is to be found on America's heartbreak hills, where it has become impossible to drive without running across (and nearly over) at least one bedraggled jogger drenched in sweat and close to collapse, the very picture of agony. Why do they do it?
The participants will tell you that they go to marathon movies for culture. They run for health. They spend 48 consecutive hours locked in a Holiday Inn ballroom in enforced communion with complete strangers and call it therapy. (Sartre had another word for it: he once wrote a play based on the convincing premise that hell was being locked into a room forever with other people.) But surely there are less trying ways to acquire culture, health or psychological succor.