Vasarhelyi and Chin — How Relatable Became Dangerous

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin have built a career on a single, powerful move: they film people doing things that should kill them, then strip away the mythology until what remains is recognizably human. At IndieWire's Art of the Doc event, they described their attraction to extreme athletes as rooted in relatability. They're just humans like the rest of us, the framing goes. What makes this claim so durable is that it is both true and strategically incomplete.

When Reinhold Messner summited Everest without supplemental oxygen in 1980, he was performing an act of intellectual revision as much as physical endurance. The mountaineering establishment had spent decades treating the highest peaks as conquests reserved for the superhuman — Hillary and Tenzing positioned as mythic figures rather than skilled laborers in thin air. Messner rejected this. He reframed high-altitude climbing as technical athletic skill, accessible to anyone with the training and the particular kind of nervous system that doesn't catastrophically fail at 28,000 feet. Overnight, the superhuman mountaineer became merely an exceptionally competent human.

Vasarhelyi and Chin inherited this vocabulary. Their documentaries — Free Solo, Meru, The Alpinist. Deliberately emphasize the ordinariness of their subjects' lives: the relationships, the doubt, the morning coffee. The strategy works. Audiences who might have dismissed a film about a man climbing a vertical rock face as distant spectacle instead watch a story about vulnerability and attachment. Risk-taking becomes legible as something a person might do for reasons other people understand.

But making someone visible as a person requires deciding what parts of them to leave dark. The shift from superhuman to relatable has destigmatized extreme sports; it has also obscured something crucial about who survives them. There are neurological patterns that distinguish the climbers and free soloists who walk away from the ones who don't. Decision-making under hypoxia, pain tolerance, threat response. These are not the same across all humans, and they are not equally distributed. When Messner democratized mountaineering by emphasizing skill over myth, he also created permission to stop asking whether certain risk-takers possessed traits that made their survival statistically more probable. Relatability became a kind of blindness.

Vasarhelyi and Chin are not responsible for this drift. They are working inside a culture that prefers the story of the ordinary person pushed to extraordinary limits to the story of the person whose ordinary neurology happens to be calibrated for extremity. But their films participate in it. To show someone's humanity is to choose which of their particularities to illuminate. The question is not whether extreme athletes deserve to be seen as human. It is whether humanizing them, in the specific way we have learned to do, prevents us from seeing what they actually are.