"A Seaman's Life Flashes Before His Eyes" And...Stuff
Our Fragile Existence
No words.
Just, none at all.
Not that that’s a bad thing or a good thing!
That’s actually how The Flying Sailor (2022) plays out, much like the first half hour of Wall-E, we are privy only to the movements on the screen and a thrilling composition to match every cut and swirling, circular motion.
Based on the very real story of one Charlie Mayers who was blasted over 2 kilometers away in the Halifax Explosion of 1917 and lived to tell the tale, we get an existential and moving animated short by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby about life and almost-death.
We begin with what looks like a stop-motion of boats aggressively floating towards each other in a harbor and then our protagonist strutting along the docks nearby. He pauses his jaunty walk to watch as the two boats crash anticlimactically. He lights a cigarette and drops his match, just as the boats stall and then explode the fabric of his existence.
The title card plays and we get a fantastic treat of chaotic, robust sound design peppering over a multimedia-esque series of animated scenes from the sailor’s life: nature, childhood, work, mistakes. Memories of his life intercut with his current cyclical and foetal spin through the sky.
These 7 minutes are long but short. We watch him grow up, and then do it a second time in flashes as he sails through the sky, limbs akimbo and body flailing unmajestically, hideously like a naked ballerina. He twirls like a dancer and then somersaults like a dolphin and splays like a sloth falling from a tree. The motion is clean as he transitions in forced slowmo into each contorted yet casual pose and his peachy pink form spiraling is, for lack of a better word, disturbing.
It’s in these moments, which honestly couldn’t have been more than a handful of jam-packed seconds in real time, that take him through his lifetime.
I once had a teacher that said “Enjoy this year because you’ll blink and it’ll be over” and another that posited that “10 years will go by regardless of what you do, so you might as well do something you want” and watching this short was like both of those sentiments jammed into a short film.
What is a life?
What moments make up your identity?
If we died today, which scenes would play out on the metaphysical movie screen of our lives and…why? Is it important to us because it was formative or because we found beauty in the silent moment of it? Will we remember every little excruciating detail from the knobs on our knees to the skinned flesh of our palms and what color and temperature the sky was?
Will we remember how we felt in that moment or will it be overshadowed by the longing to go back, the nostalgia and the understanding that that is all it can be?
The flashes of this sailor’s life pick out what must be key moments to him, whatever that means and entails for his existence into the man he is. The abstract nature and juxtaposition of memories with reality strings together an experience that transcends time, that denies the linearity of how we perceive the foreboding clock and instead shapes this little slice of world like an ouroboros.
Scenes flying through space and stars and across the world are deeply disorienting, but not nearly as disorienting as the slap to the face realization of how desperately fragile our existence is in this world and how, after all is said and done, we still have to live it.
Presented by the New Yorker, a short film by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby: “The Flying Sailor”