Trapped in the Closet meets Love in an Elevator

A particular New Yorker article caught my attention recently, after I missed it on release in 2008. I'm not sure why, but in the detail it was able to go into, the layering of time upon time, it really to capture the experience of being trapped for 41 hours in a lift, without any sense of whether this would end in a meaningless, undignified death by mechanical failure. Specifically, the smallness of the actions that lead to vast consequences - the life-or-death blow-ups of the immediate regret experienced after the decision to balance the laptop on the pile of books - and the difficulty of reconciling that smallness afterwards; the trapped man couldn't go back to work, because it would give the impression that he had not been ruined by the experience.

Nick Paumgarten's Up and then Down got me, maybe for the style, maybe for the depth, or maybe just because I spend a lot of time in lifts.

I didn't realise at the time that the video of the inside of the lift was also available on the New Yorker's Youtube channel, here. It's quite marvellous that the New Yorker has a YouTube channel. The law of YouTube comments remains dominant, alas - most of the discussion seems to be about whether and how the incarcerated might have gone to the toilet.

Apart from the deadly gravity of YouTube comments, what struck was that the breadth provided by the article, and the way it was put together, made for a better and perceptually more accurate picture of a man trapped in a lift than the actual video of a man trapped in a lift. Score one for print media. From, admittedly, my highly subjective viewpoint.