The Last One(6)
Waitress does not have to cross the river, she only has to use the compass to find her way through the woods. For her, this is a challenge, and the shot conveys as much: Waitress stands, her curls framing her face as she turns in a circle and studies the unfamiliar tool. She bites her bottom lip, partly because she’s confused and partly because she thinks that doing so makes her look sexy.
“Is the red or the white end north?” she asks. She’s been told to narrate her thoughts, and she will do this. Often.
Waitress’s secret, one viewers will not be told, is that she never submitted an application. She was recruited. The men in charge wanted an attractive but essentially useless woman, a redhead if possible, since they already had chosen two brunettes and a blonde—not platinum blond, but blond enough, the kind of hair that would lighten in the sun. Yes, they thought; a beautiful redhead would round out the cast.
“Okay,” says Waitress. “The red end is pointier. That has to be north.” She turns in a circle, biting her lip again. The needle settles at N. “And I need to go…southeast.” And though the points of the compass are clearly labeled before her, she says in a singsong voice, “Never eat shredded wheat.”
She begins walking due south, then mutters the mnemonic again and angles herself to the right. After a few steps, she stops. “Wait,” she says. She looks at the compass, lets the needle settle, then turns left. Finally, she walks in the correct direction. She laughs a little and says, “This isn’t so hard.”
Waitress knows she is unlikely to win, but she’s not here to win. She’s here to make an impression—on the producers, on the viewers, on anyone. Yes, she’s a full-time server at a tapas restaurant, but she starred in a candy commercial when she was six and considers herself an actress first, a model second, and a waitress third. Walking among the trees, she has a thought she will not speak: This is bound to be her big break.
Back at the river, Tracker decides the rock is a relatively minor hazard, and that the known obstacle is better than the unknown. He springs. The editor will slow the footage, as though this were a nature documentary and Tracker the great cat he secretly thinks he inhabited in a previous life. Viewers will see the length and power of his stride. They will see—a few would have noticed already, but a close-up will demand the attention of the rest—his odd but recognizable footwear, their yellow logo a tiny mid-foot scream of color on the otherwise dark expanse of him. They will see his individually sheathed toes gripping stone. They will note his balance and speed, the control Tracker has over his movement, and some of them will think, I should get a pair of those. But Tracker’s footwear is only an accent on his control, which is beautifully expressed as he leaps from stone to stone, passing above churning water. His body seems longer in motion than it did while still, and in this too he is catlike.
The ball of his right foot lands upon the unsteady stone, which rocks forward. This is an important moment. If Tracker falls, he will become one character. If he flows onward untroubled, he will become another. The casting process has finished, but only officially.
Tracker splays his arms for balance—revealing a red bandana worn braceletlike around his right wrist—and experiences a rare moment of less than total grace; he wobbles. Then he follows the motion of the rock, and he’s gone, onto the next foothold, which is steady. Seconds later, he’s across, breathing with moderate exertion, dry from his clean-shaven scalp to his individualized toes, dry everywhere save for a slight dampness in his armpits, which viewers cannot see. He adjusts the straps of his sleek, nearly empty black backpack and then continues into the forest, toward the Challenge.
The wobble will be edited out. Tracker has been cast as impervious, unstoppable.
Meanwhile, Waitress stumbles over a protruding root and drops her compass. She bends from the waist to retrieve it, and gravity grants her cleavage—just as Waitress intended.
Two ends of a spectrum converge.
Between these extremes, Rancher wears a cowboy hat that looks nearly as weathered as his craggy, stubbled face, and he saunters with ease through the woods. He wears his black-and-yellow bandana in true cowboy fashion, around his neck, ready to be yanked over his mouth and nose should a dust storm arise. He is a thousand miles from his speckled Appaloosa, but riding spurs jut from his leather-bound heels. The spurs are an offering to the camera, given to Rancher by the on-site producer. Upon accepting them, Rancher flicked one to rotation. A dull edge, but an edge nonetheless. Useful, perhaps, he thought. He was also given a striped poncho to wear, but this he refused. “What’s next?” he asked. “You want me to carry around a stack of corn tortillas and a chili pepper?”
Rancher’s ancestors were once categorized as mestizo and largely dismissed by the powers-that-be. His grandfather crossed the border in the night and found work shoveling manure and milking cows at a family-owned ranch. Years later, he married the boss’s daughter, who inherited the business. Their light-skinned son married a dark-skinned seamstress from Mexico City. Rancher’s skin is the lightly toasted hue that resulted from that union. He is fifty-seven, and his shaggy chin-length hair is as sharply black and white as his beliefs about good and evil.
There are no obstacles between Rancher and the Challenge. Competency—or lack thereof—is not his defining feature. It is his proud, cowboy stride that is on display. His character is established in seconds.