Ryan Gosling is acrophobic. Ironic, given his avian surname, plus his recent film, The Fall Guy, where heights and falling sum up the story.
Gosling is Colt Seavers, a Hollywood stuntman who doubles for action hero, Tom Ryder. Indeed, Scene One has Seavers as fake Ryder falling backwards down a 12-storey atrium, which is to say we see Gosling doing a post-melt Icarus, all the while feigning a cool attitude about altitude.
Spoiler alert: he breaks his back. Leaves the industry. Eats a pallet of tacos, yet somehow keeps his washboard abs. Only to be lured back to moviedom – to Sydney, in fact – for the latest Ryder vehicle, which happens to be a turbocharged car that flips into a record eight-and-a-half cannon rolls on Kurnell’s sands.
Ryan Gosling in The Fall Guy: coming to terms with contranyms at the multiplex.Credit: AP
The actual stunt driver, squinting at the credits, was Logan Holladay, who played Gosling by stealth, who was doubling for Aaron Taylor-Johnson who played Ryder, who goes missing somewhere in Darling Harbour. Add Emily Blunt, the English actress playing American director Jody Moreno, who has a mutual thing for Colt before the skyscraper incident, and you have the whole Shakespearean enchilada.
Yes, I did see the movie. For research purposes. My focus was “stunt”, the word, being an intriguing contranym. These are terms, like “fast” or “refrain”, owning diametric meanings. Fast can describe that speeding car as much as it can label a person half-buried in sand, unable to move. Just as refrain can mean to repeat, or stop. If a coach resigns, is he prolonging his stay or quitting?
Loading
Likewise, stunt can mean a daring feat. Yet stunt the verb doubles as hinder. How? The answer lies in separate roots, where the Colt Seavers stuff derives from “stunde” in German, or hour. Come the moment, come the man, etc. Meanwhile stunt, the verb, emerges from Old Norse’s “stuttr”, or scanty. Two false cousins, or the dictionary’s equivalent of body doubles, where separate words converge into the one action hero.
“Epic” was my field trip’s second focus, a word occurring thrice in The Fall Guy script. Twice in the hyped sense (about epic stunts), and once to label Colt’s epic fail of a career. A modest tally, given the word’s general glut, where a news trawl tells us that epic may apply to surf conditions, union battles, football matches or tuna toasties in Brunswick.
Epos was once a Greek tale, a heroic poem of sweeping length, where eventually the hero concept kidnapped the grander connotation, only to be stunted by its modern enlistment in real estate ads and movie posters.