Senna — Cultural Digest #11
Do we all have a date with destiny?
The word destiny is getting a lot of traction at the moment. Maybe it’s something to do with the new Indiana Jones. Its been making me think about Asif Kapadia’s award-winning documentary debut Senna. With perfect kismet, I also discovered this week (much to my disbelief) that my sister absolutely loves Formula 1. How could I not have known this about her?
I remember occasional Sundays if our Uncle happened to be visiting, when we would be forced to watch the cars making their way round and round whichever global circuit they were chasing that week but I don’t remember her paying particular attention to what was going on, certainly not anymore than me. I’d be helplessly waiting for the roast dinner at the end of it rather than ever really engaging with the race, though I got to learn some of the drivers’ names and heard about their rivalries. My favourite parts were the frantically timed pit-stops. My sister says those vital six to sometimes (now considered lengthy) fifteen second windows from the ‘90s have been reduced to barely one - How, I ask? I guess the tools have gotten better, she says.
This enlightening conversation cropped up because she wanted to watch the Netflix docu-series Drive To Survive, which tracks the latest seasons’ racing. I can suddenly picture its brilliantly colourful glare on my ‘You Might Also Like’ panel of suggested shows when she mentions it, though I haven’t yet been drawn in enough to press play. There are five seasons, she says. I’m surprised by this, too. I’m sure it was only recently that I’d seen it on the streamer, I thought it was something newer that I was ignoring in favour of the familiar repetition of Friends.
We watch a couple of episodes. Admittedly some of it is compelling, inevitably the more human aspects — the internal politics and vulnerability of those faced with disloyalty when another team offers a driver more money and they take it without a backward glance. Sometimes it happens during the middle of a season when the same driver has six months left on their existing contract and still has to work cohesively with the team they are leaving behind, despite their flagrant lack of fealty.
After two hours or so, I start to feel drained by it. With very hard cuts that can feel pretty clunky at times, exacerbated by a sound mix which leaps between the controlled radio mic pitch perfection of a talking head, to the violence of race-day engine revs, it feels a little like a rush job.
I ask my sister if she’s ever watched Senna. I’m as shocked to learn that she hasn’t as I was that she had an interest in this sport. But Senna is a stand-alone classic, I insist, let alone if you’re into Formula 1. It’s considered the most comprehensive documentation of the history of the sport, I go on. It’s adored by cineastes and critics and people (like me) with no outside interest in Formula 1, alike — it’s 86 minutes of movie-making perfection — it wildly exceeds five collective seasons of Drive to Survive, is what I’m really trying to say. Ok I’ll watch it, she concedes begrudgingly.
Whether she will or not is another matter but I rank Senna amongst my top movies of all-time, documentary or otherwise, so I went back to it this weekend and boy oh BOY.
I think God gave me this chance, which I have been waiting for so long.
Ayrton Senna
This is a film drunk with portents. It opens with footage of Ayrton Senna’s parents talking to a reporter about their fears for their son’s safety whilst respecting that this is a career path he is destined to pursue, that his talent for racing is God-given and therefore must be taken seriously. Ayrton stands alongside them listening on, he appears to wipe away a tear. They are a God-fearing family and Ayrton echoes their sentiments. This faith is the narrative thrust that will carry us through the rest of his story from his first Formula 1 race in 1988 to his fatal and historic last, in 1994.
I remember it well. It was one of those weekends when my Uncle had come to visit. I watched everything as it unfolded in real time though given my disinterest in the sport I didn’t know anything about Ayrton Senna, the man, then. I had no context for the life that was lost; the charisma, the extraordinary drive (forgive the pun), his faith, his humanity. All of that I discovered for the first time as an adult, through this film, sat in a cinema sixteen years later. Though the narrative of the movie sets things up with expert subtlety, suddenly the shape of the racetrack, the colours, the car all seem hauntingly familiar. The hairs on my arm stand on end.
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Maybe I’m romanticising but there is something about this story that has the quality of the old studio big hitters of the same era, of which Top Gun: Maverick felt like a revelatory comeback, the first of its kind in 20 years. The danger, the rawness, the conflict, the corruption. It even has its own Hollywood villain. Where his teammate Alain Prost was all methodical pragmatism, favouring strategy over the flamboyant wins that Senna craved, a fierce and authentic rivalry was born. They bristle towards one another. Jovially at first but later after a number of near-miss crashes and accusations of sabotage, they narrowly avoid a fist fight. Each one of them will lose out on contesting the Championship (two years in a row) as a result of their cars’ collisions with each other. Prost will also leave their shared team because he finds Senna ‘impossible to work with’. But like all great antagonists, they can’t really live without each other either, there is no real challenge if the other doesn’t exist. They will eventually be reconciled - it seems distance will grant them a little respite. Years later they celebrate on the podium together at Senna’s 1993 win at the Australian Grand Prix, and appear much more relaxed with one another during the press conference afterwards. We don’t know it, but this is the last time either of them will stand on a podium. In the end, Prost will be one of those invited to carry his coffin.
Nowadays we have access to extraordinary footage but perhaps we’ve become too aware of the camera, of fame, of exposure so it doesn’t feel like so much of a sneak peek behind closed doors anymore. In Drive To Survive for example, the selfie generation feel all too knowing and self-conscious, whereas the footage from the eighties and nineties we are gifted with here, is gritty with clandestine captures - from the drivers conferences before races where they would debate safety issues, to the shady handshakes between Prost and the nefariously bespectacled Balestre, head of the FIA at the time — even the candid interviews with drivers where Senna himself openly discusses the problems with his car the day before that same car will drive him to his death.
From a magnificent piece of footage captured from the camera affixed to the left-hand side of Senna’s car, we take his final lap with him. The sixth of fifty-eight. For nearly a full minute we ride alongside him. The camera doesn’t dare cut away. You can almost hear his breath, you can certainly feel his focus. You are right there with him until the very last bend.
The technological advancements in racing at the time were deemed to be giving some teams an unfair advantage over others and were duly banned for the 1994 season, much like drug usage in athletics and cycling, except that some of the cars without these electronic shortcuts suddenly became far less race worthy; dangerously unstable and challenging to drive as evidenced in the huge increase in accidents at the opening of the ‘94 season.
It is rare to see so much footage of someone on the day of their passing, famous or otherwise. But this film, made with the blessing of Senna’s family and Formula 1, has it in abundance. His sister tells us that on the morning of May 1st 1994, he asked God for guidance and reached for his Bible, her voice over delivers its both ominous and somehow profoundly reassuring message over images of Senna visibly uncomfortable in his car, preparing for the race that day.
Another driver, Roland Ratzenberger, had died on the course the previous day. It was the first Formula 1 driver death of their generation. The day before that, Rubens Barichello, Senna’s friend and protege, had barely survived another terrifying crash but the race went ahead regardless. Frank Williams, the head of Senna’s team at the time, thought he might not race that day. Senna’s close friend, Professor Sid Watkins the F1 doctor also had his doubts. Comforting Senna the day of Ratzenberger’s death, the day before Senna’s own, he suggested that Senna quit. ‘I can’t quit’.
‘… [H]e sighed and his body relaxed. And that was the moment — and I’m not religious — that I thought his spirit had departed.’
Prof. Sid Watkins
It’s masterful editing but it’s also an observation of someone who lived so closely in alignment with their truth that the narrative structure of their story seems to somehow make sense. The things Senna chooses to express at the moment he chooses to express them all seem prophetical somehow, his journey can be neatly mapped out more than most. And though perhaps the greatest tragedy is that it was a fault of the car that killed Ayrton Senna, not a mistake he made himself — other than choosing to drive — you might say that it was his destiny, a race to the finish. If he had crashed six inches in any other direction it is likely he would have survived. There is certainly something of the Romeo & Juliet about his story, a hopeless longing for an alternative outcome from the moment we see him accelerate out of the San Marino blocks.
On what would have been Senna’s 63rd birthday, Netflix announced a six-part miniseries earlier this year. The fictional dramatisation will bear the same name as the documentary “Senna”. Again it has the involvement of his family so maybe it will be just as triumphant but much like choosing to watch Citizen 4 over Snowden, or Man On Wire over The Walk (both fictional versions weirdly starring Joseph Gordon Levitt but the factual ones containing the most extraordinary footage) — I’d rather watch the real thing.
This film plays out like a poem, or aptly even an allegory — Ayrton Senna devoted his short life to race car driving but also to God, after all. I saw it twice in the cinema back in 2010 and have watched it countless times since. If you need anymore convincing, it has an IMDb rating of 8.5 and 93% on Rotten Tomatoes — with an even higher audience score of 95%.
In many ways it strikes me that the appeal of this documentary is not at all dissimilar to why I love HBO’s 100 Foot Wave the epic docu-series on big wave surfing, and also Free Solo, the documentary feature following Alex Honnold’s attempted climb of El Capitan unaided. They are all delicate examinations of the intrinsically human endeavour to overcome the impossible, to dance with death and simultaneously interrogate how those things inevitably impact the relationship between our humanity and our inherently spiritual nature. They all at some point beg the question, why are we doing this?
Perhaps it is my own compulsion to live in a near-constant state of self-reflection that means I find pieces like these so inspiring but no matter where you sit on that spectrum of self-discovery, this film is so tenderly made I promise it will make for compelling viewing if nothing else. It is an exemplary interrogation of who we are and why we’re here and why it is that some of us can only experience ‘a life well-lived’ if we push ourselves to the absolute limit, and sometimes go beyond it.
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