There was (again) a Luzon wide power failure today which lasted all of six hours and paralyzing everything from mass transit and the vertical travel of building employees everywhere. I was trying to lessen my neglected emails load, then the computer just went kaput. I didn’t know the whole island was affected then. So I went out of the house already, and proceeeded to the network to pick up a friend before heading to the UP Film Center. The traffic was awful and when I got there, we had barely an hour before the screening. I rushed into the building, flashed the ID, ran into the elevator banks and got into one just as the door was closing. I was in a hurry, and eight storeys up does merit the use of an elevator. Then within ten seconds there was a thud and we stopped. Right there between the second and third floors.

Now my first reaction would be to curse the darn electric company for being so inefficient and treating us to survivoresque situations when I have no inclinations whatsoever to take part in reality television. (A camera guy got stuck with us, and he filmed what was happening most of the time.) Being trapped in an elevator is not my favorite form of past time.

Immediately, scenes from my two favorite elevator movies came to mind. One was Louis Malle’s L’ascenseur pour l’echafaud, or A Lift to the Gallows (1958), with the totally divine Jeanne Moreau. It was a thriller about a murder and suicide attempt gone wrong, with the murderer ending up getting stuck inside an elevator. Then there’s Combat de Fauves, or Wild Games from last October’s Cine Europa. (Combat de Fauves was made in 1998, but has the same look and feel as the Louis Malle movie.) A workaholic advertising guy gets stuck in an elevator in a building where he's trying to find an apartment and ends up spending 3 gruelling days stuck there playing mind games with the building’s equally crazy owner. The experience of just watching those guys trying to get out but couldn’t, and add the mental torture of people out there, who are free to move and go to the bathroom as they please, just didn’t appeal to me.

Elevators are such cramped spaces that the reflex reaction would be to get out. There is a limited amount of air. You cannot preen in front of a mirror unless it has reflective surfaces. No food, no drink – unless you came in there armed with army provisions. If there are no escape hatches, the only next logical reaction would be hysteria.

Fortunately, one of my elevator fellows works with the security and maintainance people. They had to manually pull the elevator so it would land exactly at the elevator banks and they would try to pry the doors open. I think there were two guys who went to the very top of the building and pulled the weight equivalent of a small elephant. It took them all of twenty minutes.

I think I shall be climbing up the stairs all the way to the ninth floor for sometime following this, or at least wait for the non-glitch elevator.