“Nothing happens by chance,” says Carl Boenish at the start of the documentary on his life, Sunshine Superman. “Every single thing that happens has a reason—it happens due to the laws of the universe.”
As the driving force behind one of the first extreme sports, BASE jumping, Boenish parachuted from mountaintops, television towers and skyscrapers—until a final leap from Europe’s tallest vertical rock face, Norway’s Trollveggen, ended in death. “It’s encumbent upon me to figure out those laws and obey those laws,” Boenish added. He had little use for trespassing ordinances and park regulations, but gravity, the law that eventually sentenced him to death, he acknowledged.
Boenish is the subject of Sunshine Superman, a documentary by first-time director Marah Strauch. Archival footage is interlaced with interviews and judiciously edited reenactments to compose a compelling narrative of a life at the edge. The voice heard most often belongs to Boenish, the subject of many interviews from the 1970s through his death in 1984. And there is plenty of action footage because a camera was his constant companion.
The chronicle of Boenish’s drive to excel is easy enough to assemble, but his inner life is harder to fathom. The director presents indications without imposing her own interpretations. After recovering from childhood polio, Boenish proved he could outrun all the other kids in foot races at school. Unlike extreme sports fanatics who appear to be nothing more than adrenalin addicts or mindless thrill junkies, Boenish was guided by a philosophy of life, even a spirituality, whose salient points he raised often in interviews. Passing mention is given to his adherence to Christian Science, which aside from rejecting modern medicine is based on the premise of mind over matter and the power of positive thought. Boenish had faith in his ability to overcome hurdles—a pointedly childlike faith. As he insisted in interviews, a child is someone who hasn’t been taught what he cannot do.
His life’s work resulted from a string of logical developments. As an engineer at Hughes Aircraft, he gravitated to skydiving, and while he was far from the first to film a parachute jump, he gained fame for the technical achievement of his short films. With cameras strapped to crash helmets, he staged the sport as an aerial Busby Berkeley production as divers descended in choreographed patterns.
As an accomplished skydiver, he looked for new heights to surmount, leading jumps from the top of El Capitan in Yosemite that brought him in conflict with park rangers enforcing rules against such things. He later brushed against trouble by trespassing on top of tall buildings and TV towers.
Preoccupied with his struggle against physical limits, Boenish was a latecomer to human intimacy, but met his soul mate while screening one of his skydiving films at a college campus. Jean Boenish, whose interviews provide a glimpse of her husband’s emotional life, concedes that most of his daredevil associates thought she looked more like a nun or a librarian than someone who would jump off a mountain.
The archival interviews assembled in Sunshine Superman show that for Boenish, BASE (for Buildings-Antenna towers-Spans-Earth) was not an end in itself but a lesson for life. He thought his example should inspire everyone to push beyond socially or self-imposed physical and mental limits. Perhaps, in his final jump, he made the mistake of refusing to acknowledge that limits do exist.
