Skateboarding, Trauma and the Case for Free Will in Minding the Gap
By: Dylan Skurka
Tags: Culture, Life Lessons, Free Will, Philosophy, Life

J.P. Sartre’s Conception of Existential Freedom Applied to Minding the Gap

So we see that Zack’s life is headed in the wrong direction while Bing and Keire look like they’re on the right path; what does this have to do with free will?

In fact, when Bing asks Zack why their lives are turning out so differently even though they grew up in similarly broken homes, Zack intelligently casts doubt on the fact that his friend actually freely chose a better life than him:

“Some people do take their negative experiences and turn them into powerful, positive things. I just don’t think I’m that kind of person.”

Don’t things feel this way sometimes — that our successes and failures are not the result of free choices but are really more a consequence of us being “that kind of person” that we are?

But if you watch the film closely, you’ll notice that Keire and Bing’s maturity doesn’t come out of nowhere. Instead, their growth only begins to take shape once they take the extremely unpleasant first steps of confronting the haunting depths of their pasts and take accountability for the trajectory of their futures.

This happens for Keire, for instance, once he begins to work through the combination of grief and rage he has towards his disciplinarian father who passed away a few years back and surrounds himself with a new group of friends who accept his newfound ambition to live responsibly.

These steps seem to undeniably be acts of courage that depended on the characters to first accept that they were capable of breaking their respective cycles of trauma to happen. The much easier decision would have been to succumb to their demons and claim that they couldn’t have done otherwise.

“Bad faith” is the term coined by the French existentialist philosopher J.P. Sartre that reflects this latter attitude — that is, the way of thinking that denies the absolute freedom we have to become what we want by blaming our circumstances and fixed personalities for the way we are.

Instead — as if he were narrating Bing and Keire’s journey into adulthood — Sartre points out in his famous lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism that:

The coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic. There’s always a possibility for the coward not to be cowardly anymore and for the hero to stop being heroic. What counts is total involvement.

For someone like Sartre, we can’t shrug off the things we do as just being a result of “being that kind of person” because there is nothing about us that can be separated from our actions to begin with: we are what we do.

And if our behaviors are not just the expressions of a predetermined personality, no matter how beaten down we’ve been in the past, every new day is an opportunity to transform ourselves from a passive victim of circumstance to someone who can take all the pain they’ve been through and turn it into something positive.

Bing is ultimately able to do this by creating an award-winning documentary about his friends and hometown called Minding the Gap, while after getting a promotion from his dishwashing job, Keire moves to Denver to become a professional skateboarder.

In one of the more powerful scenes of the film, Keire admits that he loves skateboarding even though it’s something that constantly makes him angry. “But it hurts you,” Bing points out curiously. “Yeah,” Keire responds with a big smile. “So did my dad — but I love him to death.”