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Into the Wild

Into the Wild is the story of a young man who perhaps took Emerson and Thoreau a little too much to heart–he ends up striking out on his own into the Alaskan wild and starves to death three miles from civilization. But what is the story behind this story? The book Into the Wild takes a journalistic view of Chris McCandless’s life, simply chronicling his journey from privileged Emory school graduate to the single-minded drifter he became. The facts of McCandless’s life are fascinating, but the real question goes unanswered–was McCandless’s life and death a heroic, albeit tragic, attempt to transcend the material trappings of adulthood? Or was McCandless’s journey simply a self-mythologizing and elaborate tantrum? Sean Penn’s film is the kind of record McCandless probably hoped to leave–we can easily imagine McCandless, alone in a bus in the Alaskan wilderness, imaging how sweeping and epic his struggles would look to a sympathetic audience.

Penn does follow his character like a sympathetic God, showing his approval by providing ever more lyrical props for McCandless’s journey (rushing rivers, wild horses, mountain streams etc.) McCandless is presented as victim of his childhood and of the society he never really enters, and his behavior in the film seems more fated than willful. My problem with Penn’s film, however, is not that it sympathizes with McCandless, but that it doesn’t concentrate on what I consider the most interesting elements of the story. The movie doesn’t grapple with the difficulty of judging McCandless (Idealistic or desolate? Sublime or shallow? Inspiring or insipid?). Nor does it address what that difficulty must have been like for anyone that knew him.

If I knew McCandless, I think I would be most tortured by not being able to settle on an opinion about him. Usually, it isn’t hard to basically decide who is and who isn’t a “good person” nor is it hard to settle on some internal consensus about someone’s flaws and strengths. In McCandless’s case, it is impossible to be sure if he is a self-indulgent fool or some kind of romantic hero. If you were talking to McCandless, and he started going on about the evils of society and the beauty/truth to be found in nature, you might roll your eyes and tell him to “get real.” Or, you might quote Thoreau in unison and pat him on the back for his brave life-choices. But no matter how you reacted, you’d always wonder about the other possibility. The cynical responder would wonder “well…what if I’m wrong? Maybe I just roll my eyes because I am too complacent and weak to live so fully.” And if you supported him, you’d wonder “This kid might just be an egomaniac who just wants his own life on an epic scale. All his quoting and going on about the truth is for show.”

Talking with McCandless would be fascinating because your opinion would never become fixed. You’d be embarrassed that you ever thought him a hero when you decided he was a fool, and then ashamed you ever thought him a fool when your thoughts shifted and you thought him a hero. He would create an opposite impression on you from moment to moment, and you would experience the strange sensation of watching him change before your eyes. This would be no gradual change. He would, with the flux of your thoughts, wholly transform in an instant and then change again. He would seem to flicker, and talking to him would be hypnotic and unreal.

That, I think, would be the phenomenon to capture on film. You could shoot the actor’s face close-up, as if from the next bar stool, and simply hold the shot as McCandless’s character rattled on about his plans and ideas. McCandless’s monologue could be written with alternating moments of brilliance and small-mindedness, originality and derivativeness. Then the audience could experience the haunting indecision that surely marked any conversation with the real McCandless. The question is not whether McCandless lived an authentically heroic life, it is whether such a life can still be authentically lived.