The “real” McCandless

It’s rare that a work of art—of any kind—lingers with me the way Sean Penn’s screen version of Into the Wild has. And I want to know why. The basis of my query is decidedly nonliterary. I’ll admit that I’m fairly non-literate, not in the writing sense, but the reading sense. I am not steeped in the great traditions that Into the Wild is build upon– not the story itself– but of the vast literary history of writers abandoning the society to probe deeper truths out there, literary pilgrims, so-to-speak. From Walden Pond to On the Road, Americans have probed the wild and the road. Krakaur’s book, Into the Wild, most likely speaks to that impulse. Trouble is, I haven’t read the book, so all I have to offer is how the film itself impressed me, not in dialog with Alex Supertramp’s story (or the book about it), but how as a cinematic experience it connects with ours.

It’s curious that the bus that served as his grave has become a modern pilgrimage site. Alaskans don’t get it, because to many of them Chris was a fool for doing what he did: venturing into the bush ill-prepared with few provisions and a kind of middle class arrogance that all will be fine. Indeed, as the case of his demise has been extrapolated and explored, one gets the sense that he may have had an unconscious death wish. He must have known on some deep level that what he was doing would end badly. No doubt, when he did decide to return to civilization and found the summer runoff too difficult to ford, it doesn’t take much to try other routes. And had he walked a few more miles, his escape would have been complete. Did he accidentally poison himself? We’ll never know. All we can be sure of is that he rejected the dominant values of civilization, and in that courage I think we find the core gestalt of his appeal.

There is an inner Jack London in all of us that simply would like to burn the cash and credit cards, ditch the car in the arroyo and walk off into the sunset. In some ways it’s very American. McCanldles’ deathbed epiphany that joy only has meaning when it’s shared was perhaps the supreme lesson of his life, for we cannot say he was truly free. He was running from something and was so determined to make a statement to his father, his ultimate outcome is not much different than a son’s suicide as revenge.

The film is a hyperreal fantasy of nature. The real location was moved for better views of the mountains to satisfy the requirements of cinema. A love story here, and some exaggerated scenery there, glosses over the more mundane aspects of a boy’s journey into America’s interior. In fact, as I have pondered the film, I was wondering why something so innocuou–a person traveling, running from his famil–could resonoate so deeply with the culture and myself. At the end of the film when we see a picture of the actual Chris (not the actor), it becomes painfully clear that this was a real life. And at that moment I wept like I’ve never wept at the end of a movie. How could I love this anonymous character so much? Is it the power of cinema, or connection with a sense of loss and abandonment that is so often at the core of our daily neurosis?

To some he comes across as a Jesus-like character, to others, just a middle class American fool lost in his own convictions like America in Iraq. With Penn at the helm, we could say this is the anti-parable of the war. If you are going to lose yourself, do it for moral reasons, for god sakes, like connecting with the Great Whatever and the “wild” that alludes us high-tech capitalistas.

The wild is a construct of the literary culture: it was devised by the Greeks to be the first big cultural Other to permeate the psychosis of Modern Man. Now we want to reclaim it, but it means death. And how fearful were we as we watched the film thinking, I could never do that, but I wish I could. We are so deeply ashamed of our domestication and trapped by our worldliness that we hunger for that taste of authenticity Chris/Alex sought and tasted. You see it in his dying smile, one of the eerie media artifacts he left with his undeveloped roll of film.

Which begs the question, was he not a bit self-conscious that his experiment would impact the culture, and he would not survive to see it? What was the purpose of the journal and camera if he was so free of our civilized trappings? Photos embalm, as philosophers have noted, and these artifacts he left us contain the self-reflective traces of a Western man, a narcissus who only vouches for existence in the mirror of media. This is not a criticism, just a reflection of the zeitgeist. Chris was both and instrument and mechanic of the culture. He knew what he was doing, his determination and focus the clues that his legacy would impact the world.

Note: I initially wrote this piece for Reality Sandwich, but someone else wrote a really good article and beat my lazy ass to post it. I recommend that you go over and read Andrew William Smith’s article too.

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