Into the Wild

Does dysfunctionality make one representative and typical? Does one's difficult relationship with his family necessarily lead to universal significance for humankind? Such questions ought to occur to the viewer as he or she watches Sean Penn's excellent film Into the Wild (2007) based on the book of the same title by Jon Krakauer (1996). Krakauer's book tells the story of Chris McCandless, who after graduating Emory University in 1990 disappeared and set out on a quest—to live well and meaningfully, to discover the "real" America, to find himself. These may be oversimplifications of what he was out to find, but they will have to do here. He changes his name, cuts all ties with his parents, gives his money to charity, abandons his car. Over a period of two years he wanders in the American west, holds numerous jobs, makes friends and acquaintances, and carefully avoids putting down roots anywhere. In April 1992 he makes his way to Alaska and wanders off into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. He lives in an abandoned bus for four months and then, after eating a poisonous plant that blocks his digestive system (Krakauer speculates), dies of starvation. His body is recovered in September. Both the book and film do not suggest that McCandless went into the Alaskan wilderness with the intent of dying there. Both make clear that he planned to return to the continental United States. Yet the book contains excerpts from letters McCandless wrote to friends telling them that he would never see them again, at least implying that he considered the possibility that his wandering would end in his death.

Penn's film version of the book is carefully and expertly done. He preserves most of the basic and even minor details of the McCandless story, though he tells it in a somewhat different order than Krakauer. While the book tells the story in chronological order (and engages in several pertinent and revealing digressions), the film moves back and forth between scenes of McCandless in the Alaskan wilderness, scenes describing his wanderings before he makes his final trip to Alaska, and scenes involving his family, especially as they think about him after his disappearance. McCandless' sister provides frequent voiceover in the film, where she quotes from conversations with her brother or from his letters to her. (He did not write her or his parents after he disappeared).

In general, the virtues of the film are the virtues of the book. The film is more narrowly focused, however. on McCandless, his adventures, and his family. The book views McCandless in a larger context. Krakauer compares McCandless to other wanderers and loners who wanted to lose themselves in the wild, some of them coming to grief in ways similar to McCandless. Krakauer also refers to his own experiences and describes at some length a foolhardy mountain climbing experience in Alaska while he was in his 20s. Krakauer sees many similarities between his youthful self and McCandless, and suggests that he survived his own experience in the Alaskan mountains only by good fortune. The film emphasizes the relationship between McCandless and his parents, suggesting that the repressive atmosphere of the McCandless household, and especially the domineering personality of McCandless' father, were responsible for his decision to abandon his parents and to retreat into the anonymous hinterlands of America. Krakauer does present this argument, but he does not give it as much emphasis as the film does, and in certain ways he minimizes it, suggesting that McCandless might have moderated and tempered his attitudes towards his family with time. The film never lets go of this connection between McCandless and his family, while the book treats it in a discrete chapter and also considers other ways of understanding McCandless and his personality.

For Krakauer, McCandless is one of a larger group of individuals who sought fulfillment and retreat in the American wilderness. He is a young idealist, scarred by family, perhaps, but driven as well by the American literary tradition of fascination with Nature and the wilds. He's also on a quest for personal fulfillment.

In the film, McCandless is significant as a single individual, while in the book he is also significant as a participant in a larger cultural and historical phenomenon.

Both the book and film are fascinated with McCandless as a person and a personality, a young man of considerable intelligence and gifts, a charismatic soul, yet someone so traumatized by his relationship with his parents, especially his father, that he was compelled to break off all links with his family and with the life they lived. He told his sister shortly before graduating from college that he planned to break all ties with his parents and never see them again. This at least raises the possibility that there was a motive of revenge in what McCandless does, though neither the book nor the film makes much of this.

The America that McCandless sets out to find, the one he believes must necessarily be out there—based on his readings of such writers as Jack London and Henry David Thoreau and John Muir—is the America of the wide open spaces, of the west, of wilderness, of a land undominated by the quest for wealth, world domination, and material objects. It is also the America of the margins—of people who live outside cities, who wander from place to place—aging hippies, street bums, the maladjusted, individuals and itinerants and the down and out, and the people who simply choose not to join the mainstream. In a sense McCandless relives in his quest the decades of the 1930s through the 1960s, of the Depression and the Beats.

The film joins in with McCandless in his search for these Americas. At the same time it views him from more objective perspectives, so that we are aware of his relative youth and inexperience, so that we never lose track of the argument that his stubborn independence plays a role in his ultimate fate. He is a noble philosophical wanderer on the one hand and on the other a victim of his own innocence and naiveté. The book tends to hold McCandless at arm's length. It makes us aware of what the boy was thinking and feeling through quotations from letters and journal entries and through conversations recounted by people he met along the way. The book sympathizes with McCandless but tends to maintain a more objective perspective than the film.

The film takes relatively short sections of Krakauer's book and expands them: an example is the friendship McCandless strikes up with two aging hippies who live on the road and sell books and knickknacks at flea markets along the way, with a seventeen-year-old girl, with an 80-year-old man who has been living alone for years. Hal Holbrook is excellent as the old man. Catherine Keener and Vince Vaughan are also excellent as supporting characters (Vaughan is hardly recognizable and shows that he can play characters other than the buffoons he has so often played in recent films).

When I first heard about Chris McCandless and his death in the Alaskan wilderness, like everyone else I was struck by the pathos and mystery of the story. Why had he cut himself off from his family and friends? Why would such a promising young man so intelligent and creative wander off alone into the wilderness to die? What had happened, and why? This was a great mystery. Sean Penn makes a strong argument for the impact on the young man of his dysfunctional family, the controlling father, the discovery that his father had married his mother well after both he and his sister had been born, the life of deceit and deception for which McCandless blamed his parents. I've known plenty of individuals who grew up in families with similarly complex profiles, people who did not go on to live the life McCandless committed himself to. Why did McCandless make the choice he made when others did not? For me, the dysfunctional family argument does not provide a complete answer. Krakauer's efforts to view McCandless from a number of perspectives is ultimately more convincing for me.

I sympathize with McCandless' desire to throw everything away and go and live on the land, on the road, to discover the real and genuine America that would give the lie to the lives we all live in the cities and in our affluent culture of self-satisfaction. Yet his idealism is not a way of thinking that can survive in the real world, in a nation of nearly three hundred million people. Perhaps that is part of the tragedy of the story, that individualism, solitude, iconoclastic living are difficult in our modern times. There is a selfishness and solipsistic naiveté in the path McCandless ultimately took. He could have done service to his society, he could have played a role in changing those parts of society he did not like, but he took a path that brought him to isolation and death.

It is not fair to blame McCandless too deeply. He was undone by bad luck, inexperience, youthfulness. He planned to return to America after all. This is the sadness of his story.