by Brandon Carter
Coastal Journal Staff

“Into the Wild” Starring: Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Jena Malone, Catherine Keener, Brian Dierker, Kristen Stewart, Vince Vaughn, Hal Holbrook

Written and Directed by Sean Penn

As Sean Penn's Into the Wild crept to its final moments, I took the time to ask myself:  Do I even like Chris McCandless?  Based on Jon Krakaeur's 1996 book, Into the Wild revels in the adventures of one Christopher McCandless, an Emory graduate who abruptly extracted himself from all semblance of organized society to wander mythical American landscapes (mid-western farmland, hippiedom) and trace his way back to his mother--his Earth Mother, that is, since he didn't seem to care for the one he got saddled with (Marcia Gay Harden).

Penn's film seizes the Freudian undertones and then magnifies them considerably, pitting the innocent majesty of the Call of Nature against that most phalic of enormities called Modern Civilization.  Though most of the film jumps back and forth between McCandless's life at home, his life on the road, and his life on the Stampede Trail, the most drawn-out sequences involve that womb-like bus he finds on the side of a mountain.    

As any other review will tell you, the film is an impressively mounted poem about the quintessential American desire to go West in search of something unbound and new.  Through such a lens, McCandless becomes an anti-hero that goes to extraordinary lengths to achieve a level of personal freedom that we all want but are too enslaved to material living to pursue.  The film could easily play little nephew to Easy Rider, and indeed 60s counterculture is an important reference for Penn here as he stuffs his film with hippie imagery, philosophy, and music (courtesy of Eddie Vedder).

The biggest obstacle to this romantic, countercultural reading of the film is McCandless himself.  As played by Emile Hirsch, he is an arrogant, reckless, confused egomaniac with an abstract sense of victimization.  I knew guys like this in college:  Smarmy little brats who had all the answers and few friends because no one likes to be lectured on Marx during lunch.  In McCandless's case, his Marx was Thoreau.  Well not even Thoreau knew what he was saying. 

McCandless is a puzzling figure in that he was all too willing to abandon one set of abstractions for another.  He wanted to leave the suburbs and engage directly with nature because that booze-hound Jack London told him to.  While I would not put myself in the camp that asserts McCandless had a death wish, he may have identified a little too closely with the passage in London's John Barleycorn where he falls into the San Francisco Bay and has a sudden realization that he wouldn't mind being carried out to sea.  Of the ironies in McCandless’s story, and there are many, the most fatal was probably his failure to move beyond the abstract world of Academia that he so loathed.     

If my criticism of the late McCandless seems harsh, I would argue that it's hard to come to any other conclusion about what he did to his family as well as every other person that extended the prospect of love and community to him.  To Penn's credit he doesn't shy away from the ugliness behind McCandless's mission.  His sister (played by Jena Malone) is an effective narrator, creating the necessary distance between McCandless's  warped worldview and everyone else's.  She claims to understand why he did what he did but is hurt that he would abandon her.  So is the aging hippie he charms (Catherine Keener) and the old widower who wants to adopt him (the great Hal Holbrook).  The trail of bodies he leaves behind is as long as the Stampede Trail.

On the other hand, it's hard to sniff at a guy who burned a wad of cash in the desert, hopped trains at night, paddled into Mexico, and stared a bear square in the eye.  All things I'm pretty sure I couldn't do.  He was truly dedicated to the Cause, whatever that may have been, and pushed himself as far as his imagination could carry him. 

It's hard not to think of Timothy Treadwell and Herzog's Grizzly Man, a similarly disturbing film about a similarly Quixotic man who found more solace in the company of bears than humans.  The differences between Timothy Treadwell and Christopher McCandless are significant, none more so than their age.  Treadwell was 46 at his death and had experienced enough hardship in his adult life to figure out he couldn’t handle it.  He lived with those grizzlies for 13 years before they dispatched him.  McCandless was barely an adult when he burned up the rest of his money and slung a backpack over his shoulder. 

The sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as McCandless zipped himself shuddering into his sleeping bag for the last time came from the fact that he didn't give life much of a chance before he abandoned it, a realization he came to only as the end drew nigh.