Comments on Into the Wild

For all the time that we spend with Christopher McCandless, he does not emerge as much but a stubborn nature lover with an aversion to bourgeois American life. There is a reason for this: he could pass for any of us. Sexless, a bit bland, utterly conventional in his choice of unconventional heroes (Tolstoy, Thoreau, Pasternak), this kid is a stand-in for everyone who ever considered quitting a job or running a marathon. And because he's—in all respects but one—so very ordinary, he is immediately loved by all who spend time with him: they just project onto him whatever is missing from their lives (generally a lost loved one). In this he resembles the religious figures who've absorbed so many adoring, desperate gazes.

But unlike Jesus and Siddhartha, who were no friends of the nuclear family, this lad's moment of enlightenment, the delayed acknowledgment that kindly old Ron Franz spoke a truth worthy of Morgan Freeman, is an affirmation of the importance of human community, people, family.

The story involves some deep questions, but it's a story with little in the way of event, so the movie's writer and director, Sean Penn, has crafted a complex interweaving of narratives, with various voiceovers, McCandless's postcards and journal, and even grainy footage of events that don't fit into either of the two main narrative strands: events that took place in McCandless's childhood.

I found the story moving in spite of Penn's unfortunate indulgence in narrative overload and lots of fancy camerawork and editing to convey some sense of (1) McCandless's cognitive meltdown on Los Angeles's skid row and (2) McCandless's death by starvation. So elaborate was the first that I thought for a bit that our hero had taken a puff on some crackhead's pipe; so long had the movie been going on by the second that I just gritted my teeth. As I say, I was moved. We all should be, because we're all guilty of the sort of complacency that McCandless never for a moment endured. We all put off our Great Alaskan Adventures, and so we, unlike McCandless, bathe regularly, chat, go to church, eat foods killed for us by others, survive. Many think that they can escape from the dullness such a life generates by trekking in Nepal or picking grapes in Burgundy or finding God, but I suspect that these mean less than not much. Some people, no matter whether they're mopping floors or teaching autistic kids to read, are simply, in every moment, utterly alive. Most live lives of quiet desperation.