Into the Wild

This past weekend, in addition to Revenge of the Sith, we also watched Into the Wild. In talking about movies in one of my classes (before the class started!), a few people said it was excellent, and so I wanted to check it out.

(Danger, Will Robinson, Danger! If you’ve not seen this movie yet, you may want to skip this one; spoilers ahead.)

Alright, is everyone who doesn’t want to read spoilers gone? Good. For those who are braving ahead even having not seen it, the plot is this: a young recently-graduated college student basically abandons his family - parents and one sister, the latter with whom he is extremely close - to go tramping across the country. While he goes many places, his ultimate goal is to go to Alaska; he wants to find the ever-elusive Truth, and he thinks that going into solitude and living a simple life will help him do that. He ultimately ends up dying in Alaska, trapped by a flooded river. In the movie at least, he dies from ingesting a poisonous plant that he had confused with another, edible plant. It’s not clear whether he truly died from eating a poisonous plant, or simply starvation.

The movie lived up to the hype of my friends; it was quite good. I was really swept up into the story, and found myself thinking a lot about the message the guy was giving throughout his travels: modern life is too complicated, and we need to simplify. Near the beginning there’s a scene where him and his family are at his graduation dinner. His parents offer to buy him a new car, and… he gets angry with them. What’s wrong with his old car, he asks? He likes his old car - it works; he accuses them of obsessing over things, “things, things, always more things.” His attitude about much of life is like this - less is more, essentially. Get back to nature, get back to experiencing the moment.

The day after I watched it though, the more and more his actions bugged me. I felt that in the movie, he (Christopher McCandless) was portrayed as noble, in a way, for abandoning his family and going off into Alaska. There’s nothing wrong per se with leaving your family and doing your own thing - I’m certainly not saying that. But he was of age; if he wanted to do such a thing, his parents couldn’t have stopped him. Why didn’t he send a postcard or letter to them, or at least to his sister? Did making them suffer through the worry help him in doing what he was trying to do? It almost seemed like he got off on leaving all of them hanging.

Furthermore, there’s a line between being adventurous and being stupid, and I think he crossed it when he went into Alaska with, more-or-less, nothing. On the Wikipedia page about it, it’s stated that he decided in July, after a few months there, that he was ready to leave; however, the river he had crossed on his way in was larger and swifter, and he couldn’t cross it. In August, there’s a journal entry which is assumed to be his last words. His body was found in early September. Even if one assumes that he died immediately after writing his last journal entry, that was still a month’s worth of time for him to attempt to get out. The real kicker? There was a hand-operated tram 1/4 of a mile from where he tried to cross the river. If he’d gone “into the wild” with a few maps of the area, he would have known that, and he could have been able to walk right out.

While I did enjoy the movie a lot, the more I think on it, I’m afraid I share the sentiments of a park ranger, who is quoted on the above-linked Wikipedia page:

When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. […] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.

I get what the guy was trying to do, and part of me thinks, yeah, we should all simplify more; we don’t need all the crap that we have now to be happy. But the other part of me thinks that he could have let his family know what was up, at least his sister, and that he could still be alive right now if he’d executed his plan with a little less idealism and a little more common sense.