If BabbelOn took a backpack, a bag of rice and a survival manual and wandered into the wilderness without telling anyone where he was going, hardened readers would say he was crazy and deserving of everything he received, including possibly a lingering and lonely demise.
If BabbelOn was a 22 year old, good looking, intelligent middle-class American student (and who is to say he isn’t?), progressive readers might say that he was misguided and “looking for himself”.
If his misadventures became the subject of a New York Times Best Seller and a “Sean Penn Film”, soft-boiled readers would have to concede that he was perhaps, albeit posthumously, onto something.
Christopher McCandless went looking for himself in Alaska in 1992, died of starvation three months later and has been immortalised in Into the Wild.
This film was nominated for two Oscars and numerous other awards. (The ABC’s resident hobbit gave it 5 stars). At the time that BabbelOn began scribing this post, the film was ranked the #245 best film of all time (by IMDB.com), putting it just ahead of Harold & Maude and behind Shaun of the Dead. At last count, it had risen to a frankly astonishing #130, ranking it ahead of Die Hard, Annie Hall and Ben Hur and trailing not very far behind Gladiator. (As at 7 April it is now #126 and has gone past Gladiator.)
BabbelOn is rarely moved to review movies but cannot let this one pass.
Into The Wild is something of a departure for Sean Penn. Cineaste readers will be familiar with his earlier films, The Indian Runner (with a young Viggo Mortensen), The Pledge (with an old Jack Nicholson) and even The Crossing Guard (with a not quite as old Jack Nicholson). (Mr Penn enjoys working in “The” movie business apparently.) Those films were violent, psychological fictions. This one is a gently moving true story with a charismatic lead and nice scenery. But pretty actors and Alaskan landscapes do not equal Ben Hur (let alone Die Hard).
The $22 question is - should one care about McCandless’s story?
Before BabbelOn attempts to answer that question, a short detour into the plot is required (BabbelOn begs the indulgence of those readers who have seen the film or have not but are prepared to have it spoiled).
After graduating from university, McCandless gave his college fund to charity, said so long to his family and drove his old Datsun into the desert in search of adventure (he called himself, without irony, ”Alexander Supertramp“).
What was he running away from? His family; in particular his parents. He wasn’t beaten or threatened in any way. In fact the worst thing his parents did to him was to offer to buy him a new car. This was the catalyst for him to take off for good. Admittedly there was parental abuse. William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden yelled at one another and he once held her tightly in the kitchen. But the sin committed by Ma and Pa McCandless was that … they lied to young Chris. It turns out that Pa had been married to someone else at the time he met Ma (gasp) and they weren’t married until some time after Chris and his sister were born which made them, technically, bastards. BabbelOn wryly observes that if every kid whose parents had to get married in the ’60s decided to burn his money and hike into Alaska, Nome would have the population of, say, Los Angeles.
The film’s voice-over is by Chris’s sister who loved him and put up with his aberrant behaviour and in return didn’t get so much as a postcard or a phone call. In the film, McCandless thinks about calling home but then gives his dime (apparently his last one) to an old guy having his own short-changed crisis on the next pay phone.
Our hero does not appear to have been running towards anything special either – despite his protestations about western materialism and his second-hand philosophy about nature and the simple life (he finds room in his backpack for Jack London and Thoreau. Rimbaud must also have been in there somewhere). What he really needed was a stack of books made out of edible paper or Jamie Oliver’s Moose and Wild Grass Salad recipes.
His longing for the far horizon apparently didn’t extend beyond continental USA. His one foray across the border into Mexico ended quickly with him begging to be let back in, having burnt his social security card (presumably he never had a passport) along with his remaining cash and his bridges.
McCandless has some encounters on his road trip, with hippies and drug dealers and an old guy who shows him how to make a leather belt (adding holes to it becomes symbolic of his weight loss in Alaska). The hippies are friendly and philosophical and try to gently guide him (“Don’t go to Alaska in the winter”). But their efforts prove futile against the boy philosopher with the strong will and the chip on his shoulder.
Naturally, there is romance of sorts as he is picked up by a 16 year old in the hippie camp. She looks like a young Brooke Shields and sings like Jonie Mitchell but even she can’t stop his vision quest.
After much dicking around, making enough money doing odd jobs to pay for his adventure, eventually he hikes into Alaska with a fishing rod (which apparently he didn’t know how to use), a knife, a pup-tent, a book on edible plants (apparently not many of which grow in Alaska) and his books. No map, canoe, first aid kit or even water-proof boots. His ego wouldn’t allow him to tell anyone where he was going or to ask for advice from an actual Alaskan.
Incredibly for him, he finds an old bus in the middle of nowhere, which has been fitted out with a stove, bed and basic kitchen. If he hadn’t lucked onto the bus, the film would have been an hour shorter (rather than 2 1/2 hours). As it is, he survives shooting small game, wandering around, communing with nature.
After three months he has worked through most of his issues (with the help of Thoreau and the boys) and decides to leave. Tragically for our hero, the stream he waded across has now swollen with the melting snows (who would have thought it?) So he is trapped. No game around, no edible plants (although he does try some that make him sick). So begins a downward spiral to starvation, hallucination and cult status.
One of his last acts is to write in the margin of one of his books “Happiness is only real when it is shared” (with humans, not grizzlies).
So, back to the $22 question ($10 on Tuesdays) – should one care about McCandless?
BabbelOn always enjoys answering a question with another one. Would this film have been made if the boy had survived (say by hiking up the river to where it wasn’t so deep, or setting off a distress flare, or using a radio, or even learning how to use that fishing rod?) Does a grizzly makes its toilet in the woods?
Was he a hero? Was his death a tragedy? Probably. It certainly seems inevitable with the benefit of hindsight. What did he do with his life? One is forced to conclude – not much. How should he be remembered? Was he an idealistic young artist, starving in his garret? Or a selfish, narcissistic middle-class waster. If nothing else, he is a warning to all would-be Grizzly Adams’s, the poster boy for the National Parks & Wildlife Service.
Why don’t we let some actual Alaskans have the second last word?
Alaskan Park Ranger Peter Christian wrote: “I am exposed continually to what I will call the ‘McCandless Phenomenon.’ People, nearly always young men, come to Alaska to challenge themselves against an unforgiving wilderness landscape where convenience of access and possibility of rescue are practically nonexistent […] When you consider McCandless from my perspective, you quickly see that what he did wasn’t even particularly daring, just stupid, tragic, and inconsiderate. First off, he spent very little time learning how to actually live in the wild. He arrived at the Stampede Trail without even a map of the area. If he [had] had a good map he could have walked out of his predicament […] Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide.”
Judith Kleinfeld wrote in the Anchorage Daily News that “many Alaskans react with rage to his stupidity. You’d have to be a complete idiot, they say, to die of starvation in summer 20 miles off the Park’s Highway.”
That’s good enough for BabbelOn. Perhaps the only thing more wasteful than Christopher McCandless’s short young life was making it into a film.
