Into the Wild, Essay Example

Introduction

Christopher’s story is told in Into the Wild, John Krakauer’s bestselling 1996 book that was turned into an acclaimed 2007 movie by writer/director Sean Penn. From the surface it looks like Christopher abandoned his family and the world, but if students look deeper they can see that Christopher saw things the other way around. As he saw it, his parents had abandoned him, leaving him to make his own way to the world. Part of what makes Christopher’s story reverberate with readers and viewers is that all of us have felt abandoned at times.

This film follows a troubled twenty-two-year-old college graduate named Christopher McCandless to the Alaskan wilderness where he hiked more than 20 miles down the Stampede Trail to an abandoned Fairbanks school bus. The road, which is not actually in the park, frequently crosses private land and is largely low, boggy, muddy and wet. The bus is more than 20 miles from the town of Healy and though much of it is well travelled by vehicles, there are a number of dangerous river water crossings including the Savage and Teklanika Rivers. These are icy, glacial rivers that should not be attempted.

(Source: Robert Ebert Web)

Before Watching This Film

Before watching this film, students must realize that Into the Wild is not a journey into the wild but into the mind. Men like Christopher think that they are escaping civilization and its discontents, but in fact they occupy the place of its death instincts. Their fantasy is of a world of absolute control and order: “I can make it on my own”. As Kevin Mahan notes, the “return to wild” desperately acts out the myth of the self-made man, editing out love, warmth, vulnerability, and ambiguity (Mahan 17). As Mathias Nilges points out, Christopher shows the desire to return to a more enjoyable form of subjectivity via the return to and struggle with nature is not just an escapist but also clearly a bourgeois and anti-dialectical desire (Nilges 216). Similarly, A. O. Scott writes in New York Times, “He does not court risk but rather stumbles across it – thrillingly and then seriously – on the road to pleasure” (Scott).  Students must realize that the film’s final montage, combining shots of Christopher’s last journal entries and his parents and home life, advances the interpretation that he fully intended to return and renew his connections to the cultural world.

Historical Context Of Identity In Into The Wild

The question of generational identity is one that has been the focus of all types of writing just about as long as people have known how to write. From the struggles that Absalom had emerging from his father, King David, in the Old Testament, to the psychologically bizarre twists of Oedipus Rex, to such modern works as the examinations of parent and son relationships in Sean Penn’s Into The Wild, the ways in which younger generations find their own individual voices and niches apart from those in which their parents have raised them have fascinated writers and readers alike.

Students will learn from this movie is that Christopher:

• Is angry and hurt by his father’s deception and perceives it as a betrayal.
• Rejects not only his father’s love but his values and beliefs as well, viewing them (correctly) as shallow and imaginary.
• Is all on WATER without a moral compass, and this lack of orientation accelerates his identity crisis.
• Is unable to believe in the persona passed down to him by his parents, he goes in search of his own truth.

He is a “wanderer” who sought loneliness in the wilds that only adds mystery to loss (Fradkin 9). Christopher, because of his own father’s failure to do the same, can only move forward into an unknown and impossible future. He heads for Alaska, seeking not wholeness but oblivion. But, as Joanne Laurier said, “he remains always aloof”.

A Quest For Freedom

Christopher’s quest for freedom did not only risk death, however; in a way it was depended on it.

• He was punishing his family – and society – for deceiving him, and he did by sacrificing himself.
• His trip to Alaska was more than a Londonesque test of manhood or rite of passage; it was a search for meaning, an attempt to strip away the layers that came between him and the truth, to remove all the masks and see what lay behind them.
• His death was testimony not merely to his own folly but to his father’s failure to provide values for him to believe in.
• His parents pay the ultimate price for their failure to love their son in a way that is meaningful to him, because he (albeit unconsciously) chooses to die rather than live in a world without this meaning.
• If his death has more significance than the life his parents wished for him ever could, it is because it was at least his own meaning, and his choice.
• He was torn between the person his family expected (assumed) him to be and the person he felt he was.
• He was smothered and oppressed by these expectations, and willing to seek freedom at any cost, including death; and
• In the end, death became the only freedom possible.

The realization of an inner truth invariably either precipitates crisis or is the result of one. Christopher’s decision to seek the truth of the wild – to disappear into the unconscious – precipitated a corresponding crisis for his family, who experienced his coming to manhood the only way they could – as loss and betrayal. Christopher, for his part, creates a crisis that is final, total, pure, and that allows such realization to occur. As Stephen Innes writes, only in the isolation of nature does Christopher realize his need for humanity, the need for a connection to his own kind. This realization, Stephen Innes concluded, comes too late for him to use; but then, it may never have come at all.

What Drove Christopher To The Wild?

The call of the wild in this movie is the call of his identification, the great wilds of the unconscious that lies behind and underneath the flimsy constructs of culture and ‘identity’. The New Yorker’s David Denby reviewed this movie, and argued that Alaskans have not made him the profound, Romantic trope he is become elsewhere, but rather an artless wayward inspiring other to clown with death. This movie shows the failure of the family fold to provide meaning or context for the ego to sustain itself with, and the inevitable collapse (both of the ego and the family) that result. The center – the male child, the “heir” upon which all future hopes are pinned – cannot hold (Denby). This sin of the father weighs heavy upon Christopher, and Denby sees no possibility for honest communiqué with his father, and there is no possibility of settlement either. The split in his psyche is a generational wound which can only be healed by owning the very violence and deception that caused it. Like the water that finally traps Christopher and lead to his death, this split is an unbridgeable wide chasm (Clark and Rabey 31). Because the father denied his own unconscious – his guilt and responsibility, and the wounds that drove him to betray his family – because he assumed instead a superficial and inauthentic façade of decency, Christopher is compelled to move in the opposite direction (Clark and Rabey 31). He goes all the way into the unconscious realms, into the identification, into the wild.

What Is The End Result?

This film ends up as he becomes conscious that no matter what truth or happiness he comes across in the wilds is worthless lacking someone to share it with. His desires to attach with wild thus come to know his own realness is not complete without others. This may be the ultimate reality that he realized; in a way, it is the reality that took his life – or somewhat, the reality that he had to die to find out. Because of this, Christopher can only move further and further away from his father, from his past and from his roots, into the unknown. He travels as far and as fast as he can go, without every knowing or caring where he is moving towards. And eventually, inevitably, that great void into which he journeys takes his last breath from him, and swallows him whole.

Works Cited

Clark, Chap and Steve Rabey. When Kids Hurt: Help for Adults Navigating the Adolescent Maze. Baker Books, 2009. Print.

Denby, David. “Lost Men”. The New Yorker, 08 October 2007. Web. 04 December 2011.

Fradkin, Philip L. Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife. University of California Press, 2011. Print.

Innes, Stephen. “Wilderness Experience”. CultureWatch Articles, 2008. Web. 04 December 2011.

Laurier, Joanne. “What drove Sean Penn Into the Wild?” World Socialist Web Site. 2007. Web. 04 December 2011.

Mahan, Kevin Paul. It was and it isn’t: A Rhetorical Exploration of Simulcara in Emerging Church Vintage Worship. ProQuest, 2008. Print.

Nilges, Mathias. Nostalgia for the Future: Post-Fordist U.S. Literature and Culture. ProQuest, 2008. Print.

Scott, A. O. “Movie Review: Sean Penn’s ‘Into the Wild’”. The New York Times. 21 September 2007. Web. 04 December 2011.