In the mid 1990’s when I originally heard about Chris McCandless and his starvation while camping in Alaska, I, like many others thought it was sad story of another person ill equipped and disrespectful of nature. Though I was no longer living in Alaska, I know that many other Alaskans were saddened by what only appeared to be a normal news story. Peoples’ hearts went out to the McCandless family, but it’s a bit of a fact that people die in the Northern elements all the time, some are equipped for it and others are not.
However, I soon turned disgusted of the writer of the near novelization of Chris’s troubling journey and ultimate death. This author really made a mint of off Chris’s problems. I then stopped thinking off it, until that is, this summer when Hollywood-land mounted an hype-assault upon my quiet reason. The new movie, as it turns out, is mostly based upon the mythical story told in the book “Into the Wild”, and only loosely upon Chris’s real life and death
This book alone is spectacle by itself.. it is a throughly egotistical romance with the idea of ego-destruction through nature-escapism. Krakauer has been very open about the fact that he never billed himself as a journalist or that the pseudo biographical (and pseudo auto-biographical) book was even objective. Even so, it resonated with many suburbanites in the lower 48, and with cool dudes like Sean Penn. People ate up the themes of journeying across the country, the wild Alaskan settings, and the spectacle of a young man attempting dangerous ego-destruction without proper equipment and without any adult supervision.
But that was only part of it…
I think the ultimately enduring consensus of Chris’s life, is well explained below (link at bottom) and it feels more correct than Krakauer’s romantic vision. As recent news has shown, the kid wasn’t poisoned at all, he simply starved as he really could not take care of himself. As we are coming to learn, Krakauer constructed a near-literary work of hero-worship, when he really could have been writing about the tragic onset of mental illness.
The publicity for this movie was equally disturbing. If the book was one influenced by the author’s own wanderings, the movie takes the ego-spectacle up a notch. The ironic thing is that if the kid was really on a vision quest the last thing he would have wanted was the circus his story created.Having grown up in Alaska, I’ve seen wide-eyed people both visit and relocate there. There are plenty of good people that have made the great state of Alaska home. They are living humble lives in humble homes and who are quite happy and in a respectful communion with their natural surrounds. People who choose to live a humble life far away from the buzzing dirty transformers and unrelenting commercialism found in most of American cities. Some of them maintain good relationships, have families, raise gardens and animals, live in the woods situated far from the main roads, and a few may even live entirely off-the-grid. These choices for healthier living are likely goals Chris could have enjoyed… But these humble travelers are not suffering from the same illness as was Chris. What is very tragic is that Chris would never quite achieve that level of peace with himself, his friends and the world.
At any rate, much of the movie’s pre-release coverage (like September’s issue of
Outside magazine) was actually coverage of how Sean Penn wanted to *make* this glamorous movie, and the way he won the rights from the McCandless family to do so. And so after ten years of waiting, and the looming threat of another movie house actually making a similar movie, the family finally green lighted Sean Penn’s vision. This magazine, and other articles, plunged into the breathless details of life on the set, just how perfect the main actor was, funny stories of filming the shooting “the rapids”, and how Sean Penn got into a boat to show the main actor how to be fearless, etc. So the media coverage goes…blah, blah, blah, and I really do not care.
The sadness of the true story is overwhelmed by the venal story telling and the crassness of the story tellers.
Because of this krackpot exploitative book from the 1990s, we have all had to endue months of hype regarding “How Sean Penn© hung in there ten years, to get to make an Important Movie™” with an “all star cast and crew”… I just can’t stand it, this movie’s self-important hype alone has negated much of the “importance™” of this boy’s needless death©. Ugh, please, I could go on..
The story of a young man and his suffering, packaged as a journey towards enlightenment, towards freedom from material ways and towards nature — is a great dramatic story. But in Chris’s case, the illness and the suffering was so powerful that his wandering and his railing could not diminish it. In Chris’s time of need, he turned his back on others who were feeling compassion towards him. Or was it Alex Supertramp who forced Chris to forgo human connections and send him on his long march north? (Read the links below for that interesting theory.)
Who really killed Christopher McCandless?
The links below are some of the better articles and posts I’ve read about the events from last decade, the shameless movie as well as the some mounting and overdue criticism of Jon Krakauer for creating the “Cult of Chris McCandless”…
Read Doug O’Harra’s fascinating posts below as he crafts a fine theory about how Chris met his final end… just who killed Chris McCandless?
OUT OF THE WILD — By Doug O’Harra
Into The Wild: The False Being Within — By Doug O’Harra
Also interesting:
McCandless’ fatal trek: Schizophrenia or pligrimage? — Respected author overlooks obvious.
Theories differ on the cause of McCandless’ death — EXPERTS DISAGREE: The movie’s botanical villain is different from the book’s. And Krakauer changes the text in his book’s latest edition to protect his position, not to reflect the findings.
LOST MEN — David Denby’s sober review of the movie in the The New Yorker.
