When I was younger, I was keenly interested in the idea of “pure” freedom: being completely independent of all social bonds, creating oneself howsoever one wishes. This idea has a central part in (at least one permutation of) the American dream, in the archetype of the lone frontiersman striking off into the great unknown and claiming absolute independence for himself. It has been a recurring theme in modern art and philosophy: perhaps most prominently, it was fetishized in the novels of Jack London and glamorized in a more moderate form in Thoreau’s Walden (which, embarrassingly, I’ve never read). In Death of a Salesman and Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows, it was presented as an ideal alternative to the endless, destructive strictures of society (although somewhat humorously in Sirk’s film).
Now that I’m a bit older, I’ve come to realize the absurdity of this dream (at least when it is taken to extremes): our very existence is inherently an existence-with-others, and the dream of absolute freedom is an impossible one. Many of my favorite works of art (for example, Melville’s novels, Heidegger’s Being and Nothingness, and Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life) revolve around the phenomenological and metaphysical foundations of this impossibility.
Anyway, the point is that the hero of Into the Wild, Chris McCandless (aka Alexander Supertramp), unabashedly embraces the notion of ultimate freedom, preaches about it to any old man, naïve young girl, or burned-out hippie that will listen, and ends up dying in the Alaskan wilderness because of it. McCandless is aware of the literary tradition that I’ve mentioned, and he approaches his quest for freedom specifically in terms of this tradition. Because of this, the film has a unique opportunity to address the tradition, to critique and comment on it; alternatively, it has the opportunity to uncritically idolize its hero and all his literary predecessors. Some people have criticized Penn’s film for doing the latter, but I think it actually attempts to do the former.
The film alternates between scenes in the Alaskan wilderness and McCandless’ journey across America that leads there. The Alaskan scenes by themselves could be just another Jack London-esque story of Man in his solitude with Nature, but the scenes from his earlier life provide an ongoing counterpoint to this story. Throughout his journey, McCandless never finds meaning in solitude, although, perhaps, he thinks he does; instead, he continually finds meaning in the company of others—the wise old man, the earthy farm workers, the traveling hippies, the young girl with a crush on him, the naked, foreign gamblers, even the guy who drives him out to the trailhead in Alaska and gives him a pair of boots. And McCandless’ sister provides ongoing narration informing us of the narcissistic source of his discontent with society: he refuses to accept or forgive the failings of his parents.
Specific scenes augment this subversion of McCandless’ “great Alaskan adventure.” Early on, right after writing an idiotically grandiose manifesto about his ultimate freedom, McCandless is unable to shoot a deer because it is followed by its offspring. Later, in a voice-over, he tells us about humanity’s need to find meaning by testing its own limits and proving its strength, referring to him conquering his fear of water by swimming with a hippie; but the cinematography makes clear that the true meaning of this hippie-swim is in the reunion of two hippie lovers. Most prominently, almost every time that McCandless leaves the people whom he has befriended, they are left in tears. The film lingers on these tears far too long for me to believe that it blindly supports McCandless’ dream.
Eventually the two narrative threads converge. In the Alaskan-wilderness thread, McCandless reads a Tolstoy story which makes him realize that all he wants from life is to help people, read some books, and raise a family. Apparently struck by the profundity of this notion, he immediately heads out of the wilderness. Unfortunately, a flooded river (and his general incompetence) prevents him from getting back to the highway, so he returns to his magic bus and slowly starves to death. He writes in his diary that he is lonely and scared, and that he has realized that happiness only exists when it is shared. In the other narrative thread, about his cross-country journey, McCandless meets a kindly old man who tells him that the true beauty of existence is found in God’s love, and that the only way to get that love is to forgive people their failings. During his slow starvation, McCandless manages to connect his ideas about the good, child-raising, book-reading life, with the old man’s ideas about love and forgiveness; hence, he forgives his parents and dies smiling with God’s light shining on him.
So, given this narrative structure, what is the film’s stance? It seems to me that it simultaneously acknowledges the impossibility of McCandless’ dream, while admiring his foolhardy search for it. And, like It’s a Wonderful Life, it suggests that one can only truly appreciate the value of social bonds once one has ventured outside them—once one has seen their limits and can walks the line of those limits. The shot of McCandless returning to his parents to embrace them seems to support this interpretation: the camera initially shows him smiling, but then it reveals his face become uncertain, as he wonders whether his parents could ever benefit from his forgiveness once they were rebound by social concerns; or, put another way, he wonders whether he could bring his newfound understanding with him when returning to society.
Now, all of this seems like it could form a good story and a great critique of the naive quest for ultimate freedom, but the film is, unfortunately, an overblown mess. The sister’s narration is painfully melodramatic, McCandless is one-note and irritating in his naivete and clownish bravado, the endless slow-motion is ham-fisted and tiresome, the film’s structure is pointlessly repetitive, and the old man’s moral lesson about forgiveness really should have occurred before McCandless had his Tolstoy-induced epiphany (the way it is now just muddles the point of the final half hour). Also, the portrait of the real-life McCandless at the end instantly made him seem more real than the caricature that we saw throughout the rest of the film. His face seemed so much older and livelier than Emile Hirsch’s, and it suggested to me that the film’s themes would have been far better served if the central character had a bit more depth.
Tags: absolute freedom, American dream, movies
