Krackauer - Into the Wild

[kaima]

Into the Wild is a new movie based on the old John Krakauer book about a kid going off to the wilderness and dying of starvation. The book is based on his journal, and the movie is based on the book, so it is twice removed from the reality the dead man experienced. The New York Times has a review on the movie; the Anchorage Press had one last week, one that I took up with me to within a few miles of the actual location.

The perspective offered by the two reviews demonstrates the differences in how the individual was viewed by different audiences. Krakauer tends to romanticize the fellow, while Alaskans tend to think the fellow was bonkers and this was a case of Darwin's Law winning out in time to keep the kid from reproducing.

From the New York Times:
September 21, 2007
Following His Trail to Danger and Joy

By A. O. SCOTT
Published: September 21, 2007

There is plenty of sorrow to be found in “Into the Wild,” Sean Penn’s adaptation of the nonfiction bestseller by Jon Krakauer. The story begins with an unhappy family, proceeds through a series of encounters with the lonely and the lost, and ends in a senseless, premature death. But though the film’s structure may be tragic, its spirit is anything but. It is infused with an expansive, almost giddy sense of possibility, and it communicates a pure, unaffected delight in open spaces, fresh air and bright sunshine.

Some of this exuberance comes from Christopher Johnson McCandless, the young adventurer whose footloose life and gruesome fate were the subject of Mr. Krakauer’s book. As Mr. Penn understands him (and as he is portrayed, with unforced charm and brisk intelligence, by Emile Hirsch), Chris is at once a troubled, impulsive boy and a brave and dedicated spiritual pilgrim. He does not court danger but rather stumbles across it — thrillingly and then fatally — on the road to joy.

In letters to his friends, parts of which are scrawled across the screen in bright yellow capital letters, he revels in the simple beauty of the natural world. Adopting the pseudonym Alexander Supertramp, rejecting material possessions and human attachments, he proclaims himself an “aesthetic voyager.”

Mr. Penn serves as both his biographer and his traveling companion. After graduating from Emory University in 1990, Mr. McCandless set off on a zigzagging two-year journey that took him from South Dakota to Southern California, from the Sea of Cortez to the Alaskan wilderness, where he perished, apparently from starvation, in August 1992. “Into the Wild,” which Mr. Penn wrote and directed, follows faithfully in his footsteps, and it illuminates the young man’s personality by showing us the world as he saw it.

What he mostly saw was the glory of the North American landscape west of the Mississippi: the ancient woodlands of the Pacific Northwest, the canyons and deserts farther south, the wheat fields of the northern prairie and Alaska, a place that Mr. McCandless seemed to regard with almost mystical reverence. Mr. Penn, who did some of the camera work, was aided by the director of photography, Eric Gautier, who previously turned his careful, voracious eye on the wilds of South America in Walter Salles’s “Motorcycle Diaries.” That movie, like “Into the Wild,” finds epic resonance in a tale of youthful wandering and proposes that a trek through mountains, rivers and forests can also be a voyage of self-discovery.

Mr. Salles’s film, in which Gael García Bernal played Che Guevara, found a political dimension in its hero’s journey. And while Chris’s fierce rejection of his parents’ middle-class, suburban life contains elements of ideological critique, Mr. Penn and Mr. Krakauer persuasively place him in a largely apolitical, homegrown tradition of radical, romantic individualism.

An enthusiastic reader (with a special affinity for Tolstoy and Jack London), Chris is in many ways the intellectual heir of 19th-century writer-naturalists like John Muir and especially Henry David Thoreau, whose uncompromising idealism — “rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth” — he takes as a watchword. (Had he survived, Mr. McCandless might well have joined the ranks of latter-day nature writers like Edward Abbey and Bill McKibben.) His credo is perhaps most succinctly stated by Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, who advised that “the ancient precept, ‘Know thyself,’ and the modern precept, ‘Study Nature,’ become at last one maxim.”

One problem with this strain of American thought is that it sometimes finds expression in self-help nostrums and greeting-card sentiments. “If you want something in life, reach out and grab it,” Chris says to Tracy (Kristen Stewart), a teenage girl who develops a crush on him, collapsing Self-Reliance into something like an advertising slogan. But the movie’s theme, thankfully, is not so simple or so easily summed up in words.

Mr. Penn, even more than Mr. Krakauer, takes the Emersonian dimension of Chris McCandless’s project seriously, even as he understands the peril implicit in too close an identification with nature. The book took pains to defend its young protagonist against the suspicion that he was suicidal, unbalanced or an incompetent outdoorsman, gathering testimony from friends he had made in his last years as evidence of his kindness, his care and his integrity. The film, at some risk of sentimentalizing its hero, goes further, pushing him to the very brink of sainthood. After Chris offers wise, sympathetic counsel to Rainey (Brian Dierker), a middle-aged hippie he has befriended on the road, the older man looks at him with quiet amazement. “You’re not Jesus, are you?” he asks.

Well no, but it’s a comparison that Mr. Penn does not entirely discourage. (Note the final, man of sorrows image of Mr. Hirsch’s face and also an earlier shot of him floating naked in a stream, his arms extended in a familiar cruciform shape.) At the same time, though, “Into the Wild” resists the impulse to interpret Chris’s death as a kind of martyrdom or as the inevitable, logical terminus of his passionate desire for communion with nature.

Instead, with disarming sincerity, it emphasizes his capacity for love, the gift for fellowship that, somewhat paradoxically, accompanied his fierce need for solitude. Though he warns one of his friends against seeking happiness in human relationships — and also rails incoherently against the evils of “society” — Chris is a naturally sociable creature. And “Into the Wild” is populated with marvelous actors — including Mr. Dierker, a river guide and ski-shop owner making his first appearance in a film — who make its human landscape as fascinating and various as its topography.

The source of Chris’s wanderlust, and of the melancholy that tugs at the film’s happy-go-lucky spirit, is traced to his parents (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden), whose volatile marriage and regard for appearances begin to seem contemptible to their son. (His feelings for them are explained in voice-over by his younger sister, Carine, who is played by Jena Malone.)

Fleeing from his mother and father, Chris finds himself drawn, almost unwittingly, to parental surrogates: a rowdy grain dealer in South Dakota (Vince Vaughn), a retired military man in the California desert (Hal Holbrook) and Rainey’s companion, Jan (Catherine Keener), who seems both carefree and careworn.

Chris reminds some of these people of their own lost children, but all of them respond to something about him: an open, guileless quality, at once earnest and playful, that Mr. Hirsch conveys with intuitive grace. “You look like a loved kid,” Jan says, and “Into the Wild” bears that out in nearly every scene.

He is loved, not least, by Mr. Penn, who has shown himself, in three previous films (“The Indian Runner,” “The Crossing Guard” and “The Pledge”) to be a thoughtful and skilled director. He still is, but this story seems to have liberated him from the somber seriousness that has been his hallmark as a filmmaker until now. “Into the Wild” is a movie about the desire for freedom that feels, in itself, like the fulfillment of that desire.

Which is not to say that there is anything easy or naïve in what Mr. Penn has done. “Into the Wild” is, on the contrary, alive to the mysteries and difficulties of experience in a way that very few recent American movies have been. There are some awkward moments and infelicitous touches — a few too many Eddie Vedder songs on the soundtrack, for example, when Woody Guthrie, Aaron Copland or dead silence might have been more welcome — but the film’s imperfection, like its grandeur, arises from a passionate, generous impulse that is as hard to resist as the call of the open road.

“Into the Wild” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has profanity, brief nudity and some violent or otherwise upsetting scenes.

[kaima]

Here is the home-grown movie review from the (Alaska) Anchorage Press. Locally it is considered a well written reflection of the spectrum of attitudes and perceptions of the event. It is quite typical to comment on the accuracy of the portrayal of Alaska, and the liberties movie makers and writers take with our great State.

Feature Story, Vol. 16, Ed. 37 on Thursday, September 13, 2007
www.anchoragepress.com
Into the Wild ride
Wouldn’t it be ironic if Hollywood made Christopher McCandless real?

By Lynne Snifka

When Christopher McCandless sauntered off the road near Healy and into the early spring snowpack 15 years ago last April, he could hardly have guessed that he would be the subject of a New York Times bestseller and a Hollywood movie. He had deserted his family in favor of a rootless existence and a search for Truth. Alaska was McCandless’s epic. When he died 113 days later, just a few miles from salvation, McCandless’s 5-foot 6-inch corpse weighed just 67 pounds.

His story called countless pilgrims north on a soul-searching mission — a Jack London for Generation Me. Fairbanks 142, the bus where he squatted, has become Jim Morrison’s grave for a certain subset of young philosopher-mountaineers found in the college town coffeehouses of the West and North. For others, especially many Alaskans, McCandless represents all that’s wrong with Outsiders: the hubris, the ignorance, the plain ol’ idiocy. McCandless was the ill-prepared pinhead who deserved to die.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if it was a Hollywood movie that brought those two extremes closer to reality?


David, who said he didn’t want his last name used, walked up the Parks Highway to The Blue Loon on Monday, September 3. He went to the bar to see the first public screening of Into the Wild, the movie about McCandless based on the eponymous book by Jon Krakauer. David had hunted off the Stampede Trail near Healy in 1989, he said. He slept in the same bus where McCandless ultimately starved in 1992.

David wore a Harley Davidson henley with jeans and work boots. His graying hair, tied in a ponytail, stuck out under a dirty ball cap. He wanted to see how Hollywood handled the bus, and Alaska, and McCandless’ story, he said. He wondered aloud why McCandless got all the attention he did. What about Squatter Sam, David said. Sam was a guy in his 50s who spent his life living off the grid, eating what he hunted and foraged. He died in a trailer in 2005, David said. But no one makes movies about Squatter Sam. Then again, Squatter Sam didn’t keep a journal.


Into the Wild was the first book I read when I moved to Alaska in 1997. The slim volume seemed less intimidating than McPhee or Michener. How could someone think a 10-pound bag of rice would sustain him for months in the backcountry? I’d been in Alaska three days and already knew better.

Less than a week before, a friend and I had been stranded on the Alaska Highway south of Watson Lake in the Yukon Territory. An unusually wet July caused the road to wash out. In the Lower 48, we’d just drive back to the last exit and take a secondary road. But here was different. There was no other road. And while I may have had most of my worldly possessions in the tiny U-Haul trailer I pulled behind my VW Fox, the only sustenance we carried was a half-gallon of water and an open bag of pretzels. A man on the road shoulder ahead of us was headed out hunting, he said. An ATV swelled out of his truck bed. He lowered the tailgate and pulled out a collapsible picnic table and cooler. We played poker and ate ham sandwiches, washing them down with swigs of Stolichnaya vodka.

As I read Into the Wild, I couldn’t imagine what McCandless was thinking. He was 24 years old when he tromped off that road, just a few years younger than I was. Maybe he was crazy. How else to explain changing your name to Alexander Supertramp, which McCandless did sometime in the two years between college graduation in Atlanta and death in Alaska. I placed myself firmly in the “what an idiot” camp. “Just another example of natural selection at work,” I recall saying at a party.

Krakauer’s book sounded like a love letter to McCandless, or as Men’s Journal writer Matthew Power put it recently, “a meticulous legal brief in defense of the human soul.” (There is no shortage of writings about McCandless and Into the Wild. See Outside or Esquire or Men’s Journal magazine this month. For the good stuff, check out “I want to ride in the bus Chris died in,” by Sherry Simpson, which ran in the Press on February 7, 2002 or “I Now Walk Into the Wild,” by Chip Brown, which appeared in The New Yorker in February 1993, about the same time as Krakauer’s book-inspiring article in Outside.)

They want to romanticize everything, I thought. He died just a few miles from the road, for God’s sake. There was a hand tram across the Teklanika River — the river whose late-summer swell kept McCandless from crossing it and walking out of the wild — a half-mile from the darn bus. Tolstoy! Thoreau! In reality Krakauer and McCandless were nothing more than a couple of over-indulged upper-middle-class kids who had to manufacture high drama and alienate their parents in order to cope with their banal existence. If McCandless hadn’t kept a journal, I thought, he’d be just another statistic.


The 5:30 showing of Into the Wild let out and moviegoers spilled into the Loon’s front bar. It was a little after 8 p.m., just before the second of two sold-out shows. The people who worked on Into the Wild — “parkies” from Denali and a tow truck driver from Wasilla and the people who waited on director Sean Penn at roadhouses in Cantwell — got in for free. The rest of us paid $25, money that would go to the Denali Education Center. Penn and the center’s executive director, Willie Karidis, had “kinda connected” when the crew was filming here, Karidis said.

“It was killer,” said Robert Tillery, who was less than 24 hours off the North Slope. “I was very impressed with it. I thought they did a really good job.”

Tillery drove the bus that stood in for Fairbanks 142 up from Wasilla on a 42-foot trailer he pulled with his pickup. “That birch tree that he was hanging his little water thing on? We brought that up too,” Tillery said. Apparently, the more scenic Cantwell location that replaced the real site of McCandless’s camp doesn’t host any birches. The trees, like the fireweed and wolves, had to be imported.

Still, the mood in the parking lot was nothing less than ebullient.

“I thought everything was nuts-hot, that’s all I’m saying,” said Duke Russell, the Anchorage artist. He was hired as a scenic painter on the film. He made the prop bus look like the real bus, which is still exactly where it was when McCandless ate his last berries in it.

“The lady next to me was crying for both of us,” Russell said. “It’s about family. It’s about relationships. It’s deep, man … It’s the only honest thing I’ve seen in the movies in a long time.” Russell dismissed those who call McCandless a phony as “quick sketchers.”

“We have to have compassion for this guy because he is the reason we’re all together now,” Karidis, the Denali Center director, said. “He was a catalyst.”

Oh sure. Everyone’s a hard ass until they get to work on the movie. One whiff of the craft services table and McCandless is a hero, a noble young man who made a few mistakes — don’t we all? Sean Penn is a visionary.

I walked into the main bar at the Loon prepared to loathe Into the Wild.


In the 10 years I’ve been in Alaska, the McCandless legend only grew. Every time I got on a plane to come back to Alaska, it seemed, someone was reading that book. I steeled myself against their wide-eyed tourist amazement. That book, that bus: They’re no more the Real Alaska than the gold rush storefronts of Skagway or calving glaciers glimpsed from a cruise ship deck.

People from the Lower 48 can have their NFL teams and Red Lobsters and winters filled with sunlight. We get Alaska with all its humbling mountains and 50-below-zeros and moose tangled in our Christmas lights. We get the myth of the frontier: even if every last inch of it has been mapped, even if we don’t go hunting without a four-wheeler piled with enough food to feed a high school track team, even if the closest we’ve ever gotten to “the wild” is eating Alaska salmon served on a cedar plank. We get to laugh at Chris McCandless because we live here. Alaska is our professional sports team. When it wins, we cheer.

“I don't admire people who suffer from willful ignorance of the land and Chris McCandless seems like a classic example,” wrote Alaskan writer Nick Jans in a letter to Outside Magazine after Krakauer’s original article appeared. “Close calls are part of the deal; they're hardly news. In Alaska I've run into several McCandless types — idealistic, energetic young guys who overestimate themselves, underestimate the country, and end up in trouble. They've become almost cliché.”

The thing is, the movie seems to get that.

In interviews about the film, Penn, who also wrote the screenplay, defends McCandless’s hubris. “This was 113 days, 79 of them by choice,” he told Men’s Journal. “And he did pretty darn well.”

Penn implies that those of us who haven’t walked a mile in McCandless’s borrowed rubber boots ought to be careful about whose memory we stomp on. But in the film, though McCandless (played by 22-year-old actor Emile Hirsch) seems like an affable, intelligent young man bursting with wanderlust, he also sometimes comes off as a selfish prick bent on putting his family, even his beloved sister, through hell.

Alaska, on the other hand, has never looked better.

So rare is an Alaska movie shot in Alaska. Mystery, Alaska, anyone? Insomnia? Snow Dogs? British Columbia is lovely, but when the opening shots of Into the Wild included Creamer’s Dairy, The Big I bar, Down Under Guns and other familiar Fairbanks landmarks, the Loon crowd cheered. Denali gets plenty of face time, as does Hirsch, standing on high rock plateaus, arms outstretched, taking in the majestic panorama. True, the outer range, where McCandless spent his days, doesn’t look a thing like that. And Krakauer’s book says nothing about McCandless climbing more than a few thousand feet. But it sure makes for great cinematography.

The crew shot in 36 cities, said John Kelly, an executive producer on the film who had flown up for the event. They hit the road for 140 days, a hundred days of shooting, Kelly said. “Sean (Penn) put his heart and soul into this movie.”

He messed up too. Into the Wild includes a scene where McCandless realizes he has poisoned himself by eating wild potato seeds — a scene based on a Krakauer hypothesis in the book meant to explain McCandless’s staying at the bus when he could’ve been looking for a way out. Unfortunately for Hollywood, Krakauer’s theory has long since been proven bunk.

The requisite grizzly bear scene is an eye roller. And Alaska audiences will enjoy moments such as McCandless’s return to the bus after his ill-fated attempt at a river crossing. Dejected and drenched from a downpour, McCandless returns to Fairbanks 142 on a pitch-black night in…July.

Still, Hirsch’s performance is soulful and nuanced. Unlike the book, where it seemed McCandless could do no wrong as he alighted in people’s lives like an enigmatic butterfly, the movie McCandless sometimes comes off as callous, self-centered and — early in the film, when his parents offer to buy him a car — downright bratty. The movie McCandless makes the people in his life cry. He seems real.

The movie made me see McCandless as a human being. Stripped of the book’s passages lifted from Mark Twain and Krakauer’s accounts of his own rebellions, the film McCandless seemed more pure. I could see people I’d known in him too — the earnest idealism that sometimes accompanies a life of privilege, the passion for social justice and rejection of material comforts. I was watching one more interpretation of a man who’d been interpreted with the frequency of Gatsby. But something here resonated.

A few reviewers have criticized the film, saying Penn made McCandless out to be “Christ-like.” But if Penn’s McCandless is a little too good to be true — a scene where he foregoes sex with a young nymphet so the two might spend time singing a moving duet on a ramshackle stage for a bunch of squatters leaps to mind — it’s in mostly harmless ways. When Hirsch appears onscreen as McCandless in his final days, it’s shocking. Emaciated, dirty and not too far from 67 pounds, he doesn’t look like a god. He looks pathetic.


There is a moment about two thirds of the way through Into the Wild when Hal Holbrook, who puts in a soulful performance as a man McCandless befriended in California, pleads with his young friend not to leave. “Alaska?” he says. “What the hell are you running from?”

Someone should sell T-shirts. The front would read “Alaska.” On the back:
“I was running from my family” or
“I was running from a relationship” or
“I was running from the law” or
“I was running from my whole life.”

The vendor would make a mint.

Most people hung out a while after the second show. David, the hunter who spent the night in Fairbanks 142, ordered a Budweiser. “I called him an idiot before,” he said. “But after seeing the movie, and seeing how his life was, I would’ve done the same thing.”

McCandless’s journal from the bus and the picture album/diary he left with a friend in South Dakota were just vague enough. Almost any lost soul can find a passage to cling to. McCandless underlined passages in Doctor Zhivago and scribbled notes in the margins. “Disaster,” read one dated item found in the bus. “HAPPINESS ONLY REAL WHEN SHARED,” he wrote in the margins of a book. Why didn’t he try to leave the bus again? He wrote that he’d had “a happy life,” but does that mean he found himself? When he circled “refuge in nature” in black ink, what did that mean?

That may be his greatest legacy. McCandless left just enough details for everyone to remake him the way they see fit — just enough material to create a mystery, a book, a target, or a classic adventure film with a character who’s exactly sympathetic enough to make you wonder what you’d do in the same situation.

[kaima]

I just returned from a trip to Eight Mile lake on the Savage Trail, the location where the last chapter of the mis-adventure takes place. My first trip in was in the spring of 1972 on skis, my first cross country ski / camping trip in Alaska. The Trail was a real trail at the time, with the end of the drivable portion just a mile or so from the main road. A later hike in the summer revealed the mud and swales of the thawing track. I have a photo of my friend standing in one of the dips of the trail - and you can see him from the waist upwards! Obviously the trail was vastly improved so that someone was able to drive the 'school bus' in to the point where McCandless settled and died.

While Thoreau is often quoted as a favorite writer of his, Thoreau did show the sense to go to Walden Pond - wilderness then just a few short miles from civilization and all its comforts.

From the Wikipedia entry on McCanless, "Some Alaskans have negative views of both McCandless and those who romanticize his fate. McCandless was unaware that a hand-operated tram crossed the river a quarter mile from the Stampede Trail, while a nearby shelter was stocked with emergency supplies, as described in Krakauer's book. 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 a good map he could have walked out of his predicament ... Essentially, Chris McCandless committed suicide."[10]

Judith Kleinfeld <noted Alaskan writer and psychologist> 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 Parks Highway."[11]"

[rdywenur]

Interesting enough I just saw an interview with Sean Penn about the making of this movie and a brief story about the guy. I thought of Kai in the wilderness with his moose ;D

[hollister]

Kai,
I hope I am not too late for this discussion - In Idaho there is not much sympathy for McCandless outside those who want to live off the grid. There is a real problem with people who move into the area and buy an old farmhouse out in the country and then complain because the farmer neighbor actually farms and gets their house dirty and noisy. There has actually been cases over such issues. They want the National Geographic picture farm with the pet farmers but not the reality.

[kaima]

Ah yes, here we do have someone every hear or two hwo sees the old movie Swiss Family Robinson and comes off to Alaska to traipse into the wilderness, sometimes dragging momma and the kiddies with them. They hit the news every now and then, rarely fatally but often with stories of gross stupidity to pass along. It seems to be the reverse of country folks going onto the city and getting in trouble for a lack of street smarts.