"Into The Wild" (2008)

         This is an incredibly personal movie. It reminds me of a time and a place so I can't write about it without writing about my connection to it. About 12 years ago I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor of my rustic apartment on 24th st. in San Francisco and feeling tremendous pain as I was readying myself for a personal journey. I was crying, literally pulling my hair out, and rocking back and forth on the hardwood floor. I had been having a profound spiritual experience and I knew in my heart that the next step was to give up the life that I had known up to then. This meant giving up my belongings and my family and friends. I had no idea where I was going but I knew that I had to be alone. My friend Jeff was living in the same apartment at the time and I was explaining this to him and feeling more alone than I had ever felt in my entire life. I also felt this enormous guilt because I knew how much pain this was going to cause everyone. I spent a night stewing in it and by morning knew that I couldn't do it. It was too damaging to everyone. I felt relief and a new kind of guilt. I felt like a coward, like I was avoiding my true path and it honestly, to some degree haunts me to this day. I know I would have lost everything and I would have never met my future wife or my future children, so I know I made the right decision, but it still haunts me because I remember how at a deep soul level I knew that I had to give up my name and find myself.

         "Into The Wild" is the true story of a young man's journey to the Alaskan wild to find peace, freedom, and his true self. What it really is, however, is a story of incredible loss.

         The main character is Christopher McCandless, played by Emile Hirsch, an adventurous soul who has recently graduated from Emery University. He hates what society represents, and the idea of the american dream. He believes his way to true happiness is to let go of all of society's conventions, to rid himself of his belongings and his name and to hitchhike across the country to the Alaskan Wild. He believes that only in living in this wild, in living apart from the lies of his old world and giving himself a new name, will he be free.

          Christopher's journey is filled with such a mixture of beauty and sorrow. There are scenes of magnificent forests, wide open plains, rivers, mountain vistas, and the quiet desert. When he arrives in a California city it's such a depressing jolt that we identify even more with his need to rid himself of his old world. Most of the beauty and sorrow come from the people that he meets along the way. As I met each of these characters I slowly fell in love with each of them. Three characters, in particular, were important in his journey, each of them a symbol of the family that he's left behind. There is a hippie woman, played by Catherine Keener, who takes to him right away. He reminds her of the son, about his age, that she hasn't seen for two years. She is a beautiful person, an earth mother of sorts, but there is a visible hole in her and a great sadness. He meets an old man, played by Hal Holbrook, who has isolated himself from the world ever since he lost his family to a drunk driver while he was in the war. He is so alone it's almost painful to watch and he truly loves this young man that he's barely just met. He even offers to adopt him after Christopher tells him he has no family. Thirdly, he meets an attractive, flirtatious sixteen year old girl, played by Kristen Stewart, who is about the same age as the sister he left behind. She is lonely and awkwardly isolated,  and seems to have found in Christopher someone who will fill a hole in her. There is so much love in these scenes that your heart almost can't take it. These people adore him, and their beauty expands in his presence. As he continues on his journey you feel such an overwhelming sense of loss. You feel the pain of these people that have to say goodbye to a light that filled them for a little while and you feel his loss as well. Even if he doesn't fully recognize it he has left his family again, a surrogate version, but a family that maybe loved and understood him more than his own.  

         Gradually, throughout the movie we learn that he has had a difficult childhood filled with violence and lies. His father repeatedly abused his mother in front of him and his sister, and his mother was complicit in his father's lies, one being that he was still married to another woman when he was born. This has resulted in anger and disillusionment. Christopher hates what his parents represent. His father is an incredibly succesfull NASA scientist who values prestige and success over anything else, and his mother is the perfect suburban housewife. Part of this journey is about them. There is an element of sado-masochism to the whole thing. He's angry and he's punishing them, but he's also turning that anger inward and punishing himself. He's not prepared for this journey. He brings no map, and little knowledge for survival in the wild, and as much as he's experiencing beauty and peace along this journey, he's also suffering.

         The story ends tragically with Christopher trapped on the other side of an untraversable river, with no food, and he mistakenly eats a poisonous root that causes slow paralysis and impairs the digestive process. At one point in the movie Christopher talks about how important it is to do things that don't necessarily make you strong but make you feel strong. One of the last images of the film is of him withered, weak, barely able to move and a bear comes upon him, huffing, taunting him and then walking away. Nature has kicked his ass. The bear at any moment could have torn him to shreds but his threat level was non-existent. It's almost as if the bear pities him. This journey wasn't pure. It was filled with rage and delusion as much as it was with love and truth.  He is suffering greatly in the end and right before his death, when it is too late, he realizes and writes in a book that true happiness is shared with others.

         Towards the end of the movie we have seen the effect that this quest to the Alaskan wild has had on Christopher's parents. They are absolutely decimated. They have lost their son. They weren't good parents and they were both fucked up people but they loved their son and now he was gone and they couldn't find him. There is an image of the father, played by William Hurt, sitting splayed out in the middle of the street clutching his knees and he is on the verge of madness. The mother, played by Marcia Gay Harden, sometimes hears him in her sleep. 

          It is a movie about loss. Every character connected to Christopher has suffered. They have felt the beauty of his soul, his greatness, and had to say goodbye. Christopher, in the end, realizes that he has time and time again left behind beautiful people in order to be alone and that it is the greatest mistake of his life.