The Road to Freedom
Director: Sean Penn
Screenplay: Adapted from the true story told in Jon Krakauer’s 1996 book of the same name.
Into the Wild. I’d like to talk a little about this 2007 biographical film, another pop-culture icon that inevitably appears in the movies section of Facebook profiles and in conversations about nature and rejection. I say ‘a little’ because this piece is more a criticism of popular culture than of the film itself.
After Jon Krakauer turned Christopher’s journey of self-discovery into a book in 1996 (Into the Wild), Sean Penn brought the life story to the screen in 2007 as a powerful film about a young man, with great success. At heart, rather than delivering the back-to-nature message its title suggests, it is a road movie: a story of hitchhiking and travel. I think the people Christopher meets on his way to Alaska could each be the subject of a film in their own right. A young man who graduated from a good university with good grades encounters these free, independent characters for the first time. His decisions and transformation as he searches for himself are the film’s main subject. Its popularity comes from a narrative that perfectly expresses the urge so many people have to ‘just leave and go somewhere’. Through Christopher McCandless’s biography, it shows you what comes after the moment when you say, ‘I’ll just go, whatever happens. That’s enough, I’ve had it.’
I will never forget Christopher McCandless. A young man of above-average intelligence, who could have been very successful had he fitted into the system, rejects society as we know it and places himself in nature’s hands somewhat unprepared. There are people like Timothy Treadwell, Dian Fossey and Ahmet Bedevi, and many others who managed to do this, devoted a lifetime to it, made sacrifices and were even killed for it. Christopher’s path ended before it had properly taken shape. Young and inexperienced, but intelligent and eager enough to have continued along it for many years, his personal journey was extinguished by a simple practical mistake of the sort an American scout camp could teach you to avoid. Had he explored the area where he thought he was trapped in winter a little more thoroughly, there was apparently a place not far away where the river’s current was weak enough to cross.*
It is true that Christopher’s courage could serve as an example to many of us. That courage does not lie in trying to live alone in the wild; we cannot really say he was fully prepared for that. It lies in having the opportunity and qualifications to build a respected, accepted life with a respected, accepted identity in his society, yet deliberately choosing isolation as a form of cleansing and taking a path that society did not accept. Christopher is saying this to us: I could easily have acquired those positions and labels you devote your lives to, the ones you turn into Gollum or even Alfrid Lickspittle to obtain. Instead, I chose to die inside an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness. Because you, with your expectations, selfishness and corrupted souls, deserve that.
Yet his inexperience and indifference to what might happen along that path suggest overconfidence, arrogance, or perhaps something else: that he set out without much thought, prompted by family and personal problems and listening to the emptiness and inner unhappiness that come from the artificial, nature-detached lives of almost all modern people, rather than simply trying to shed imposed labels or oppose the system. I don’t think he was ready for his chosen path, either practically or emotionally.
Perhaps the reason the film and life story became iconic in popular culture lies in Christopher’s impulsive, poorly planned decision to settle in Alaska, followed by his avoidance of the communication that could have helped him learn and gain experience along this unfamiliar path. He turned the journey into a ‘complete escape’. The relatively experienced people he meets, themselves living somewhat outside elite society, repeatedly warn him about what may happen. Ignoring all those warnings with the air of a seasoned adventurer is ironic to a degree that doesn’t fit the seriousness of his chosen path. Instead, it trivialises the journey and its purpose, turning it into a more personal reckoning. With popular culture pushing it along, the cliché of a young modern person trying to resolve inner conflicts through travel, distance and rejection is presented to us as ‘the struggle to return to nature and reject identities’.
For many young and teenage viewers who discovered and watched the film through popular culture, Christopher’s story actually produces this feeling: ‘I want to escape everyone and everything too, but I’m afraid to leave my comfort zone. I don’t have the courage. If I did leave, the same things that happened to Christopher would happen to me. Yet he left and made that journey anyway. He’s my hero.’ It is an idea of returning to nature and rejecting the system that glorifies one’s own helplessness and weakness in Christopher’s failed attempt, presented as a success. Young people raised within the system, by its own mechanisms, find this unfamiliar nature and the luxury of being nobody appealing: the first human, stripped of everything and completely naked. Yet they depend on labels and spend their lives pursuing them. Isn’t even their admiration for this story and elevation of it to such heights an unhealthy tendency?
The modern person’s return to nature and rejection of an imposed identity won’t come with the maturity and experience of a Serdar Kılıç. Nor will this scenario suddenly find them in the wild like their ancestors, prepared for every possibility. They aren’t remotely serious enough to prepare for it either. They are now a domesticated version, ‘alien’ to nature and deprived of their ancestors’ practical knowledge and experience. Christopher describes them better. They can identify with him because they are going through similar stages, or have already done so. They too are troubled by things in their own way; something is missing from their lives, they are unhappy, and on top of it all, they lack courage. Christopher is an example of someone who showed that courage, even if he did so without thinking. And what was he trying to do, achieve or become in his short life? At this point in human evolution, to snap his fingers and suddenly (!) return naked to nature, his first home, as though nothing had happened, and adapt immediately? Nature is waiting for him with a mother’s warm embrace, of course. This can be compared to a teenager rebelling against their parents: identifying with an example from popular culture and taking on that role to fill the emptiness inside. He has the same faults, after all. The attempt to return to nature is just as temporary, superficial and fleeting as the rebellion a teenager experiences during a period of hormonal change.
Perhaps that is why, while you can read 76 pages of praise and criticism of Into the Wild on Ekşi Sözlük, films about people who pursued this more idealistically, devoting themselves and their lives to it and even being killed in the process, receive only a page or two of praise. I offer this example to underline a concrete reality, rather than to make a competition of it.
The result is a good film, with fine music, cinematography and performances. Considering how few ‘good’ and ‘sincere’ productions we find in this genre, it deserves to be seen. Its being adapted from a book and based on a ‘true’ life story makes it special. But I’ve read grand pronouncements in plenty of places along the lines of ‘I watched this film and it changed my life.’ I dedicate this piece to the minds behind those comments.
If, during a conversation among friends about films concerning ‘returning to nature and travel’, you hear adolescent observations such as ‘It’s amaaazing, so incredible’, ‘Dude, Eddie Vedder did the music, it’s legendary’, ‘Christopher, my man!!’, ‘It’s such a deep, meaningful film, bro’, or ‘It made me want to just leave everything behind too’, get out of there immediately.