Into the Wild

My .02, I honestly don't see how you can watch that film with an open mind and come to the conclusion that Penn "canonizes" everything McCandless does. Really, I mean...the guy isn't even in touch enough with his deep human feelings to understand where Ron, the Hal Holbrook character, is coming from, and he pretty much completely abandons his trusting and loving and reasonably understanding sister. That stuff is not "canonized."

the near phone call to his parents at Hoover Dam--no evidence he ever did attempt to call his parents, more like Penn giving McCandless some sensitivity that he didn't have. He did send Wayne Westerburg some postcards but Penn never develops the relationship between them.

I saw the movie and didn't feel that Penn made mccandless a hero, or canonized him. Where did you get that from?

How do you know that McCandless didn't have some sensitivity?

For whatever reason he had an early hard on for Alaska, which was basically his downfall.

Could'nt things have happened differently is he had chosen a less forbidding destination?

Its this aspect alone that makes me question his mental state. yes he seeks isolation and being alone in the wild, but at some earlier point he could have cut his losses and decided that he could STILL be isolated but survive.

Good movie overall tho. And I think Penn is a brilliant director. Only fools suffer Hollywood politics. The rest of us find them all laughable hypocrites. Do your jobs and shut up.

jamese1045 wrote:

The guy was hell-bent on taking twisted revenge on parents/Dad for their perceived rejection of him. His compulsion to get back at dad took him past some very nice possibilities for having friends and a nice life. He had to go to Alaska to complete his self-destructive pilgrimage. Even when he could have been planning, exploring, he looked at little things that didn't involve getting out safely (I think he did not even look carefully for a way out of the wilderness beyond seeing the raging river, when he was only a mile or two from civilization) for long-term survival.

Production values and photography and even acting were fine. The sad part is the guy's throwing away alot of good people and possibilities in order to complete his suicidal mission.

Watched it last night for the first time, haven't read the book. I'm not sure I would say Penn portrayed his disillusionment and subsequent abandonement of society as rebellious payback for an unloving father. I understood it as an important factor that influenced his views on life, but I never got the impression that he was doing it out of revenge.

And what exactly is a nice life by your standards? Money, power, prestige? Things that he had any desire for (or things anyone ought to have any intrinsic desire for)? Something tells me that even if McCandless did survive Alaska, he could have never gone back into the world. Not after experiencing life like that. I never got the impression that it was suicidal, but I'm assuming that he was rather indifferent to his death (until maybe it seemed all too real to him) as long as he lived on his terms. If that killed him, fine.

I guess people are pissed that he didn't become another "productive member of society" and that he's influencing others to "dissappear" as well. I know there were obviously people hurt, like his family and the relationships he made along the way. But do some of you people feel so threatened as to call him a mentally ill pretentious lunatic who threw away so much "potential"? I suppose you are aware that you are a part of what "Supertramp" was trying to escape. Yeah, in the end, tragic, but not in a senseless meaningless way. If it's true that he left the note about living a happy life in his final goodbye and writing "happiness isn't true unless it is shared" then I'm willing to take it at face value that he had no regrets, lived a full life, and learned a bittersweet lesson. Maybe he could have planned better for the wilderness or found another way across the river. Maybe he didn't want to.

I will agree with .02 that it's ironically painful that his story has been commercialized into an brand being sold by starbucks. If there were such thing as an immortal soul, it would be shamed.

enjoyed the movie- but Alaska is not 4 me-Baltimore IS WILD ENUFF.

what do you think about the new movie coming out called Surfwise?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4Csz6brroc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQZnQoR_BXs

ignorant poster wrote:

harangue...eschewing...dichotomy...denouement...cavil...

What pompous, self-inflated language...wow, you must be one heck of a film critic...

You can get away with one or two of those words--gives your text some weight--but all of them make it seem like you're working a bit too hard...big words are not the cornerstone to good writing (or thought)...

The words I used in my post should be understood by any high school graduate. And I am not Seer of Things. I appreciate your advice on what is (or is not) good writing. I'll pass it on to my professors when I'm in Cambridge next year beginning coursework for my English Ph.D. If you want to get into an internet pissing match over credentials, be my guest. Just realize that there are people out there who intellectually dwarf you. And some of them use "big words".

"learned a bittersweet lesson"

OMG talk about the understandment of the year! "Bittersweet" would have been if he had made it back and found out and old girl friend had moved on, or something minor like that. HE STARVED TO DEATH IN AN OLD SCHOOL BUS.

Credentials, Cambridge...etc...I accused you of using pompous, self-indulgent language, and you retort with mumblings of cambridge, credentials, your ability to intellectually dwarf me. Thanks for proving my point...As I said, pompous to the core...smart too, maybe, but you can't write worth a damn, despite the use of idiotic words like cavil.

I'm going to stand by my comments. Your gratuitous "What is your standard for a nice life, money, power, prestige?" was so far removed from anything I said or was shown in the film that it is oddly out of place, blocks out the rest of your comments, which are similarly removed from the storyline or theme. Ony you called the guy mentally ill or referred to "you people" when addressing a single post--surely "you people" is the faint-voice phrase of the disenfranchised critic.

"indifferent to his death?" Hardly. The man hurtled toward it, fending off several alternative fates that may have involved a longer and more fruitful relationships--and none of which involved collapsing at the sight of the "impossible" river crossing (as if there was no other way to go," and waxing poetical and melodramatic on a self-created death bed--bus.

That movie SUCKED ASS. Dude deserved to die. In real life he was an idiot who had he even the most basic sense of the necessary survivial skills would not have died.

You suggested he passed up a nice life. What nice life? I didn't notice one. At least not one that was "nice" to him. Yes, I was making an assumption of what you considered a "nice" life based on what he gave up.

Fair enough, I suppose I wasn't responding directly to you but to plenty of his other critics both on and off this thread. My mistake for jumbling them.

Because he wanted those relationships right? Right or wrong, regardless of your views, he clearly wanted to abstain from making any further permanent connections in life for the sake of keeping things simple. Yes, it seems he regretted it to some degree on his death bed, and it was a hard way to learn a *bittersweet* lesson. But if his life choices killed him, fine, but he wasn't actively pursuing it for it's own sake. I suppose he realized it might be his only escape once he realized he couldn't go back to civilization and the flashbacks and visions of what might have been obviously showed the decision wasn't without some regret and confusion. Yes I'm reading into the movie and making some interpretaions, but I never once got the impression that he wanted his own death as revenge. Maybe we saw different movies.

I recently watched the movie, which sparked enough interest for me to read the book as well. For anyone intrigued by the movie, I recommend the book, it does a much better job, as books usually do, of relating the story, or at least what is possible to relate.

Obviously McCandless' neglect and hostility toward is family is reprehensible, and one cannot help but feel for his grieving family. However, I did identify with some of his reasoning for doing what he did. Modern life often seems so complex and meaningless, and this affected McCandless deeply. As an answer to this, he sought a different sort of life as a means to understanding it, and he seemed to have found some meaning in it. Towards the end of his life, he even saw that his view of relationships was somewhat flawed, but some moldy seeds prevented him from acting on this newfound insight. Barring his behavior towards his family, is searching for meaning and truth in life through less conventional methods that bad?

On a lighter note, anyone know how fast he was?

The same movie? in which the protagonist on his way to Alaska to fulfill his , um, destiny, (1)stayed with a loving "hippie family" who loved him and offered him a "nice life" option, and the (2) "cowboy" alternative (Vince Vaughn, right? THAT movie?) who offered him a loving "nicer" alternative than continuing on to his ultimate choice of a cold lonely and final bus stop. A bus stop that didn't have be be the end of the line but for his... choice to make it so. What was in his head for making that choice is less clear than the facts of what he did.

Your abstract speculation does not evade these concrete events.

I'll have to agree with "ignorant poster" to some extent here. Certain words fit in certain situations, and should lead to an overall better flow to the prose and a better experience for the reader. I think writing is about enabling the reader to understand your thoughts deeply and easily. Your review just sounded forced, where words were implanted that just didn't fit, didn't add anything to the piece except to distract from the meaning. And no, I wasn't distracted because I didn't know the words, but because they just didn't feel right. I guess it all boils down to a style preference, though...

That's one reason I enjoy writers who write in a more casual, conversational style that invites the reader into their world, not writers that sound more like their work should be in a peer reviewed journal.

Also, the arrogance - a tad much for my taste as well. Have a nice day, and enjoy Cambridge!

To be fair, I only acted arrogantly after I was greeted with peevish criticism from "ignorant poster". I posted earnestly about issues of interest to me in Into the Wild, and instead of responding to the content of my

post, "ignorant poster" somewhat nasally and condescendingly offered his editorial emendations.

If one prefers a prosaic style of writing, that's fine. However, don't assume that a more complex style is simply pompous. Look at Nabokov, even those with an encyclopedic lexicon need a dictionary when reading any of his works. Is he considered pompous? Well, as a person, yes, but stylistically he is undoubtedly a master.

Off the top of my head, a few of the words I've encountered in Nabokov (and only in Nabokov) are: cinereal, mephitic, velutinous. These words are not conversational, probably something you'd more likely see in a "peer reviewed journal". They "distract" the reader, and they certainly don't invite the reader into Nabokov's world. You gain entry into that world only after painstaking effort.

The places where words seem awkward to you seem inventive to others. Staid idioms may be easy to understand, and attempting to be unidiomatic often results in failure (hell, Nabokov is considered great mainly because he could pull it off), but an attempt to write with novelty and flair shouldn't be treated with disdain. Obviously I'm no Nabokov, maybe my post failed and sounded stupid. But I do know what I'm doing when I write, and I don't appreciate snobbish, surfacey criticism that doesn't even deign to deal with the cinematic/textual issues I raised.

I was snobbish in my criticism, I'll admit. But your frustration over the fact that I didn't address your cinematic/textual issues is exactly my point. The 'forced' language you employed, instead of clarifying your thoughts, was--for me at least--a huge distraction. To such a degree that any points you made where lost.

To me, writing with 'novelty and flair' is more about startling images/metaphors, etc, than the use of stilted or 'smart' sounding words. Too often, I believe, the use of 'words that draw attention to themselves' are a sort of fortress for the person writing--a buffer against criticism of content or ideas...

Anyhow, to each their own. I saw Into the Wild last night and enjoyed it quite a bit. It resonated with my youthful feelings about the world, and I truly think McCandless had a ton of guts to do what he did (and yes, he was stupid and bullheaded to boot). But I've done some solo camping and hitchhiking, etc, and McCandless had way bigger balls than I did, but then again, I lived to tell about it.

Did they play up the parents angle more in the movie than in the book? It seemed that way to me. I was under the impression (from the book, though I haven't read it in years) that McCandless was rebelling more against the dominant culture/society than his parents. Of course, his parents were good representatives of that culture.

When we're young we're often so pigheaded and think we know everything: quick to act, quick to judge, quick to spot inconsistancy. When we're older we're often stuck in our ways and bitter. Scornful of passion, idealism, and threatened somehow by those who veer off the path of the status quo, as if by their actions they are condemning how conventional we have become. I'd like to think there is a middle ground in there somewhere.

I just finished this book and really enjoyed it. I laughed when I reached the part that talks about Chris being a HS runner. As I was reading the book and the character was being developed, I was thinking that he had the personality that would love distance running.

Now I will have to find the movie.

I also recently finished 'Into Thin Air'. I thought that was a great book.