Into the Wild

Kit Stolz's defense of Christopher McCandless, the hero of Into the Wild, sums up just about everything I am uncomfortable with in characters like him. McCandless, a wealthy Virginia kid, gave up everything he had to go live an "authentic" life. This eventually led him to Alaska, where he wandered into the backcountry without any kind of provisions and starved to death. Jon Krakauer and now Sean Penn have idealized McCandless in print and film.

McCandless definitely represents an archetype of American environmentalism--the driven masculine loner who turns his back on privilege and goes to find himself in nature. Other prominent examples are Edward Abbey, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. Perhaps the most salient comparison is the early 20th century artist and writer Everett Ruess, who as a young man wandered into the southwestern deserts, never to be seen again. But should this behavior be lionized? I think not.

First of all, I have a lot of trouble dealing with kids like McCandless because despite their pretensions to giving up their privilege, in fact they are still incredibly privileged. McCandless was a rich kid whose behavior was deeply influenced by his wealth. You don't see many working-class kids engaging in this kind of behavior. Why? They are too busy figuring out how to eat to romanticize what it would be like to not eat, or only eat foods you gathered. It takes some serious privilege to distance yourself enough from real life to think wandering off into Alaska for the summer without having a clue about your surroundings is a good idea. No doubt someone out there might find some working-class examples of this behavior, but I've never met them nor read about them.

Second, it reinforces the wilderness ideal in environmentalism. I have long argued that focusing on pristine wilderness has done more to undermine the movement than anything Reagan or Bush have done. At one time, environmentalism focused both on protecting land and protecting human bodies. It was during this period, in the 1960s and 1970s, that everything from the Wilderness Act to the Endangered Species Act to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed. Environmentalists made close connections between protecting land and protecting humans. Thus they were able to do both. Environmentalism was a bipartisan issue.

Starting in the 1980s, and probably because of the hostility of the Reagan administration to environmental legislation, the environmental movement began focusing almost exclusively on saving pristine land. New, more radical groups like EarthFirst! and Greenpeace helped promote this shift through their vigorous defense of American forests and whales respectively, but the Sierra Club and Wilderness Society probably did more to push this new emphasis because they found they could raise much more money when they promoted charismatic, but endangered, animals or beautiful forest and desert scenes that were under attack than they could by focusing on the kind of legal and technical issues that create legislation. Once the environmental movement gave up its emphasis on human beings, it lost popularity and became divisive rather than consensus building. Thus since 1980, they have succeeded in protecting a lot of wilderness areas when Democrats are president, but they are completely left out in the cold when Republicans are in power and they are nowhere near building groundswells of popular support for any sort of legislation.

To be fair, I do believe this is starting to change. Young people seem to be much more into coalition building and connecting humans and wilderness. And this is an absolute good.

Third, people like McCandless do a very poor job of making connections between their own behavior and its larger implications on the land. Now McCandless may have never made claims to being an environmentalist, but given that his cause has picked up on my so many environmentalists, this is still a worthy point. McCandless went out there with his gun and was hunting animals to survive. He even shot a moose (or it could have been a caribou) once, though because he didn't have a freaking clue what to do with a large animal to preserve its meat, it all went bad. What he didn't realize, and what his defenders don't seem to get, is that it was through the behavior of people just like him that the nation's wildlife plummeted during the 19th century. Of course, there was a lot of pointless hunting for fun as well, and there is no doubt that significantly added to the decline of the bison and passenger pigeon, among other species. But what if everyone wanted to live like McCandless? What if even 5% of Americans did? What if they all went out to Montana or Alaska or Arizona or wherever and decided to live off the land. How fast would wildlife be hunted out? When people like McCandless go hunting in the wild, they do far more environmental damage than they ever would living in the city. If you really care about nature, leave it alone.

Stolz also lauds the film, which I thought was really pretty blase. He says, "After this movie, he may become a Clint Eastwood of indie filmmaking, a completely free spirit and a free talent. Watch out world." The merits of Eastwood as a filmmaker aside (the most overrated American director), Penn's movie falls flat in a lot of ways. I went in thinking I would either love it or hate it. In fact, I was bored by it. Despite a great supporting cast, Emile Hirsch never seems to inhabit the character. He's almost a cipher that other great actors can work around. He mutters some words about his great Alaskan adventure without any convincing emotion and then Catherine Keener or Hal Holbrook can worry about him in a meaningful way.

Stolz also talks about how great the music by Eddie Vedder was. About this, the less said the better. It added nothing to the film and in fact became rather annoying several times.

What's more, what many viewers and readers don't seem to get is that Christopher McCandless was a total asshole. Despite extremely sympathetic portrayals of the man by both Krakauer and Penn, he clearly didn't give a shit about the people who cared for him. And this is what comes across in sympathetic portrayls! Imagine what an unsympathetic how he would look to the more critical chronicler. Both Krakauer and Penn make it abundantly clear that so many people who he met were touched by him, cared for him, etc. I have no doubt this is true. But a person to model oneself after this does not make. What makes a good person is also caring about the people who care about you. McCandless clearly did not. He was a spoiled, neurotic rich brat who couldn't deal with the kind of modern family crisis that thousands of other kids manage to live with every day. He decided instead to abandon his family, and continue to abandon people who wanted to bring him into their families, in order to live out his wilderness fantasy. Had he even brought a goddamn map with him into the wilderness he would have lived. Instead, he died.

Christopher McCandless did not deserve to die. I feel bad for his family and for all the people who knew him. But he also does not deserve to be remembered by history. And he especially does not deserve to be heroically portrayed in books and on the big screen. Rather, his is a story of personal dysfunction, the search for false authenticity, and a fatal romanticization of wilderness. It is a cautionary tale, not a laudatory one.