A Prairie Home Companion

Rating: Null/10 (21 February 2010)

Sean Penn's "Into The Wild" is perhaps best viewed as being part of a recent wave of eco-themed films ("Wall-E", "Avatar", "The Happening", "An Inconvenient Truth", "Grizzly Man", "Dreamland", "Day The Earth Stood Still", "Antichrist", "Day After Tomorrow", "Happy Feet" etc). Most of these films urge their audiences to "return to nature", "retreat to some pastoral existence" or "save the planet" (without looking at the systemic or economic forces which completely undermine or neutralise such wants).
Interestingly, aside from "Antichrist", "Grizzly Man" and "Into The Wild", nature in these films is always portrayed as being some kind of mystical, "balanced" system. While mega-studios, quite ironically, advise us to harmonize with nature, "smaller" directors (Penn, Herzog, Von Trier) seem to instead posit worlds in which nature is vile and base. Nature is still portrayed as being majestic and splendid, but is then associated with asphyxiation and choking, death and rot. The only harmony – as Werner Herzog once famously said – is that of overwhelming and collective murder.
Murder, then, is the central theme of both "Grizzly Man" and "Into The Wild". Like Sydney Pollack's "Jerremiah Johnson", both films are about young men (Christopher McCandless in Penn's film, Timothy Treadwell in Herzog's) who cut themselves off from civilisation and venture off into the wilderness. Of course both Herzog and Penn initially romanticise their central characters' flights. They see beauty in this journey and a kind of crazy inner strength (McCandless rejects vapid materialism, 9 to 5 routines and sees the modern word as being a hindrance which atrophies humanity and conscience ). But both artists are also careful to counter this idealism with nature at its most violent.
And so both films find their heroes "leaving civilisation", but only because they've first suffered a total, psychological collapse. They now disbelieve in their Master Signifiers, in their Symbolic Orders, and see civilisation itself as being representative of that which is arbitrary and chaotic. Both films then end with the deaths of their central characters, McCandless killed by a lowly poisonous berry, Treadwell killed by a mighty grizzly bear. This is not romanticism: the impetus for our adventures is something sad and pathetic, even if they're absolutely right. Their problem is that they've diagnosed civilisation but idealised Nature, a fatal failing; mankind's history is a history of battling the wild outdoors. Respect Nature. Approach with caution.
And so both Treadwell and McCandless are portrayed as being disenchanted idealists who cut themselves off from a world they no longer feel apart of, no longer trust, no longer believe in. But while Penn romanticises Christopher's idealistic dream of "entering the wilderness", he is careful to counter this with nature at its most violent. Christopher hunts for food but recoils from maggots, Christopher attempts to cross a river, but nature's violent highways prove too powerful, Christopher forages for berries, but eats only poisonous weeds which ultimately kill him.
The result is that Penn celebrates disenchantment and urges one to disconnect (mental breakdown, oft the precursor to wisdom), even as he warns that drifting too far is itself a form of suicide or self-destruction. Chris wants to cut himself off from mankind (the film opens with a quote from the Romantic Movement which advocates "ostracizing oneself from humanity"), but also learns that "Happiness Is Real Only When Shared" (the last dreams he has is of hugging his parents). And that's Penn's irony: it is the connections that Christopher makes with other people as he continues along on his journey which allowed him to survive in the wilderness for as long as he did. When towards the end of the film Christopher turns down an offer to live with an elderly man, he effectively gave up entirely on humanity. This total disconnection, this suicidal action, is ultimately what the film warns of.
The kind of balance that the film longs for is thus similar to the teachings of Thoreau, who advocated finding a middle ground between rejecting and fully embracing the wilderness. The people Chris meets (and rejects) along his journey are thus in possession of the life he longs for.
Elsewhere the film is about the enchantment of text and the romance of words. Krakauer wrote about Chris not only because Chris' journey was inspired by idealistic books (Chris takes literature rather than food with him) but because Chris was himself a writer and left behind numerous documents. What the film thus does is sets up a war between the word (fantasy) and the image (world). As each level of text is one step removed from reality, image eventually wins, the image of a berry and the failure to correctly read it being what ultimately kills Chris.
Audiences typically view Chris as either a "hero" or a "jerk", but he's more a lost, fragile child. Having learnt that everything he knew about his parents and his own history was a lie, Chris began to distrust everything. Suddenly all truths were shattered. The only way for Christopher's mind to cope with this subjective destitution was to then enter a little fantasy world in which he's a "noble adventurer". As he loves meta-acting, Penn thus has actor Emile Hirsch play Christopher as a wounded guy playing the role of the very romantic hero he reads about in books.
Elsewhere, like Kirk Douglas' "Lonely Are The Brave", Penn contrast modern technology with primitivism. He stresses the artificiality of the caravans and abandoned buses which Christopher relies on to survive, and counterpoints Christopher's physical death with a near spiritual shot of a modern passenger jet. The film does not condemn modern technology, it recognises it as a necessity. The film then ends with Christopher's body seemingly "transcending" into heaven. The film then rewinds, his body sucked into the ground, Penn's camera pulling back such that Christopher's corpse seems to be asphyxiated by Nature.
8.5/10 – Worth two viewings.