A parable of arrogance, unforgiveness, and its consequences

Rating: 7/10 (9 January 2014)

It's amazing how the moral blindness of modern culture obscures the plain meaning of some people's stories, even when they're held up right before our eyes as examples!
Into the Wild proves that our moral sensibilities have become so twisted toward the glorification of human autonomy and self-realization that we cannot see what is right under our noses: namely that Chris McCandless was an almost biblical example of self-centeredness elevated above everything else in life and its consequent self-destructiveness.
But our society sees only a free, independent spirit; a hero of our modern stupidity. Sean Penn predictably holds Chris up to us as an example of authentic living; a bold pilgrim of human self- fulfillment. How tragic, and how blind!
Chris suffered some emotional abuse at the hands of his parents, who are stereotypically portrayed as hypocrites, drunks, and phonies. They were more likely just fallible human beings like the rest of us, but Penn indicts them as unforgivably shallow and unauthentic people—the unforgivable sin! So Chris feels he is justified in escaping from their evil influences and abandoning all ties of family and friendship, striving toward the holy grail of pure autonomy and authentic existence, eventually challenging himself with living alone in the Alaskan wilderness with nothing but his own physical and mental resources to keep him alive.
He certainly would have been better off challenging himself to come to terms with his own human fallibleness and hypocritical tendencies so that he might be willing to forgive his parents' mistakes and character flaws; but no! It was all or nothing for Chris. He was convinced of the absolute vindication of his cause, and there was room for no one else in his vision of a perfect, solitary, independent world.
It is ironic that this pure and absolute independence finally depends on an abandoned school bus as his final shelter, and a field guide to edible and non edible wild plants to allow him to safely live off the wild.
In his foolish arrogance, Chris assumes he can get along without help from anyone else. He wastes the life of a moose, not realizing that the animal represented far meat more than he could either consume or preserve for later. Despite his best attempts to larder the meat by using a method someone told him about, the meat rots and becomes food for wolves, maggots, and other scavengers, not him. He is grieved and guilty about the waste, but is helpless to prevent it.
Tragically, Chris learns a final, fatal lesson about the bankruptcy of his assumptions when he eats the wrong wild potato plant, realizing too late that the wild not only contains peace, bounty, and beauty, but the same potential for violence, pollution, and death that he assumed he was escaping from when he abandoned his family. The toxic plant disables his body's ability to process vital nutrition. He suffers miserably for many days before starving to death alone in the abandoned bus in the middle of nowhere.
If you've bought into the heroic interpretation of Chris's odyssey, caveat emptor!