luddite fetishization of a coddled man in way over his head

Rating: 1/10 (18 November 2018)

I found something utterly fascinating in the true story of Christopher McCandless, venturing out into the "wild" of Alaska with basically nothing but a gun and some food, and eventually succumbing to the inevitable.

I passed no judgment on him or his decisions when I read through the story, focusing more on the mystery of what drove him to a vagabond existence culminating in total hermitage from which he absolutely could not survive. The cliché of "the devil is in the details" is one horribly true here, and tends to tear apart the story.

In truth, McCandless essentially committed suicide. He refused all the necessary help to survive in the cold, did not even learn how to dry meat, and, had he had a map, could have easily walked back to civilization at almost any point in time.

In fact, we can learn almost nothing from McCandless or his time spent in the wild, as his journal entries are as mindless and empty and almost completely devoid of any real content. They literally amount to things like "Day 2: Fall through the ice day." "Day 4: Magic bus day." "Day 9: Weakness." "Day 10: Snowed in." "Day 68: Beaver Dam. Disaster." "Day 107 (the last entry): Beautiful berries"

Going into the actual film itself, we get virtually none of this. Instead we are taken on a tediously long, droning journey that covers almost none of the survival aspects and just covers his wandering through the US in the years leading up to the event.

Throughout this "journey" we're treated to overly dramatic musical montages waxing poetic on how "society, man, society is just society, man" ranting and railing with all the emptiness and incoherence of someone with basic understanding of almost everything, but knowledge of almost nothing.
Life sure does sucks for a rich white kid who graduates from a prestigious university with nearly all A's, the movie tells us. How can you be happy with things like money and a job instead of living in the woods, hanging out with psychotically upbeat Danish tourists you meet after barely surviving a dangerous river paddling you jump in with 0 paddling experience, ignoring the guy who tells you you need to sign on with a professional because you could die. What does he know? Society, man. Screw society, man.

The truth about the abuse he and his sister suffered from their parents wasn't revealed publicly by the time his movie was made (though she did disclose it off the record to the book author Jon Krakauer), so it's never made fully explicit here. But the whole theme of the movie is such that it doesn't matter, because it doesn't easily fit into the theme that "society sucks and you can only be happy living in the woods".

The immense scale of the romanticization is insufferable. It becomes painfully pretentious almost immediately and it makes the protagonist thoroughly unlikeable; a vapid, empty vessel literally living the dream of the vapid spoiled white kid who worships nature and thinks modern society is a drag. The least I can say about this fictional version of McCandless is he is at least completely devoid of the self-righteous spite and meanness of a character like Holden Caulfield. He's not rubbing our faces in this pretentious message; the film itself is, and sometimes it seems as if he's just as much a victim as we are, having his adventure luridly fetishized as if he were an idol, and not someone who was way in over their head.

I can't help but think of a similar story of someone who died in the Alaska wilderness, Carl McCunn in 1981. He went with almost 2 tons of food and supplies, multiple weapons, and actually left highly detailed journal entries telling a tragic story of a man who made a rather different mistake; He did not make it clear to the pilot who left him in the wilderness to return for him 5 months later. As 5 months slips into 6 months, you can clearly feel the pain in his entries as he realizes he is likely never coming back alive, and no one is likely to come looking for him. At one point, he is even spotted by a state trooper flying over in a plane, but laments in his journal that he apparently accidentally signaled to the trooper that he was okay and not in need of rescue. His final entry is a plea to God to forgive him and look over his family, then writing "They say it doesn't hurt" before taking his own life rather than freeze to death.

There's nothing remotely like that in this film. The film barely lingers on Chris's experience of solitude in the wild, preferring to go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on with his silly adventures, interspersed with upbeat montage after montage set to popular music