"He's leaving home, bye, bye".....the quest for IT....

Rating: 7/10 (8 January 2008)

ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac was published 50 years before this film came out. And then there was Voltaire's CANDIDE. Can the Enlightenment be so very far away? A lot of people get irritated with Holden Caufield when they read CATCHER IN THE RYE. A lot of people react the same way when they encounter Christopher McCandless and they WILL encounter his persona on screen for years to come, thanks to Sean Penn. Why this irritation? It's like asking why the squares got irritated with the gatherings of gentle people at Monterey Pop during that "Summer of Love" in 1967 Frisco : in essence, people like Christopher McCandless remind them of their own "lives of quiet desperation" of what 60s freaks called, "the death culture".
Christopher McCandless is a well read guy. He pulls out his Jack London and Leo Tolstoy in order to be closer, to relax with his friends. He's had it with what Holden Caufield called,"phonies" and these include his lying parents. Generation gap redux, mai oui.
Christopher McCandless wants to discover Truth. And to do this, he ventures out "on the road" as Dean Moriarity and Sal Paradise did in 1947, hitching and driving and being driven all over America and even down to Mexico, just as Sal and Dean did. And just as Dean and Sal were, Christopher McCandless is searching for IT.
But what is IT?
Christopher McCandless only knows that IT isn't the narrow materialistic individualism of his parents or of people like them. He fervently believes in a "spiritual" path which might lead one to IT, but first he must divest himself of crass materialism-- most worldly goods . For, unlike the rich man/camel who cannot pass through the eye of a needle, Christopher McCandless will make it into his heaven because he refuses excess material. He believes in his vow of poverty. So did the Buddah and a thousand Beats and Hippies. He believes that he must make contact with the "spiritual" truth by living simply, living like a character out of one of Jack London's adventurous Alaskan adventures. It is a call of the wild which draws him, north, ever north to the Alaska outback. There, he reads Tolstoy's words on how to achieve happiness through simple living and he takes that advice on, living in his own "Magic Bus"...oh shades of Kesey may your spirit live on.
Is it true? Can one find "spiritual" fulfillment this way? Perhaps. Especially, if one is inclined to try to find it standing on its head, as the priest in "The Black Robe" did in his 17th Century Canadian wilderness trek amongst the native heathen. Religious quests are almost always filled with suffering. Is this not why we were placed on this Earth, like so many chess pieces for the amusement of our Lard.
But, in material reality what hath Penn wrought? This is a lad with all the right instincts for freedom, still tied in knots with philosophical Idealism. He's trying to kick out the jams; but he doesn't realize that heading down the path of material deprivation will not get him home--free. As a result of his "true believer" mentality, poor Christopher McCandless doesn't recognize his real happiness when it stares him, lovingly in his face. Ah sweet Tracy... He sees the poverty of a future of dead time in the suburbs and he rejects it. Good move, Chris. This rejection makes a lot of the one-dimensional individuals hate him, especially when his disdain is magnified on the silver screen. He sees the wisdom of NOT "taking more than you can use" from the Earth, a fact that is brought home hard for him when he shoots a moose, he cannot possibly consume. Hooray for Christopher McCandless there!
Christopher McCandless made some discoveries. Like Candide, Sal Paradise, Holden Caufield and the people of his own parents' generation, especially ones who can be seen on in docos like "Monterey Pop", he did glimpse IT here and there, only to lose it in the end. For it is in the social relations of friendship and love, all of which he leaves behind in order to live on his own, in a vain attempt to depend only his own, narrow individualism to find "the truth". The ghost of Dean Moriarity, walking down those railroad tracks in Mexico...yes, Dean More-E-air-IT-tee.