the stories he could have told us

Rating: 9/10 (13 April 2008)

This tears the heart. We grift and stumble to survive and our children are the witnesses. What they learn from us, or their schooling, or their experiences, forms them and has to get them through. But the human spirit is stubbornly selfish. Naive. Methodical. McCandless may have shed some of his parent's superficial values (money, social climbing, prestige), but the deeper deficiencies remain. It's still all about HIM.
So here he is, struggling both to hatch into adulthood and to stay in his protective, selfish shell. In a fitting metaphor, he literally dies in that shell - cocooned in a mummy bag, inside an old bus. Yes, he is a fool, but he is our own uniquely American-made fool.
It is fitting that many of the characters in the movie save him, by feeding him and sheltering him, but all this does is delay his self-destruction. If he had survived, what stories he would have had to tell, what a life he would have had to live.
Kudos to the actors and the writers. Especially kudos for the cinematography. Ultimately it's the wide-open beauty of America that baited and lured McCandless to his doom. Finally many thanks to Ziggy in Anchorage for his excellent belt-work. The belt is a metaphor for the whole odyssey, tooled in leather, ominously becoming shorter day by day.