Outstandingly Prophetic

Rating: 10/10 (24 February 2008)

Sean Penn reaches here a peak in his vision of society. He reaches a turning point in his historical approach of life. He depicts what 1968ers and hippies have become thirty years later, today, and what their idealism and ideals may produce today. Christopher, an allusion to a certain Christopher Columbus, decides to abandon everything, to give away his 24,000 dollars of savings, to burn his money and disappear in the vast territory known as the USA. He is looking for real life, for real nature, for real humanity, a life, a nature, a reality that are no longer simulacra of the truth, the truth that existed before man and humanity perverted it. So, along the road, he explores several possibilities that are all fake and he will end in Alaska. Sean Penn accumulates the elements showing there is no escape from society and civilization. No escape for the hippie couple Christopher becomes friendly to and who move freely thanks to their caravan, making an income along the way by selling second hand books they recuperate left and right. No escape from social norms in sex when Christopher refuses the approach and gift from a girl on the only basis that she is 16. Woodstock is really gone and forgotten. No escape in the friendship he develops with a farmer of some type who is finally caught up by the FBI for some illegal activity. No escape in the friendship he develops with an older retired GI who proposes to adopt him to provide him with some kind of a family, to provide himself with some kind of a substitute for his accidentally killed son. But no escape either in Alaska where he is trapped in a way three times, at least. Trapped in a bus that is grounded in the middle of the wilderness. Too easy to survive in this absolutely human environment whose engine is dead and has no fuel. Trapped by his forgetting that to survive in nature you have to know nature's cycle and he did not know the migration cycles of animals and found himself one day foodless, and he did not know the cycles of the rivers and found himself locked up by the water of the river and crossed on foot before. Trapped finally by his lack of knowledge about nature and by his lack of preparation that makes him mix up two wild plants, one edible and one inedible. And he dies slowly poisoned by wild sweet peas. And finally, but too late, he understands that happiness is only real when it is shared. But it is too late and he can only compensate his death with the beauty of the sky his dying eyes capture as he breathes out his very last breath of life. Complete, absolute, irreversible evolution of humanity from barbaric animality to necessarily social and shared civilization. To refuse that historical construct is to refuse to live and to condemn oneself to death, in other words to commit suicide.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines