I Got Your Wild Right Here

Last night, my wife and I were watching Into the Wild, the Sean Penn adaptation of the Jon Krakauer book, both highly anticipated and critically acclaimed, but we decided to stop it halfway through. We finished watching it this morning, mostly out of curiosity about the ending (Partly because I started writing this and I have a cool wife), even though last night, we didn't really want to keep watching. Because the hero, the self-styled Alexander Supertramp, is a complete and utter putz. Allow me to explain.

Chris McCandless is the child of a loveless sham of a marriage; his parents are materialistic alcoholics, who fight all the time and treat their children coldly. Because of this, the day after he graduates from college, Chris gives all of his savings away and drives off to find himself. He finds that he enjoys the great freedom of having nothing, no ties and no responsibilities, and he decides to travel to Alaska to find the ultimate freedom from our shallow capitalist hypocritical society. He travels there and tries to survive, but he fails.

Now, I have great admiration for people who travel. Especially for the individual who roams around America (or any country) without any destination, the road gypsy who tries to find out what this land, this country, this people -- and thus the traveler himself -- are all about. I think those people who do the modern version of the vision quest are brave and honest, and are doing the right thing in trying to escape the chains of expectation and societal indoctrination, in trying to peel away the layers of themselves in order to find their center, their core needs and strengths.

But the guy in this movie, and presumably the one in the book, is not trying to find himself. He's trying to lose himself, in order to hurt the people who hurt him -- mainly his parents, but also anyone else who cares about him and who failed him by not making his life better, by not saving him from his parents. That's mainly his younger sister, who unfortunately hero-worships the shmuck and provides a most unfortunate voice-over to the movie in an attempt to add a veneer of profundity to his stupidity.

Look at what he does. He waits until he graduates from college, even though (according to the voice-over) he sees college as some absurd, meaningless ritual insisted upon by his parents, one that does him no good at all. Then he destroys all of his IDs and credit cards and such, and gives away his savings -- but keeps his car, until he wrecks it by parking on a floodplain and sleeping through a storm. Then he leaves it, right there in the middle of the Arizona desert. He hikes out to a road, after burning all of his cash, and starts hitching rides. Then he works for a wheat farmer who sells illegal satellite TV boxes on the side, driving a harvester and helping to sell the grain. With the money he gets, he buys a small kayak and paddles down the Colorado River without a permit, avoiding the river patrol, until he finally floats illegally into Mexico. He lives there for a month and then he comes back over the border, into LA; he wanders the city until he goes to a mission in order to get a bed for the night and help getting some new ID. But he goes out and sees himself in the face of a yuppie in a bar, and he panics and hits the road again, this time riding the rails. Until he gets caught and beaten up by the railroad police.

His next stop is at a campsite with a pair of hippies he had befriended early on in his travels. He stays with them for a while until he heads off to train for his Alaskan adventure, which for some reason includes living in the Anza-Borrego desert outside of San Diego. Because that's the best way to prepare for spring in Alaska, of course: 120 degree heat. In the desert, he befriends a very kind and very lonely old man who takes him in for a while, cares for him, and then lets him go -- after giving him a pile of supplies for his trip. The man only asks one thing in return: he asks to adopt the kid, in order to carry on his family name -- but Supertramp says no. Because, you see, Supertramp has lied to this kind man, has told him that he has no family, when in fact, he does. Even though he doesn't contact them for the entire two years he's gone, he has parents, and he knows it, so he can't agree to the one favor this generous person asks of him. But neither does he admit to his lies and at least grant the man honesty and respect. No, Supertramp just takes everything the man has to give and leaves him by the side of the road to go to Alaska. For himself.

There are, interspersed with these flashbacks, several scenes showing his life in Alaska: he takes a rifle in order to hunt, and a big bag of rice, and not much else; the guy who gives him a ride out into the middle of nowhere gives him a nice pair of rubber boots to keep his feet dry. He finds an old abandoned bus, converted into a home, with a stove and a mattress; he lives there, slowly starving because he can't hunt well, until he finally manages to kill a full-grown moose. But because he's an idiot, he hasn't prepared for preservation of the meat, and so the flies get to it and the entire thing is wasted. He writes in his journal that he wishes he hadn't killed the moose at all, that it is one of the great tragedies of his life -- which would make me like him more, except. Except.

Here's the problem. None of this is freedom. This is freeloading. This kid is selfish and cruel, and the fact that his selfish cruelty imitates the nobility of an actual vision quest does not redeem him. He finished college, taking thousands of dollars of his parents' money, even though he didn't believe in it. He didn't tell them where he was going or why, nor his sister nor anyone else; he fixes it so they can't find out until three months after he left, so they won't be able to track him down. He leaves his car for someone else to deal with, lets people with cars give him free rides. He breaks the law and risks his own life, and thus puts a greater burden on society by requiring the police to chase him, and potentially requiring the state to deal with his injury or his death. He takes a spot away from a homeless person in LA (albeit temporarily), he steals rides and risks the liability of the railroads; he takes and takes and takes, and gives absolutely nothing back, to anyone. Oh wait: he is nice to the pair of hippies early on in the trip. That's apparently the only good thing he does for anyone, ever.

This made me think about my admiration for people who do this, who travel the country and find themselves, who seek freedom from society and materialism and convention. And I realized: the means do not justify the ends. This kid did what I consider a brave and admirable thing, but he did it for entirely the wrong reasons, and that made the whole thing worthless. He did this, not to find himself or his place in the world, but rather to punish everyone, including society and those who conform to it and take part in it -- including, inevitably, himself, because we are always the final victims of our own cruelty. He took advantage of everyone he could, particularly of those kind enough to give him things. And he did it only because he wanted to be free of his parents, so he could show them that he wasn't like them and that he hated them for the way they raised him, for the way they lived.

Here's a secret. Actually, it's not a secret, but it is apparently something that this kid never learned, and, it seems, lots of other people have never learned, as well. You cannot be free if you are beholden to others.

I'll say it again. You cannot be free if you are beholden to others. That includes taking the freely offered charity of kind people, which obligates you to return charity to those who need it, and it includes taking the gifts of those who care for you -- such as a free college education, whether you wanted it or not -- without repaying them in some way. It includes using the gifts of our society, such as safe roads, health care, money, the kept and protected areas of natural beauty that are all over this country, without giving something back to the society that provides those things to you. For what you are given, you owe -- and you cannot break the chains of obligation, you can only free yourself of them by paying off the debt.

Freedom is not the avoidance of material possessions -- it is not, as Kris Kristofferson wrote and Janis Joplin sang, just another word for nothing left to lose. Freedom is another word for nothing left to owe. Nothing that you have taken without giving something back, whether to the giver or to another who can pass on the gift. Nothing that you have promised, but haven't lived up to. No cruel acts that you haven't, at the very least, apologized for and decided never to do again.

You do not need to go into the wild to find yourself. You need to take an honest accounting of what you have given, and what has been given to you, and you need to do whatever it takes to balance those two. Going into the wild, stripping away the concerns and the trappings -- and the traps -- of modern materialist society may help you find what you have truly been given, and what you truly owe, but it doesn't excuse your obligation to discover those things and take action based on what you discover. Supertramp recognizes that at the end. He realizes that happiness is not real unless it is shared. He realizes that to forgive is to love. He realizes that love is what makes [Insert preferred metaphor for spiritual bliss here; the movie uses the light of God shining down on you, and that will do]. He realizes that part of our purpose in life is to call things by their real names, to recognize and speak truth. And so, at the end, he calls himself by his real name, and he forgives his parents, and he regrets his loneliness. But all he can do is regret, you see; because he died in his Alaskan wild. He ate the wrong plant and poisoned himself, and then he starved to death. And this story is sad, not because he died so young, but because he took so much, and never had the chance to give back -- because he was too goddamned stupid, and too goddamned selfish and self-centered and arrogant, to actually learn what he needed to learn to survive in an Alaskan spring. It seemed to me that he always knew, deep down inside, that if he really needed to, he could drag himself back to civilization and ask for help, and he would be helped; thus he didn't take the time to learn to trap game, or properly identify the local edible plants. He didn't need to, in his mind. More kind people would give to him, and demand nothing in return. Unfortunately, the idiot waited until the spring thaw flooded the river and trapped him away from people who could help him -- and so he died. Alone. Leaving everyone else owed for everything that made him who he was, that made him alive, and whole, and strong, and intelligent, and brave, and yes, even stupid enough to go on this ridiculous adventure. An adventure that should have been admirable but was not, because his only cause was his own masturbatory exploration, an attempt to find more and more exciting ways to live, in order to really stick it to everyone who had made him the spoiled, selfish child he was.

By the way: almost every nature shot in the movie, which does indeed feature some incredible locations, is spoiled because it focuses almost exclusively on the character. The world is the background for his portrait. It's annoying to watch. And it is entirely appropriate.

I've rambled too much here, and I've probably laid into this a bit more than it really deserves. But then again, this young doofus is a hero, to judge by the acclaim given to the film and the book of his life. People admire him and want to emulate him; they believe that his original instinct, to destroy everything he was given but didn't want, including his family, his friends, and ultimately his own life, is a worthy and admirable choice to make.

It ain't.

So that's my next trip in the time machine: back to Atlanta, Georgia, to the Emory University graduation in May of 1990. There I will find Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, and I will slap the snot out of him. I will tell him that he can define himself as separate and distinct from his hypocritical, materialistic parents without being cruel to them, without injuring them and his other loved ones by leaving them without any word -- that, in fact, his selfish cruelty makes him more like his parents, not less. I will tell him that gifts do not force us to take them as they are given: that a college education, offered solely as a means to an end -- as a ring to jump through on the way to a successful career, 2.5 kids and three ulcers -- can be taken and made into something of real value, a growth opportunity -- a chance to find one's self and one's place in the world. You know, like what he went into the wild to find. That the failure to make something valuable out of a gift is the recipient's fault, not the giver's -- it's like being given a gift card, and blowing it on crap. You're the one who blew it, pal. I will give him a chance to learn the same lessons he learned -- the value of sharing happiness, of forgiveness, of truth and honesty -- without having to die and inflict so much pain on others.

Then I'll look him right in the eye and say, "Supertramp? Seriously?" And I'll slap him again.