Sean Penn's Adaption of Into the Wild; Starring Emile Hirsch

Sean Penn's passionate adaptation of John Krakauer's book Into the Wild, conjures up an experience close to Jack Kerouac's On The Road meets Thoreau's Walden. The film glorifies the journey of Christopher McCandless; a young idealist who ditched his Harvard bound life for a great Alaskan adventure. Some have asked whether McCandless's mythic trip, under his alias Alexander Supertramp, was a suicide dressed as self-righteous spiritual transformation.¹ This realty check is skillfully avoided by Penn's screenplay, thus becoming a passionate homage to one man's detachment from society.

One scene sums up what would've been a typical reaction to anyone who announced the adventurous vagabond intentions of McCandless. Sitting in a bar with farmer Wayne Westerberg (played by Vince Vaughn), McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) rants about the sickness of society and why he desires the Tundra's complete abandon of the Tundra. At this point in the tale McCandless is already well into poverty, by society's standards, but living a rich life on the road. Farmer Westerberg humors McCandless' daydreaming, giving him something like, "Yea Man; Society", with Vaughn's gifted drinking-buddy comedy.

"Yea Man; Society." The drunken finger pointing of humanity's ailments summed up by institutionalized consumerism and hypocrisy. Yet McCandless is drunk on a literary substance; Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy and Jack London. His high is an intellectually fueled call to the wild, subtracted from society's equation of family, credit cards and automobiles to find summation as a being of nature.