U Rock Blog: Version Z.0
Blog the Seventh
October 29th, 2009
Supertramp
I wish I’d thought to bring a camera along, but this week I watched Into the Wild with an audience, as part of U Rock’s film series.
The film concerns Chris McCandless, a young college graduate from a dysfunctional household. Chris was desperate to escape modern society and to find himself within the wilderness. He roamed the country for a time, working jobs in grain elevators and fast food joints. The entire time, he nurtured a fascination with Alaska. Chris continued to wander, eventually meeting a hippie couple and spending time in a communal society known as “the slabs”. McCandless wanted to be entirely alone, a “supertramp” living off the land in an area that was, for all intents and purposes, a blank spot on the map. The film depicts his struggles to survive in the wild after finding an abandoned bus in the Alaskan bush. After 113 days in the wild, McCandless died. When moose hunter found his body two weeks later, he weighed less than 70 pounds.
There’s a fair amount of controversy about the film and its source material, the 1996 book by Jon Krakauer; namely, how the film projects the last few months of McCandless’s life. Both the movie, directed by Sean Penn, and Krakauer speculate that McCandless accidently consumed moldy potato seeds that made it hard for him to digest food properly. They suggest that Chris became weak suddenly, then found himself unable to escape by crossing the nearby roaring river. According to the film, McCandless had no map to guide him, and had shed himself of all money and forms of identification (leading some detractors to believe that McCandless was on a suicide mission.) However, newer evidence indicates that McCandless did in fact hold onto his map and all of his identification (including three library cards) along with three hundred dollars in cash, suggesting that he did plan an eventual return to society. Additionally, there’s been no indication that “moldy seeds” were a factor in his demise.
There are many tragic elements to Chris’s story; the fact that he never got the chance to speak to his sister once he fled; his idealistic insistence on not bringing essential equipment and supplies, like a compass, that could’ve saved his life. In addition, McCandless never discovered a manually-operated tram less than a half-mile from the bus, which he could’ve potentially used to navigate the deadly river. And, of course, if he’d been able to hold on for two more weeks he would’ve been saved by the moose hunters.
Some websites about McCandless wonder what exactly happened to him in those final months. Did he starve to death simply because there wasn’t enough food? Did he sustain some sort of shoulder or leg injury that made escape virtually impossible? We may never get all the answers. Besides the evidence found on the bus and subsequent autopsy reports, park rangers found rolls of undeveloped film which show McCaandless posing in front of the bus, along with other images of the small game he killed. The last image in the roll is heartbreaking; we see an emaciated McCandless smiling for the camera, his hand in the middle of a weak wave. He’s holding a farewell message to his family, but the words are impossible to make out.