“Into the Wild”

I went to see Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild” with some trepidation and reservation but came out loving it. If you like the spirit of Cairns, you will almost surely love the movie. It is amazingly put together. I have watched four times in my effort to understand the power and art of movies. Certain shots, certain transitions, the entire organization of the movie expands my sense of cinematic possibilities. I love its Whitmanesque depiction of common people and its deep capturing of the spirit of specific place.

But beyond the form is the subject of the movie. I’ve been reflecting on that a lot because my early manhood was very similar to that of Chris in the movie except he starved to death and I didn’t. Apparently, much of the response to the original book revolved around whether Chris is “heroic” or an arrogant, foolhardy incompetent. I believe this focus on judging a personality misses the main point. Throughout history, many individuals have gone “on the loose”. What is the nature of that experience? Why do people do it? These questions bring up several, independent themes, all of which need to be acknowledged.

The first is the ecstasy of being footloose, of being free/responsible to choose every single action one does throughout the days. Shall I lay in the tent and sleep all day or read a book or climb that mountain or maybe should I head to Alaska for several months of adventure? For all of us who have experienced it, roaming is a profound window into the heart of life, and the movie wonderfully celebrates that exhilaration of freedom.

Second is the nature of food. Probably the most profound development in human history was the change from hunter/gatherers to industrial agriculture. It has altered the landscape, altered the proportions of human life to non-human life, altered our relationship with the land and each other. In one sense, it has made us far more free – a few hours of my labor can translate into enough food to allow me to go roaming in the Grand Canyon for two weeks without thought or worry about starving to death – but in another sense, it means our economic system has got us by our stomachs. For almost all of us, the only way to hold off starvation is to somehow participate in the money flow. Some of us might garden and preserve beans and tomatoes that contribute a meaningful percentage of our diet but very, very few of us can secure our entire diet without money. Alysia raises most of our meat but this involves buying animal feed. This change in our relationship with the productive land is absolutely mind-bending but one most of us unconsciously accept. Chris was consciously exploring just how much of his food he could obtain on his own (and even then, he was still dependent on the economic system that produced his rifle and bullets). Apparently, when high water prevented him from getting back to the economic food supply, he starved.

The third, fourth, and fifth strand sort of snarl together in a way that is hard to untangle. Speaking from personal experience, there is more than the ecstasy of roaming that draws young people (especially men) out into the wild (in many senses of that word). I think part of it is genetic. In a lot of species, the young (especially males) need to leave their home territory and go find a vacant territory. This is a very dangerous time and many die. But just as the parents of every salmon were genetically programmed to go into fresh water and their death in order to mate, so we might be genetically programmed to accept the need to go out in search. Some gene kicks in somewhere in youth and produces some hormone that psychologically insulates the “potential victim” from the paralyzing awareness of imminent death lurking – insulates them with an incredible sense of adventurous invulnerability/immortality that drives parents crazy.

It’s the siren song of the edge. If you go over the edge, you die. But if you hang out along the edge, you just might come upon a place where, with a jump across (such as at the Bering Strait), you will land in a vast, uninhabited territory and you will be the sire of millions of its future inhabitants. The siren song of the edge calls us out onto adventures in which we seek to establish autonomy, confidence, and dominance.

Then there is the universal myth of the hero journey and Joseph Campbell’s interpretation that all of us have within us this psychological/spiritual calling to complete a quest, the goal of which is to find some gift from beyond, unique to us, and bring it back for the enrichment of our people. I reflect back on my roaming days with that perspective.

Couple this with our culture’s lack of puberty rites, initiation, purpose. Getting your driver’s license, graduating from high school/college, being able to drink are psychologically fairly shallow. When does a boy become a man? A sense of manhood doesn’t come; it must be earned, created. Some of our sub-cultures define and support this transition but the mainstream culture does not. I would speculate that it doesn’t (in part) because it doesn’t want autonomous, self-confident men. It wants subservient workers, people who will go along with the system. So the boys age into their twenties and their jobs but without a sense of connection to their life force, without a sense of walking on one’s Own life path.

For at least all these reasons, young people go straying, finding something in that roaming they would otherwise not experience.