Into The Wild: Romanticizing Nature in Modern Context

Into The Wild: The Folly of Romanticizing the Natural World in a Modern Context

Nature has long been viewed as an escape, a way to alleviate yourself from the burden of society. Henry David Thoreau, in his seminal work Walden (1854), established a new American tradition for idealizing and interacting with nature, which he portrays as an antidote to modern ills. Sean Penn in his 2007 film adaptation of the John Krakauer nonfiction book, Into the Wild (1996), subverts this notion. While the main subject, Christopher McCandless, is enamored with the Thoreauvian archetype of nature as an escape and antidote to modern ills, he ultimately dies in his pursuit of that Thoreauvian ideal. In the final scene, two years after Chris moved away from home and traveled to the Alaskan Frontier in search of existential meaning, he dies in a bus — a symbol of the remnants of a decaying and unavoidable modern society. In his dying moments, Chris scribbles into his notebook the final words, “Happiness only real when shared.” By using Thoreau as a tool to better understand Chris’s philosophical orientation, this paper will explore Chris’s use of nature as a reprieve from modern society and, finally, reveal the inescapability of that modern society — even in the most remote reaches of Alaska.

Chris was the product of an upper-middle-class childhood in what he thought was the idyllic American family. However, that worldview was shattered when he discovered that much of his childhood was built on a lie. In the film, Chris’s sister, Carine, narrates that “their fraudulent marriage and our father’s denial of this other son was, for Chris, a murder of every day’s truth…these revelations…made his entire childhood seem like fiction” (00:54:20 and 00:54:34). Chris’s father had already been married to and had a child with another woman by the time Chris was born. As Chris discovered this truth, his conception of the ideal familial life shattered, and in response, he turned to literature for answers on how to pick up the pieces and move forward. Once again, Carine narrates, “He risked…a relentlessly lonely path, but found company in the characters of the books he loved. From writers like…Thoreau” (0:20:25 - 0:21:01). As his previous world view collapses, Chris immerses himself into the pages of Thoreau’s Walden — the 19th century reflection of living self-sustainably in nature — and begins to pivot. Chris adopts a world view that views nature as an antidote to the societal ills that propel him away from home and towards Alaska — what Chris views as the last place uncontaminated by modern society, and where he will find his Walden.

Sean Penn uses the teachings from Thoreau’s seminal work, Walden, to better understand Chris’s philosophical direction. In Walden, Thoreau refers to truth as an amorphous property existing within the individual and only to be discovered through a test of one's natural instincts within nature, or the wild. Following the discovery of his family’s lies and his escape from home, Chris states his need for this Thoreavian truth, explaining to fellow travellers that, “I don’t need money, it makes people cautious…I’ll paraphrase Thoreau here. Rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness, give me truth” (0:30:00 - 0:30:00). This is the first moment in the film in which Chris explicitly states his motivation: the pursuit of truth. Truth, that nebulous term Chris freely and loosely uses, can be directly tied to the writings of Thoreau.

To better understand this shift in Chris’s worldview, it is important to examine the mentioned Walden — Thoreau’s memoir that helped shape Chris’s perspective — and the concept of truth. In this memoir, Thoreau describes his motivations for leaving the 19th-century city life of Concord, Massachusetts, in favor of the remote, dense forests of the nearby Walden Pond. When there, he reflects:

“But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed… It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before” (Walden 8).

Thoreau argues that mistaking labor as a necessity for life has become the common fate of the individual. Instead of living life by their own terms, the individual has been mechanized by society and used as a tool for production, recognizing what Charles A. Madison describes in his essay as, “the economic fact that most men could not provide for their daily needs without dissipating the better part of themselves” (Madison 110). To remedy this condition of society, Thoreau decided to drink the tonic of wilderness, explaining: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Walden 68). Thoreau’s decision to abandon society was rooted in a deep conviction that his idea of truth can be found in nature. When one strips away the unnecessary distractions of life, that truth, that better part of man, is revealed — free of material attachment and societal constraints. This idealised interaction with nature resonated with Chris, who not only sought an immaterial existence, but was determined to live self-reliantly in the Alaskan wild, and to live the Truth that Therou describes.

In the movie, Chris envisions Alaska as his truth, the same way Thoreau envisions the forests of Concord in his book, Walden. By escaping to Alaska, Chris separates himself from civilization and enters the new frontier akin to Thoreau’s Walden Pond. In this sense, Alaska can be viewed as a symbol that represents Thoreau’s Truth and an escape from modernity into a timeless freedom. Once there, Chris describes his journey as, “The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. No longer to be poisoned by civilization, he flees. And walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild” (0:11:25 - 0:13:24). Chris believes that his Thoreauvian Truth, or spiritual revolution, can be found in the remote reaches of Alaska. By separating himself from the material comforts and false necessities of modern society, as he describes it, Chris attempts to escape what Thoreau called the “fool’s life.” Possessed by this Thoreavian pursuit, Chris fatally overlooks the brutal realities of Alaska’s wilderness — the very qualities that earned it the name the Last Frontier — revealing the naiveté and folly of his pursuit.

Alaska can be described in pop culture as “the Last Frontier” for its abundant wildlife and terrain, an environment untamed and untouched by modern society. It represents the only unexplored area in America, and as Roxanne Willis puts it, “the last American space where true nature could be found” (Willis 22). The Last Frontier is the one place in America that is free of human corruption, and in Thoreauvian terms, the last place one can live deliberately and free of distraction. But the reason for Alaska’s desolation is what Chris had mistakenly ignored. When looking at the reports of individuals who attempted to replicate Chris’s adventure, it is stated that “two people have died trying to do so” and there have been “15 bus-related search and rescue operations” (Sophie Williams). In the blur of inspiration, Chris failed to recognize the danger of venturing into the Alaskan bush, blinded by his idealism and pursuit of Truth, and foreshadowing his own demise. Instead of arriving meticulously prepared for his adventure, Chris entered the wilderness in haste, equipped only with a 10-pound bag of rice, a plant identification book, a camera, a .22 caliber rifle, and an eagerness to test himself in the most difficult of terrains. Ultimately, Chris’s overzealous approach to his spiritual revolution led to his death.

The difficulties of life in the Last Frontier are displayed through Chris’s continuous struggle in Alaska. From the first moment he arrived to his last breath, Chris’s attempt to live the self-sustainable Thoreauvian lifestyle was met with serious challenges. In one of the most pivotal scenes of the movie, Chris is seen accidentally spoiling the moose he had miraculously managed to kill, further revealing his shortcomings in the wild. More significantly, as he attempts to prepare this spoiled moose-meat, he is seen recalling traumatic moments from his childhood, saying to himself, “Shut up Carine! You hear me? You hear me, woman?” (1:28:11 - 1:28:24). As Chris is met with tragedy he begins to regress and relive traumatic memories. Instead of graduating from the societal ills that poisoned his childhood, Chris remains haunted and trapped by them. This inability to break from societal constraints and withstand the harsh environment of Alaska reveals another truth — one that underscores Chris’s ultimate shortcoming in attaining Thoreau’s ideal of Truth.

The final moments of the film are poignantly depicted as Chris dies in a discarded bus — a symbol that represents the remnants of an abandoned society and Chris’s inability to reach that Walden Truth. Despite Chris’s relentless efforts to detach himself from this society, the inescapability of the modern condition remains, as seen in the symbol of the bus, haunting Chris. The symbol of the bus also served as his shelter, his comfort in society, but it also proved his ruin and grave. Despite his escape into the wilderness, Chris was never able to truly break away from society. The broken bus further represents man’s or woman’s inability to fully conquer nature, which remains an untamable object in the story — the folly of Thoreau’s truth conception. Expanding on this idea in his essay, Steve Vanderheiden states, “Once denatured, social man cannot return to the state of nature, or wholly depend upon a morality founded upon natural pity or compassion” (Vanderheiden 176). Vanderheiden argues that once humans are shaped by society and all of its superficialities, the ability to return to their more primitive nature is lost, as seen in Chris’s deliberate isolation. In his final moments, Chris scribbles into his journal, “Happiness only real when shared.” Modern humanity has become so detached from its natural instincts that even the necessity for human interaction is forgotten. In the end, Chris’s attempt at using a 19th-century philosophical world view of nature’s remediating properties to transcend modern ills ultimately cost him his life and was revealed to be a hollow and fatal pursuit.

Throughout the film, Sean Penn depicts Christopher McCandless as having a youthful idealism encapsulated by his reading of Henry David Thoreau’s book, Walden. Ultimately, Chris’s fascination with the teachings of 19th-century Thoreau led him across the country and into the Alaskan frontier, where he met his tragic fate. The resulting death in his pursuit of that Thoreauvian Truth, which he believed would antidote the poison of modern civilization, reveals our tragic failure as a society. As Chris breathed his last breath in that abandoned bus, it illuminated our inability to escape our own creation of modernity. We are now so far removed from the possibility of committing to that Thoreavian pursuit that we have constructed our own unavoidable barrier in the name of innovation.