Into the Wild

This movie has affected me in a way I was unprepared for. I have never been physically moved to tears by anything other than the time I ran over someone's kitten and I could have probably saved it, but I was afraid to reverse the car back to check on it. Ya, I'm walking a fine line between being a horrible person and a living saint.

The thing this movie is teaching is so much more than what it realizes. It's a rare film that creates such a layered metaphor it becomes a double helix, seen in profile. One of the helixes is the simple story, the timeless classic tale of a young man who ventures off into the wild. Before you openly mock Emile Hirsch's character, you should know he belongs to the ranks of men who ventured off on epic journeys with almost no preparation; a group that includes Charles Darwin, Andy Warhol (read the biography if you think I'm just being a dick), and the possibly fictional Jesus. He wants to get away. He wants to escape what he's stuck in. Chris Candless had a particularly difficult personal life, and came from a middle class family.

The second helix is the essential part of this movie that Sean Penn has succeeded in capturing: it's wrong to want to isolate yourself. It's inconsiderate. To abandon society because you don't like it is wrong for the same reason ants wither up and die when they're outside the ant-hill. Emile said it best at the end of the movie: happiness means nothing if it's not shared. I am unapologetic about this. If you have the desire to fuck off to Alaska, you make sure you're coming back.

There isn't a ton of happiness in a lot of places. To rob your family, to rob your friends of the unique ideas and concepts contained in your brain is a disgusting crime. To isolate yourself from society is a horrific crime, a slap in the face against every single human being who could benefit from your singular opinions and conclusions. I have as little respect for Chris Candless as I do for suicides. There's no such thing as a reason to kill yourself, with the possible exception of inevitable death caused by sickness.

The really interesting parts of this movie are when the Helixes collide. When the Sine curves overlap, you're in a zone where the metaphor is no longer a flashback, you're at the very last scene of the movie where the tree falls in the forest. The tree is the most beautiful, symmetrical fir you've ever seen. It's had a good summer, wide rings and strong, well covered branches. It's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen grow from the ground, and one strong wind topples it. When those two curves hit each other, the sad fact that people need to leave violently clashes with the equally difficult fact that people need to share.

And you were the only one to see it. You didn't bring anyone with you to share it. It never happened. You wasted your life, Chris Candless. You were a smart guy, and you deprived society of an intelligent mind, something we are lacking. Isolationists think they're fixing their own problems by leaving society, but all they're doing is losing the vital social interaction that creates a human, and at the same time, contributing to a society that is arguably getting out of hand.

So fuck you, hermits. Read my lips: fuck you. I give you ironic permission to end your lives so you may never produce children that insist on making life worse by being selfish. Fuck you with a rake.


*note: I noticed upon editing that I subconsciously typed "christ" instead of "christ" each time

*note: I noticed after my last note that I did it in my note too. I assure you I am still an atheist, albeit an obviously Freudian one.