SPOILER WARNING: Book Vs. Film is a column comparing books to the film adaptations they spawn, often discussing them on a plot-point-by-plot-point basis. This column is meant largely for people who’ve already been through one version, and want to know how the other compares. As a result, major, specific spoilers for both versions abound, often including dissection of how they end. Proceed with appropriate caution.
• Book: Into The Wild, Jon Krakauer, 1996
• Film: Into The Wild, adapted and directed by Sean Penn, 2007
I missed Into The Wild during its initial theatrical run in September 2007, and didn’t catch it until the awards-bid screeners started crossing our desks in November. Which left a full two months for the film’s supporters and haters to argue their cases at me. And pretty early on, I got the impression that it was one of those films, the polarizing kind that people either loved or hated, but rarely shrugged off. Actually seeing the film didn’t change that dynamic at all; the only difference was, once I fell into the “loved it” camp, I had to help defend it from the haters. The last real argument I got into about a film at a party was over this one: Whether it was unbearably twee (No!), whether it was annoyingly shrill (No!), whether it disingenuously lionized its subject, Chris McCandless. (Nnnnn… um, well…)
According to the book, by travel/adventure writer Jon Krakauer, McCandless himself was a highly polarizing subject. For those not familiar with the story: Chris McCandless was a nice suburban kid, reportedly charismatic and outgoing. He was also an idealist and a bit of a fanatic. Immediately after college, he cut ties with his parents, donated his $25,000 grad-school fund to Oxfam, and started wandering the country, working short-time jobs, making friends, and living rough or with whoever took him in. Eventually, he worked his way up to Alaska, with a dream of living off the land and off the map. Months later, his starved body was found in a bus in the Alaska wilderness. He weighed 62 pounds. Much like Timothy Treadwell, subject of Werner Herzog’s fascinating 2005 documentary Grizzly Man, McCandless shunned society and left it behind, and subsequently fell victim to his own convictions out in the wilderness.
When Krakauer first wrote an article about McCandless for Outside magazine, the responses poured in—half fascinated, half vitriolic. Some people sympathized with this kid whom they didn’t know. Others fell over themselves to deride and castigate him at length for his foolishness, his immaturity, his “dumbassedness.” So it’s no real wonder that the film would provoke a similar response—people who saw McCandless as a foolish twerp who got what he deserved naturally aren’t going to appreciate the way writer-director Sean Penn revels in his life and shows events from his viewpoint, framing him as an almost Christ-like shining hero. Viewers with some sympathy for McCandless’ anti-establishment, pro-freedom, pro-independence beliefs, on the other hand, were predisposed to like the film.
But among all the people I’ve heard out on whether Into The Wild is a great film or a terrible one, a fairly common pattern has emerged: An awful lot of the people who absolutely hated the film had previously read—and in many cases loved—the book. And I suspect that the difference between Krakauer’s approach and Penn’s is a large part of what sparks all the vehemence.
I think it comes down to this, for the most part: Krakauer’s book is an examination of McCandless’ life and death. Penn’s movie is an enthusiastic celebration of it.
Krakauer’s book is something between a journalistic investigation and a personal essay on a topic that interests him, and the style varies a lot, with extremely accessible newspapery prose one minute, and show-offy vocabulary stretches like “contumacious” and “analysand” the next. It’s basically McCandless’ life story, as near as he can get it, based on a combination of interviews, McCandless’ letters and diaries, guesswork, deduction, investigative legwork, and sometimes a combination of all of the above. He fills in the blanks with personal musings, revelations, memories, and environmental descriptions. Often he jumps between methods based on what he has to work with at a given moment, producing mismatched segments like this one:
McCandless had tried to disguise the fact that he was a drifter living out of a backpack: He told his fellow employees that he lived across the river in Laughlin. Whenever they offered him a ride home after work, he made excuses and politely declined. In fact, during his first several weeks in Bullhead, McCandless camped out in the desert at the edge of town; then he started squatting in a vacant mobile home. The latter arrangement, he explained in a letter to Jan Burres, “came about this way:”
One morning I was shaving in a restroom when an old man came in, and observing me, asked me if I was “sleeping out.” I told him yes, and it turned out that he had this old trailer I could stay in for free. The only problem is that he doesn’t really own it. Some absentee owners are merely letting him live on their land here, in another little trailer he stays in. So I kind of have to keep things toned down and stay out of sight, because he isn’t supposed to have anybody over here. It’s really quite a good deal, though, for the inside of the trailer is nice, it’s a house trailer, furnished, with some of the electric sockets working and a lot of living space. The only drawback is this old guy, whose name is Charlie, is something of a lunatic and it’s rather difficult to get along with him sometimes.
Charlie still lives at the same address, in a small teardrop-shaped camping trailer sheathed in rust-pocked tin, without plumbing or electricity, tucked behind the much larger blue-and-white mobile home where McCandless slept. Denuded mountains are visible to the west, towering sternly above the rooftops of adjacent double-wides. A baby-blue Ford Torino rests on blocks in the unkempt yard, weeds sprouting from its engine compartment. The ammonia reek of human urine rises from a nearby oleander hedge.
“Chris? Chris?” Charlie barks, scanning porous memory banks. “Oh yeah, him. Yeah, yeah, I remember him, sure.” Charlie, dressed in a sweatshirt and khaki work pants, is a frail, nervous man with rheumy eyes and a growth of white stubble across his chin. By his recollection, McCandless stayed in the trailer about a month.
“Nice guy, yeah. Pretty nice guy,” Charlie reports. “Didn’t like to be around too many people, though. Temperamental. He meant good, but I think he had a lot of complexes—know what I’m saying? Liked to read books by that Alaska guy, Jack London. Never said much. He’d get moody, wouldn’t like to be bothered. Seemed like a kid who was looking for something, looking for something, just didn’t know what it was. I was like that once. But then I realized what I was looking for: Money! Ha! Ha hyah, hooh boy!
“But like I was saying, Alaska—yeah, he talked about going to Alaska. Maybe to find whatever it was he was looking for. Nice guy, seemed like one anyway. Had a lot of complexes sometimes, though. Had ’em bad. When he left, was around Christmas, I think. He gave me fifty bucks and a pack of cigarettes for lettin’ him stay here. Thought that was mighty decent of him.”
Sometimes the blend works. Sometimes it seems like Krakauer is just padding, especially when he goes off into page-long descriptions of the Alaskan wilderness, or when he devotes a long chapter to other survivalists and fanatics who “marched off into the Alaskan wilds over the years, never to reappear.” It’s generally interesting stuff, but it feels like a rabbit trail.
An even more difficult segment comes later, when Krakauer heads off into a major diversion (which, like the other-fanatics bit, naturally isn’t reflected in the film): He stops talking about McCandless directly, and starts talking about himself instead. Specifically, he sets out to illustrate his belief that McCandless wasn’t suicidal, or honestly planning to die in the wilderness. Some people have suggested otherwise, largely because McCandless’ last letters before he headed into the wild say things like “If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hear from me again…” Krakauer thinks these were natural and entirely practical misgivings, but that McCandless had every intention of coming back alive. And as proof, Krakauer offers a lengthy story from his own life, in which, as a young man, he set out to the Alaskan wilderness to climb a forbidding mountain known as the Devil's Thumb. He made a lot of mistakes, hit a series of staggering setbacks, and ran up against his own mortality, but he emphasizes that he was never out to kill himself: He was trying to test himself, and to prove a point.
That particular multi-chapter story is sprawling and closely detailed, and in any other context, it would probably be fascinating, but here, it just seems like a vast, self-centered, self-serving side trip, especially when Krakauer goes out of his way to draw personal parallels between McCandless and himself, and set them up almost as alter egos. I understand what Krakauer is trying to do—he’s illustrating, personally and intimately, what sort of mentality would drive a young person to McCandless’ extremes of behavior. Since he can’t fully get into McCandless’ head, he offers up himself as a stand-in. It’s an understandable byway, and I think it’s well-intentioned enough. At the same time, journalistic stories that take the focus off the subject and put it on the writer are always a little suspect, especially when the subject isn’t around to call bullshit. Does Krakauer really understand McCandless so very much better than anyone else? Well, who’s going to be able to deny him?
At any rate. That’s the book in a nutshell: McCandless from Krakauer’s fractured perspective, as seen through the refracting lens of a whole bunch of different voices. Whereas the movie attempts to present the same story from one perspective: McCandless’.
This means setting aside a lot of the interesting data that Krakauer digs up, things McCandless didn’t know, and which thus have no place in Penn’s version of the story. For instance, the question of why that bus was sitting out in the wilderness. (The segment on the history of the bus alone would have made the book worth reading for me.) Or what ultimately happened to McCandless’ abandoned car, which was claimed by the local park service and used for undercover drug sting operations for the next three years.
- Comments