The book also tells a lot of early stories about McCandless: his childhood, when he showed a lot of talent in various areas, but lacked the respect for authority, the stick-to-itiveness, and the patience to hone any given skill. His adventures in activism in high school, including bringing a homeless man to live in his parents’ travel trailer. His crazed career as the leader of the cross-country track team, leading his squad off into uncharted territory. His college life, including his stint at the school paper, where he wrote intense, ranting editorials on a wide variety of subjects. The film leaves all this out, I suspect because it’s irrelevant to how McCandless would tell his own story. No one wants to think that their personality was formed in childhood, and that the choices they make as adults might be predictable continuations of behaviors from grade school. Krakauer draws a clear line from McCandless’ earliest days through to his death; Penn’s movie, on the other hand, practically has him springing fully formed from the head of Zeus after college, with no past and a bright future.
That said, there are a great many specific parallels between the book and the film. The film necessarily dramatizes a lot of scenes between McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) and his acquaintances along the road, but much of the material specifically involving McCandless’ life between his college graduation and his death is placed onscreen about as it appears in the book. The tone is different, but the facts are more or less the same, particularly in segments like the finding of the bus, the killing of the moose, McCandless’ odd jobs, and his relationships with Ron Franz (played by Hal Holbrook, in an Oscar-nominated turn) and Jan Burres (Catherine Keener). It’s worth noting, though, that Tracy (Kristen Stewart), the raw young camp singer who tries to seduce McCandless in the film, barely gets a mention in the book. Instead, Krakauer theorizes at some length about McCandless’ sexuality and his beliefs on chastity and asceticism.
The book also includes a lot of darker material that Penn omits, like the segment where Krakauer accompanies McCandless’ parents on a trip out to the bus where their son died, to look around and to leave a survival kit for any future inhabitants. Or the segment where Franz, depressed after McCandless’ death, returns to heavy drinking and declares himself an atheist. It throws in some fairly depressing information about an easily accessible escape route that McCandless might have used to escape the wilderness area where he got trapped. And it draws some very pointed lines between the revelations about his father’s infidelities, and his refusal to stay in contact with his family. The film presents this more as airy independence and a condemnation of their consumerist lifestyle, but in this area in particular, Krakauer paints McCandless as a sullen, brooding, grudge-holding, judgemental boy, very unlike the merry wanderer of the film.
In fact, the book takes a noticeably dimmer view of McCandless in general. While Krakauer’s whole “I’m just like McCandless myself” segment certainly implies a lot of sympathy for him, he doesn’t hesitate to judge him, either, and he highlights points where McCandless was arrogant, insensitive, flippant, and dismissive—where he tells his sister Carine that their worried parents are “fucking nuts” and “a bunch of imbeciles,” or responds to the question of whether he has a hunting license with “Hell, no. How I feed myself is none of the government’s business. Fuck their stupid rules.” Contrast this abrasiveness with the scene in the film where he faces off against a park ranger about the question of boating down the Colorado River, and is met with indifference, contempt, and senseless regulations that would put him on a four-year waiting list for the trip. Rather than ranting about fucking the government’s stupid rules, McCandless seems to find the red tape hilarious, and of course he does what he wants anyway, and no harm comes from it. (There’s no parallel to this scene in the book, nor to the follow-up where, while boating and dodging the authorities, he meets the free-spirited Europeans out on the riverbank.)
This, no doubt, is where a good part of the accusations about Penn deifying McCandless come from. In the book, he’s impatient, selfish, and caught up in a dream of idealism that has him reading Walt Whitman and writing ecstatic, enthused commentary in the margins. In the film, he’s a gentler soul, cheerful and friendly, wandering the earth like Caine from Kung Fu and dispensing wisdom that doesn’t necessarily help people, but still makes him seem a bit like Buddha. There’s a sort of wry, munficient humor to just about everything he does. And that idealization really bugs some people. But here’s the thing: I think that’s a perfectly valid interpretation, because Penn isn’t setting out to create a documentary. He’s telling McCandless’ story from McCandless’ perspective, and in McCandless’ eyes, of course he’s a warm and happy hero. He’s out living the dream of freedom. The people who stand in his way really are bad guys. Cities, as seen through his eyes and Penn’s lens, are genuinely oppressive, crazy, dirty, dangerous places. Even the all-Eddie Vedder soundtrack (which drove some people of my acquaintance nuts, even people who otherwise really loved the film) strikes me as fitting. It’s the music playing in McCandless’ head: raw, young, jangly, and just a bit self-aggrandizing.
But it’s worth comparing the film as a whole—the joyous “what a great big ol’ world I’m living in” attitude that Penn credits to McCandless—with McCandless’ actual voice, as seen in the book’s diary and letter excerpts. My biggest gripe with the book is that there aren’t nearly enough of these; they’re more telling than anything else Krakauer runs across, and they say volumes compared with all Penn’s idealizing and Krakauer’s theorizing. For instance, there’s the way McCandless refers to himself, in the third person, by his “road name,” Alexander Supertramp. And the way he sees every setback as a monumental disaster and every success as a massive triumph. He comes across as impossibly young and naïve in these excerpts, which puts a very different spin on his life than the one either the book or the film is selling as a whole. For instance, this passage from his diary, written as McCandless was canoeing around a series of canals in Mexico, expecting (based on no information, just desire) that they’d take him down to the sea:
All hopes collapsed! The canal does not reach the ocean but merely peters out into a vast swamp. Alex is utterly confounded. Decides he must be close to ocean and elects to try and work way through swamp to sea. Alex becomes progressively lost to point where he must push canoe through reeds and drag it through mud. All is in despair. Finds some dry ground to camp in swamp at sundown. Next day, 12/10, Alex resumes quest for an opening to the sea, but only becomes more confused, traveling in circles. Completely demoralized and frustrated he lays in his canoe at day’s end and weeps.
Instead of giving us this voice—the easily frustrated kid who just assumes everything will work out, and draws a blank when it doesn’t, the film gives us the voice of his sister Carine (played by Jena Malone), who narrates his story with a dreamy melancholy that further idealizes him. She describes his flaws, but her longing tone implies that she holds him up as a sort of idol at the same time. All of which is particularly odd, since his sister Carine isn’t one of the book’s major interviewees. Krakauer gets her perspective, and she describes her grief over her brother, but she knew little about his adventures or what he was up to; while he described himself in letters as incredibly close to her, he shut her out of his life when he shut out their parents, and she was as baffled and lost as anyone.
Then again, perhaps this is just more life from McCandless’ perspective: Of course he’d see his little sister as admiring and missing him. Penn sticks to his perspective in other ways, too, inventing a great deal of dialogue and interactions where Krakauer only has second-hand reportage that McCandless was in this place or that. Penn presents various theories of Krakauer’s as fact, including the cause of McCandless’ death: Where the book consciously takes a journalistic step back and mulls over theories and possibilities, raising the carefully detailed hypothesis that he didn’t starve to death, he accidentally poisoned himself by eating the wrong plant, the film accepts that idea as truth, and puts us right there in the bus with him as he figures out his fatal mistake. Similarly, Krakauer sadly muses that starvation is a terrible way to die, but adds, “Some people who have been brought back from the far edge of starvation, though, report that near the end the hunger vanishes, the terrible pain dissolves, and the suffering is replaced by a sublime euphoria, a sense of calm accompanied by transcendent mental clarity. It would be nice to think McCandless experienced a similar rapture.” Penn just shows us the rapture as he’d like to think McCandless experienced it: bright lights and drifting euphoria, a death as beautiful and immaculate as his life.
And in the end, it’s pretty much inevitable that the Chris McCandless of the film is going to come across as a more sympathetic figure than the one in the book. Part of that is the choices Penn makes, to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. But it’s also because the viewers are right there with McCandless all the way. There’s a big difference between being told that he believed certain things, and seeing a beaming young man living out his dreams. And there’s a big difference between considering why someone might have died, and looking into the panic-stricken eyes of his cinematic proxy. Some people have accused Penn of glossing over the truth, turning McCandless into Jesus Jr., and overromanticizing the whole story. I think he’s just showing us McCandless as McCandless might have seen himself, and there’s nothing particularly wrong with that.
Next time on Book Vs. Film:
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