Sean Penn's "Into The Wild" (2007)

IN the spring of 1992, after vagabonding around the country for two years, Christopher McCandless, a 24-year-old Virginian and Emory graduate, hitchhiked to Alaska and set off into the wilderness with little more than a .22-caliber rifle and a 10-pound sack of rice. Not far from the Teklanika River, he set up camp in an abandoned International Harvester bus, a 1940s relic of the Fairbanks City Transit System. He lived there for four months, from late April to late August, before finally starving to death. When his body was discovered in September, he weighed only 67 pounds.

Exactly what happened is something of a mystery. Some Alaskans believe that Mr. McCandless was a hopeless tenderfoot with no business being alone in the wild. Others speculate that Mr. McCandless, who had burned or given away all his money, cut himself off from his family and renamed himself Alexander Supertramp, was mentally unbalanced.

Jon Krakauer, in his best-selling book about Mr. McCandless, “Into the Wild,” argues that he had sufficient skills to survive but might have inadvertently poisoned himself by eating the seeds of the wild potato plant. Mr. Krakauer’s book also suggests that, far from being deranged, Mr. McCandless was a hero in the tradition of Jack London and Thoreau: a solitary quester, an explorer of his own interior landscape, in search of a more authentic relation to the natural world.

The Krakauer view has prevailed among a small band of pilgrims who over the years have visited the bus and made it an informal shrine, keeping everything there much as Mr. McCandless left it and adding their own written tributes. The place, 22 miles from the nearest road, is apt to become a full-fledged tourist attraction after the opening next week of “Into the Wild,” a deeply affecting movie version of the Krakauer book, with cinematography so beautiful it makes the Alaskan landscape seem seductively otherworldy.

The movie was written and directed, and even partly filmed, by Sean Penn, who invested the project with some of the same testy singleness of purpose he has recently brought to his political activism, his reporting stints in Iran and Iraq, his jeep tour of Venezuela with Hugo Chávez. That Hollywood might not be wild for a movie about a guy who slowly turns himself into a cadaver did not deter Mr. Penn for an instant.

Read the full article in The New York Times here.

Video Clips:

Click Here – Ultimate Freedom

Click Here – Things, Things, Things

Click Here – Where Are Your Mom and Dad

Click Here – Society

Click Here – I’m Supertramp

Click Here – Do You Wan’t to do Something Together?

Click Here – Moving On

Click Here – I’m Gonna Take Stock In That

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