‘’Into the wild’’ is an adventure biographical drama about Christopher McCandless, an American nomadic adventurer who, after graduating from university, developed a passion for hitchhiking. In an effort to escape the expectations and rules of the society he lived in, he fled to the Alaskan bush to try to live by himself off the land. Sadly, he was found dead by starvation in his camp. In between his belongings, his diary documenting his journeys was found. The film was directed by Sean Penn as an adaptation of the 1996 non-fiction book of the same name written by Jon Krakauer.
The cinematic experience describes nature as a pure force that really has no mercy, far apart from caricatured representations. The film pursues a connection between its sublime beauty and the human experience in ``wild´´ ecosystems. The film shows us captivating scenes of Northamerican wild environments and the spiritual connection that the main character develops with them.
I personally think, depending on the reading of it, that it can have some short critique about the dualism between human and nature, considering life in nature as something exotic or rather alien to the cosmopolitan Western life. Showing us that, maybe a lifestyle far away from the expectations of rational society, may make us happier, and becoming re-enchanted with the wonders of nature it’s important to awaken our irrational and spiritual worship towards nature. The downside about this portrayal is that, portraying this lifestyle as something exotic, is a bit cosmopolitan-centered, as even inside the West, there are a lot of people that live in ``true connection´´ with nature and live off it not as ‘’tourists’’, but rather as their traditional way of life.
The perspective of this movie is more of an anthropocentric one, as it shows nature’s conception of Westerner humans and in some occasions nature is shown more like some sort of tourist attraction of surface level spiritual experience, rather than what it actually is, which is a set of linked environmental phenomenons and complex ecological structures that work together to auto sustain themselves without any sense of will.
This can raise the debate about humans being separated from nature, and conceiving it as an inhabitable spectacle which can only be inhabited by ‘’uncivilized’’ people that are outsiders to Western society, when, in reality, we are part of nature, like Andy Goldsworthy said: “We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we've lost our connection to ourselves.”
Some of the scenes of the movie do very well in showing us the grandiosity of nature compared to the small existence of the human being in a very Romanticist-like way, but i think they don't achieve to bring us closer to it, but ratherinvite us to spectate it from a distance far from its “dangers”, just keeping a “sublime-gaze“ of it. This is done through very long and wide shots about the scenery.
The problem about placing a division line in between civilization and society, and representing it as an escape for the civilized subject, is that they get placed into independent perception realms in which we forget the correlation in between them that is so crucial for our obtention of resources and the environmental consequences of our acts inside or outside of civilization. Apart from this, the conception of “pristine nature“ as something far away from society is very inaccurate and ethnocentric, as society does not mean big institutions or cities, but rather communities of people in a certain location, independent of complex social structures.
Some other critiques about this movie can be based on the masculinization of nature as a place for the white male to test himself, but I think this was not intentional but rather an outcome of the original history and the general Westerner ignorance about nature, seeing it as an element separate from us that needs to be conquered and tamed by us.
In conclusion I think this film does extremely well in telling the history of a subject overwhelmed by Western society's expectations and a naive conception of lifestyles that lead him to a very tragic end throughout a very moving and relatable story telling. Also, in my personal experience, it developed the first steps to gain consciousness and appreciation about nature through a spiritual connection to it.
On the other hand, this portrayal of nature inevitably contributes to the dichotomy between humans and nature and the conception of an enmity between two elements that are not isolated from each other, but are rather cohesive.
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