Justice For Chris Mccandless In The Movie And Book “Into The Wild”

Justice For Chris The movie “Into The Wild” does justice to the book and to Mr. Chris J. McCandless himself. The movie portrays McCandless as a self-reliant, knowledgeable, and wild runaway who wanted to see the world as it is in its purest form. McCandless knew he didn’t want to be a pampered and treated like a child in a way he wanted to be on his own and know what it’s like to be self-reliant. The way that he plans on doing this was to travel to Alaska and live In the wild.

He wanted to live life without materialistic distractions or family tension and fighting. It is depicted he chooses to leave the chaos behind when he says “The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have endlessly changing hearts and for each day to have a new and different sun.” This feeling that true joy doesn’t come from city life but from new things, people, and sightings. He knows where he wants to go and how he’s going to get there, just not what ways to go or what he will encounter on his way. He shares with those he does encounter some of his travel strategies, for example, he states in his journal in May 1992, “Two years he walks the earth, no phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom”. An extremist, an aesthetic voyager whose home is the road.

This meaning how he knew what he wasn’t going to have, he knew life would not be comfortable or Hakuna Matata. He knew there would be troubles, he knew he wouldn’t have the comforting lavish he once lived with anyone to back him up. In the movie it shows how McCandless was quite proud of himself for being a planned unprepared traveler, he states “When you want something in life, you just gotta reach out and grab”(Penn, 2:07). The movie also shows how he didn’t care about the unplanned accidents, for example, his car breaking down, the moose meat wasting away, and more. None of it was planned but he always figured something else out which ended up benefiting him. His car breaking down and his impatience ended up helping him to meet new people. The moose meat wasting encouraged him to try new things besides meat, he saw each thing in both the movie and book as purposeful and not just accidents.

He knew things wouldn’t go his way but he didn’t care he knew the dangers and still bravely walked into the wild. Being a self-reliant person is a huge part of the book, movie, and Chris’s life in general. In the movie, it is very clear that McCandless has more than his fair share of supplies, with clothes, hunting tools, fire starter supply, and much more than it looks in that small backpack of his. However, as he did have a lot of supplies those he rode and hitchhiked with knew that it would not be enough to take care of himself so far into the wild as he had hoped to go into. It is stated at the beginning of the book that all Chris had was “ten-pound bag of rice. His gear seemed exceedingly minimal for the harsh conditions of the interior”(5), but he didn’t care he just wanted to know that he could do things on his own and see the world in his hopeful eyes, not the consistent drama and fake smiles he was taught and shown throughout his childhood.

“During that final year in Atlanta, Chris had lived off campus in a monkish room furnished with little more than a thin mattress on the floor, milk crates, and a table. He kept it as orderly and spotless as a military barracks. And he didn’t have a phone, so Walt and Billie had no way of calling him”(22). This quote shows how much McCandless didn’t care about having communication with his parents whatsoever, he wanted to live with nothing distracting him that was from his past. It’s also important when it comes to being self-reliant because it brings up how he was lived in a “monkish” room, monks lived off in their own kind of a world apart from others to focus on their meditation and well being. Chris not only knew what he was doing, but he wanted to make sure no one helped in a huge way that would completely destroy all his self-reliant work that had already done because he was a free runaway boy looking how to grow up and be a man.

McCandless was initially viewed as a runaway. He left his parents to get away from their severe dysfunctional chaos and superficial views. He made a new definition for runaways, he made it a point to not just run away from his family but also from himself by changing his name, attitude, outlook, and his overall hope for his future. When graduating from college he knew he would not be headed into employment right away. His plan was to leave and see the world as he chose to and not as everyone he was around tried to make it seem. He wanted to do something that was spontaneous and wild, which he got. He knew people would see him as a crazy runaway but he didn’t care, he wanted to make sure he would be able to be a self-reliant person and do spontaneous things no one would have thought he would have done. In the movie it shows this, it shows how much he just wants to get away from it all and that his memories of his past are bad except for his sister.

In both, the movie and book Chris meets an older man named Mr.Franz, a man who doesn’t get out anymore because of the death of his wife and son. When he encounters the runaway he tells him what he has gone through and Chris says “make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservation, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future”(56). This being a strong part of how Chris was before he left really shows how he has changed throughout his time of being a runaway.

People who have heard of Chris’s story say he could have run away to a different state and gotten a good job and settled down, however that’s exactly what Chris was running away from. When watching ‘Into The Wild’ people could say that it was awful and that in no way did it do justice to Chris’s wellbeing as a person, that it made him look even more like a moron than the book did. However, that is wrong because it shows his bravery and courageousness in the movie. It explains that yeah he should have read the fine print when reading his berry book but that you still feel bad for him and feel like there could have been another way. It shows how he was smiling as he took his last breath meaning that he felt fulfilled when he passed on. The book mentions how much he struggled when hunting food, and during his last days, and some more stupid stuff that he did along the way.

Even Though, the book mentions his stupidity the movie fights back and is a way of showing that he was way smarter than the book makes him seem, it tugs at your heartstrings when it shows his father abusing his mother in front of his sister and him, and how he grabs his sister to protect her you feel bad for him and not the parents, that’s why he says “Some people feel like they don’t deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past”(Penn,1:16). In the end, one of the reasons for him running away was because he didn’t feel loved or accepted into his family. In the book it mentions how his parents fought and that there was abuse, however, it explains more bad about what Chris had done like leaving the Datsun and not being patient or not taking anything that people were giving to him. For one example in the book, it says “Gallien offered to drive Alex all the way to Anchorage, buy him some decent gear then drive him back to wherever he wanted to go, but he said no thanks anyways”(6).

In the movie, it’s as if it is explaining more of why he did what he did and that it was for good reasons and not purely out of pride and arrogance. His life was an untimely, and unexpected demise that no one thought would happen to a smart and quiet man like Chris McCandless. He spent twenty-four years being in a place he would come to find out, he never wanted to be in. He knew it wouldn’t be safe staying in one play, he felt he was a boy needing to become a man, and was a city slave who wanted to be a free bird. The book and the movie are based on the same person, and all actions from the book occurred in the movie, however, the movie gave Chris a whole new platform and as it is too late to applaud Chris for his admiration we can definitely thank him for opening people’s eyes to new and adventurous things.

People saw him as a stupid moron, an idiot that didn’t know what he was doing, and should never have been out in the bush, while others love him so much because they felt able to try new things because of his story. Chris J. McCandless did not see himself as anyone important, he didn’t ask for anyone to judge him, follow him, or do anything for that matter, he just wanted a self-reliant life all to himself, the one thought he had in his mind and was determined to overcome and see was the wild and Into The Wild he went and achieved even in death.