The story of the three children of the Anglo-Australian family, who lived in a house in the woods in the province of Chieti and were forced to leave their home to move to an educational community, where they will remain with their mother for a period of observation, immediately reminded me of the story of Christopher Johnson McCandless, whose tragic journey was told in the film Into the Wild by Sean Penn. The similarities are evident, as are the differences.
In any case, I propose below the chapter that I dedicated to him in the volume The cinema of empty roomsco-written with Isabella Cesarini.
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What if, to dismantle this recurring sadness, we had to turn our gaze away from God and men? What if the solution was escape and the reasons to be found within ourselves?
Not only an internal escape, and therefore beyond the threshold of the rational, but a physical one, like that of Christopher Johnson McCandless, the pure idealist who falls into utopia and a progressive derealization of the ego, whose biographical story was adapted into the film Into the wild by Sean Penn.
The framework of this story is clear from the beginning. Christopher, on the same day he graduates with excellent grades in History and Anthropology, plans an escape. But he is not a loser, even if in many moments such a suit could be sewn for him. Its sworn enemy is materialism in all its forms; that hedonistic and pleasure-loving God around whom American society gravitates and who after his university studies would have welcomed him with open arms with a well-paid job, an exemplary career, a bourgeois family and a comfortable home.
Christopher wants to escape from a society and a circle of acquaintances that no longer correspond to his moral demands. He feels the need to immerse himself in the world, deciding to do so – precisely – by subtraction. He does not opt for a large-scale sociological investigation; it doesn’t want to tell a story; he’s not even the singer of a lifetime on the road lost between drinking, orgiastic drifts and pure nihilism; and therefore there is nothing comparable to the generational and ultra-political malaise of the ‘flower children’. Here we are faced with a game of life, equal and opposite to those mentioned several times in this book, where the degree of biographical consistency slowly annihilates.
He immediately imposes a personal seal on the escape, so much so that once he leaves, his parents will never see him again. It crosses a large part of that deep America to reach the wild and uncontaminated lands of Alaska; perfect metaphor for a catharsis with all the insoluble problems of a stringent definition like this, where purification is absolute solitude.
And family events, the father’s infidelity and a mother dominated by her husband cannot be the only triggers for the escape, as certain critics were quick to assert. The decision to adopt Alexander Supertramp as his new name (tramp means wanderer) is not just the result of the rejection of a name. In addition to the ‘super vagabond’, a new ambition stirs within him. He knows that the past has marked him and he cannot sever it with a clean cut, but only project himself towards a sort of eternal becoming to be built by subtraction. Along the way he tries to adapt (and adopt), almost in a Pirandellian manner, the various masks imposed on him by the social contexts with which he comes into contact, but in an attempt to escape each of them through a vitalistic itinerary to the sources of truth; and therefore he consumes them even before having made them totally his own.
He almost seems to be following in Schopenhauer’s footsteps when he projects the solution to this continuous ‘desiring’ typical of American society into the annihilation of the self that yearns for catharsis. In getting rid of all the materialistic ballast step by step, we find that sort of nirvana which also passes through chastity, the liberation of physical objects and the denial of the good life; at least of living everyone else’s life. And therefore cancel materialism and desires not to encounter a vague transcendent but to encounter oneself.
It is obvious that the director’s marked underlining testifies to a radicalism that deliberately dresses in ideological guise. Sean Penn was so fond of the project that he waited ten years to obtain the rights to film the book, but he drew heavily, perhaps too much, from his political background. In the weeks following its theatrical release, he toured the seven churches to publicize it and impose a personal interpretative direction. And perhaps it was precisely certain themes that were too close to his radicalism that meant that quite a few reviews were distorted and almost reduced to a battlefield where Luddites and neo-modernists attacked each other.
However, once the rhetorical burdens have been removed, what remains is the real story of this boy who ferrets out the other side of the moon, the dark corner of our inner world; what still keeps alive the flame of wildness, of anarchy, we dare say from poetry. Supertramp breaks through the dried-up wall of everyday banalities. Through unexplored paths he goes in search of that little flame by appealing to reality and therefore, first and foremost, to nature.
In some respects, it is the counterpart of The Stranger by Camus. The one escapes and seeks new adventures; he drowns in boredom, acting out a sense of belonging to a world that does not belong to him and which he nevertheless suffers because he is not shaken by any tremor or feeling; and everything flows in an apathy marked by a recurring phrase (“but this means nothing”) every time some small or large unexpected event enters the scene of life. Christopher’s journey is instead ‘initiatory’, in the manner of von Trier, characterized however by the element of subtraction.
The book shows how much with the passage of time he consolidates certainties and abandons certain presumed truths; but do so by wrapping yourself in nature, almost abandoning yourself to it, and immersing yourself in a sort of enormous and protective amniotic fluid.
It is no coincidence that in his Magic Bus, that sort of ramshackle minibus and final resting place in which he was found dead, in the Denali park in Alaska, they recovered books by Tolstoy, Jack London and Henry David Thoreau. Perception tools for an ‘other’ reality which tended to unify the contours between the external and internal world but always gravitating around the mutual position between the figurative character of the existent and the Ego. Annotated books, and therefore alive. On many of those pages he had marked impressions and thoughts, also with respect to the aesthetic and philosophical intensity of that escape. In an engraving later found in the Magic Bus there is the profound and definitive trace of that choice: «For two years he travels around the world: no telephone, no swimming pool, no dogs and cats, no cigarettes. Extreme freedom, an extremist, an esthete traveler who has the road as his home. So now, after two years of walking, the last and greatest adventure arrives. The apogee of the battle to kill the false inner being, victoriously seals the spiritual revolution. To no longer be poisoned by civilization he flees, walking alone on the earth to get lost in the wild nature”3.
And in fact, in addition to Jack London, he often quotes Henry David Thoreau. He recounts his adventure and reports his impressions in a diary which in the film is read by the voice-over of his sister, Carine McCandless. Through Christopher we seem to hear the echoes of Walden: or life in the woods Thoreau’s famous book. Those two years, two months and two days lived alone in the Massachusetts countryside, on the shores of Walden Lake, in which there is a poetic mastery of life through the wild nature: «I went into the woods – writes Thoreau – because I wanted to live authentically, to face only the essential problems of life, to see if I would learn what it had to teach, and so as not to discover, at the point of death, that I had not lived».
Unusual choice for civilized citizens of the third millennium. Yet, a greater identification with the first part, namely that relating to the experience of escape, is not uncommon to find in many thinkers and writers even if, it must be reiterated, here we are beyond simple escape. Because it is not even an unrealistic generational revolt whose sole task is to desecrate a family model, a flat bourgeois life and the civilization of consumption. His move away from civilization is a penetration into that dimension of nature which invites him both to a destructive principle and to a constructive and therefore meditative one, which expresses itself thanks to a direct and ancestral relationship with wildness and origins.
But nature has its laws. Christopher’s journey is indeed towards an impossible perfection on this earth. And continually going beyond the limits will lead him to aspire to the absence of any frontier: to a search which, knowing no extremes, is guilty of hubris.
His death, lost in a forest that has become an enemy, is a significant element; that sought-after West (like Thoureau’s West) is a space of epiphany and death because rebirth cannot do without a nature that is welcoming and stepmother, providential and mortal. And in similar situations man is almost always destined to succumb: climbing a mountain, crossing a desert, or projecting ourselves into any other undertaking that exposes us to ‘hybris’, is an action that cannot fail to clash with the plastic image of the supremacy of nature.
One can ‘realise’ oneself only in full awareness of an organic whole where nature is in full harmony with other living beings; and which, however, should not be understood as a macrocosm where eternal quiet reigns but a space in which to aspire to constant balance between the parts and in which man is integrated and not absolute dominator, participant in change and not Lord. And therefore, sadly aware of its fallibility.