Into the Wild

Into the Wild

Into the Wild is an american drama movie created in 2007 and directed by Sean Penn. It is based on a true story of a young american man called Christopher McCandless, who decided to travel across North America on his own to feel the extremist freedom.

 His dream was to live the experience of a completely freedom, in a very wild land, Alaska. 

It seems that Christopher or his character in the movie (Chris or Alexander) played by Emile Hirsch is what we could call a noble or good savage. 

I found this picture in internet about the trip of the real McCandless.

This movie as I said is a biographie of the last years of a young man called Christopher McCandless, who decided to travel North america. He wanted to reach Alaska as reaching what he's longing for, the ultimate freedom. He feels that the nature is closer to what life is in real, and not what the civilization created. 

The movie is very close to the real life of this man. 

The movie first begins with the trip of Chris arriving to Alaska and how he provides himself buying in some stores. While we are watching those scenes, we see the letter that Chris is writing to Wayne. Then, we watch the arrival of Chris to Alaska, brought by his friend Wayne who gave him some supplies to provide himself in the wild. 

After waving off his friend, he started his way into the nature. 

Sean Penn took one poem and a song (at the beggining of the movie) to illustrate his feelings about society. This poem is a poem of Lord Byron (a poet from the english romanticism) called Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. This is the extract that uses Sean Penn in his movie:

Also this painting fits with the poem of Byron. It represents the idea of a misanthropist. It means that it is someone who doesn't like humans and doesn't feel confortable in the company of his/her fellow humans. 

Those two documents represent the idea of the romantic. This poem and this painting, belong to the romanticism.

Then, the song is one of the songs created by Eddie Vedder. It is called Long Nights.

This song fits pretty well in the movie and in relation with Chris's feelings, because it also has those ideas of the romantic philosophie. 

During the song, Penn knew very good how to link the song to the images. Let's just talk a little bit about when the song is playing. The first scenes show us the nature and the landscape of Alaska, including the sky and the mountains covered with snow. Those images enable us to discover the lofty ideals of Chris. Sean Penn probably wanted to show the sky to link the images to the expression "the sky is the limit" as saying you don't have limits because the sky is impossible to reach. It shows that Chris has very big ambitious. 

 I would like to add that this scene remember us the previous painting we studied about Lord Byron's poem. 

Sean Penn decided in the movie, to mix the present with the past. The present is when Chris lives in what he called the Magic Bus, a bus he found in the middle of the wild and let us know that someone has already lived there, because he found some enamelwares and a bed. The past is narrated by his sister who was very close to him. 

During the movie, we see all his steps until he reached Alaska. He met a lot of people during his trip, and went to a lot of places but didn't find the perfect place that brings him the ultimate freedom, that's why he decided to go to Alaska. 
He started that trip because of the hidden past of his father that he discovered when going to California to visit some family's friends. He felt betrayed. He didn't give any information to his family during those two years he travelled across North America. 

We see Christopher's story in a chronological order. We could say that his trip across North America  in habited places, was his first step to the noble savage he is going to be when living in Alaska.

***
The myth of the nobel savage

We said that Chris represents the idea of a noble savage. Before proving that we will look for a definition of a noble savage.

A noble savage is a literary stock character who embodies the concept of an idealized indigene, outsider or "other" person that haven't been "corrupted" by civilization. He simbolizes humanity's innate goodness. The myth that persists is that there was ever, at any time, widespread belief in the nobility of savages.

Even though the myth of the nobel savage has been removed in the 18een century, it reappeared in the mid-nineteenth century, however, when the "myth" was deliberately used to fuel anthropology's oldest and most successful hoax
The origin of the term first appeard in English in poet Dryden's heroic play, The Conquest of  Granada(1672)

"I am as free as nature first made man,

Ere the base laws of servitude began,

When wild in woods the noble savage ran"

A few centuries later, Terry Jay Ellison wrote a book called The myth of the noble savage (2001)  where he explains the origins and the term in general. 

The modern myth of the noble savage is most commonly attributed to the 18th-century Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. He believed the original “man” was free from sin, appetite or the concept of right and wrong, and that those deemed “savages” were not brutal but noble.

Chris seams to be someone that doesn't really like to follow the rules forced by the society. He thinks that it is not neccesary to do everything as the society and most of the people does. To  illustrate this idea we could give the example of a scene. The scene is played in a restaurant during the day of his graduation form College. In that scene his parents told him they are going to buy him a new car because his looks very old, but he wasn't agree with that idea.

He wants to break up from society and to feel the ultimate freedom. He did an interior monologue in the movie where he expresses his thoughts about his experience. Let's talk about it!

First, he says "Two years he walks the earth. 

No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes

ultimate freedom, an extremist

An aesthetic voyager who's home is the road."

Those stanzas introduce his feelings, his life and what he really is. 

He also imitates a dialog between him and his father "hey, listen, old man"

He uses the term "two rambling years" to designate the two years he spent travelling. 

"spiritual revolution" is what he uses to designate what he is doing: to live this experience in the wild. 

All this monologue, give us some clues to conclude he is a noble savage. Someone who hasn't been "touched" by the monster of the society in all its bad things.

He had to hunt to eat and had to learn how to live in the wild. That made him to be close as a real noble savage. 
For Rousseau, as I said, a savage doesn't need to be  brutal, he 's more like a noble person. Tha'ts why Chris represents properly this term. He is not savage as being brutal but more savage in that term of being a noble savage.

During the movie, we have the example of a very energic Chris, who wants to live the life as happy as he can. For him the ultimate happiness is when you are like a savage, someone who doesn't follow the rules. As he thinks that the society makes us being egoists and consumers. Our society is based on a consuming way of life.
But he thought that living in the nature was easier than it was later for him. He had problems speacially when hunting and preserving the meat. The meat is very fast infected by flies who leave their eggs into it. That scene in the movie, in my opinion is very stressful. He manages to hunt a moose, but after it he couldn't eat it because of the flies, and other bugs. 

Another scene which show us that Chris wasn't ready for everything he finds in the wild, is the scene when he wants to come back to the civilization. He wanted to cross the river back but it was impossible for him. The river increased a lot because of the thawing during the summer. 

But, at the end of the movie, we see his deseperation of living in the wild. He get very thin, and it was impossible for him to hunt, because of the disappearance of the anmails, probably hibernating. 

When he was dying alone, he noticed that, being a savage doesn't make you being happy. He uses a sentence, which I think it's true, and it is the one "happiness is only real when shared". He knew that being a savage, alone, in the wild, out of the society, doesn't make him happy.
At the end of the movie, is when we see in real he is not what we call a noble savage. He doesn't have the habilities to live in the wild for himsel. I also just need to add that the savages we can find in the nature nowadays (like the savages we can find in the deepest Amazon rainforest) live in communities, all together. They help each other when hunting and so on. But Chris was on his own. Someone who has grown in the civilization, doesn't have the habilities to know how to manage nature in all senses. 
Chris is more like a romantic savage than a noble one. Living in the nature is for him a choice, an ideal. For noble savages, living in the nature is their way of life. They are able to live out there. 
Like the definition of a romantic designes someone who likes romanticism, which is like a philosophie of life. Romantics love nature, Romantics love nature, old things like castles and churches, love poetry and beauty, and have a tendency to get carried away by ideas.

That's why Chris fits exactly in the term of the romantic savage and not in the noble savage. He loves nature, and has lofty ideals he'll never reach. He is a day dreamer. A romantic dreamer.

Then, it is impossible for someone who has lived in civilization all his life to go and live in the nature. To survive in the nature you need to be very stong in all its significations. All people who live in the completely nature, live with other people, and they all make a community, different to ours but one.
Also, after living in the civilization, you adapt yourself to what is around you. We really never think about it, but we have a lot of amenities in each moment of each day. Those amenities, most of them, are impossible to find in the wild. 

***

In a nutshell, Chris doesn't represent what we call "a noble savage"He is more like a romantic savage. His ideals of living in a life without judgements. Out of our consumer life. Even if he tries to live in the nature, it is not easy as he thought. Thanks to the magic bus he could survive longer. That shows us we couldn't live without any amenity. Finally, Sean Penn wanted to illustrate the romantic savage using some philosophical subjects as the poem of Lord Byron, the monologues and some sentences, that gives Chris the feeling of being a perfect romantic savage from litterature. Chris has lofty ideals, who remember us the romantics poets of the Romanticism, always connected with nature, with lofty ideals, and philosophical thoughts.