Picketing the Zeitgeist: Calls of the Wild: On the Page & on the Screen

Page 3 May–June 2008 Let’s face it: the wilderness gave American writers a sense of place and distinguished them from their English literary cousins. Moreover, as the US has become, increasingly, a land of malls, Prozac, and iPods,American writers have gone on bounding into the beyond. It’s as though, as a culture, we need to reconnect to that sense of awe, wonder, and fear our earliest ancestors felt when they set foot on a continent that struck them as virgin wilderness. Christopher McCandless, the twenty-something , anti-hero of Jon Krakauer’s 1996 nonfiction narrative, Into the Wild, and Sean Penn’s 2007 movie of the same name, dies alone inAlaska, a victim to his own illusions. Like the book, the movie struggles to understand why a college-educated young man from a prosperous, but emotionally troubled, middle-class white family would throw away his privilege. “I now walk into the wild,” he wrote, as though he were a fictional character in a Jack London short story. Reviewers have called Into the Wild a “mystery,” but there’s little that’s mysterious about McCandless and his behavior. Young men like him, in real life and in the pages of fiction, have been doing much the same ever since the days of the Roman Empire. There’s nothing like a dose of imperial ennui to prompt young men and young women, too, to flee from urban and suburban confines, and to run with wolves, go native, and embrace the barbarians at the gate. The real, flesh-and-blood McCandless gave away his inheritance, rejected his name, called himself “Alexander Supertramp,” and embraced the life, as he perceived it, of his literary hero, Jack London, the writer who extended, more than anyone else, at the start of the twentieth century, the tradition of American literature that James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville initiated in the nineteenth century. “Jack London is King,” McCandless wrote tersely. In fact, he carved those four words on a piece of wood in the wilderness, as the camera shows, and, in that scene and elsewhere, Penn relies heavily on words, rather than cinematic images, to get his points across. McCandless couldn’t have picked a popular writer more fascinated with the wild than Jack London. The author of The Call of the Wild (1903), of course, which recounts the adventures of a tame dog who becomes a ferocious wolf—and dozens of cautionary tales about men in the wild, like “To Build a Fire.” London took on the persona of the wild man, and it brought him wealth and fame, just as the American frontier was declared closed. In the pages of literature, he kept it open. Like the McCandless whom we meet in the pages of Krakauer’s slim, elusive narrative, and also on the screen in Penn’s tantalizing and disturbing film, he ran from home as a young man, in part because of troubles at home, and not simply for an ideal, an idea, or to live out a myth. McCandless and London both had uneasy relationships with their fathers, and both wanted freedom from them, and, at the same time, they sought substitute fathers and father figures. Unlike McCandless, however, London came out of the wilderness with a wealth of stories and images he’d heard and seen, and an appreciation of the art of storytelling. If McCandless had genuinely grappled with London, he might have walked out of Alaska, or perhaps never left home in the first place. Moreover, unlike McCandless, who rejected the company of men inAlaska, London spent almost all of his time in the wild, with others. The Indians intrigued him, too, and he would write about the decline of their culture in the clash with white civilization . London seems to have known instinctively, and from the start, what McCandless only discovered shortly before his death, and that he announced in his farewell words to the world—that “happiness only real when shared”—another text that the camera captures on screen in a movie that never quite frees itself from the written word. London’s literary tour de force, Krakauer’s meditation on manliness, and Penn...