Into the Wild
2007 – Sean Penn
Rated R – 147 minutes
Vault Rating: 8
Grizzly Man
2005 – Werner Herzog
Rated R – 108 minutes
Vault Rating: 8
We are dealing with two types of extremist today in the Vault. Both of whom reject society in their own ways. Both of whom express that rejection by traveling to Alaska. Both of whom learn too late that nature, like the society of men, is also an unforgiving society to keep.
Both stories are true; one a documentary and one a dramatization, and both come highly recommended.
Chris McCandless lived well and traveled into the wild by a circuitous shoe-leather route. He found the benefits of wealth and education not all they were cracked up to be when he disappeared himself after college, rejecting all his successful, warring parents stood for.
Reinventing himself as Alexander Supertramp, McCandless cut his tether to the wheel, burning his identity cards and donating all he had to charity and walked away a free man in the world.
His story is known because he kept journals and his travels were a kind of modern vision quest, or a sort of post-Reagan “Easy Rider.” The people he acquainted along the way, from a lovely hippie couple to a wise convict to a lonely old war veteran, were in many ways kind and kindred, but also suffering from prolonged exposure to society.
It is natural that such a person might run as far away as he could. It is natural that his image of Alaska might well have been one of paradise. Perhaps it is natural that McCandless was destined to overestimate his own self-reliance.
There is much in this film, as in “Grizzly Man,” that calls on the wisdom and the folly of Byron, Thoreau and poets like them. Director Sean Penn captures the poetry and the story magnificently.
Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary on the life and death of grizzly bear activist Timothy Treadwell, who lived for years in the warm seasons of the famed Alaskan Grizzly Maze.
Treadwell, a failed actor, was also running away, it seems, and embraced a life in the wild where he became part of a certain set of grizzly bears’ world. For years on end, as a means to protect the creatures he so loved from poaching, Treadwell watched the bears he lived among grow and produce offspring until he seemed a normal part of their world.
His massive amount of footage, which survives him and which Herzog uses, shows him in an honest light, veering between activist and madman. Some of the footage is beautiful (such as that where a den of foxes become his running mates in the wild) and some underscores the vanity (such as when he films himself ranting a vulgar tirade at society) of the man.
Treadwell famously met his end in a bear attack, yet managed to turn on his video camera to record his own demise.
Both Treadwell and McCandless overestimate themselves and underestimate the unforgiving wilderness. Both men realize some perfection in the wilds of Alaska, yet both, by strange coincidence, wind up being unable to leave. One is trapped by a late season rain storm and the other by a missed flight. Both late migrations turn strangely deadly.
Somewhere in the two stories there are to be found strands of dignity, pride, beauty and pathos. In both stories, men travel from eccentric to extreme leaving we normal people looking through a window we haven’t the courage to open.
