Into the Wild
Directed by Peter Doctor, Released in 2021.
The Character
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Christopher McCandless is a recent college graduate from Emory University. He comes from two very rich parents, who fought a lot when Chris and his sister were young. Chris is smart, resourceful, and a very likable young man. However, his disdain for society and Western Culture’s “Rat Race” has been testing his patience.
The Conflict
Chris has enough of his materialistic parents and their money-driven lives. He burns his social security card, driver’s license, money before changing his name to Alex, and embarking on a journey to the wilderness of Alaska. While successfully evading the police and his parent’s attempts to find him, Chris travels all over the country for two years by foot, jumping trains, and hitchhiking. Along the way, he befriends a number of different people including a hippie couple named Jan and Rainey in California, a girl named Tracy Tatro in Slab City California, a man named Wayne in South Dakota, and an older man named Ron Franz. Chris never stays in one place too long (always to the dismay of the people he met), because he is focused on getting to Alaska. Chris finally makes it to Alaska and after hiking into a remote area of wilderness, he sets up camp inside an abandoned school bus.
“Somebody becomes an enemy if you personalize the unconsciousness that is the ego. Non-reaction is not weakness but strength. Another word for non-reaction is forgiveness. To forgive is to overlook, or rather to look through. You look through the ego to the sanity that is in every human being as his or her essence.”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
As a child, Chris watched his dad abuse his mom, and his parents constantly fight. This seed of resentment fueled his egoic shortcomings and explains why he never loved fully. If he could have forgiven his parents and taken their unconsciousness less personally, he would have stopped identifying with the idea that people are evil, and realized ego is the root of all evil and not our true selves.
Key moment
After 4 months of living in the bus, Chris is struggling to find food and is beginning to starve. He tries to hike back the way he came, but due to the snowmelt, a river in his path has become too dangerous to get across. After returning back to the bus, he goes to search for food. After mistakenly eating poisonous berries, he realizes he is about to die. Chris makes a stunning realization and writes in his notebook “Happiness is only real when shared” before a very painful death.
(Watch through 2:32)
All the people in the montage cared about Chris dearly, but his ego stopped him from truly appreciating those people. The message he writes in his notebook represents the final disidentification from his ego, unfortunately right before death.
Resolution & Analysis
Chris always had a calling to nature inside of him, and recognized the shared “being-ness” between nature and himself. In that sense, he was very ahead of his time in understanding who he was. His sense of self was also not defined by items, social status, labels, or many other byproducts of society as illustrated by the radical changes he made before his journey. Unfortunately, Chris’s tough upbringing conditioned his mind to distrust other people and believe that living amongst any sort of society was bad. He was never able to forgive his parents', and that resentment he held onto shaped many negative thought patterns. The separation that his mind created between himself and others strengthened an egoic belief that he was superior to society. He believed humans to be separate entities from each other and he never understood that we all share the same life and the same being that makes up who we are. This egoic belief limited Chris’s life because he never truly appreciated the gift of human relationships, and he never discovered how that connection is a window into finding our true selves. He broke the hearts of his parents', his sister, Ron Franz (who wanted to adopt Chris as his grandson), Tracy (Who fell in love with Chris), and Jan and Rainey (Who saw Chris like a son to them). It wasn’t until Chris’s last living moments when he made the connection that EVERY living creature in the world of form, including Humans, all share the same essence of being.