Into the Wild

I will always remember Sean Penn as Jeff Specoli in Fast Times in Ridgemont High. I know he is all grown up now, a serious auteur perhaps, a political activist, and an indulgent actor who like Jack Nicholson is sometimes good and sometimes annoyingly mannered. To me Specoli was iconic--his mischievousness, the text book fashion in which he uttered Californian "dude" terms (like "bud" and "bogus"), and the way the rest of his features dealt with a nose that was perhaps too big for his face--and still he was cute.

But now Sean Penn has made a very serious, beautiful film (not that The Pledge and Indian Runner weren't serious).

Into the Wild is about a determined young man, with no apparent libido, who instead of wanting to make a million dollars after graduating college and/or get laid a lot, wants to escape the grid/matrix and head out on the road without money or credit cards (though he does seem to have nice sweaters!) and experience life. In a sense since the kid was born in 68 and graduated college in 1990, he was born perhaps two decades late, but he has been traumatized by his parents and his childhood and wants to run away from family and not be found.

Ironically all the folks he meets on the road want him to join their family--no one wants to have sex with him (except an underage teenage girl--and instead of having sex they sing together!) but everyone wants to adopt him--a bickering Danish couple, a religious widower, a roguish hard-drinking farmer with some illegal activities, and especially a rather endearing hippie couple in a van complete with Buddhist prayer flags (the woman is missing her teenage son who also ran away). Each wants Chris to stay with them and he allows each to project on to him all sorts of psychic needs. Even the woman who works at a homeless shelter appears worried for him after he darts our of her facility, even though she has just met him. Everyone cares for him, almost instantly.

But his goal is to disappear into the Alaskan wilderness and he leaves people behind. Of course once in the wilderness and unable to survive he realizes that happiness has to be shared. There's almost no way to escape family and human entanglement, and if one does manage to slip through and evade all forms of companionship one is in posed in a dangerous if idyllic place--after all the landscape, the sky, the plants, the animals offer beauty and reason but do not provide an escape from loneliness. Solitude turns into an abject state and nature is no longer harmonious but full of dissonance. I thought of Herzog's Grizzly Man, a documentary about another fellow with mixed feelings about humanity who moves to Alaska to live with the bears as believes rather erroneously that he can live with another species.

But Into the Wild is also a travelogue and in each location the camera is always featured as an amazing, new found device that can give a sense of place--the way land, water, and sky interact, converge and sever. One can almost sense Specoli's ability to get siked and stoked in Sean Penn's insistence in spending the time to examine a vista and his romance with the people who live on the edges of the American terrain--those without social security numbers who have never paid taxes and have never used an ATM but know how to gather around a campfire. I prefer a boutique hotel in a loud metropolis (and a retirement fund)...but Sean Penn successfully evokes the romance of marginal types on the road.