Penn Goes Wild

I haven’t read Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild in nearly a decade, but I don’t quite remember it like this. I am, of course, referring to Sean Penn’s film adaptation that hit theaters late last year and has recently arrived on DVD. I had avoided it during its theatrical run, scared away by my own pessimism, which only intensified after reading Penn’s asinine perspective on it. In that interview, one statement in particular, in which Penn responds to park rangers criticizing McCandless’ trek into the wild as idiotic, struck a nerve:

“I’m not all that interested in what the park rangers have to say. I accept that there’s an automatic instinct to judge those you envy and who have more courage than you do, and I think that while he (the ranger) rides around in his four-wheeler on a CB radio getting fat, Chris McCandless has spent 113 days fucking alone in the most unforgiving wilderness that God ever created. You just go out there and take a look at it sometime. This is a guy that wanted to challenge himself in a way that for us to judge would just be ridiculous.”

I disagree. Ostensibly, yes, one could call what McCandless did — abandoning his life of luxury to live off the land in the indifferent wilderness of Alaska — courageous, but this dualistic approach to human nature seems callow and shortsighted. Simply labeling actions as cowardly or courageous or typifying people as heroes or villains marks a reductionist viewpoint of a more complex matter. There’s more subtlety to it, and if we don’t approach it on all levels, even those that don’t put the subject in the best light, how are we to even begin to penetrate the human psyche?