Alexander Supertramp and the Failure of Individualist Escape
Andrew William Smith
The release of director Sean Penn’s film Into the Wild renews the controversial debates generated by Jon Krakauer’s book of the same name. At their roots, these charged deliberations have little to do with Penn’s ambitious directing or Krakauer’s compelling prose and focus instead on our collective interpretations about the tale’s real-life protagonist, Christopher “Alexander Supertramp” McCandless.
Now the stuff of common lore, the details of McCandless’s dramatic departure from mainstream culture and his traumatic demise in the Alaskan wilderness provide fodder for fierce debates about everything from the virtues of drop-out culture to nitty-gritty strategies for extended survival. Too many discussions have honed in on a crass character analysis of the deceased, describing the young vagabond as a naïve kook and arrogant idiot – just another white male iconoclast who, in hoping to commune with the land, has only further conquered and contaminated it.
One especially blunt commentator that Krakauer cites puts it this way:
“Such willful ignorance amounts to disrespect for the land and paradoxically demonstrates the same sort of arrogance that resulted in the Exxon Valdez spill – just another case of under-prepared, over-confident men bumbling around out there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite humility. McCandless’s contriverd asceticism and pseudoliterary stance compound rather than reduce the fault.”
Even if these assessments are the inevitable and necessary counterpoint to Krakauer’s and Penn’s sympathetic and romantic portrayals of a wild young hobo monk, inspired by the likes of Jack London and Henry David Thoreau, I find the posthumous focus on the precarious minutiae of McCandless’s impractical tactics to be an unnecessary distraction motivated by a moralism as harsh as the one that apparently motivated McCandless. Truth be told, I count myself among the staunch McCandless apologists and find Krakauer’s book, Penn’s film, and rocker Eddie Vedder’s soundtrack to be an emotionally haunting and spiritually memorable trilogy – poetic meditations on the possible evacuation routes from the perpetual madness of civilized insanity and technophilic postmodernity. Beyond my appreciation for the story itself and the care with which its tellers convey to a wide audience, we can locate within it many layers of commentary on the alienating aspects of mass society, as well as current speculations about a coming cataclysm that may force many of us to change our relationships to nature and each other.
The selfishness and sadness about how this tale ends, in sacred foolishness, deflects some aspects of courageous dissent that come with the clarity and ferocity of McCandless’s initial break with society. While Abbie Hoffman once burned money as a public prank, the self-made mythmaker of Alexander Supertramp burned his last stash of cash as private prayer – a perverse theater of the self that takes the voluntary simplicity rap to its youthful extreme. This brash purge of modest barter power came after McCandless donated a much larger sum to Oxfam, shredding bank cards and personal identification, and generally denouncing his preparation for participation in the world – a likely path guaranteed by his upper-middle class credentials and recent college degree.
Shot entirely on location in the places that McCandless visited, Penn’s profound rendering of Krakauer’s book gives off an emotional power and visual weight wrought by precise and hungry cinematography. When tramping under the assumed name of his adopted archetype Alex, McCandless is often carefree and careless, yet compassionate to the people he encounters. Penn captures the elation of Alexander Supertramp’s early adventures with celluloid passages that inevitably conjure thoughts of other great American road art, from the epic historical movie Easy Rider to Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and its “bop prosody” – jazz-like riffs of wide-eyed drunken beauty. Despite the unwashed material poverty of it all, the early chapters of the Supertramp-McCandless odyssey offer a sense of unencumbered jubilation, to be later matched by the conclusion’s emaciated devastation.
Once in Alaska, the lonely spartan reality of the McCandless quest offers a poor example of how to live as a solitary forager-hunter. From the point of view of what has been called “re-wilding,” people have the potential to recover lost lessons from our ancestral heritage, learning practical and tactical skills that might serve the outback escapist today and the person who outlasts the catastrophe tomorrow. The survivalist critique of the McCandless story avoids condemning survivalism. From either the naturist or the collapsist point of view, what’s wrong with this picture stems not from the possibility of retreat but with the errors that lead to the inevitable defeat.
We will never know for certain all the factors that fuel McCandless’s starvation, and I wish to engage in an entirely different kind of speculation. As much as there is some Alexander Supertramp within me, I never “pulled a Christopher McCandless” when I was young because of the love I have for my parents. Today, I resist the temptation for the illusory exultation of escape in part because of the love I feel for my partner and children. In leaving the noise of society for the silence of Alaska, McCandless found that he could not silence the noise of his psyche, a noise that almost pulled him back from the brink.
Even in the evils of a malevolent society that people of conscience for centuries have rejected, there always remain the seeds of a different society. Rather than reject the social entirely, McCandless meant to follow the path of the temporary monk. When Krakauer extrapolates from the journal that McCandless kept, his book suggests that before McCandless’s life ended, the lonely exodus was about to end. Indeed, before the fatal transport to the other side, McCandless was likely “ready, perhaps, to shed a little of the armor he wore around his heart, that upon returning to civilization, he intended to abandon the life of the solitary vagabond, stop running so hard from intimacy, and become a member of the human community.”
The question for us, then, is how to preserve “human community” without “returning to civilization.” Indeed, McCandless’s accidental and individualist suicide wish might be instructive in helping us avoid collective suicide. Rather than a rejection of the social, anarchism might revise how the social gets organized. Far less romantic than the burnt dollars and torched flags of pure rejection, compromise and cooperation can still provide motifs for communal change. At the end, investigating Alexander Supertramp’s individualist anarchism encourages us to invest in a nuanced rejection of pure individualism in favor a social and socialist anarchism that supports and honors already the individual.
Interestingly, McCandless visits just such a vision before departing forever. Even though his excruciating excursion fails to extol the larger narrative of individualist escapism, it grants some gravity to the gracious necessity of collaborative and communal escape. Clearly, the most heartfelt moments in Penn’s film do not take place in a perfect, out-of-the-way place. Rather, having rejected his family of birth, McCandless finds a family just by wandering the earth. The relationships McCandless cultivates with fellow tramps and travelers demonstrates the undeniable ubiquity of love.
One of the movie’s most memorable sequences takes place at “the Slabs” – an amazing autonomous zone that Krakauer describes as “an old navy airbase that had been abandoned and raised, leaving a grid of empty concrete foundations scattered far and wide across the desert.” In this no-go zone, we witness a kind of cooperative escapism. Like festivals, gatherings, and communes, places like this could grow to be not only an antidote to the disaster of individualism depicted in McCandless’s miserable fate, but also an answer to the inauthentic virtual worlds where so-called “social networks” exist entirely in the ether. In words that could have been scribbled by Hakim Bey, Krakauer depicts “some five thousand snowbirds and drifters and sundry vagabonds” who “congregate in this otherworldly setting to live on the cheap under the sun.”
Indeed, when he constructed the notions of temporary and permanent autonomous zones, Bey probably envisioned places like this: “The Slabs functions as the seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society—a tolerant, rubber-tired culture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually unemployed. Its constituents are men and women and children of all ages, folks on the dodge from collection agencies, relationships gone sour, the law or IRS, Ohio winters, the middle-class grind.”
Krakauer contemplates what he calls McCandless’s particular “variety of lust,” a monastic passion seduced more by open spaces than sexual places. From the lessons of this lust, we might develop an equally devoted passion to creating a slab of reality not unlike the Slabs: a new autonomous zone where rejecting the daily grind does not require us to lose our minds; where we can reject society without ejecting the social, and form loving and lasting contacts with other souls similarly disenchanted with civilization.
Image credit: Into the Wild by Travis S., used under Creative Commons license.
This essay also appears in the current edition of Fifth Estate, North America's longest-running, anti-authoritarian periodical. Please visit http://fifthestate.org for more information.
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crossing rivers
Thanks for an insightful article.
The stories of Alexander Supertramp and Chris McCandless are full of many lessons, and open many questions. But the one thing I think that says a lot about the whole situation, is that he could very well have made it, reconciled his "armor", his emotions and so forth and made it back home - if only he walked a short way down the Teklanika River, a river he thought was impossible to cross, and found that gondola that would have easily taken him to the other side.
I agree. I think this is
I agree. I think this is something that a lot of McCandless' critics overlook. In my mind McCandless made it. He was succesful. He just didn't explore a little further down the river, unfortunatley. And as I recall, at that time he was in no panic to get across so he decided to wait it out.
"Sitting on the outside, just me and my mate. I made the moon come up two hours late. Ain't that a man?" -- Muddy Waters
Amazing Film!
Slab Cities of Light
Hi Andrew,
I enjoyed this movie and appreciate your analysis of it here. I dug the slab city scene too and wonder if new slab cities are being built right here and now, out on the internets? These are socnets like the one we're forming here on RS where people can live free and be themselves under the bright LCD glow of their laptop screen.
When one's goal is to create a "City of Light" then in some ways, it almost helps for it to be less real from it's inception. The innernets are showing us that being virtual and impermanent might be the hallmarks of our new reality. Not that we and everything on this earth isn't already virtual and impermanent--it's just something that has been very hard for us to accept, as it means dealing with the inevitable fact of our own death in a manner similar in philosophy--if not practice--to Alexander Supertramp.
peace,
jp
Change in priority...
Into the reel
Nice article, beautifully written. It's rare that a work of art—of any kind—lingers with me the way Sean Penn's screen version of Into the Wild has. And I want to know why. The basis of my query is decidedly nonliterary. I'll admit that I'm fairly non-literate, not in the writing sense, but the reading sense. I am not steeped in the great traditions that Into the Wild is build upon, not the story itself, but of the vast literary history of writers abandoning the society to probe deeper truths out there, literary pilgrims, so-to-speak. From Walden Pond to On the Road, Americans have probed the wild and the road. Kraukaru's book, into the wild, mostly likely speaks to that impulse. Trouble is, I haven't read the book, so all I have to offer is how the film itself impressed me, not in dialog with Alex Supertramp’s story (or the book about it), but how it connects with ours.
It's curious that the bus that served as his grave has become a modern pilgrimage site. Alaskans don't get it, because to many of them Chris was a fool for doing what he did: venturing into the bush ill-prepared with few provisions and a kind of middle class arrogance that all will be fine. Indeed, as the case of his demise has been extrapolated and explored, one gets the sense that he may have had an unconscious death wish. He must have known on some deep level that what he was doing would end badly. No doubt, when he did decide to return to civilization and found the summer runoff too difficult to ford, it doesn't take much to try other routes. And had he walked a few more miles, his escape would have been complete. Did he accidentally poison himself? We'll never know. All we can be sure of is that he rejected the dominant values of civilization, and in that courage I think we find the core gestalt of his appeal.
There is an inner Jack London in all of us that simply would like to burn the cash and credit cards, leave the car in the arroyo and walk off into the sunset. In some ways it’s very American. McCanldles deathbed epiphany that joy only has meaning when its shared was perhaps the supreme lesson of his life, for we cannot say he was truly free. He was running from something and was so determined to make a statement to his father and his ultimate outcome is not much different that a son's suicide as statement.
The film is a hyperreal fantasy of nature. The real location was moved for better views of the mountains to satisfy the requirements of cinema. A love story here, and some exaggerated scenery their, glosses over the more mundane aspects of a boy's journey into America's interior. In fact, as I have pondered the film, I was wondering why something so innocuous—a person traveling, running from his family—could resonoate so deeply with the culture and myself. At the end of the film when we see a picture of the real Chris (not the actor), it became painfully real that this was a real life. And I wept like I've never wept at the end of a movie. How could I love this anonymous character so much? Is it the power of cinema, or connection with a sense of loss and abandonment that is so often at the core of our daily neurosis? To some he comes across as a Jesus-like character, to others, just a middle class American fool lost in his own convictions like America in Iraq. With Penn at the helm, we could say this is the anti-parable of the war. If you are going to lose yourself, do it for moral reasons, for god sakes, like connecting with the Great Whatever and the "wild" that alludes us high-tech capitalistas.
The wild is a construct of the literary culture: it was devised by Greek to be the first big cultural Other that permeates the psychosis of Modern Man. Now we want to reclaim it, but it means death. And how fearful were we as we watched the film thinking, I could never do that, but I wish I could. We are so deeply ashamed of our domestication and trapped by our worldliness that we hunger for that taste of freedom Chris/Alex sought and tasted. You see it in his dying smile, one of the eerie media artifacts he left with his undeveloped roll of film. Which begs the question, was he not a bit self-conscious that his experiment would impact the culture, and he would not survive to see it? What was the purpose of the journal and camera if he was so free of our civilized trappings? Photos embalm, as philosophers have noted, and these artifacts he left us contain the self-reflective traces of a Western man, a narcissus who only vouches for existence in the mirror of media. This is not a criticism, just a reflection of the zeitgeist. Chris was both and instrument and mechanic of the culture. He knew what he was doing, his determination and focus the clues that his legacy would impact the world.
Fear
fear of exactly what happened to alex/chris is the only thing that has kept me from doing exactly what he did. i wish every day for the courage. but, i simply do not have it in me to go it alone as he did. i have studied and practiced survival for years now, expecting 'the end of the world as we know it' (teotwawki). i have nothing but sympathy for that which drove him away (although i honestly would never choose to go to alaska...*shiver*)
i also think that, however tragic was his death, at least he lived a life of his choosing. this is rare in our world. his last note shows an acceptance of his fate that make clear, to me, that he felt this as well.
but, i agree that community is the thing. 'happiness is only real when shared', as supertramp himself realized. it is our connection to other people, our relationships, that ultimately make life feel worthwhile and meaningful.
my love and blessings go out to his family, and to chris/alex himself, wherever he may be now. he has left a legacy, filled with lessons to be learned. his life, though tragically short, will have more meaning, to more people, than the lives of most 10 other people combined. something to consider, before we try to judge him a fool.
is the point of life just to live? or to make a difference?
well...which one makes us happier?
"You must *be* the change you wish to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi
literary pilgrim
i took a journey, as a young dood, it was called staying out of the military draft, i became a poet so it all made some kind of sense to me, i use to hitchhike a lot, i did not hitchhike across the country, but up and down the California coast, some times standing on the highway all alone in the cold, big trucks would try to run me over, just for the fun of it, one time a cop pulled a gun on me and stuck it in my head, other times i would be picked up by very crazy people, i more or less stopped hitching rides when i was rolled after a couple of biker doods pulled a knife on me, and held it to my throat, after which i got out and one guy punched me so hard i passed out on the freeway on ramp. So just being some kid with long hair is dangerous, i remember sleeping behind a church once, with only a jacket on, hitching to San Fransisco from Yosemite.
Another time my sleeping bag was taken away by park rangers, and i had no money, some girls helped me.And i met some really interesting people too, and i remember seeing this guy from Guatemala standing on the side of the road hitching right near the entrance to Nepenthe resturant in Big Sur, i had passed him on the road, and had recently met him on the main drag of Santa Cruz, and he told me amazing shamanic stories.And i had been thinking about his stories, and there he was thumb out in the magnificent magical spot of Big Sur, and i saw his energy radiating in the crystal blue brilliant California coast sunlight and the red woods.
But being a literary outlaw is very dangerous, because you are out there reading all these writers from different times and walks of life, and the more you read them the more you experience their journeys, like walking down the country road with Rimbaud toward the City of lights.With a pipe and a pen, and some crazy ideas to keep you from the wolves and the floor of the tavern.
into the wild, into the gutter, into the long journey to the end.Maybe a railroad track in Mexico, or like John Hoffman whose writings were just published by City Lights, along with a poet whom i met after calling him on the telephone. the book is, Tau by Philip Lamantia and Journey To The End, by John Hoffman
John died in Mexico at the age of 23 of unknown causes.
Philip influenced Allen Ginsberg, and from that came Howl.
Great movie!