According to this movie review published in Slate, the implied abuse was invented for dramatic purposes and doesn’t appear in the book.
Agreed - I read the book but didn’t see the movie. The worst I would have said about his family is that they were conventional and pretty normal. I don’t have it at hand to compare, but when I read the comment in this thread about an abusive home life, I worried that my memory had let me down terribly. Penn did his viewers a serious disservice with this bit of dramatic license, and was practically if not actually libelous about the senior Mr. McCandless.
The bus had been there for a while before he got there. It was used by other people before him including hunters. I don’t recall if the book talks about how it got there. The real bus is still there but the movie used a different bus for filming.
In the comments, of the same article, Chris’ sister wrote a comment that the abuse was real as she helped write that part of the script. If the poster is her of course is up for debate.
Oddly enough last night I was in the same box as her and the rest of her family at an Eddie Vedder concert in Baltimore and the only reason I found that quote is because I was looking for photos of her this morning.
Hmm. The Wiki article led to an interview with cast and crew which is very vague on the topic of the ‘extra’ material regarding the family’s history.
The Denali Chamber of Commerce’s page about visiting the bus is actually pretty amusing, in a macabre way.
When the movie came out people in Alaska were worried more people would try to live off the land and end up like he did.
Heh urban types looking for a spot of wilderness adventure to escape society and dying stupidly is hardly a new phenominon … one of my favorite versions of this is the following:
I read the book and it blew me away, and then I saw the movie, and the movie did not blow me away. The biggest difference has already been mentioned: the allegations of physical abuse in the movie that were mentioned nowhere in the book. “See what your mother is making me do?” Casts an entirely different light on that family. I had wondered whether Krakauer had left that out, or whether Penn had created it – while I am glad to learn that the abuse was not real, if I were one of the McCandless family I would be livid. Anyway.
If you choose to read the book, you will see that Krakauer took great pains to re-create what happened to “Alexander Supertramp” and to examine why he did what he did. Personally, I think the book is better than the movie at least in part because we are piecing together McCandless’s story, knowing he died, instead of watching him lose it all. Krakauer also shares experiences from his own life, as well as those of other men who suffered similar fates, to try to explain why some young men seem to need to challenge themselves with adventure. Is it part of the human experience to choose to suffer instead of doing what most young people would have done, using their educations and obvious intellectual gifts to climb the ladder of success, yadda yadda, or is it part of some tiny group of people with a particular kind of mental illness (for lack of a better term) to let one’s romantic idealism blind oneself to proper preparation? Krakauer tries to argue that we shouldn’t just necessarily see McCandless as some dumb rich kid (and it is very difficult not to), but as a remarkable individual who might well have made it despite his lack of preparation and experience in the wilderness.
Yes, I think McCandless and his family were all wound a little tight. When his sister is told that her brother is dead, she is in hysterics for what, four or five hours? I couldn’t keep that level of emotion going for twenty minutes, and was it really inconceivable by that point that he wasn’t coming back? I think the parents were difficult people in a tragic marriage and that their kids learned to cope with the daily tension as best they could. Chris was one of those guys whom you couldn’t tell anything. I like Krakauer’s claim that he went to college only to prove a point to his parents – that he could get admitted to a challenging school and graduate. I mean, wow. That’s a hell of a way to win an argument with your parents. You don’t want to get in the way of someone like that.
Yeah, exactly that. I read the book, and it was … weird, I was almost scared that I’d do something stupid like that.
I think he was mentally ill or at least very stressed in some way. No idea if he was bipolar or what, but the book gave me the impression of a person who is not living in the same world as the rest of us, just standing half a meter next to it. I don’t know what demons drove him out there, but I don’t think he really made a clear and concious decision. Like he didn’t know what to do in this world, what was expected from him.
Really scared the hell out of me. What if I snap and do something like that? Choose to run away and leave it all behind? It’s like standing close to a cliff, and something in your head actually urges you to jump.
ETA: Didn’t see the movie, but Eddie Vedders Soundtrack is really really great, though.
LOL
What I found a masterpiece of double standard and stupidity was that his reason for not taking a map/compass/etc. was he wanted to live completely by his wits and pit himself against nature.
But he took a rifle.
Okey dokey.
The notion of pretending he was some sort of caveman was ridiculous on so many levels, not the least of which is that cavemen (who rarely used a rifle that low calibre) would never have done anything that stupid. Even Neanderthals, judging from the archeological sites and that there were more than one generation of them, knew to
— not travel alone
— gather intelligence before moving on (if you don’t know what’s on the other side of that hill you might want to take a look before just breaking camp and plugging on)
Of course also Neanderthals/mountain men/pioneers/Indians/medieval village idiots/whatever the hell he was going for would also have grown up learning how to kill and butcher animals, what plants you can and can’t eat (which IIRC is what ultimately killed him-), how to take care of their clothing and what kind of clothing that should be, how to recognize the signs of game animals and of predators, etc., i.e. things that 20th century urbanites just don’t grow up learning and not something you can pick up in a few months. Of course mountain men and cavemen and even village idiots generally knew the importance of learning from others who have been there before or have any survival skills to teach.
I’m of the McCandless was a class A dickwad (who may or may not have been mentally ill but if he was it doesn’t mitigate his dickwaddiness [this was no manic episode but an ongoing choice]) whose decision to throw his life away caused major pain to many people and helped absolutely nobody. Why he has a cult is beyond me. (I’m guessing if the real McCandlesshad looked less like Emile Hirschand more like dj qualls he wouldn’t.)
That just kept getting better and better.
This was another thing in the movie that took me out of the story. Emile Hirsch is too cute and boyish. That picture of the real McCandless sitting against the bus is haunting. He looks more like a young Clint Eastwood, not a cute boy, illustrating the difference between a dumb kid who got in over his head and didn’t have the sense to pull out when he could have and the tragic loss of a very talented individual who listened to his own gods, his own voices, come what may. Krakauer has a line at the end of the book when he is speculating what McCandless may have thought and felt at the end – Was he frightened? Did he feel self-pity at the thought of dying so young? – and describes his attitude in this last photo “as serene as a monk gone to his God.”
Just, wow.
A bit off topic, but about the time the movie came out Sean Penn gave a profanity ridden diatribe (meaning Sean Penn was speaking) because somebody had recently stolen McCandless’s boots from the bus. I remember being very shocked- that McCandless’s boots were on the bus. (The bus became a shrine to fans of the book and many made pilgrimage; it’s amazing anything was even left of the bus itself.)
There were a few more when he passed that nudist camp.
I’ve not seen the movie or read the book, but my understanding is that he was inspired to take on the Alaskan wilderness by the works of Jack London. If so, in addition to the personality flaws listed in the OP, he suffered from a serious lack of reading comprehension.
Or possibly he was reading a different Jack London than what I read. 'Cause the stuff I read hammered home pretty heavily just how easy it is to die in the wilds of Alaska. It was what you might call a major recurring theme.
As my husband put it, Jack London would kick this guy right in the balls.
I understand he was rash, short-sighted and not the most social person in the world.
But I don’t get all the hate. So what if you don’t want a car? So what if you don’t want to go to law school? So what if you don’t want to have a family or lots of friends? Not all of us want the same thing. Some of us want lonely and strange things. It doesn’t matter if you were handed all of the opportunities in the world, if they weren’t opportunities to do stuff you want to do. Are we really so insecure we have to heap scorn on everyone who doesn’t value the same things as us?
For me it’s the fact he caused so many people so much pain. Had he remained where he was and OD’d on heroin it would have been no more worthy of scorn.