Abstrakt
In 1990, 22-year-old Christopher McCandless set off from his comfortable suburban upper-middle class home in Annandale, Virginia on a journey that would eventually lead to his death in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness. The story first gained recognition with the publication of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild in 1996 and gained even greater notoriety with the release of Sean Penn's film of the same name in 2007.
This tale of the self-reflective sojourn of McCandless reflects his total rejection of the capitalist society and all its excesses, his embracing of the innocence of wilderness, and the exuberance of a youthful idealism. As such, Into the Wild has been vigorously embraced for its romanticism and critiqued for its naïveté.
The purpose of this presentation is to critique the filmic version of the story in terms of its place and space-based elements, which is intended to add an analytic layer to an understanding of the significance and popularity of the tale. Our study is informed by an integration of two time-honored theoretical perspectives: Bildungsroman and Mobility, the latter as envisioned by Cresswell (2006, 2010).
The former is used to frame the life-story of the protagonist in its social-psychological realm, while the latter is used to place this realm within the geographic context of movement and crossing borders toward the imaginary. Through this lens, the presumption of subversion often associated with the story is questioned.