Emile Hirsch, Alpha Actor - Page 2

When asked what year she was born in, she tells Chris that she's only 16.

Chris leaves behind his calisthenics and reading and makes his plans for Alaska in consonance with Jack London's Odyssey of the North. His progressive lack of discernment allows him to abandon his inchoate crush on Tracy after having played a duet with her guitar and Chris' second-hand organ from Rainey (Brian Dierker) and Jan Burress (Catherine Keener). They sang "Angel from Montgomery":

Make me an angel
Just give me one thing
That I can hold on to
To believe in this living
Is just a hard way to go

Rainey had confided to Chris that Tracy is lusting after him — "That poor girl's just about ready to vault herself onto a fencepost" — but he declines to make advances on her. Chris tells Tracy that he finds her pretty magical just before departing for his great adventure in Alaska.

Chris calls himself Alexander Supertramp (his errant alter-ego): "Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road", he writes down, "no longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild." 

Inside the magical bus (brought in by a mining company) which becomes Chris's home in Alaska, he writes in his diary: "DAY 100 - MADE IT. BUT IN WEAKEST CONDITION OF LIFE. TOO WEAK TO WALK OUT. HAVE LITERALLY BECOME TRAPPED IN THE WILD". Shaking in pain due to starvation, he vacillates for an instant about using his rifle to end his life, but he just starts to scream out instead, anticipating in his agony the future slain warrior he's quickly transmuting into. Far behind the memories of Chris McCandless as the Emory College graduate possessed by the spirit of Thoreau, who couldn't cope with the stresses of family life and capitalist society's dark side, now triumphant in his battle of de-individuation and his eyes brimming with tears, his stomach heaving, he is waiting for an imminent death.

Sean Penn's cinematic tachisme washes us in existential romanticism and we learn a cathartic lesson about forgiveness, deism, and love (how Chris's rejection of love led him to misery and isolation). In his final fevered moments he learns this lesson even more clearly in a heartrending revelation about shared happiness (a hopeful sentence scribbled across a page) during his death throes. This theory, which differs from Krakauer's poisonous berries conclusion, makes this story more unresolved and enigmatic.

Article Author: Kendra

I'm an Aragonese/Catalonian freelance writer, poetress and film critic. My favourite genre is independent cinema. My real name is Elena Gonzalvo.

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