Into the Wild: Alone

   One of the most tragic aspects of this movie, to me, was what Chris wrote at the very end of his life, just before he died.  When he wrote that happiness was only real when shared, it broke my heart because it was like in his final moments he was realizing his mistakes.  It felt like he had made all of these huge, sweeping declarations and stuck to his guns so thoroughly and completely and then just as his adventure was coming to an end, he acknowledged his regret.  As sad as it was, I think he was right in his regret.  What shocked me about this movie was how long Chris was happy.  For the majority of his time away, he was having a great time.  He was struggling in the most exciting way and meeting the most amazing people.  He found what he had never found with his parents in more than one group on the road.  Almost everywhere he landed, in fact, he found a home.  When he was working on the fields, the men he worked with were his family, a true honest family he shared openly with and loved.  In Slab City, he found people who could really have been parent figures, and who even seemed to want him to take on that role within their community.  Ron openly asked him to be a part of his family before he left, begging Chris to let him adopt him and be his grandfather.  It seemed that Chris was so blinded by his quest that he didn't stop to notice when he had already found it.  He was trying so hard to release himself from the fake, cruel restraints of society he had been exposed to growing up, but what he really needed was a release from those aspects of society.  He needed people who were not centered around material goods and getting ahead in a cruel world, people who cared about making other people happy with their company and working hard for what they had and sharing generously.  He kept pushing forward even though he came across many opportunities to be truly happy, to be wildly different from what he had been but not entirely secluded.  I think in his quest to drive away the gross competitive nature of society, he found a similar nature in himself because he couldn't have been happy with what he found, he needed to keep looking until he reached some mythical perfect point of complete release and freedom.  His ideals were sound and his complaints with society were very real but I wish he would have opened his eyes along the way and realized that it wasn't all bad.