The Call of the Wild

I doubt that I'm the only person out here who is incredibly grateful that this film was made. I first read about this story in Jon Krakauer's article in Outside Magazine, sometime back in 1993 (that's 27 years ago!). I've been haunted by it ever since.

This is a remarkably coherent film, which almost seems like a veiled insult, but when you consider he probably had the tiniest of budgets, the film strikes upon many, many salient points in the story. For example, he times things to film the graduation at Emory University, which was sort of the embarkation point for the whole Into the Wild story. He talks with the new graduates who all appear to be super serious and oriented towards goals of most people would term as ambitious. Not a flake in the bunch, no one who wants to light out for the territory.

I can't believe that the book and film Into the Wild didn't know that the kid had $300 in cash and a lot of identification with him at the time of his death. That's a HUGE bit of news I learned from this documentary.

He should have ended the film with his own words instead of the over-used paragraph from Walden:

"Why he didn't walk out, perhaps, is less important in the big scheme of things than why he walked in. The former is fleeting and peripheral, whereas the latter is timeless and profound. It is the idealized McCandless, the seeker, who in the end matters most to me."