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Into the Wild · This Film is Lit

• 0:04
  Speaker A: This Film Is lit, the podcast where we finally settle the score on one simple Is the book really better than the movie? I'm Brian and I have a film degree, so I watch the movie but don't read the book.
• 0:15
  Speaker B: And I'm Katie, I have an English degree, so I do things the right way and read the book before we watch the movie.
• 0:22
  Speaker A: So prepare to be wowed by our expertise and charm as we dissect all of your favorite film adaptations and decide if the silver screen or the written word did it better. So turn it up, settle in, and get ready for spoilers because this film is lit. No longer to be poisoned by civilization, he flees and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild. Alexander Supertramp May 1992 it's into the wild and and this film is Lit. Hello and welcome back to this Film Is lit, the podcast where we talk about movies that are based on books. Sorry we're a couple days late. Lots of stuff going on. House almost got hit by a tornado. We had to go help support a local restaurant that was getting attacked by bigots. It's been a lot of stuff going on, so real life got in the way a little bit. But we're here, we're back with a very full episode, so we're gonna jump right into it. If you have not read or watched into the Wild, here is a brief summary of the film in Let me sum up. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.
• 1:40
  Speaker B: In April 1992, Chris McCandless arrives in a remote area called Healy, just north of Denali national park and Preserve in Alaska. Noting McCandless's unpreparedness, the man who drops him off gives him gumboots. McCandless sets up camp in an abandoned city bus that he calls the Magic Bus. He is content with the isolation, the beauty of nature, and the thrill of living off the land. He hunts with a 22, reads books and keeps a journal as he prepares his new life in the wild. In May 1990, McCandless graduates with high honors from Emory University. He is disenchanted with modern society after discovering he and his sister Perine were born out of wedlock, McCandless destroys his credit cards and identification, donates his savings to Oxfam, and sets out on a cross country drive in his Datsun210 to experience life in the wilderness.
• 2:37
  Speaker A: Nailed it.
• 2:39
  Speaker B: He does not tell his parents or Karine where he's going or what he is doing or where he is going, and does not contact them after his departure, this causes his parents to become increasingly anxious. At Lake Mead, McCandless's car is caught in a flash flood. He abandons it and begins hitchhiking, burning what remains of his cash. He assumes the name Alexander Supertramp. In Northern California, McCandless encounters hippie couple Jan and Rainey. Rainey tells him his relationship with Jan is failing, which McCandless helps rekindle. In September, McCandless arrives in Carthage, South Dakota, and works for a contract harvesting company called called Wayne, owned by Wayne Westerberg. He leaves after Westerberg is arrested for satellite piracy. McCandless kayaks down the Colorado river and, though told by park rangers he may not do so without a license, ignores their warnings and goes downriver to Mexico. His kayak is lost in a dust storm, and he crosses back into the United States on foot. Unable to hitch a ride, he jumps on freight trains to Los Angeles. Not long after arriving, however, he starts to feel corrupted by modern civilization. Leaves. He's forced to resume hitchhiking when railroad police catch and beat him. In December 1991, McCandless arrives at Slab City in the Imperial Valley and encounters Jan and Raini again. He also meets Tracy Tatro, a teenage girl who shows interest in him, but turns her down because she is a minor. After the holidays, McCandless continues heading for Alaska. One month later, camping near Salton City, McCandless meets Ron Franz, a retired widower who lost his family in car accident while he was serving in the United States Army. He leads a lonely life in a workshop as a leather worker, Franz teaches McCandless leatherwork, resulting in the making of a belt detailing his travels. After two months with Franz, McCandless decides to leave for Alaska. Franz gives McCandless his old camping and travel gear, along with an offer to adopt him as his grandchild. McCandless tells him that they should discuss it after he returns from Alaska. Four months later, at the abandoned bus, life for McCandless becomes harder, and he makes several poor decisions. Trying to live off the land, he hunts down a large moose with his rifle, but cannot preserve the meat and its boils. Within days, as his supplies dwindle, he realizes that nature can be harsh. McCandless concludes that true happiness can be found only when shared with others, and he seeks to return from the wild to his friends and family. However, he finds that the stream he crossed during the winter has become wide, deep and violent due to the thaw, and he is unable to cross. Defeated, he returns to the bus. In a desperate act, McCandless gathers and eats roots and plants. He confuses similar plants and eats a poisonous one. Falling sick as a result, slowly dying. He continues to document his process of self realization and imagines what it would have been like if he had managed to return to his family. He writes a farewell note to the world and crawls into his sleeping bag to die. Two weeks later, moose hunters find his body. Shortly afterwards, Corinne returns to Virginia with her brother's ashes in her backpack.
• 5:57
  Speaker A: All right, there is your summary of the film into the Wild Source from Wikipedia. I don't know if you said that.
• 6:03
  Speaker B: At the top because I don't think I did.
• 6:04
  Speaker A: That was sourced from Wikipedia. We do have a guess who this week, so let's do it. Who are you? No one of consequence. I must know. Get used to disappointment. He didn't appear to be very old. 18, maybe 19 at most. A rifle protruded from his backpack, but he looked friendly enough. Five foot seven or eight with a wiry build. He claimed to be 24 years old and said he was from South Dakota.
• 6:35
  Speaker B: Is that Alex slash Chris?
• 6:37
  Speaker A: Yes, that is Alex slash Chris. I originally wasn't gonna do that one. There are probably more descriptions of both him and other characters, but really only one of them jumped out to me while I was reading it. And it was like a very specific description. So that's the last. The other one I'm gonna do here. A bearded, taciturn man with longish salt and pepper hair combed straight back from a high forehead. Tall and solidly, solidly proportioned. He wears wire rimmed glasses that give him a proportion, a professorial demeanor.
• 7:05
  Speaker B: Until you got to the glasses. I was thinking Vince Vaughn's character. He doesn't wear glasses.
• 7:13
  Speaker A: He does not.
• 7:15
  Speaker B: It could be.
• 7:16
  Speaker A: And the professorial demeanor doesn't fit.
• 7:19
  Speaker B: Does not fit his character either. But that also doesn't fit the hippie guy.
• 7:27
  Speaker A: Oh yeah, and rainy.
• 7:29
  Speaker B: Yeah, rainy. But that description also doesn't sound old enough to be Franz, because you said.
• 7:42
  Speaker A: There was an age listed that I left out intentionally to make it a little more difficult.
• 7:47
  Speaker B: But you said like salt and pepper hair. Right?
• 7:49
  Speaker A: Bearded, taciturn man with longish salt and pepper hair combed straight back from a high forehead. Tall and solidly proportioned. He wears wire rimmed glasses that give him a professorial demeanor.
• 8:02
  Speaker B: Because the guy in the movie was like really old.
• 8:06
  Speaker A: There's a character you're forgetting or a person. I say character. We'll get to that too. But.
• 8:14
  Speaker B: Like a main character kinda.
• 8:17
  Speaker A: To be fair, they're not in the movie. A Ton. But they are a very important character in the movie.
• 8:22
  Speaker B: Could be his dad, I guess. His dad doesn't give that vibe in the movie either.
• 8:30
  Speaker A: What vibe?
• 8:33
  Speaker B: A long haired vibe.
• 8:36
  Speaker A: Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, it's his dad. I'm just gonna spoil it because.
• 8:42
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 8:43
  Speaker A: He didn't seem like you were gonna give any additional. It's his dad.
• 8:46
  Speaker B: Okay, well, I was thinking. But yeah, yeah, because it was the long hair that threw me. Because I feel like the only character in the movie that long hair fits as Rainy.
• 8:59
  Speaker A: Right.
• 8:59
  Speaker B: But the rest of that description I didn't feel like fit. Rainy, yes.
• 9:04
  Speaker A: 56 years old bearded Samuel Walter McCandless is a 56 year old bearded, taciturn man with longish salt and pepper hair. Comes straight back from high forehead. He also doesn't have a beard in the movie. Yeah, I don't even know if he wears glasses in the movie, but I thought maybe the professorial demeanor. And tall and solidly proportioned because he's a very imposing man. He was also like a NASA scientist, so I thought that might.
• 9:27
  Speaker B: In the movie he looks like the principal from Ferris Bueller's dad a little bit.
• 9:31
  Speaker A: Yeah. He's played by. I can't remember that actor's name, but that's a fairly famous actor. Yeah. Yep, that was his dad. So. All right, one for two. Let's get into Katie's questions in.
• 9:45
  Speaker B: Was that in the book Gaston? May I have my book, please?
• 9:48
  Speaker A: How can you read this? There's no pictures.
• 9:51
  Speaker B: Well, some people use their imagination.
• 9:53
  Speaker A: Before we get into the questions, I wanted to note that I am going to constantly switch back and forth between calling our main subject of this story Alex and Chris. My notes literally constantly switched back as I was reading the book. Back and forth. The book switches back and forth kind of at random.
• 10:12
  Speaker B: Well, I mean, to be fair, he doesn't go by Alex for the entirety of his.
• 10:17
  Speaker A: And like I said Alex, and that was my next point is Alex. Chris did the same thing himself. The book does this. I'm not sure how to explain this, but sometimes writing Alex felt right and sometimes referring to him as Chris felt right. I literally like whenever, initially when I first started taking notes, I was writing Chris slash Alex. And then eventually I got tired of doing that after like the first two times I did it.
• 10:42
  Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds very tiresome.
• 10:43
  Speaker A: So I just stopped and just went with whatever my brain did and just let it go. You could probably do like a weird like psychological analysis of like when my notes refer to him as Alex and When they refer to him as Chris and what that says about my opinions, I don't know. It is interesting, but I will bounce back and forth constantly. So if you hear Alex or Chris, they're both referring to Chris McCandless. So the main character for story.
• 11:11
  Speaker B: So this movie opens kind of in media res with him being dropped off in the Alaskan wilderness. And we see. We talked about this a little bit in the prequel episode, but we see the guy who drops him off gives him his boots.
• 11:28
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 11:28
  Speaker B: Which the Wikipedia summary calls gum boots, which I had never heard of.
• 11:33
  Speaker A: Just a type of rubber.
• 11:34
  Speaker B: It's just a type of rubber boot. So rain boots is what I would call them, but whatever, I guess. Is that scene from the book?
• 11:43
  Speaker A: Yes. Not only is that how the book opens, it's like the first part, not counting the forward and stuff. But the guy in the movie, and I mentioned this in the prequel, is actually the guy from real life who gave Chris McCandless his boots when he dropped him off at the Stampede Trail. So this is the actual guy who did that. For people who don't know, I assume most people, this is a true story, as we kind of alluded to, but this is based on a true story and Chris McCandless is a real. Was a real guy. So. And yeah, like I said, this character in the movie is played by the actual guy, which is interesting.
• 12:17
  Speaker B: Yeah. So did. Sorry, I'm gonna go off script here for a second. Did Jon Krakauer. Did he like interview that guy?
• 12:28
  Speaker A: He interviewed lots of people, right? Yes, he interviewed him at a bar in somewhere. Yeah.
• 12:35
  Speaker B: Did he feel bad about it? I feel like I would feel guilty.
• 12:38
  Speaker A: You mean the guy who dropped him off, he definitely had some level of like, regret about not like doing something, but he also didn't know, you know, he.
• 12:47
  Speaker B: Right.
• 12:48
  Speaker A: And there's a point I'll get later. The movie doesn't include their whole. It literally just kind of shows the very end where he drops him off. But there's a whole part before that, and I'll just say now where the. This guy, Jim Gallion, who's the. The guy's name, spends the whole drive, like, trying to convince him not to do this.
• 13:07
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 13:08
  Speaker A: He's like, are you sure you want to do. You don't really have the right equipment for this and you're kind of not, you know, like, that's why he gives him his boots. Is he. Alex is wearing like, I think just some kind of like non waterproof, like hiking boots basically, that are not remotely adequate for The Alaskan wilderness. So he gives him these rubber waterproof boots, basically just to give it. He also, in the book, which they don't include, is he gives him his lunch. He has two sandwich. Like two tuna fish sandwiches or something. And he makes him take that and then something. He gives him one other thing that I can't remember. Oh, he takes a picture of him before he leaves. He, like, takes a little photo of him. And that stuff's not included in the movie. But, yeah, the guy. The guy was. There's some talk in the book of him being like, if I would have known, obviously, but, like, you know.
• 13:54
  Speaker B: I mean, no, you would never know, but I. I think I would feel guilty for the rest of my days. Another thing that we see in this, like, opening part of the movie is him taking off his knitted cap, which we find out much later where he got that. And, like, leaving it on a tree br. Branch or something as a trail marker.
• 14:16
  Speaker A: Right. As he crosses the river.
• 14:17
  Speaker B: Yeah. So he knows, like, where he crossed.
• 14:20
  Speaker A: Teclanika river or something like that.
• 14:23
  Speaker B: Does that happen in the book?
• 14:25
  Speaker A: So this is not in the book or reported as far as I know. I couldn't find anything about it. So I think this is a good place here right at the beginning to discuss something that I thought was kind of interesting about this episode. As I was working on my notes after we watched the movie, doing, like, better in the book, better in the movies, and figuring out where to put stuff. It felt very strange to me to say that something in the movie is quote, unquote, better in the movie when I know, or at least assume that the thing that I'm talking about is not true and was created literally to add, like, narrative weight to the film in what is very much a true story. I don't. It just felt kind of wrong to me to discuss how it makes for a better story when it's, like, a true thing. And, like, the vast majority of what we see in this film is either reported to have actually happened or, you know, is their guess at, like, their best guess at what transpired. And that sort of thing based on his journal. So all that to say it isn't in the book. I like it thematically as a symbol of his connection to other people. Especially when we find out later where that hat's comes from.
• 15:33
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 15:34
  Speaker A: And having it be trapped on the opposite side of the river from him when he comes back later in the movie is a really good, again, thematic point. It's also a good visual marker for the audience to realize that he's both in the same place as he was in the beginning of the movie. And also that a significant amount of time has passed because the hat is really, like, ratty and like, yeah, beat up. This isn't to say that I'm not going to say stuff is better in the movie. I just kind of wanted to talk about that dichotomy because I don't. I'm sure we've done a true story before.
• 16:05
  Speaker B: Yeah, we've done Hidden Figures.
• 16:10
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 16:10
  Speaker B: We did Black Clansmen also, I guess.
• 16:14
  Speaker A: I don't remember if we had this conversation.
• 16:15
  Speaker B: I don't remember. Both of those episodes were so long ago.
• 16:18
  Speaker A: Like I said, it was just a thing where, for me, upon writing the notes, it felt strange to be like, this is better in the movie when I'm like. But it's literally just added for narrative. Like, it's a thing they added for thematic purposes to, like, better tell. This true story feels.
• 16:36
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 16:36
  Speaker A: Kind of strange. I don't know. It's not. Like, again, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. And I am gonna say this. Some of the stuff is better in the movie. Like, this is a detail that I think is a good addition for the audience watching the movie. But that still doesn't take away from the fact that it just feels a little weird to be like, yeah, good job changing reality. You know what I mean? I don't know. Like, it's just a little. It's a little weird is all. I wanted to kind of get to.
• 16:58
  Speaker B: All right, so we also talked about this in the prequel, and I promised that I would ask about it again.
• 17:06
  Speaker A: Because we know something. A handful. There's definitely people that only listen to the main episodes and don't listen to the prequels. You should listen to the prequels. They're great.
• 17:12
  Speaker B: But the prequels are great. You should listen to them. But, you know. So why is there an abandoned bus in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness? And also in the book, is it already set up like a camp?
• 17:29
  Speaker A: Yes. So the book goes into this in pretty explicit detail. There were originally three buses placed at this location by a construction company that were there to act as cabins, shelter for workers who were, like, building a road or something like that. Eventually, the road project, or whatever the. I think it was road. But whatever the construction project was, was abandoned. And they ended up taking two of the buses out, but they left one there to kind of serve as like, a wilderness cabin for, like, hunters and hikers and stuff. And lots of People have used it, had used it over the years before Alex ever got there. It's noted in, like, the book that there's a bunch of other people have, like, signed it and stuff like that, you know, so it was very much a known thing that people used. Which is also the reason why at the end, when the hunter, the moose hunters find him, it's because they know, you know, they're going to that right bus or whatever. So, yeah, that's why it was there for. For a construction project that got abandoned. And it was already set up to be like a. It had like a stove in it and bunks and stuff like that. So.
• 18:28
  Speaker B: Because I don't. I know we talked about it in the prequel, but I don't know why that caught me off guard. When we were watching the movie, I was expecting it to be a bus and not like a camp inside of a bus.
• 18:41
  Speaker A: Like, it is a bus. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't know. And I was actually thinking about this. I'm not sure if we know because I can't remember if the book mentions this. If Alex knew it was there or not, we know he wants to. My bet is that he did hear from somebody and that's why he goes out there, because he just chooses to go up the Stampede Trail. And I can't remember which is the name of the trail that he's on, which we see a sign, like a road sign in the movie that says Stampede Road or something. But Stampede Trail is where he was. But I just can't remember in the book if they mentioned if he knew the bus was there.
• 19:16
  Speaker B: Yeah, because he does seem like. In the movie, I felt like he seemed a little maybe not surprised, but like, yeah.
• 19:26
  Speaker A: Delightedly might be surprised. I think it's fair to say he could not know it was there because he writes in his journal the day he finds it in all caps, magic Bus Day. And that's why he called it. They call it the Magic Bus, which kind of implies that, like, maybe he didn't know it was there, but also.
• 19:42
  Speaker B: Like, he felt like it. The universe manifested itself.
• 19:45
  Speaker A: But also he's a interesting, quirky enough guy that I don't know if you can necessarily infer, which will be my note about a lot of this stuff when we get into it later. I don't know if you can necessarily infer from his journal that he didn't know it was there. He could have just gotten to it and been like, it's Magic Bus Day. I found the bus. I was looking for you know what I mean? Like, I don't know, but I think there is at least an implication that he didn't know he was gonna find it.
• 20:08
  Speaker B: Okay, so the movie uses a non linear narrative style to tell this story where obviously, I already said we start out with him going into the Alaskan wilderness, but then the movie jumps back and we see some of his backstory and how he ended up starting on this journey around the country, like hitchhiking and stuff. Does the book do the same thing?
• 20:34
  Speaker A: Absolutely. The movie nails this and actually kind of simplifies it a little bit. The book does start off, like I said, with him getting dropped off at the stampede trail, then actually jumps to his body being discovered in the book. Then we go back and show all of his travels leading up to Alaska. And then it recounts his final days fairly similar to the film does, like before he died. But the book also jumps back and forth more sporadically in his. Like when we're going through kind of like the lead up to Alaska, it doesn't. The movie follows a fairly straight linear narrative in the past, whereas the book kind of jumps around all over the place a little bit. There's also other sections in the book that are direct, not directly related to Chris's adventures at all. Mm, we'll get to that in a little bit. But there's a handful of chapters that discuss other people in a way that's relevant, but not like his directly his story. So it makes sense for him to not be in the movie. But we'll get to that later.
• 21:32
  Speaker B: A little detail that I wanted to know if it was from the book at one point after, he's been, like, traveling for a while and his parents think he's been living in Atlanta this whole time, but he hasn't been. And then when they find this out, they. I don't remember if this is how they find this out or if just. If it just coincided with it. They get a bunch of letters that he had the post office like, hold.
• 22:02
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 22:03
  Speaker B: So that his parents wouldn't find out that he was not in Atlanta. Is that something that happened in the book?
• 22:10
  Speaker A: Yes, but there's still a bit of a change here. In the book, they actually know that he's going on a road trip that summer. He tells them before he leaves. Like weeks before he leaves. I think I'm gonna disappear for a while. But this is a thing he'd done before. We find out in the movie he went on a road trip out west after high school, and that's when he found out the backstory about his dad cheating on his mom and all that sort of stuff. So he's done this numerous times before, so it's not unexpected. And in the book, they make a point that his dad is kind of just like. They don't really think much of it. They know he does this kind of thing. What is true, though, is that he does hold the letters because he's, like, planning to really take off this time. So they expect him to disappear for a month or two, and then he'll be back in Atlanta or whatever, but he just never comes back. And he holds the letter so that they don't come looking for him. But they did at least know it wasn't a complete surprise that he was, like, going on a trip or whatever. So there's a little bit there that I think the movie tweaks, but it's fairly similar.
• 23:13
  Speaker B: So I was assuming as we were watching the film that a lot of the voiceover was gonna be from the book, because that is sometimes the case when we have voiceover. But I was curious. The film sets it up as his sister speaking.
• 23:31
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 23:32
  Speaker B: And I was curious if the book did the same thing.
• 23:35
  Speaker A: Yeah. So many of the voiceovers in the movie are from parts of the book. Like, there are. Like, at the very beginning, it opens up with, like. I think there's a voiceover with that, isn't there? Or maybe it's just text on screen. But, like, we see, like, it's a postcard he wrote to Wayne before he's going into the thing. So some of the voice. And I think there is a voiceover with it. I can't remember, but there might not be. But other times we hear some voiceovers, and they are from parts of the book. Sometimes it's postcard or the postcards of the journal Alex wrote, or it's excerpts from books he was reading or other books that Jon Krakauer thought were relevant. Those serve as chapter intros. Every chapter starts with a little excerpt from a novel or something that is somehow relevant to Alex's story. And some of them are parts specifically from the books that Alex had with him that he was reading on the trip. Other ones are just other stuff that is kind of thematically relevant to what we're discussing. And some of those get used. Like, there's a. In the movie, there's a quote from. They read, like, a part from. Not Thoreau, but I can't remember somebody else at one point in the movie that is like an excerpt from a book that he was reading. And that sort of thing. But the book itself is written from Jon Krakauer's perspective. It is his investigation into what happened. So he writes it from his voice. And much of what Korine's V.O. in the movie is, which is his sister, is stuff that is either direct quotes when he interviewed and talked to her, or it's summaries of what she told him. I'm pretty. That is, like, revoiced by her in the movie. I'm pretty sure there's a handful of times in the movie that I explicitly recognized lines she was saying. But they weren't direct quotes by her in the book, but they were Jon Krakauer's retelling of what she told him. And then the movie just takes that and gives it in her voice, basically, which I think makes sense in words.
• 25:33
  Speaker B: Interesting.
• 25:34
  Speaker A: She also did write a book later, like a Tell all about this, where a lot of additional info comes from that came out after. I don't know if it came out after the movie, but it definitely came out after the original book did. And that John didn't have all of that info at the time. But I think that might have come out before the movie. And the movie might use a little bit of that. I can't remember. But anyways.
• 25:57
  Speaker B: So we see a lot of Alex's adventures and the things that he's doing in this kind of quote unquote flashback portion. And at one point he gets a kayak and he. He wants to kayak down the Colorado River.
• 26:18
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 26:20
  Speaker B: But they. He can't. Or they tell him he can't because he has to have a permit, which he obviously hates.
• 26:27
  Speaker A: Yes, yes, he does.
• 26:30
  Speaker B: And at one point he has to paddle away from the river police. Does he have to paddle from the river police in the book?
• 26:41
  Speaker A: Yeah, that was a real thing that happened. He kayaked the Colorado river kind of just on a whim and was chased by authorities because people kept reporting him for not using safety equipment, which there's a moment in the movie where he's, like, going through some rapids and one of the other guys on the side of the river is like, you're not wearing a helmet.
• 26:58
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 26:58
  Speaker A: And he's just like. Yeah. And that was apparently a thing. He kept getting reported. And he was kind of infamous because people knew he was paddling down the river without a permit and again, very unsafely and all that sort of thing. So that is in the book, although the movie ends up covering his Colorado river trip in a fair amount of detail. And we see some scenes from that. Whereas the book skips most of that and we get the opposite. Whereas in the movie. The movie kind of just skips over his Mexico kayak adventures and we just mention it briefly and then he's back at the border. Whereas the book goes into a little bit more detail about that part, about him trying to. He's trying to paddle his kayak to the Gulf of California. And he keeps running into all these issues because the streams don't connect and he has to drag his kayak over. He just. And I think he does eventually get there. I can't remember. But he does lose his kayak and just walks back to the border eventually and gets detained because he's also. In the book they mention. I don't remember if they say this in the movie. He has a gun on him. He was just carrying a sidearm, like for hunting and stuff. And he. He's carrying that with him when he tries to come back over the border. And they're like, no, but they do let him go. They confiscate the gun and let him back in.
• 28:11
  Speaker B: But I was kind of impressed in the movie. It seemed like he should not have been able to outrun the river police in that one scene. Yeah, they were in, like, a motorized boat and he was not very far ahead of them.
• 28:27
  Speaker A: Yeah, we do see him, like, pretty quickly after they. They're chasing him, dragging his kayak up. I think the. The imp. Might be that the. The river police in that particular scene stopped and talked to the Danish couple that he was talking to.
• 28:40
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 28:40
  Speaker A: And they, like, stalled him enough that he then was able to.
• 28:43
  Speaker B: Right.
• 28:44
  Speaker A: You know, get out and get away.
• 28:45
  Speaker B: But yeah, so then after he goes to Mexico and crosses back over the border into America, he goes to la and he's in the city, but he's there for the movie. Implies less than 24 hours that he's there and he gets so overwhelmed that he has to leave again. Is that something that happens in the book?
• 29:15
  Speaker A: Yeah. So we know from his journal that he did go to LA to get an id, which is what he's. In the movie, he mentions like, hey, I need to get an id, and she's like, go to the DMV or whatever. But in his journal, the book doesn't go into much detail about this is like. We just get, like, a little line about how he went to LA to get an id. But. But in his journal he wrote, quote, he felt extremely uncomfortable in society now and must return to the road immediately. End quote. So that's what that scene is doing. I thought the movie's handling of this was kind of lame. It felt cheap and cliche to me. The way they show him, like, walking through the street also felt a little weird that the thing he's like. And this is very counter to his. What we know of him, at least. Like, we see that scene of him, like, walking through, like, a skid row, like, seeing all the homeless people. And that seemingly, like, affecting him in a way where he's like, I gotta get out of here. And then. Then after that, we do see him go to, like, he's, like, standing outside a restaurant and he's, like, watching, like, all the business people inside. And he sees himself in.
• 30:16
  Speaker B: Yeah, he, like, hallucinates himself as. Or imagines.
• 30:20
  Speaker A: I don't think it's so much hallucinating as. Yeah, so much as just, like, seeing what his life could have been had he not done the thing he did and being kind of repulsed by it and wanting to get away from it.
• 30:29
  Speaker B: Right.
• 30:30
  Speaker A: Which is fair. But what we do know about him is a detail, and that's mentioned in the book quite a bit, is that when he was a kid, supposedly, according to the book and according to his sister, he would go and just, like, hang out with homeless people. Like, he would go and him, like, give them, buy the meals. And like, he was very. Apparently very. Like, he hated that there were homeless people and that people were going hungry in the country. And he was very, like, socially conscious of that kind of thing. And so the idea, that scene where he's, like, standing there in the. To me, that doesn't read as much like, oh, this is a travesty that all these people are, like. That these people are, like, homeless and that sort of thing. And he feels bad about it. To me, it feels more like I can't be around this weird degeneracy or something. I don't know. Like, in the movie, that wasn't how I interpreted it.
• 31:17
  Speaker B: I interpreted it more as him being upset by, like, the state of society.
• 31:24
  Speaker A: Okay. And that's fair. I think that's what they were going for. And I think that's true over the whole scene.
• 31:29
  Speaker B: Overall, I still didn't really like the scene. Cause I also thought it was kind of cheap and cliche.
• 31:34
  Speaker A: Yeah, you get that vibe from the whole thing. Overall, it was just something about the way he was looking at the. I don't know. And I think you're right. And that would make sense because Sean Penn was very committed to who wrote and directed the movie. He was very committed to the book and portraying it in a way that he felt was accurate and all that sort of stuff. So I think he would clearly be very aware of the parts talking about how he was very compassionate for the unhoused and stuff like that. So I don't. I don't think that would necessarily be what the movie was implying, but I think it's just the way they portray that felt.
• 32:02
  Speaker B: Yeah, I totally get that. Yeah. Yeah.
• 32:04
  Speaker A: It just didn't feel right.
• 32:05
  Speaker B: I think you could definitely get either reading from that scene pretty easily. So another thing that we see him doing a couple times in this kind of, like, middle part of the movie is hopping freight trains and doing that to get around instead of hitchhiking. But then at this point, he gets caught doing that and he gets beat up by the railroad police. We got river police and we got railroad police, and that's too many police.
• 32:39
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 32:40
  Speaker B: Does that happen in the book?
• 32:42
  Speaker A: Yeah, that exact interaction is outlined or mentioned in the book. Specifically the part where the guy, after he, like, beats the shit out of him, says, if I see your face again, I'll kill you, or whatever. Although the movie leaves out a detail that I thought was really funny, or at least I think it leaves it out. I don't remember this is that Alex goes, okay. And leaves and then says that he immediately snuck back in onto the same train and didn't get caught and wrote it wherever he was trying to go.
• 33:08
  Speaker B: Yeah, I don't think that was in the movie.
• 33:10
  Speaker A: Yeah, I didn't think so either because that seems like a very good moment. But that's what the book says, is that he mentions that interaction of the guy beating him up and telling him he writes it in, like, a postcard either to his sister or Wayne or somebody, that he had an interaction with a train police that beat him up and said he would kill him. But he's like, but I got the last laugh because I got on the train anyways or something like that. And who knows if he's telling the truth?
• 33:30
  Speaker B: Right?
• 33:31
  Speaker A: That's what he said in the letter.
• 33:34
  Speaker B: So throughout this, throughout the whole movie, we do kind of pop back to him in Alaska every now and then. And we see him doing different things. And one thing I was curious about, we see him invent a way to take a hot shower.
• 33:52
  Speaker A: Yeah. He makes a camping.
• 33:53
  Speaker B: When he's out there. Yeah. He, like, has a bucket that he punches holes in and puts hot water in it. And I wanted to know if that was from the book.
• 34:03
  Speaker A: So I don't believe this is mentioned. In the book at all. And I will say that it runs a bit contrary to other things we know about Alex, which I will get to in your very next question.
• 34:11
  Speaker B: All right, excellent. My next question. Does he get a job at Burger King and get reprimanded for not wearing socks?
• 34:22
  Speaker A: Get reprimanded by what's his name's Dylan's wife. Dylan's wife, yeah. That was a funny. I was like, oh, my God, it's. What's her name? From severance. Yeah. So he does actually briefly get a job at a fast food restaurant in the book, but it's McDonald's they specifically mentioned in the book.
• 34:37
  Speaker B: I wonder if they couldn't get McDonald's to agree to be a McDonald's.
• 34:40
  Speaker A: Did we see it was explicitly Burger King.
• 34:42
  Speaker B: It was explicitly a burger.
• 34:43
  Speaker A: I thought it was just a generic, like. Like burger place.
• 34:45
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 34:45
  Speaker A: Yeah, okay. Yeah, but it's McDonald's. In the movie or in the book, he opens a bank account. This is while he's in a place in Bullhead City. He opens a bank account and actually considers settling down in the city for a while, briefly, but he ultimately ends up quitting and leaving. And it's mentioned by some of the other employees and kind of seems like from maybe his journal. And Krakauer speculates that he ends up leaving when some of the other employees start kind of getting on him and asking him to bathe. And he's just not particularly interested in doing that. And so the movie translates that to, you need to wear socks, which is also an issue. He was not a sock person. He did not wear socks. But I think the main issue as described in the book is that he was not. He did not bathe regularly.
• 35:31
  Speaker B: Not particularly. Good hygiene.
• 35:33
  Speaker A: Yeah. And that was the. And when you're working in a restaurant serving food, you kind of have to. Unfortunately. I mean, I say unfortunately, fortunately. I mean, you have to bathe if you're gonna.
• 35:41
  Speaker B: Yeah, you're gonna be in food service and also generally gonna be around people. That's like. That's like the. The socially nice thing to do.
• 35:50
  Speaker A: Yes. And like I said, I think it's probably likely that along with that, that they were probably being shitty to him about it because he is a. He was a different person, which we'll get into. So I'm sure they weren't, like, super nice necessarily about this guy. Not. So he may have had, like. He may have just not felt like he wanted to stick around there. But that being said, you gotta shower if you go to work. A restaurant Sorry, I kind of have to.
• 36:15
  Speaker B: And I will say in the movie, I said reprimanded. But Dylan's wife was not mean about.
• 36:20
  Speaker A: No, she was not mean.
• 36:20
  Speaker B: She was like. She was very nice. She was like, I want to help you get to Alaska, but could you please wear socks?
• 36:25
  Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. And that character is mentioned in the book, his manager at McDonald's. And she kind of talks about how she liked him, but also had issues. Like, she was like, he was a good worker, but also, like, she was. Like, he always showed up on time and stuff. But he was also, like, he wouldn't. Like when. Like, during rushes and stuff, he would just work really slow and, like, he wouldn't respond to, like, hey, we gotta pick it up. He just did his own thing. And, like, it's not like he was a bad employee, but just. He wasn't, like, a good employee, basically. I was like, yeah, that sounds about right.
• 36:57
  Speaker B: Something that I noticed periodically throughout the movie was this kind of recurring motif where he would be out in, like, the wilderness and then see a plane going overhead, which I felt like the movie was using to represent modern society encroaching on the wilderness.
• 37:17
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 37:18
  Speaker B: And I was curious if that motif was anything pulled from the book.
• 37:23
  Speaker A: Yeah. I don't remember that specifically being mentioned in the book, but there may be. It did tickle something in my brain of some line somewhere about Alex wanting to be somewhere where there weren't. Like, where he couldn't see anything. You know, planes or anything like that. I can't recall specifically, but for the movie, I thought that was a perfectly good motif. And that's also the kind of thing in a movie like this that, to me, feels perfectly not weird. Like, those kind of additions, like, that's not something that's, like, changing a fundamental fact about a thing that happened. You know what I mean?
• 37:52
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 37:52
  Speaker A: It's more so, like, adding thematic stuff visually to a movie that I thought made sense and worked. So I like that that was kind of a. Better in the movie. I say better in the movie. Yeah, I liked it.
• 38:04
  Speaker B: Here we go. McCandless was candid with Stuckey about his intent to spend the summer alone in the bush, living off the land. He said it was something he'd wanted to do since he was little. Says Stuckey says he didn't want to see a single person. No airplanes, no sign of civilization.
• 38:21
  Speaker A: Okay, there you go.
• 38:22
  Speaker B: So there you go.
• 38:22
  Speaker A: There is. I knew. It's like, there's something in. Bouncing around in my brain that I thought that. But. Yeah, all right. There you go.
• 38:30
  Speaker B: Another scene from when he's by himself in Alaska, because this is the thing.
• 38:36
  Speaker A: The movie does that the book doesn't really do, is that during the flashback, we occasionally go back to Alaska to kind of see what he's up to.
• 38:42
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 38:43
  Speaker A: Like, we flash back forward to Alaska. The book doesn't really do that in the same way. The book's kind of more everywhere, but anyways.
• 38:51
  Speaker B: Yeah. So one scene where when we're back in Alaska, like, seeing what he's up to, that I thought was really hard to watch was the scene where he kills the moose and then he's not able to butcher it quickly enough before the flies start getting to it and maggots. And is that from the book?
• 39:15
  Speaker A: Yes. So, yeah, this is one of the big turning points in the book, is that he does kill a moose, but he cannot butcher it quickly enough or preserve it quickly enough and it does all spoil. And the line in the movie where he writes down in his journal, like, the greatest travesty of my life, that that was what he wrote, or tragedy of my life or something like that. He's like, I wish I'd never killed the moose. That all comes directly from the book and from his journal. And it is. It's one of those. Yeah, it is. Very, very. It's. It sucks because it's. It's in the book. They make a point. And I don't know how accurate this is that we see him in the movie getting information from Zach Galifianakis character when he's out hanging out with Wayne about how to preserve meat or how to clean an animal and then preserve the meat or whatever. And Zach Galifianakis is explaining this to him. The book makes a point that that happened in real life. Krakauer says he got the tips on how to clean and preserve meat hunters back in South Dakota or whatever, but that that information didn't translate to the Alaskan wilderness. Like, it's not the same environment, it's not the same type of meat, all this sort of stuff. And that it really wasn't. That he needed to, like, look to what the locals in this area would do to preserve meat and. Cause he tries to smoke it. And Krakauer insinuates that that was a mistake, that he should have just cut it very thinly and then like, put it out to dry into, like, jerky, basically, instead of trying to smoke it all. And that that was part of the issue, basically. Krakar kind of insinuates that he just goes about it all wrong because he doesn't know better. Like, and it's not like he was completely wrong. Like, he does know a little bit about, like, how to clean it and all that sort of stuff. He just doesn't have the wealth of knowledge he needed to really be able to pull it off. But, yeah, it becomes this big disaster. I thought the movie nailed this and honestly elevated it a little bit. I thought it. Because it's. It is like, like the move the book also makes. It kind of this turning point. And it's like one of the first big mistakes he makes that really starts to, like. Like snowball.
• 41:22
  Speaker B: Yeah. Like, create this downhill.
• 41:24
  Speaker A: Yeah. And the. The movie, I thought, like, showing him, like, washing the blood off his hands and, like, is very, like, vivid or symbolic of, you know, him having the blood on his hands from this mistake. And he. He goes throughout the. He kills nothing. He kills tons of animals. In the book, his journal, they make a point at one Krakauer. At the end of the book, him and some of his friends go to the bus after all of this is like a year after McCandless is found dead there. And they're remark. They're talking about it and they mention. They're kind of talking to themselves. And they remark on the fact that his journal is like. Most of his journal is just a record of all of the animals he killed and ate. Like, that's most of what he wrote down. So he didn't really, like, have a problem with hunting, but he also was very adamant about, like, using all of the. Right.
• 42:14
  Speaker B: I was gonna say he seems like the type of person, even just from watching the movie, that would not be thrilled about waste.
• 42:21
  Speaker A: No, no, he hates waste. Absolutely. He hates waste and he hates all that sort of. This is the whole big thing, is he hates all the modern waste of society and all that sort of stuff. That's that whole big thing where his parents offer him to buy him a car at the beginning, and he's like, why are I have a car? Why would you buy me a car? And that's a big. Turns into a big argument between him and his parents and is indicative to him of their material nature and how obsessed they are with stuff. And so, yeah, it becomes this big kind of psychologically difficult thing for him because he is so adamant about not wasting things and about respecting life. And he does, you know, he kills animals to survive, but he does it just to survive. He's not out there just shooting animals and stuff like that for fun. And so it does really affect him when he kills this moose and then isn't able to actually use it.
• 43:12
  Speaker B: So something we haven't actually talked about yet are Jan and Rainey. So this is this hippie couple who travels in an RV that he meets initially closer to the beginning of the movie. And then he encounters them again kind of shortly before he heads off for Alaska. And in that second time that he encounters them in the film, there's this kind of narrative parallel setup where Jan tells him that she also has a son who's around his age that they're estranged from and she hasn't seen him or heard from him in years. And I was wondering, because that, to me, that kind of like, perfect narrative parallel is something that feels to me like a movie edition. So I was curious if that was from the book.
• 44:05
  Speaker A: Yeah, the movie makes more out of it than the book does, but it does come from the book. When he first meets Jan, she does mention to him that she has a son that she is estranged from who is about his age. And that is a thing that she mentions. And that is part of the reason she tells Krakauer later. I think that that is part of the reason that her and her boyfriend Bob in the book, but Rainey in the movie, that they, like, pick him up and take him under their wing is because she identifies him with her strange son.
• 44:35
  Speaker B: Yeah. And then following that scene in the movie, both she and Rhaeny kind of try to coax Alex into contacting his parents or at least letting them know that he's alive and. Okay, Is that something that comes from the book as well?
• 44:51
  Speaker A: Yeah, the book mentions Jan doing this quite a bit and that every time that she did this. So anyways, yeah, the book encourages. Or the book, Jan does try to encourage him to, like, contact his parents. But in the book, Bob, who is rainy in the movie, generally seems to kind of like, be like whenever she brings it up. And he can tell Alex doesn't want to talk about it. He, like, tries to be like, ah, just let him. He's an adult. He can do what he wants. So in the movie, both of them kind of like try to encourage him, whereas in the book it seems like mainly it was just Jan that was kind of like trying to push him to like, like, talk to his family again or at least call them or whatever. And. And like I said in the book, whenever she would bring this up, which is kind of what we see in the movie, he just kind of roll his eyes and ignore it. And like, yeah, wouldn't really respond. He would just Kind of move on.
• 45:39
  Speaker B: We also meet Kristen Stewart's character.
• 45:42
  Speaker A: Yes.
• 45:43
  Speaker B: Kind of around the same part of the film. I was expecting her to be in more of the movie than she was. She's really not in very much of it. And she plays like, this young girl who is a musician, and she has a big crush on him, but she propositions him. She wants to have sex, and he turns her down because she's underage. So does that happen? And then do they play music together instead?
• 46:17
  Speaker A: So, yes, there is a girl named Tracy who lives at the Slabs while he's there, which is that Slab City?
• 46:23
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 46:24
  Speaker A: There's a real place in. Obviously all these are real places, but real place in Southern California where a bunch of people just hang out in the desert, kind of like living, you know, in RVs and that sort of thing. And she does develop a big crush on him and tries to proposition him. But there's not an explicit scene mentioned in the book, like in the movie of where she's like, come have sex with me. But it's mentioned in the book that she has a big crush on him, but he turns her down because she's underage. In the book, she's mentioned as being 17, whereas in the movie she initially says she's 17, then says she's 16. Yeah, I think they just wanted to make it clear that she's definitely underage, whereas 17, like in some state. They were like, oh, just make sure. Yeah. I think that the age thing may have been kind of a convenient excuse for him. Krakauer muses on the idea that Alex may have been celibate by choice as sort of a moral character kind of thing. He was a huge fan of Tolstoy, who later in his life preached celibacy. And I think you could maybe speculate that Alex may have been ace or some flavor of Ace, potentially. It feels a little bit strange to speculate that he was a real person, but we're going based on his journal here and just kind of, you know, as far as I know and have read, he didn't seem particularly interested in relationships or sex. And that's kind of what Krakauer alludes to when he's, like, kind of thinking he was celibate by choice. At the very least, they were not primary motivations in his life was relationships and sex. Definitely not. As to your question about them playing music together, they are not mentioned to have played music together, but Alex was noted to be a very good piano player, and he wasn't shy about playing music for people. It's mentioned numerous times that at parties and stuff he would play piano and sing songs for people and stuff. So the scene is one of the. Another one of the. So the scene where they play music together, to me is another one of those. Better in the movie, but feels a little bit weird because there's nothing referencing that actually happening. But it doesn't feel wrong necessarily for their characters. And I think it kind of puts a nice little bow on their relationship, you know, and gives it more of a. Gives them more of a moment so that later it's more tragic when he. He, you know, dies alone in the woods.
• 48:36
  Speaker B: Yeah, that. No, that is interesting, what you're talking about, about Krakauer kind of speculating that maybe he was celibate.
• 48:43
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 48:44
  Speaker B: By choice, you know, for one reason or another. Because that wasn't the vibe that I got from that scene in the movie. I felt like the movie was trying to portray him as like, almost like a white knight type of like. Like virtuous.
• 49:00
  Speaker A: Yeah. The book does also say that he turned her down because of her age. That's what it says. But it also goes on at different points to talk about how there's not really. I don't think know if there was any evidence that he was ever in a relationship or ever sought out a relationship or if. If his journals or writings everywhere. I can't remember. There might. I super can't remember the details, but I don't even think it's mentioned, like, if we know if he ever like, like, wrote about having sex with anybody or anything like that. So. And again, like I said, there's. There's. They discuss. And we know he was a big fan of Tolstoy who was a big, like.
• 49:35
  Speaker B: Right.
• 49:35
  Speaker A: Celibacy guy. And he was very. He had a. Alex had a very strict, like, moral code in his head that he thought he should live by, but just generally the world should kind of abide by. And it. Yeah, I. I think it's safe to say that he was celibate by choice. Now, whether or not that was like, only a moral thing or if it maybe was that he was ace and it was just. Yeah, I don't know. Like, we don't know those sort of details or whatever. But. Or. Or, you know, God, who knows? Closeted. We. We have no idea. Like, it didn't write about any of that stuff other than to know that he seemingly didn't really have any relationships or. Or anything like that. So.
• 50:15
  Speaker B: No romantic relationships. I just thought that was interesting because that wasn't really what I felt like the movie was trying to.
• 50:21
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 50:21
  Speaker B: Portray in that moment.
• 50:22
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 50:25
  Speaker B: All right, so we got to go pop back to Alaska. And this was a scene that felt like a turning point to me, where he's reading this Tolstoy novel. I can't remember what it is now, but family happiness. Yeah. And who's talking about, like, happiness being real when it's.
• 50:50
  Speaker A: Happiness only real when shared.
• 50:52
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 50:52
  Speaker A: That's what he writes.
• 50:53
  Speaker B: Only real when shared. And to me, that felt like the turning point in him deciding that he wanted to return to society. Is that also what happens in the book?
• 51:06
  Speaker A: Yes, that is the narrative that the book kind of lands on. I think it's fair to say that a lot of the end of Alex's life in the wilderness is speculation based on his very sparse journal entries. There's a mention at the beginning of the book that there are like, a hundred. Like, we see quite a few journal entries in the movie, and he had journal entries, but he was in the woods for, like, four months, and he had 120 journal entries or something like that. So there's not a ton. He didn't write, like, a ton of stuff while he was. He wasn't writing whole paragraphs every night or anything like that. Like, many of them were just days where he literally listed, like. Like, killed a squirrel, killed a turkey, not a turkey, but you know, what animals he killed and ate that day. And that's, like, literally all he wrote for weeks or whatever. So a lot of it is speculation based on these sparse journal entries and the margin notes he made because he was reading books, he brought, like, seven or eight books with him, and he was reading these while he was there. And so some of the stuff we see is from those margin notes and stuff that he was writing in these books he was reading. Krakauer seems pretty confident that towards the end of his time there, and I assume because it was mentioned in the journal, I can't remember the specifics, that he was reading Family Happiness by Tolstoy towards the end of his time in the woods. And he did underline some of the specific passages that the movie shows about serving others, being, like, the moral purpose of life and that sort of thing. And he does write in that book, Happiness Only real when Shared. He wrote that into the book. We know whether or not this denoted, like, a marked change in Alex and a desire to return to society is a bit of speculation, I would say, from what I can gather. But it does seem very plausible, and we know he did make A list of things to do before leaving. Like he was planning to leave. We know because he wrote down like a to do list that included shaving and stuff before he, like, hiked back out. And we know he tried to cross the river because he does have a journal entry after he gets back to the bus that says, river was impassable or impossible to pass or whatever. I'm stuck here or something like that.
• 53:10
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 53:11
  Speaker A: So I think it's a fair assumption. But we don't have like, explicit, you know, like, he didn't write, like, I tried to return to my friends and family, but I'm trapped. You know, like, it wasn't that explicit. But you're putting together pieces here and that kind of seems like what happened. Yeah, we'll get to it more later. But Alex was also a very, I don't want to say changeable person, but I don't know if you can necessarily infer the fact that one day he was like, happiness, only real when shared and decided he wanted to go back to society necessarily means that he had this, like, life altering revelation about humanity. I'm not sure that you can necessarily arrive on such a concrete conclusion because the more you read about Alex as a person, he's just a very unique person who doesn't necessarily view the world in sort of the straightforward, like, way that the rest of us do, which we'll get to. That's like, the big thing is like, who is this guy? What's his deal? And we'll get to that here in a little bit. I have a lot of thoughts, but.
• 54:19
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, it definitely worked narratively in the film as, like a way to lead the viewer from point A to point B. But, yeah, for sure. There's no way to really know.
• 54:31
  Speaker A: No way to know for sure. Like I said I would be. I'm fairly confident. That seems like a really reasonable interpretation of all of the evidence we have, but you just can't be sure.
• 54:40
  Speaker B: So then we go back to kind of the last major beat of the film before we catch back up to where we started, where he goes to Alaska and at this point he's staying out in the desert somewhere.
• 54:57
  Speaker A: Yeah, I can't remember where he is. Well, he's near. Oh, my God. Springs. I can't remember if it's California or Arizona.
• 55:02
  Speaker B: Yeah, he's in the desert somewhere and he meets this old man, Ron Franz, and who teaches him leather working and he makes a belt that, like, is a visual depiction of the journey that he's been on. Is that stuff from the book.
• 55:22
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. He meets Ron Franz, who is basically identical to what's presented in the film. He is a leather worker. All the backstory is the same. We'll talk more about him in a little bit. The only real difference with the belt, he does make that belt that catalogs his entire journeys and all that sort of stuff and hits all of the different kind of points that we talk about in the book that we see recounted in the book of his car getting flooded and all that sort of stuff. The difference in the movie is that in the movie, he takes it with him to Alaska, and we see him wearing it and, like, cutting more and more belt holes as he uses more and more weight. I think that's a clever change. In reality, he did not take the belt with him. I believe he left it with Ron. He left it with somebody. I can't remember who. We do have the belt still exists, and somebody has it. I don't know, but I think he left it with Ron, which, again, it's a little change, but I think it makes sense to have him take it with him. Thematically, it just kind of works.
• 56:17
  Speaker B: I think thematically it works. And it's also a very, like, kind of practical narrative tool for, like, showing time passing.
• 56:28
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 56:28
  Speaker B: And also the, like, the physical effects of the wilderness on him.
• 56:31
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 56:31
  Speaker B: Without having to, like, completely destroy the actor's body.
• 56:36
  Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. Which I think he still did a little bit.
• 56:39
  Speaker B: It looked like he did a little bit.
• 56:41
  Speaker A: I. I don't know how much. There was clearly also some makeup and stuff going on, but he also clearly lost. Lost a fair amount of weight to do that. I don't think they were using, like, a body double, but maybe. I don't know. I don't think they were doing the. The Captain America thing, but Emil Horse strikes me as the kind of guy that would have. Would, like, go all out for, you know, and just, like, lose a bunch of weight for that.
• 57:00
  Speaker B: But, yeah, another thing that happens, and this is in Alaska, and I believe this is as he's starting starving.
• 57:11
  Speaker A: He's already ill. Yeah.
• 57:12
  Speaker B: Yeah. And he. And I wasn't sure if the bear was actually supposed to be there or if the movie was implying that he was hallucinating the bear. But at one point, he steps outside the bus, and we see a bear, like, walk right up to him, and, like, they look at each other, and then the bear walks off.
• 57:31
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 57:31
  Speaker B: Are there any mentions of bears in the book?
• 57:34
  Speaker A: There is no bear encounter mentioned in the book, and thus, I assume it's not Mentioned in this journal. Obviously I'm not. So I didn't read his journal. I don't know if it's, like, published anywhere. Like his actual journal that he was writing. Yeah.
• 57:44
  Speaker B: I don't know.
• 57:45
  Speaker A: But the book covers most of the journal entries at various points at different times. But it does not mention any sort of bear encounter. So I imagine that was created for the film. As to whether or not he's. You think he's supposed to be hallucinating it or if it's supposed to be actually happening, I would interpret that as supposed to be real, that he actually does walk up to a bear. But that part of it is that. I think you could read it a couple ways. One, he has become part of the wilderness in a way that the bear just kind of ignores him. Or also, he is starving to death at this point. You could kind of read it as the bear. Just not worth my time kind of thing. Like, why would I eat you? You don't even have any meat on you. You know what I mean? I don't know. You can kind of take it a couple ways. But it's also. I think we're supposed to see it as sort of just this. You're also supposed to question whether or not it happened because he is very ill in this moment. It's just. It's that classic, like, brush with the wild kind of moment in. Yeah, it's fine. I don't have strong feelings either way about it. I think if it had happened, he would have written it down. So it probably didn't happen. Yeah, but because he was still writing stuff up until, like, literally the day that he died or a day or two before he died. So we. If he had run into a bear, I think he would have written it down.
• 58:57
  Speaker B: Another thing that we see him do a couple times throughout the movie, and particularly at this point, it's when he's staying with Ron. But we see him a couple times throughout where he's been staying with different people. And he'll just, like, dip in the middle of the night.
• 59:14
  Speaker A: He doesn't. To date, Jan and Rhaeny early in the movie. Yeah.
• 59:17
  Speaker B: Was that also a recurring theme in the book?
• 59:20
  Speaker A: So, yeah, Alex was absolutely a fan of leaving quickly and quietly whenever he decided it was time to go. It wasn't, like, always mentioned as being in the middle of the night, I don't think. But he would definitely just dip on people without telling the. Exactly when he was going to leave. It seemed like he usually told people, like, thinking, I'm gonna Leave soon. Like he wouldn't just disappear necessarily, but he would, like, he would be like, I don't know, I might be. I'm probably gonna get on the road again here soon. And then he would just kind of be gone like in the next couple days or whatever is kind of the vibe I got. So, yeah, he. I think it goes in line with his. He is a. He's not an anti social person and we'll get more into that later. But his idea of social interaction is not what would be typical and where he doesn't necessarily see anything wrong with just leaving. And I think it's also a little bit of a defense mechanism. He's of. If I had to psychoanalyze a little bit of not having to deal with ending relationships.
• 1:00:16
  Speaker B: Yeah, that was how I read it in the movie for sure. Was that he didn't want to deal with the emotions of saying goodbye and having to leave people.
• 1:00:24
  Speaker A: And now to be fair, all of these people, he. He kept sending them letters. Like all the people he like. Jan and Bob would get postcards from him numerous times over the years after he left them. It's not like he would disappear and never talk to them again or like Wayne, same thing. He would send postcards to Wayne and even them when he would see him again, he would be happy to see him again. So it's not as cut and dry as he would leave and then just never want to talk to him again or anything like that. But I definitely think there was a level of not wanting to have to go through the emotional labor of maybe not even the emotional labor, but just not having the kind of like, I don't think he was the kind of person who had the. Who enjoyed emotional interactions with people necessarily, especially at this point in his life where he's doing all of this. If you take what the movie and the book is presenting. I think towards the end of his time in Alaska, he maybe started craving that more and more, which I think is true because he starts writing about how he's lonely and stuff like that. But. But I definitely think that is what you're meant to take is that, yeah, he doesn't. Doesn't really want to deal with the emotions and the stress necessarily of saying goodbye to people.
• 1:01:33
  Speaker B: Yeah. But Ron does catch him as he's planning to leave in the middle of the night and ends up driving him out and then offers to adopt him as his grandson, which I thought was really sweet and really sad, especially because I knew how it ended. Is that something that happens in the book?
• 1:01:57
  Speaker A: Yes. Yeah. This exact scene happens according to Ron, who Krakauer interviewed. I assume Ron does offer to adopt him as his grandson for all the same reasons. He's like my because. And his backstory is the same. His wife and son were killed in a car accident by a drunk driver while he was deployed during the war. And so he doesn't have any family. And his. His family line is going to, like, end with him or whatever, so he wants to adopt him. Scene made me tear up while I was reading the book, and it made me tear up even more watching the movie. It is, in my opinion, very deeply sad. But I will say, boy, does the movie leave out the saddest thing about Ron and his story, which we will get to shortly.
• 1:02:38
  Speaker B: All right, so back in Alaska, was it eating the wrong plant that caused him to die?
• 1:02:49
  Speaker A: That's the million dollar question. So as far as I can tell, there is still no 100% definitive answer on what killed him apart from starvation. We know he essentially starved to death, but why he starved to death and in what specific MANNER is not 100%, like, positive. Many things have been suggested over the years, many of them by Krakauer himself, who. He started investigating this, like, months after it happened and started writing the articles and stuff. And so he's been on it from the beginning. At the time that the movie came out, him mistaking sweet pea for potato seeds or whatever, which is what we see in the movie, was the number one theory. It was what Krakauer thought was most likely. But there were other theories. At one point, like initially kind of people just thought he died of protein poisoning, which is. Is when you're basically only eating lean protein and aren't getting anything else. It just messes up your body and can cause you to basically starve to death, even though you're eating calories. Then there are several different versions of the. It was the potato seeds hypothesis, which is what we see. He has that big plastic bag full of. Those are potato seeds. Because there are wild potatoes in Alaska that you can eat, but you can also eat the seeds. It gets very complicated, and I'm still not entirely sure, even reading through the Wikipedia article on this, like eight times, what the ultimate conclusion was. And it's also covered in great detail at the end of this book. This version of the book that I read is from 2015, which is a republish, which actually has a slight change in the end of the book because they learned more information. So ultimately, in 2015, Krakauer Co authored a Scientific analysis that outlined that the actual culprit was something called L. Canavanine that was in the potato seeds, either in them naturally or was related to a mold growing on them. The Wikipedia article doesn't mention the mold, but in the book he mentions mold. So I don't know. But there's something called L. Canavanine that can appear with these potato seeds that can be toxic to mammals specifically. They say that this has only been really observed in humans, in younger men, for whatever reason. And specifically, specifically, if you're already malnourished, it can be bad. If you're.
• 1:05:05
  Speaker B: If you're okay.
• 1:05:07
  Speaker A: If you're like a healthy, like, eating, like a normal diet and you get some of this L. Canavanine in your. In you. It wouldn't be a major issue, supposedly, but the fact that he was eating tons of this because he was struggling to get other food and he was already super underweight because he'd already. He'd been slowly starving from the time he got there. He was getting food, but he just wasn't getting enough. Enough calories, you know, basically from the moment he got there. And they think that is what did it. That this L. Canavanine basically acted as like a. Basically gives you a type of like, not food poisoning, but made him super weak, makes his legs not work super great, messes with your perception, all that sort of stuff. And that basically kept him from being able to get other food and slowly starve to death. Death. Because of that. I will say the main change the movie makes, which is not mentioned in the book, even though the book implies that it was him making a mistake. When the book was written, the thought was that he was making a mistake.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker B: Right? He misidentified.
• 1:06:14
  Speaker A: He misidentified these plants. The movie has him realize he did that. There's no implication in the book that he realized he made, like, a mistake. The book, he does have a note that he suspects that the reason he's ill is from the potato seeds he was eating. But he doesn't. There's no moment, like in the movie, we see him hold up and like, flip between the two pages and go. And one of them says, like, eat this, don't eat this. And he's like, oh, my God, no, I ate the. And like, that does not. There's no evidence that anything like that happened. We know he got sick and that the thing. And he suspected that the potato seeds were related to him getting sick because he writes a journal entry about it. But it was not like some big revelation. Revelatory moment of him, like, realizing he made this huge mistake.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 1:07:05
  Speaker A: Which I thought was kind of dumb and mostly there for the audience.
• 1:07:08
  Speaker B: Yeah, definitely.
• 1:07:09
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:07:10
  Speaker B: Because I don't. I mean, I don't know how they would have explained the other stuff.
• 1:07:14
  Speaker A: Would have been hard to explain it. And again, at the time of the movie, they didn't even. This L. Canavanine thing wasn't even a thought. They had a different. Like I said, it was related to some other protein in the potato seeds, they thought. Or sweet pea pods or whatever they thought did it. But anyways, again, it's still not entirely sure, but they're fairly confident that it was this L. Canavanine from already being malnourished and then eating a bunch of these potato plants and then maybe them being moldy because he kept them in a place. Plastic bag.
• 1:07:44
  Speaker B: Okay. So one of the last things that we see him do in the movie is write, like, a final note, and he signs it Chris McCandless, which I felt like the movie was implying that he was, like, retaking his. His previous identity. Was that something that you also got from the book?
• 1:08:06
  Speaker A: So the final. He actually writes two final notes. One of them is a note where he writes. And he writes, like, I'm out going out into the wilderness. I'm very ill. If you come across this truck or this van, please, for the love of God, stay. I need help. And then he, like, SOS and he signs that Chris McCandless. Then he has another note, which is the one we see in the movie on a postcard, that says, like, I led a great life. Something, something, something. God bless you. May God bless all of us. Or something. And then he signs that Chris McAnless. I don't know in reality if that note had his name on it or not. Every photo I found of that note cuts off the bottom where his name would have been. So I don't know if the movie added his name to that, or it may have just combined those two notes and put his name. Yeah, because he did sign Chris McCandless on one of his final two notes. The movie definitely implies that this was, like, a thematic choice by Alex of reclaiming his name and being like, I can. This is who I am. Like, finding himself and realizing like, I am Chris McCandless and that. I don't know how. Not huge on that. Krakauer really doesn't put that fine of a point on it in the book. Something you could take from the action of writing his name on there. But I also think you could just Take the fact that he knew he was likely to die and wanted to put his legal name down so that when somebody ultimately found him, they would know who he was.
• 1:09:38
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:09:39
  Speaker A: I'm a bit on the fence about whether or not it was, like, a big statement of him reclaiming his name versus just.
• 1:09:46
  Speaker B: It feels like in real life. Unlikely.
• 1:09:49
  Speaker A: I. I would. That this is compared to the other thing of him having that revelation or revelation wanting to go back to society. I think that's more likely and more. And is probably what happened. Whereas this. I think he was just signing Chris McCandless because he knew that's his legal name. And if I'm gonna die here that.
• 1:10:09
  Speaker B: Way, this name is searchable.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker A: Yeah, that's my vibe on what's going on there. But I understand why the movie did that. But I also think it feels weird because. And we'll get to it later, like with the. The final. Like, when he's dying, the moment of him, like, going back to his parents and like. Like imagining, like, reuniting with his parents. That does not feel right to me. But we'll get to that.
• 1:10:34
  Speaker B: Right. Okay. My last question in this section. The movie gave me an 1159 hour twist at the end here. Was that an actual photo of Chris McCandless at the end of the movie? And did he have a camera with him?
• 1:10:54
  Speaker A: So it's funny to me that you don't know anything about this.
• 1:10:56
  Speaker B: I know nothing about this.
• 1:10:58
  Speaker A: Yes, he had a camera with him. And there were actually quite a few photos of him while he was in Alaska and other places, but specifically in Alaska. I was actually legitimately surprised that we didn't see the movie recreate or even use what is widely considered to be his final photo. We have a photo of him, that card that he wrote, like, I led a good life, God bless us all, or whatever it says. And then he signed Chris McCandlan. That card. We have a photo of him holding that card, taking a selfie, like, smiling and waving, like, we assume within a day or two before he passed away. And they don't use that photo at all, which I thought was really interesting.
• 1:11:36
  Speaker B: Yeah, the photo is one of him, like, sitting on the ground outside the.
• 1:11:39
  Speaker A: Bus in front of the bus, which is the most famous photo of him. Like, that's the one you see everywhere. Like, it's the main one on his Wikipedia page. Like, that's, like the photo everybody has seen because the bus is in it, whereas this other one, the bus isn't in. But I was surprised that we didn't the movie didn't show him holding the card and taking that selfie. I thought that was kind of interesting. That being said, I did. That's what it says. I have had a happy life, and thank the Lord, goodbye, and may God bless all. That's. That's what the card says. But, yeah, I. He did have a camera, and we have a lot of photos, including that specific one that the movie does include. That.
• 1:12:11
  Speaker B: Yeah, well. And it really surprised me, I guess, because we don't ever see him take any photos of himself.
• 1:12:17
  Speaker A: No, we never see him with.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker B: We just, like. Although I do have photo at the.
• 1:12:20
  Speaker A: End, I do have a note about that later that we'll get to. That, I thought, was that final moment that made me think of something. When we see that photo, we'll get to it later. I haven't thought about the camera and the photos and stuff. All right. Those were all Katie's questions for. Was that in the book? Let's go ahead and talk about a few things that were lost in adaptation.
• 1:12:42
  Speaker B: Just show me the way to get out of here, and I'll be on my way.
• 1:12:45
  Speaker A: Wow. Yes. Yes. And I want to get unlocked as soon as possible.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker B: All right. So first off, the first thing that kind of confused me in this movie was right after he starts out traveling and he still has his car. He's parked and he's sleeping in his car. And then all of the sudden his car is, like, underwater. So where was he parked and what happened?
• 1:13:15
  Speaker A: So, yeah, that. That does happen in the movie. He is parked in a runoff area next to Lake Mead. The chapter that that happens is called Detrital Wash, and I think that's what this is. He's basically in a runoff area in the desert where when it does rain very rarely there, it floods.
• 1:13:34
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:13:34
  Speaker A: And he just had no idea that he was basically parked in a. In a dry riverbed, essentially.
• 1:13:38
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 1:13:39
  Speaker A: He just didn't realize because. Because he's didn't. He didn't see it in the movie. We see a sign that says warning flooding may occur or whatever? And. Yeah, he just didn't realize he was essentially parked in a riverbed that when it rains, will flood.
• 1:13:52
  Speaker B: So is there any explanation in the book or theory about the name Alexander Supertramp, which is the name that he takes on, if that has any meaning or why he picked that.
• 1:14:07
  Speaker A: Yeah, so that's his road name. I don't. And I don't think the book goes into details of where it came from. It's not uncommon for travelers and hitchhikers. And stuff to have like a road name or whatever. I don't remember anything in the book, but I did some looking and according to a forum I found, and this tracks based on what I know of Alex from the book. The Alexander. Half of that came from War and Peace, which was a novel that he was a huge fan of. Alexander. I was Emperor of Russia during the Napoleonic wars in the book. And then Supertramp supposedly comes from one of his other favorite books, which is a book called the Autobiography of a supertramp by W.H. davies. So that's supposedly where the two names come from, according to this one.
• 1:14:52
  Speaker B: Tramp, like a person who hitchhikes and travels. Not a.
• 1:15:00
  Speaker A: A woman of loose world.
• 1:15:02
  Speaker B: A derogatory name for a woman who is in control of her own sexuality.
• 1:15:07
  Speaker A: Yeah, no, yeah, that kind of tramp. There's a moment earlier in the movie where he's talking to Jan and Rainey and they call him a leather tramp. And they're rubber tramps because rubber tramps have cars.
• 1:15:17
  Speaker B: Right.
• 1:15:18
  Speaker A: Hence the rubber from the tires. And leather tramps just walk in shoes. I see, like leather soled shoes. So, yeah.
• 1:15:24
  Speaker B: All right, my next question, because, boy, I felt like the movie did not explain this at all.
• 1:15:30
  Speaker A: No, it did not.
• 1:15:31
  Speaker B: What did Vince Vaughn's character get arrested by the FBI for?
• 1:15:36
  Speaker A: He was selling illegal cable, slash satellite boxes so that people could steal cable.
• 1:15:41
  Speaker B: Okay. Wow.
• 1:15:42
  Speaker A: He was manufacturing.
• 1:15:43
  Speaker B: That sounds like a very 90s crime.
• 1:15:45
  Speaker A: It very much is, yes. He was manufacturing and selling illegal satellite.
• 1:15:50
  Speaker B: Okay.
• 1:15:50
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:15:51
  Speaker B: When we see him dying in Alaska.
• 1:15:54
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 1:15:56
  Speaker B: Is he dying really slowly? Because I couldn't decide if the movie was depicting him dying really slowly or if we were being kind of deliberately vague with the timeline to create a sense of confusion.
• 1:16:11
  Speaker A: I think yes is the answer broadly. But, yes, he does starve slowly over the course of about two weeks in the book, the seeds essentially just fuck his system all up and make him really ill. But it doesn't kill him outright, but they do. It does pretty much render him unable to get food or even get nutrients out of the food that he does have and is able to eat what little he can. And so, yeah, he just kind of slowly starves to death. And that's. I. I think we are supposed to be also a little bit unsure of how long it's taking place over. And he is disoriented and we see him kind of like clearly out of it in the final days. It's because he's. He's hallucinating. He honestly, like I said, with the bear, he. It could be a hallucination because at this point he's so. So wildly malnourished and, like, starving that he. He very well probably is hallucinating and stuff like that. So.
• 1:17:00
  Speaker B: All right, so my last question here that I was very curious about after watching this movie. I was wondering if this felt like a book, accurate depiction of Chris slash Alex, because to me, I felt like the movie, it. It felt very glowy to me. Like, the movie seemed like it was depicting him as, like, very much, like, wise beyond his years. He didn't necessarily feel like a real person. He felt kind of like a mythology, a mythologized version of a person. And maybe that was the point, but I was wondering if that was the same vibe you got in the book.
• 1:17:45
  Speaker A: Okay, so this is. This is the big question, and this is where we're gonna really get into it here, because I'm gonna use this as a good place to expand out maybe the. The. The most interesting conversation about this whole thing, in my opinion. So. Yes and no. This is one of the things I was most interested to see. And like I said, maybe one of the things I have the most to say about the big debate surrounding Chris slash Alex is, quote, was he a brilliant, misunderstood genius who just saw the world differently and. And kind of was operating on a level above us all and decided to go on this grand adventure? Or on the other hand, was he, quote, an ill prepared, antisocial weirdo who basically killed himself because he didn't remotely know what he was getting himself into and was just irresponsible and, you know, like, just an idiot kid? Those are kind of the two, like, competing, like, morals that people take from this or not morals. But the two competing views that people have on Alex, the movie absolutely comes down on the side of the former and depicts him as such. As to your point, the movie absolutely comes down on the side of he is this brilliant, misunderstood, operating on a.
• 1:18:55
  Speaker B: Level above us all.
• 1:18:56
  Speaker A: Yes. Where he's, like, fixing people's relationships and, like. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:19:00
  Speaker B: And like, I mean, he's almost like a Christ figure.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker A: Rainey even makes a joke about, like.
• 1:19:06
  Speaker B: Wandering through the desert.
• 1:19:08
  Speaker A: And the movie absolutely goes that way with it and it depicts him as such. The book still mostly comes down on that side. I think Krakauer very much respects and admires Chris. Like, I think he likes him a lot. But I also think the book also does its best to depict him in that light. But the book is a little more willing to give us a. A more complete picture of Alex that shows us some of his warts and some of his eccentricities that I think balance that and make him feel like a more real person. My opinion has bounced all over the place while I was reading this book. I had one opinion before reading the book. I had different opinions reading the book and we watched the movie and I had slightly different opinions. And ultimately, in my opinion, maybe unsurprisingly lands somewhere in the middle, but a very non judgmental place in the middle. So I'm going to expand on that now. I think Chris was a very intelligent, very unique person who had a lot of demons because of very understandable situations with his parents, who was also a bit dumb in ways. He's a very smart kid, but also was a very. And the book goes into this a lot. He's very intelligent, but he's not like he's kind of gotten another way the book describes it. It's not that he doesn't have street smarts, but it's just that he's so enthusiastic and sort of lost in like higher, in more like esoteric thought that he doesn't really consider as much about like practicalities as he should. So let's get into a little bit about some of the stuff about Chris from the book that I thought was really interesting. So Krakauer presents some of the people like after he gets discovered being or his body gets discovered. There was a whole bunch of like people and like the story gets published in like the Alaska newspaper. There's a whole bunch of people like writing letters about it and stuff.
• 1:21:17
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:21:18
  Speaker A: And Krakauer puts one of these letters in the book that somebody wrote criticizing Alex. And I wanted to read it because, because again my views on him are complicated. So this person wrote in the most strident criticism came. This is Jon Krakauer writing. The most strident criticism came in the form of a dense multi page epistle from Ambler, a tiny Inupiat village. I don't know how to say that it's an indigenous name that I'm not sure how to say. On the Kobuk river in the Arctic Circle. The author was a white writer and schoolteacher formerly from Washington D.C. named Nick J. Jans, warning that it was 1am and he was well into a bottle of seagrams. Jans let it fly. Over the past 15 years I've run into several McCandless types out in the country. Same story. Idealistic, energetic young guys who overestimated themselves, underestimated the country and ended up in trouble. McCandless was hardly unique. There's quite a few of these guys hanging around the state, so much alike that they're almost a collective cliche. The only difference is that McCandless ended up dead. With the story of his dumbassedness splashed across the media, Jack London got it right into build a fire. McCandless is finally just a pale 20th century burlesque of London's protagonist who freezes because he ignores advice and commits big time hubris. His ignorance, which could have been cured by a USGS quadrant and a Boy Scout manual, is what killed him. And while I feel for his parents, I have no sympathy for him. Him. Such willful ignorance amounts to disrespect for the land and paradoxically demonstrates the same sort of arrogance that resulted in the Exxon Valdez spill. Just another case of underprepared, overconfident men bumbling around out there and screwing up because they lacked the requisite humility. It's all a matter of degree. McCandless's contrived asceticism and a pseudo literary stance compound it. Rather than reduce the fault, McCandless's postcards, notes and journals read like the work of an above average, somewhat histrionic high school kid. Or am I missing something? And I don't know if that's the end of the letter, but that's where Krakauer ends it. I think that's. There's elements of that that are very true. Yeah, there are parts of that that are very true, but I also think it's overly judgmental and critical of a young guy who had a lot of issues and it feels wrong to compare. Like, I, I, there's nothing. He's not wrong. Like the part that like, like it's the same sort of arrogance that resulted in the Exxon Valdez spill. Just another case of underprepared, overconfident men bumbling around and screwing up. True, but in this instance, he just killed himself. Yeah, and there's a part of me, very deep down, the very, my, the, the libertarian part of myself that, that I, I quashed down in a deep, dark little hole goes, yeah, but like you, it's fine if you want to fuck off to the woods and die. I'm not, I won't. I don't want you to do that. Like, I would try to convince you not to do that, but if you're like, I just want to go live off the land and if I die in the woods, I die in the woods. I don't, like, I don't know if there's anything inherently wrong with that. Like, I don't know if I have a problem with that. And it's definitely something you should be allowed to do, I guess. Like, if you just, like, I want to go live in the woods and see what happens. Like, I sort. So there is that level of like, I don't think he's wrong. There is a level of sort of arrogance and just stupidity.
• 1:24:46
  Speaker B: I mean, I think he said the word hubris, which is one of my favorite concepts ever, because I think it is so accurately describes a lot of humanity.
• 1:24:56
  Speaker A: Yeah. But it's also. His hubris came from a place not of self. I don't like. After reading the book, I really don't think that his hubris came from a place of like. Like, self aggrandizement. I don't think that he thought, like, I am better than this. I can do this because I'm amazing. I think he knew that he might die in the woods. He knew that he was doing something dangerous and kind of dumb, at least to some extent. Like the last postcard he writes to Wayne. He says, like, if I'm going into the wilderness or I'm going out into Alaska if I don't survive, blah, blah, blah. Like, he knows he could die. So I don't think it's like complete hubris or like, he didn't take it seriously. I want to get into some other stuff because I think it kind of helps flesh out a picture of who Chris Alex was. Some other notes from my reading that I just wanted to put all here. This is all kind of stuff about Alex and his personality. When he was in high school, he got really into cross country and was captain of the team. And according to his teammates, he used to motivate them by telling them to imagine that they're running against the forces of evil. Like, he viewed running very spiritually. He was just a. I don't want to use the word weird, but he was just kind of a weird guy. Like, he had very.
• 1:26:09
  Speaker B: He had a very big imagination.
• 1:26:11
  Speaker A: He had a very big imagination. He was too smart for his own good, while also being kind of dumb. He was, like, able to parse and digest really interesting, like, literary concepts and stuff. But also maybe didn't. It took them maybe too literally sometimes.
• 1:26:30
  Speaker B: I think potentially, I mean, I will say too smart for your own good, but also very dumb is a pretty lethal combination.
• 1:26:37
  Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. Like I said earlier, he would go and hang out with homeless people and buy the meals. He apparently let one of them sleep in his parents camper like he, he would like let. And his parents had like didn't even realize for months that he was letting this homeless person sleep in their camper on their property. He at one point in high school I think or college, early in college or in high school he was like super gung ho about wanting to like buy a bunch of weapons and go end apartheid in South Africa. Like he found out about, about apartheid and was like this is ridiculous. This can't stand. He's like we gotta go do something about it. And his high school buddies were like what are you, we're 15. Like we're not going to end apartheid. What are you talking about? But he also had like a very contradictory personality. He's described at times he could be very, very social. Playing piano at parties and singing and being the life of the party. There's an aside about how he like he really hit it off with Wayne's mom on the final night. He was partying and South Dakota or whatever and they like had a big like blow up party and like so he wasn't opposed. He wasn't like a complete loner, but he also was a loner. Like he didn't like being around people most of the time. But he also like, like to party now and then. He would drink with people and stuff like that. He was ascetic but he was also an entrepreneur. Like he, he hated stuff but he like there's so many stories about as a kid how he would start all of these like really ambitious rack and like he was like. He very much had huge criticisms of capitalism but was also like, like I said like he would like starting all kinds of like money making schemes and stuff like that. But then he would give his money away and but he wouldn't do anything useful with it all the time. He did donate it to Oxfam, like his college fund and stuff like that. He hated conspicuous consumption. Like I said, he was very vocal about ending hunger and apartheid. But he started the college Republican group at his university. Like he was a co founder of the Young College like college Young Republicans group. He was a huge fan of Reagan.
• 1:28:31
  Speaker B: So what you're saying I feel like is that he contains multitudes.
• 1:28:35
  Speaker A: Yes. Like he, he was like his, his quote like he was like loved the. The government is best which governs least. Like that was like a big thing which you see with the whole like permits thing of going down the river. He had a ton of political idiosyncrasies. I'll see if I can find a like his political ideals were not coherent. As assistant editorial page editor of the Emory Wheel, he authored scores of commentaries. In reading them, half a decade later, one is reminded how young McCandless was and how passionate the opinions he expressed in print argued with idiosyncratic logic were all over the map. He lampooned Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden, called for the resignation of Attorney General Edwin Meese, lambasted Bible thumpers of the Christian right, urged violence against the Soviet threat, castigated the Japanese for hunting whales, and defended Jesse Jackson as a viable presidential candidate in a typically immoderate declaration that. The lead sentence of McCandless's editorial on March 1, 1988, reads, we have now begun the third month of the year 1988, and it is already shaping up to be one of the most politically corrupt and scandalous years in modern history. He was just. Just a very strange guy. And another thing, and this is kind of what that first article or that first letter I read earlier, that the guy criticizing was saying. When you read Alex's writing, it's very clear, like, his journal entries and stuff that are in the book, it's very clear that his writing style is inspired by classic authors, that he loves Thoreau, Tolstoy, all of those people. But you can also tell that he lacks the grasp of language or the true complexity of thought to express anything as worthwhile as what they were saying. Like, yeah, he mimics their style. And it's not that he's saying nothing interesting. He says interesting stuff, but it's. It's like a facsimile. I don't know how to describe it. Like, it's somebody who's clearly very intelligent and. And can digest and interpret these very meaty, like, literary and philosophical treaties. But also, then when he, like, writes, it doesn't. You can tell he's trying to write the way they do and say the important things that they're saying, but he doesn't quite have the. The wisdom to do it. I don't know. It's fascinating. So, like I said, I just. This is the place where I wanted to kind of hit all of this, because I don't, as I said at the beginning, ultimately I come down at a place somewhere in the middle of, like, I have a lot of sympathy for him as a person, and this is a tragedy. And I very much am not on the side of, like, this idiot kid. What was he thinking? Walk into the woods? He had no idea what he was doing. He was just an idiot who either was trying to kill himself or didn't care if he died or was like, had a death wish or. Or was just completely, like, hubristic. I don't think that's true. I think he was just a guy looking for answers and thought he might find them in the Alaskan wilderness.
• 1:31:36
  Speaker B: He went to the woods to find himself?
• 1:31:38
  Speaker A: Yes. I mean, that is very much the case. Like, 100%. That is what he's doing. And the book goes to great detail to spell that out. But I also don't think he's like, was maybe as wise or as sage of a. Of a, like, sort of mystical figure that the movie kind of presents.
• 1:32:02
  Speaker B: Yeah, the movie definitely depicts him as very wise.
• 1:32:06
  Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know if that's necessarily the case. I think he was smart and I think he had interesting thoughts about the world, but he also had a lot of dumb thoughts about the world. And I think he was just kind of a complicated mess because of his upbringing, and he was doing his best to figure it out. But I also. I had a note that I didn't write down here. But I also. When reading the parts about, like, his political views and stuff, I was like, I think I would hate him if I met him. I think he would be exhausting. I think he probably. He strikes me as somebody that would be exhausting to be around sometimes, but super fascinating to be around other times. Like, I think he's very much one of those people which. Which is right in line with everything in the book of what we read about him. I think he would be one of those people that when you're with him at a party for like, a night would be like, that guy was really interesting. What an interesting dude. Seemed kind of cool, kind of weird, but he was interesting. But if he had to, like, spend a lot of time with him, I feel like I'd be like, give it a rest, dude. You know what I mean? That's what it kind of strikes me as. And so, like I said, I. I land on a place of, like, I have a lot of sympathy for what he was going through and what he did. And I respect his passion and his commitment to trying to find answers and to leading his life in a way that he thought would mean something, because not all of us have the courage to do that. Like, I do think he was brave. Like, I think he had a lot of courage to just go out and see the world and, like. Like, it's not what I want to do, but I do think there is an admirable bravery to that.
• 1:33:46
  Speaker B: You know what I mean, how many of us can say that we're live. Trying to live the exact lives that we want?
• 1:33:51
  Speaker A: That we want. And he always did. And, like, that is. At least now I don't always agree with all the decisions he made or even, like, what his moral code was all the time. I think generally his moral code seemed pretty good. Like, he did live the very kind of ascetic, like, you know, minimalist lifestyle that I think is. Is a fairly. If nothing else, it's not a damaging way to live for the most part. Damaging to some of his relationships, maybe. And I think maybe his parents would argue differently, but also his parents kind of sucked. It sounds like. So, like, you know, it's a mixed bag, but. Yeah, I don't know if that's an interesting place to land, but I. That's where I land is like.
• 1:34:30
  Speaker B: It's complicated.
• 1:34:31
  Speaker A: It's complicated. Yeah. Seemed. Seemed. I wish he hadn't died. I think he might have been an interesting guy later in life.
• 1:34:37
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:34:38
  Speaker A: Like, I think if he had had the wisdom of age, he might have become a really interesting person, because he already was an interesting person. I think if he had had the wisdom of time to kind of soften some of the, like, eccentricities that he had, or maybe got worse, who knows? It may have gotten worse.
• 1:34:55
  Speaker B: Well, maybe. But maybe if he had had the time to learn from the experiences, like.
• 1:35:00
  Speaker A: If he had been able to come back across the river, who knows? And I think that is the endearing tragedy of it. And what makes it such a captivating story for people is, like, what if. Like, what if he had? Because he is such a uniquely strange person. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I just mean, like, he's a very unique person. I think that it can't help but reading the book go. I would have been really interested to see if that guy had got back across the river and, like, kept living. And you know what he would have said, what he would have done? Maybe nothing. Maybe he just would have kept wandering the desert, you know, being. I don't know. Whatever. It's just. Yeah. All right. That was it for Lost in Adaptation. It's time to talk about all the stuff that I thought was better in the book. You like to read?
• 1:35:46
  Speaker B: Oh, yes, I love to read.
• 1:35:49
  Speaker A: What do you like to read?
• 1:35:52
  Speaker B: Everything.
• 1:35:53
  Speaker A: The movie opens up with Billy, his mom waking up, like, saying that she heard Chris calling out in the night.
• 1:35:58
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:35:59
  Speaker A: It's like the first moment of the film that does happen in the book. It is described as her having this moment where she, like, vividly wakes up and she's like, no, it wasn't a dream. I heard him calling me or whatever. I just thought it was a weird way to start the movie.
• 1:36:11
  Speaker B: It was.
• 1:36:12
  Speaker A: I don't think it really fit the open. I don't know.
• 1:36:14
  Speaker B: Well. And I'm still not really sure where in the narrative that was supposed to.
• 1:36:19
  Speaker A: Have happened at any point while he's out traveling during that time when he's not home. Yeah, I can't remember when it happens in the book, like, where he's supposed to be at that time, but. But he's not there. It's. It's. I just thought it wasn't a. The best way.
• 1:36:32
  Speaker B: Yeah, no, it really was. Especially since we don't really, like, go.
• 1:36:34
  Speaker A: Back and we don't know whose parents are at that point. I just thought it was strange. I don't know. I wasn't a huge fan of it. I think that's the movie trying to introduce the parents quickly.
• 1:36:43
  Speaker B: Like, you're right.
• 1:36:44
  Speaker A: But I don't know. I thought. Just wasn't my favorite. I mentioned earlier the driver trying to dissuade him a bunch of times not to go into the woods, into the wild, but he still does. Another thing that I think shows a little bit of Alex's kind of fickle nature that the movie just glosses over is when his car. When he does get his car flooded in the book, he leaves it there because he can't get it to start after the flood happens. And he leaves a note on it, though. And when the rangers find it a couple days later, they get it to start up, like, immediately. And it turns out it was just like the. Something the water got in there for a little bit, but once it dried out.
• 1:37:22
  Speaker B: Right. So you just needed to wait for it to dry out.
• 1:37:24
  Speaker A: And then I think they had to jump it. Like, the battery died or whatever, but they were able to jump it and started fine. But he wrote a note and we had talked about earlier, like, he was in love with this car. Like, he adored this car and like, he didn't want his parents to buy him a new one. All that sort of stuff. But when he abandons the car in the desert, the note is like, like, I'm leaving this piece of shit car here to, like. It's like all of a sudden he, like, hates this car. And it's like, to me, that kind of. I think you can glean a little bit about his personality from that. When we know so much that he's like, obsessed with this car and he doesn't want his parents to get rid of it. But then as soon as it doesn't work for him once, he's like, fuck, this car's piece of shit. You know what I mean?
• 1:37:58
  Speaker B: I don't know.
• 1:37:58
  Speaker A: It just. To me, there's like a little window into, like, maybe his. He wasn't as quite of like the sage, stoic, wise person that he necessarily always was presented as. I don't know. I don't know. As I said earlier, he sends postcards to Wayne and Jan and Bob that are very final. We see the Wayne card in the movie, but I don't think we see the card he sends to Jan.
• 1:38:22
  Speaker B: I don't think so. No.
• 1:38:23
  Speaker A: These cards are definitely part of the reason that people speculate that he went into the wild, like, either wanting to die or planning to die. Because in the Wayne one, he says something about dying, and then the one he sends to Jan, he says, this is the last communication you shall receive from me. I now walk into the wild or walk out to live amongst the wild. Take care. It was great knowing you. So, like, it's very final, you know what I mean? In a way that, like. Yeah, I don't know if that necessarily implies that he was planning to die. It also be he wasn't planning that. He was just planning to stay in the woods and live in the woods, and then ultimately changed his mind, tried to come back and wasn't able to. So I thought the scene in the movie of him choosing not to shoot the moose early on because there's like a baby next to it was so overwrought, I think. Yeah, I think it's true to his character probably, maybe, like, from what we know of him. But the way it's played out in the movie, the way he acts it out felt really overwrought. But then I also was like, but maybe that would kind of work because that actually kind of feels like the thing Alex would do. He would have this big dramatic. He was a very dramatic. I don't know if he expressed stuff dramatically, but he had big dramatic thoughts. And so, like, it almost kind of works. I don't know. The Danish couple that we see in the Colorado river are not in the book. I think they kind of showed up in the movie to be like a. Here is the crazy version of Alex because they're, like, very eccentric.
• 1:39:49
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 1:39:50
  Speaker A: You know what I mean? And it kind of makes him look a little more sane in comparison. And I thought that might be what we're doing here. Which again, I thought was a little strange. I wasn't a huge fan of that. I thought their interaction was.
• 1:40:02
  Speaker B: I didn't really like that scene all that much.
• 1:40:04
  Speaker A: It was just kind of weird. Yeah. And none of that came from the book. That again, it wasn't in this book. I don't know if it's based on anything true or not, but him not calling his parents because he gives his quarter to a sad old man is also like, okay. Again, it's not out of character based on what we know of him, but it's another one of those slightly overwrought moments that paints him in a much more virtuous, like stoic. Not stoic, but yeah, virtuous, like self sacrificing light than I think is maybe true. I. I don't even say it's not true. It just the way it's depicted to me felt overwrought.
• 1:40:39
  Speaker B: Yeah, I agree.
• 1:40:40
  Speaker A: So we. One of the things I mentioned earlier is that this book covers some other stuff that isn't related to Chris McCandless that I thought was super interesting. We get a handful of chapters that cover other people that did a similar thing and like went out into the wild. We get a chapter about Gene Rossellini who tried to live as a Stone Age man in like the Pacific Northwest. And after. Jon Krakar apparently met this guy at one point, like while he was traveling. And because he was like a mountain climber up in the Northwest and in Alaska and stuff like that, apparently after like a decade of trying to do this, he concluded that it wasn't possible and then stabbed himself in the chest and killed himself. That's just one of the stories. This is Krakauer exploring, like, who are these other people who have done similar things? What can we glean from them? And what does that tell us about Alex? Basically, so that was one of them. Then he tells some other stories about people who did stuff like that. One of them is this guy. This one's crazy. One guy literally went to Alaska, I think it was Alaska or Canada. Hired a plane to drive. He just wanted to have an adventure at a cabin in the woods. Hired a plane to drop him and like hundreds of pounds of supplies off in this remote cabin in the Canadian wilderness and then forgot to tell them to come get him. He didn't tell them when to come pick him up. And then he. So he just got stranded there and died. At one point he even. This one's a crazy tragedy of Ayers. He even saw a plane Fly over at one point, like, weeks after he was supposed to get picked up and realized, like, oh, my God, I never told them. Like, he realized eventually he sees a. A. Like a random, like a ranger or something, plane flying over, and he goes to signal to it. But. And he realized this later, too. He did. He did the wrong signal. He waved with one hand and then held it up like. Like a fist and, like, shook it, like, celebratory. And apparently that's the signal for, like, I'm okay.
• 1:42:34
  Speaker B: Oh.
• 1:42:34
  Speaker A: And so he basically told them, and the plane, like, flew by and, like, okay. And then, like, just left, left. And then he realized that he. That up. And then ultimately he. He killed himself because he had a gun with him and he was gonna starve in the Canadian wilderness. And so, yeah, and then the last one here. And this is the one. And so he. Krakar tells those stories and goes, those are interesting, but they're not really, like, super similar to Chris. The last one is this guy named Everett Royce, who was, like, this kid who was 20 years old, very, very similar to him. Consumed by wonderlust and this desire for natural beauty and seeing the world and all that sort of stuff. Stuff. He also changed his name several times. He had a bush name that he used. And then right before he dis. He just disappeared. And nobody ever knows what happened to him. But right before he disappeared, he, like. The last thing they found is, like, in the. In the Arizona desert or something. He was in these old ruins, and he wrote Nemo on the wall, which means nobody, in Latin. And then he just disappeared. There's this moment where he's. They have, like, some journal entries and stuff from him. He describes, like, my literal hell at one point. Also, like McCandless, Royce was undeterred by physical discomfort. At times, he seemed to welcome it. For six days, I've been suffering from the semiannual poison ivy case. My sufferings are far from over, he tells his friend Bill Jacobs. For two days, I couldn't tell whether I was dead or alive. I writhed and twisted in the heat with swarms of ants and flies crawling all over me while the poison oozed, encrusted on my face and arms and back. I ate nothing. There was nothing to do but suffer. Philosophically, I get of it every time. But I refuse to be driven out of the woods. And I've had some real bad poison ivy, and that sounds like the worst. Suffering with it out in the wilderness while being eaten by bugs. I don't think I can handle it.
• 1:44:19
  Speaker B: You know, I just feel like, and this is just me going off on a tangent for a second here, based on what you have told me about these different, like, instances, I feel like the thing that people get really wrong, particularly you talked about the guy trying to live as a Stone Age man.
• 1:44:42
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:44:42
  Speaker B: Is that previously when humans lived out in the wilderness and, like, off of the land, we weren't fucking doing it alone by themselves. Yes, we were. Not by ourselves. It takes a village.
• 1:44:56
  Speaker A: That is very true. That is very, very true. And it is something. And, and I think that is something Alex realized. Like I said, that is part, maybe not the survival part of it necessarily, because that's what you're getting at. On top of that is like, just to survive, period.
• 1:45:09
  Speaker B: Having people to help survive, period. Having other people that can do things.
• 1:45:14
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yes, I know. I, I, I, yeah, I would agree. There's a, a detail in the book that I thought made a lot of sense is that the first time we're introduced to Walt, his dad, Alex's dad, the first line that Jon Krakauer decides to present to us that Walt says is, and this is this. Jon Krakauer is in, like, the first time he meets Walt, I think. I don't know. But this is the first line we hear from Walt in the book. How is it he wonders aloud as he gazes blankly across Chesapeake Bay, that a kid with so much compassion could cause his parents so much pain? End quote. And I think he very pointedly chooses that line to kind of get across that the kind of person Walt is, he's not. The first thing we hear from him isn't him being devastated at the loss of his child necessarily, but it's at reveling at the idea that, how could he do this to us?
• 1:46:13
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:46:13
  Speaker A: And I think that's very intentional. And the movie hits on their relationship in a lot of other ways that I think drive home the point. I mean, we literally see his dad, like, physically abusing his mom in the movie. So it's not like the movie shies away from what was going on there. But I thought that was a really telling and point that Krakauer chose. Detail that's not mentioned in the movie is that Walt bought Billy, who is Alex's mom, a guitar when Alex was born so that she could play songs for him. And they find that same guitar when his car gets abandoned in the wash. They find that guitar. He had that guitar with him, but he just left, left it there. Walt, at one point in the book reminisces about how Good. Chris was at everything but that he couldn't be coached or taught that any sort of strategy and nuance was lost at him. He was like incredibly smart and good at picking things up, but anytime you tried to like refine his skills on a thing, he just didn't want anything to do with it. And I thought it very clearly is the type of person that he was. He tackles everything just head on with zero sort of strategy or anything. Like it says, just do it. We, we get in the book a thing that obviously makes sense not to be in the movie, but Krakauer spends like two chapters chronicling his own attempt to climb the Devil's Thumb, which is this big scary mountain in Alaska. It's a bit self indulgent, but it's ultimately still relevant and interesting. It's basically he puts it in there because he goes off on the tangent of how people speculate that Alex was going into the woods to die. And he, he says that, like, he basically relates his experience of what he did, where he goes and climbs the Devil's Thumb by himself as like a 23 year old. It does a solo ascent of it. And he's like, I very easily could have died. And anybody who would have saw what I did, like, read about what I did afterwards would have been like, this guy's a fucking idiot who was trying to kill himself. He's like, what I did was very dumb, but I did not. Not. He's like, I knew I could die, but it was not. I was 23 year old and like, I just wasn't thinking about mortality that way. He was like, this is like, it's not that I didn't think, yeah, all.
• 1:48:19
  Speaker B: Young people think they're immortal a little bit.
• 1:48:22
  Speaker A: Yeah. He's like, I didn't have a death wish, but I just didn't. Like, it's just not how I thought about the world. When I was 23 years old and like wanted to climb a mountain, I just went and did it and tried to do it, you know, he's like, I don't. And so he relays that whole experience to kind of relate that to Alex and kind of combat the idea that Alex was like suicidal or something like that. A little detail that I thought was super interesting is that Fairbanks, Alaska is the town that Alex kind of starts his trip out in Alaska from. And we find out in the book that the University of Fairbanks in Alaska, they have this big satellite dish on one of their buildings. And it turns out that Alex's dad wrote some of the software that is used by that satellite dish, which is just a weird, fun little detail.
• 1:49:02
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:49:02
  Speaker A: Kind of ties.
• 1:49:03
  Speaker B: Interesting little connection.
• 1:49:05
  Speaker A: Yeah. The book does point out how unremote Alex's bus camp really was. He was not that far from civilization.
• 1:49:12
  Speaker B: Like he.
• 1:49:13
  Speaker A: It was remote in the sense that, like, he was trapped there. It's not like he could have just like. But it wasn't that remote.
• 1:49:20
  Speaker B: Well, it didn't seem like he went super far from where he got dropped off to where he found the bus. And in the movie, at least.
• 1:49:28
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 1:49:29
  Speaker B: Like it didn't seem like a crazy huge distance.
• 1:49:33
  Speaker A: Yeah. Ironically, the wilderness surrounding the bus, the patch of overgrown country where McCandless was determined to become lost in the wild, scarcely qualifies as wilderness by Alaskan standards. Less than 30 miles to the east is a major thorough, major thoroughfare, the George parks Highway. Just 16 miles to the south, beyond an escarpment of the Outer Range, hundreds of tourists rumble daily into Denali park over a road patrolled by National Park Service. And unbeknownst to the Aesthetic Voyager, which is a nickname he occasionally calls Alex because he wrote that about himself in a thing. And unbeknownst to the Aesthetic Voyager, scattered within a six mile radius of the bus are four cabins, although none happened to be occupied during the summer of 1992. But could have had supplies in them.
• 1:50:16
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:50:17
  Speaker A: So he was not like as remote maybe as it potentially he thought he was. But that doesn't really matter because it wouldn't have really solved it. He couldn't have walked 15 miles when he got started getting sick. It does turn out though, that if he had had a map, he would have been fine. Because when he tries to cross the river and it's all flooded, like it's way too big and you can't cross, it turns out if he had had a map, he would have known that like a mile up the river there was a cable car that goes over.
• 1:50:44
  Speaker B: And I had that thought in the movie. Not of a cable car specifically, but I was like, I feel like if that were me, just start going up and down the river, I would start going up and down the river too, to see if there was a better place to cross.
• 1:50:56
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:50:58
  Speaker B: And I was a little surprised that he just didn't do that.
• 1:51:01
  Speaker A: Yeah. And Krakauer notes that if he had had a map, he would have known that this cable car was there. Cause it had been there since like the 70s. This is like a cable that hangs over the river. And I say cable car. It's like a little Bucket hanging on a cable. But you could use it to get across the river because Krakauer uses it when he goes, like a year after McCandless dies, he goes to the site with some friends to, like, look at it, and they cross on this cable car. And the thing that's actually w is that the cable car was locked on Alex's side of the river. Some hunters at some point had locked it on the far side of the river so that people didn't go back and forth across it. And so Alex would have had access to it. And even if he didn't have access to it, he could have tried to shimmy across the wire if he wanted to. But because that's actually what Krakauer does when he gets there. He has to, like, mountain climb. He uses equipment. He has, like, climbing equipment, but he has to shimmy over the cable and then unlock the car so they can get across. But there was another little detail that apparently this is a thing Krakauer kind of doing his best to prop up McCandless's image a little bit. But it's a fair point, is that apparently when all of this was first reported, it was reported that in his journal he said he shot and killed a moose. The investigators who were investigating the campsite when they found him, said they found the bones and that he was so dumb, he didn't even realize that what he had actually killed was a caribou. And this became like a running thing of, like, he didn't even know the difference between a moose and a caribou. That became part of the mythology of, like, he was so dumb and ill prepared or whatever. But when they're able to find the photos, they can tell in the photos that it is actually a moose. And when Krakauer goes there, they find the bones of the dead moose. And they're like, no, this is a moose. This is not a caribou. So. So he confirms that it actually was a moose and that Alex was not mistaken about what he shot in that one part. At the very, very end of the book, Alex's parents actually visit the bus, which doesn't show up in the movie. They go there with Krakauer to see the site, and they put up a plaque on the bus that commemorates him being there. And they also leave a little store of supplies. So if somebody else ends up there, they have some stuff. Stuff. And in those supplies, they leave a note telling people to call their parents, which I thought was sad, but. And then the saddest thing you'll ever Hear. So prepare yourselves. After Alex leaves France, we talked about earlier how Ron asked to adopt him, and he goes, no. And he says, we'll talk about it when I get back from Alaska. Obviously, he never gets back from Alaska. But before he leaves to Alaska, he goes up to South Dakota or whatever to get some supplies, and he sends Ron a letter, and he sends him this big wrong letter. And some of that we see in the movie when he's, like, on the mountain yelling at Ron that. Some of that's from his letter that he sent him. And he's, like, telling him to, like, see the world and don't sit on his butt or whatever. A lot of that comes from this letter. But he sends this big letter, like, encouraging Ron to go see the world, like, go out on adventures. Don't just stay in your house or whatever. And Ron kind of does this. He buys a camper and he moves out of his house into the desert to Alex's old campsite. And he sits there waiting for Alex to come back. And then Franz finds out on December 26 that Alex has died. And Franz, we met. You see it in the movie. He mentions that he had. He. He would take him further, but he has to go to mass.
• 1:54:28
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:54:28
  Speaker A: Ron was a very, very religious, devout, like, Christian. But when he finds out Alex died in the Alaskan wilderness, he renounces God and is like, no loving God would ever let this happen. This is bullshit. Becomes an atheist, and he says he hadn't drank in years. You see in the movie that he was an alcoholic briefly after his parents or his family died. He says he bought a bottle of whiskey and drinks it in the desert, hoping it would kill him. But he says, it didn't kill me. It just made me really sick. And that's the last we hear of Ron. I don't think there's. I say it's really sad. I don't think it. Like, he did. I don't think he had, like, a tragic death or anything, but he. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how you add that into the movie in a way that's not just horribly depressing at the end, but I thought that was incredibly. Just tragic and sad. And, yeah, I feel terrible about it. And finally, better in the book, because I do not like this. The movie, I feel like, implies that, like, a reconciliation with his parents would have maybe been the happy ending. Like, him being like, oh, I. You know, when he tries to go back and return to the world. And then we, like, as he's starving to death at the end, we have that flash of him, like, yeah, like going up to his parents house and like, hugging them. That's not my happy ending for him. I think he realized he wanted to be around people, but I don't think it was his parents that he wanted to be around. I think it was people like Ron, like Jan, like Tracy, these friends and like Wayne, these people he's met, his found family, the people he's met along the way that he connected with. And it felt really strange to me to kind of have that, like, yeah, oh, if he. Maybe he could. If only he could have reunited with his family. I just. It's not. I don't know the vibe I get. It was not that even if he had made it out of that river, I don't think he was going maybe to see his sister. He liked his sister a lot, but I don't think he was going home to like, hang out with his parents. I think he wanted to go see the other people that he had met along the way. So I was not a huge fan of that, but all right. I got a handful of things to talk about that I thought were better in the movie. My life has taught me one lesson, Hugo, and not the one I thought it would. Happy endings only happen in the movies. There's a great shot at the graduation where we see him kind of obscured in that sea of other graduates. And you can't really see his face, but you kind of can, which I thought really, really fit, like, how he feels in that. Just kind of lost in this massive humanity and wanting to get away from it. They have this poem that him and his. That he reads to his sister that kind of relates to his parents. This was not in the book, but it's called. I go back to May 1927. And I thought it was a good way to kind of showcase, to highlight a little bit about, like, the. The weird backstory with his parents in a way that the book doesn't. The book goes into somewhat, but not in the same way I thought it. Thought it worked well. I liked adding a little wrinkle to Jan and Rhaenys relationship. When he meets them, we get this first inclination of like, Rainy tries to, like, hug her and she kind of like, pulls away or whatever. I liked adding that to their relation, like a. Just a wrinkle to their relationship. On the other hand, I thought Alex fixing their relationship was kind of.
• 1:57:35
  Speaker B: I thought that was really weird.
• 1:57:36
  Speaker A: Yeah, it felt, again, cheap. It leans a bit in too much into that. He's like Operating on this level that we none of us can fathom. And he's just, like, going through the world fixing people, and it's just, again, a little too Jesusy. Like, I just wasn't a huge fan of that. I did like, though, that they seeded Alex being scared of water because that is something mentioned in the book. That part of the reason that he wouldn't have even tried to cross the river, which he wouldn't have been able to anyways. But the. The big roaring river at the end they set up when he's talking to Rainey on the beach. He's like, I'm terrified of water or whatever, which was something we know about him.
• 1:58:07
  Speaker B: He kayaks down a whole river.
• 1:58:09
  Speaker A: He. He. It's a fear that he would face, but he's just still not, like, huge about water. I don't know.
• 1:58:15
  Speaker B: Fair enough.
• 1:58:15
  Speaker A: I thought the Salvation Mountain scene was fun because I think that guy's just fascinating when they go and talk to the actual guy that painted Salvation mount or made Salvation Mountain and which. Which is in Slab City. Like, it's. That's part of that, like, big kind of.
• 1:58:28
  Speaker B: Is that mentioned in the book? Okay. So the movie added that.
• 1:58:32
  Speaker A: The movie added that it existed. So it seems reasonable that he could have gone there. But there's nothing mentioned about him going there. But I thought it was like, yeah, sure, maybe. I don't know. And then there's a shot in the movie that I love that it was just a little thing, is that when they're to let us know what time of year it is because we're in the middle of the desert and it's hard to tell. We know it's Christmas time in the Slab City because there's this kid pushing a big wheel through the. Like, they're in the. Like, Alex and Tracy are, like, talking in the background or whatever. And this kid just comes pushing through the foreground, pushing a big wheel that has a Christmas tree tied to it.
• 1:59:06
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 1:59:06
  Speaker A: And I just thought it was very funny. I don't know. I liked that a lot. All right, let's get to a few things that the movie nailed. As I expected, practically perfect in every way. Movie nailed lots of stuff. As I said earlier, it's a very, very faithful adaptation. So I'm gonna list a handful of things, but we already talked about a lot of it, and most of the stuff in the movie is from the book. Book. There's a little moment early on when, during the opening, like, credits, where we see in a gas station on a bookshelf. A book called Tanana Plant Lore or something like that, which is the book he bought that he learned to like what plants to eat while he was in Alaska. I loved the. I was initially weary about having his postcard text appear on screen. But then I realized what they were doing because I know how that postcard ends, which is into the wild. And so. And. But then it like pauses towards the very end and we got get a handful of moments. But then as he walks into the wilderness, the final lines. I now walk into the wild pops up and into the wild turns into the title, which I thought worked and was fun. Nailed him donating all the rest of his college fund to Oxfam, burning his money after his car floods. He has $123 and he lights it all on fire. He meets up with the older couple who are rubber tramps and they take him under his wing. They nailed. When he gets to Alaska, he carves that triumphant screed into the wood that says like. Yeah, yeah, whatever it said. Yeah, that whole like thing that he. That existed and was there like word for word. He digs up stuff near where his car was. I'm not sure in the movie if we see him digging up stuff from where his car was, but that's a thing we know he did in the book a lot is when he was places he would bury stuff.
• 2:00:49
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:00:49
  Speaker A: And then he would come back, go.
• 2:00:50
  Speaker B: Back and get it.
• 2:00:51
  Speaker A: Get it like months later or whatever. He did it quite a bit. And we do see him at least do that once in the movie. They nailed the little detail where on his dad's birthday that one time he buys him like a questar telescope. Just the thing that's mentioned, I think kind of getting to the idea that he did like want his dad's like approval and kind of, I think never felt like he measured up in that kind of thing. Based on the little bit that we learn about Wayne in the book. Because he's not in the book that much. But based on what we do know about Wayne, I thought Vince Vaughn felt like, like really good casting for that character. He meets back up with the older couple with Jan and Rainey in Arizona at the Slabs and he helps them sell books, which we see him doing in the movie. They have like a little book stall. That's what he. And they, they hired. They have him help specifically. Cuz he knows a lot about books because he reads a ton. He is staying in the desert near oh my God Springs or whatever in like a nudist colony encampment when he meets Ron for the first time. And all of the backstory with Ron's basically the same. Walt's background is like a project manager at NASA and then him and his wife starting their own company and being kind of independently wealthy and all that sort of stuff is all the same. And then the movie mentions the post high school trip where he goes out to California and finds out that his dad had been cheating on his mom with his first wife and had another kid with his first wife after he had had two kids.
• 2:02:11
  Speaker B: Wait, is that what happened?
• 2:02:12
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yes.
• 2:02:13
  Speaker B: Because I thought that his mom was the mistress.
• 2:02:19
  Speaker A: No. Yes. She is like that.
• 2:02:23
  Speaker B: That his dad was still married to the first wife.
• 2:02:26
  Speaker A: He was legally. But my understanding of it is that he was still legally married to the first woman. Alex's and Karine's mom is the second woman.
• 2:02:34
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:02:35
  Speaker A: But she didn't know from my understanding. Or maybe she did. Maybe she did know. I don't know. I. Like, I'd have to reread it and see, but.
• 2:02:43
  Speaker B: Because I thought what he was upset about was that they were like, bastards, was what I. That's what the movie says.
• 2:02:51
  Speaker A: I don't. That word is not mentioned in the book. And I don't know if that. I don't know what his. I took it that he was just upset at his father for essentially going back and having. I interpreted it when I read the book, that he was with his first wife.
• 2:03:06
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:03:07
  Speaker A: Left her, but never got a divorce, met their mom. They got together, had two kids with her. Then while he was still with her, went back and had a little fling with his first wife again and had a kid with her. Even though he was still with. He was still with. And then. But the details of that are a little muddy. I don't know the exact.
• 2:03:29
  Speaker B: Okay. Because I did think, like, as we were watching the movie, like, I thought him being upset specifically about him and his sister being, like, born out of wedlock seemed odd. Like, it didn't feel like a thing that his character would be upset about.
• 2:03:46
  Speaker A: I think it could potentially, because he did have very weird, like, kind of strict moral, ethical code about even, like, the cheating.
• 2:03:55
  Speaker B: Sure. I could. I could see that. But, like, the specific thing specifically, like, specifically being a bastard. I was like, it didn't feel like something he would be all that upset about.
• 2:04:04
  Speaker A: I don't think that's. Again, that's not the vibe I got from the book. The vibe I got from the book that he was basically just mad at his dad for cheating on his mom.
• 2:04:12
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:04:12
  Speaker A: Again, which.
• 2:04:13
  Speaker B: That makes perfect sense.
• 2:04:16
  Speaker A: Again, I'm still not. The book, I think, was kind of vague. I'd have to go reread it and see exactly what happened there. But anyways, that's it for the book or the movie. Nailed it. Let's get to a handful of odds and ends before the final verdict.
• 2:04:39
  Speaker B: There. The specific scene in. When he's hanging out with Wayne and they're, like, in the bar and he starts yelling society over and over. Yeah, that I. That specific kind of railing against society, to me feels like. So specifically Gen X. Yeah, definitely. I'm sorry, Gen X. I'm not sure I can really describe it. I can certainly relate to being disillusioned by society, but there's some other element to this, that specific Gen X flavored disillusionment that I also cannot relate to.
• 2:05:24
  Speaker A: Yeah, I get what you're saying. I don't know if I could also put. Yeah, put to words exactly what it is what you're saying, but I get what you're saying. I think.
• 2:05:33
  Speaker B: Anyway. I don't know. It was just something that I noted as we were watching this. It felt very Gen XY to me. Well, he was Gen X. Yeah, there is that. Another thing that I also picked up on as we were watching the movie was the chemistry between Emile Hirsch and Kathryn Keener, which was occasionally uncomfortable to me because I felt like the narrative was selling their relationship as, like, maternal.
• 2:06:04
  Speaker A: So fun fact. This is actually probably not unintentional on the movie's part. The book mentions that he would flirt quite a bit with Jan. There's no implication that they were, like, sleeping together or anything like that. But they. They had both a maternalistic relationship and a flirty one, as described in the book. So make of that what you will. I don't know. I think that, like I said, I think that might not be unintentional in the movie's part.
• 2:06:31
  Speaker B: There's another point in the book where I don't even remember what. Where this was happened in the movie where he says, I think careers are a 21st century. Yeah. He says, like, I think careers are a 21st century invention.
• 2:06:48
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 2:06:48
  Speaker B: And I was like, I. Okay, man. Well, the entire history of human society begs to differ with you.
• 2:06:56
  Speaker A: This is one of the times in the movie where I think we get a little bit of the movie.
• 2:07:00
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:07:01
  Speaker A: Being like, okay. Like. Because obviously we as an audience watching, we know, like, well, that's just clearly not true.
• 2:07:07
  Speaker B: It's, like, clearly wrong.
• 2:07:08
  Speaker A: So, like.
• 2:07:10
  Speaker B: But it's also. It is like, very, like, early 20s, idealistic kid thing to think.
• 2:07:17
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So we mentioned earlier, you asked about the camera and the photo. I had a note that there's a moment early in the film where he's, like, sitting on a bridge and he's eating an apple and he's, like, talking to himself about, like, oh, this apple's so good. I'm not. Best apple I've ever had, or whatever. And then at the very end of that scene, he turns and looks and breaks the fourth wall and looks into the camera. And I was like, oh, not sure how I feel about that. That's interesting. And then it happens a handful more times over the course of the movie. It happens again when he's in LA or Vegas or somewhere. There's this moment where he's standing, like, near the camera and he looks into the camera and there's stuff going on behind him. And then it happens one more time. There's at least a couple more. But there's one more time specifically where he's sitting outside the bus and he looks into the camera. But in that moment, it's the final one in the film, I think, other than maybe like, the final shot where the camera pulls back as he's dying. He might look into the camera there, but this is one of the last ones in the film. He's sitting outside the bus and he looks into the camera. He hits the exact pose of that famous photo of him.
• 2:08:25
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 2:08:26
  Speaker A: And it made me wonder, wait a second. Are these fourth wall breaks supposed to be moments where he's, like, taking a.
• 2:08:33
  Speaker B: He would literally be looking into a camera.
• 2:08:36
  Speaker A: Yeah. Now, I've never seen any of the other photos that would relate to the other fourth wall breaks in this movie. So that may not be it, but if that had been what they were doing, that would have been really interesting.
• 2:08:47
  Speaker B: Yeah, that would be really, like, a really fun directorial choice.
• 2:08:52
  Speaker A: Yes. If that had been. And like I said, because it's definitely the last one when he. He's sitting in front of the bus and he, like, he hits the exact pose and moment that Chris McCandless hits in that famous photo of him sitting outside the bus. Plus. Yeah, but I don't think, like, him with the apple is one that is a. I've never seen it. At least I don't know. So maybe there are. Maybe those other moments are photos that he took. And if so, kudos. If not, then it's just a coincidence, maybe.
• 2:09:22
  Speaker B: And I. I just. I mean, I just googled photos of Chris McCandless and all of the ones that are coming up seem to be Alaska ones.
• 2:09:30
  Speaker A: So those are all the most popular ones that show up. So. So it's. There are other photos of him from different times. So I. But it made. I don't know. Anyways, I'll have to do some looking and if I can figure out if that was a thing or not, I'll let us know in the next prequel. But if I can find like the Apple photo or one of the other ones that I know were fourth wall break moment.
• 2:09:48
  Speaker B: But anyways, a little exchange that I really loved was when he like first meets Ron and he's trying to get him to climb up the A hill. It's not really a mountain, but like a steep hill. And he's like, oh, don't you want to go up? And Ron's like, nope, I don't do those kind of things. That was the most relatable moment in the whole movie to me. Yeah, no, I don't do that.
• 2:10:17
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 2:10:19
  Speaker B: Another little thing that I just wanted to mention was that I thought it was amazing that he manages to keep his reading glasses throughout the entire film.
• 2:10:27
  Speaker A: Yep.
• 2:10:28
  Speaker B: Felt like that would. That was an easy gimme. His reading. Reading glasses break when he does something.
• 2:10:33
  Speaker A: No, I could. I think it's true that he had them still because I think there are photos of him towards the end wearing the glasses still. So yeah, he. And reading was so important to him that I think he would have protected them very, very fastidiously. Before we get to the final verdict, we wanted to remind you you can do us a favor by heading over to Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Goodreads, Blue sky, any of those places. We would love to hear what you have to say about into the Wild. What do you think about Chris, Alex? What's his deal? Which side do you come down on on the debate? We would want to know and we want to talk about it on the next prequel episode. If you want to help us out, you can head over to Apple, Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to our show, drop us a five star rating, write us a nice little review. That would be super appreciated. And if you really, really want to support us, you can head over to patreon.com thisfilmislit support us there for 2, 5 or 15 bucks a month to get access to bonus stuff at each level. At the $5 level, you get bonus content once a month. We put out a bonus episode. Last month we put out our discussion of Nosferatu. Right. Yeah. Which was our runner up in the March Madness poll this month. Coming up soon, we will have our episode on a ghost story.
• 2:11:43
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 2:11:44
  Speaker A: Which is what we're doing for that. So, yeah, you get that. And then at the $15 level, if you have something you would really like us to talk about, you support us. For 15 bucks a month, you get access to priority recommendations, patron requests. And this one was a patron request.
• 2:11:57
  Speaker B: From Breen's Beans and Peen.
• 2:12:01
  Speaker A: There.
• 2:12:01
  Speaker B: It is technically a former patron.
• 2:12:03
  Speaker A: Former patron. But was around long enough to earn their.
• 2:12:07
  Speaker B: Their request to get the. The retroactive request.
• 2:12:12
  Speaker A: We don't. Yeah, we don't want you to join for like a day and then, you know, request something and then leave. But he was around for a few months and put in a request and then. So we decided to do it, but. All right, Katie, it's time for the final verdict.
• 2:12:28
  Speaker B: Sentence passed. Verdict after. That's stupid.
• 2:12:34
  Speaker A: I had heard the story of Chris McCandless before, but this was my first time reading the book and really diving into the mystery behind the question, who is Chris McCandless? It was a fascinating read. And while Jon Krakauer is definitely more enamored with Alex than I was, I understand the appeal. It's hard not to admire his audacity and willingness to throw himself headfirst into life. As bewitched by Alex as Krakauer was, I think this movie presents itself as evidence that Sean Penn was even more so. It's a good movie. I actually liked it quite a bit. It had some really beautiful shots. The structure was exactly what I imagined while reading the book, and I thought overall it worked really well. The performances are all great. I honestly thought Emile Hirsch had, like, some really weak moments mixed in with what is overall a really good performance. But again, just generally, I thought it was a pretty good movie. But in wanting to honor Alex's life and death, I think Penn ends up flattening a complex human just a bit too much for my liking. The Alex of the film is a bit too wise, a bit too jovial, and a bit too likable. Based on my reading of his personality from the book. The movie is a great adaptation and a good movie overall. And the book is not a masterpiece. It's just a very well written exploration of the tragic death of a young man. But it provides what I feel is a more honest and more interesting exploration than the movie. So this time, I'm going with the book. Katie, what's next?
• 2:14:01
  Speaker B: Up next, it's time for something different. We're doing something that we've never done before, and we are going to talk about she's the man, which is a 2006 film loosely based on Twelfth Night. Loosely based by William Shakespeare.
• 2:14:21
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 2:14:23
  Speaker B: Shakespeare plays have oft been the subject of teen film adaptations.
• 2:14:28
  Speaker A: We talked about one in a bonus.
• 2:14:30
  Speaker B: We talked about one in a bonus episode once, but we've never covered one one on the main show. And we're gonna. We're gonna give it a try.
• 2:14:37
  Speaker A: Our best. Fantastic.
• 2:14:39
  Speaker B: Maybe. Maybe it'll go poorly, maybe it won't, but we're gonna give it a shot.
• 2:14:43
  Speaker A: All right, well, in two weeks time, we're talking about she's the man, and in one week's time, we'll be talking about everything you all had to say about into the Wild. Until that time, guys, gals, non binary pals, and everybody else, keep reading books, watching movies, and keep being awesome.