Hacker Cinema
Into the Wild
2007 · Film · 148 min
Directed by Sean Penn
After graduating from Emory University in 1992, top student and athlete Christopher McCandless abandons his possessions, gives his entire $24,000 savings account to charity, and hitchhikes to Alaska to live in the wilderness.
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35 comments on Hacker News
just don't go full-on chris mccandless
EDIT:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McCandless
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Wild_(film)
Into the Wild, this perhaps romanticized / dumb idea that blindly chasing your passion to your demise may still be worth it. Dying from mushroom poisoning doesn't seem so fun though...
Walter Mitty and Big Year, similar adventures about people chasing their silly passions (but not fatally).
Transcendence, Her, and Robot and Frank, some of the very few AI-optimistic movies. I've always believed in the transformative social good of AI, since I first heard of the Borg, but most people and media are staunchly against it. It was nice to see a more friendly viewpoint.
I really enjoyed Arrival too and hope we have an experience like that someday, but the whole time travel thing was a turnoff.
> A few miles away from a remote forest road in the wrong direction and you might not see any people for years and years.
This is essentially what happened to this McCandless guy in Alaska. That book about him -Into The Wild, by Krakauer - is super well written and a very interesting story. The movie based on the book is also quite well produced.
I loved film Into the Wild and read up on McCandless afterwards. If I remember correctly, he died within a day’s hike from a road but had he decided to bring a map with him, he would have known how to get to the road. I got the impression that he wanted to see how well he could survive on his own with the least amount of help from society. While I admire the spirit of the man and can sympathise with the romanticism of his endeavours, I would consider not bringing a map of the area or preparing adequately for life in the wilderness to be deliberate self-sabotage.
Alaska natives apparently don't have much sympathy for those from the lower 48 who get in trouble because they didn't research or prepare for Alaskan conditions before venturing out.
The majority of Alaskans share some version of the opinion that McCandless was deeply out of his element
The Cult of Chris McCandless
https://www.mensjournal.com/adventure/the-cult-of-chris-mccandless-20121015/
made famous by "Into The Wild"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Wild_(film)
>If Into the Wild portrayed McCandless as the pitiful, hapless doofus that he was - perhaps portrayed by Adam Sandler - then all would be fine.
Now that's the one Adam Sandler movie I'd actually enjoy watching, just for the long protracted death scene at the end.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/04/24/adam-sandler-is-awful-and-its-all-our-fault/
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-Adam-Sandlers-movies-so-bad
314 miles range to "experience nature" feels very problematic.
I immediately had to think about the movie "Into the wild".
While your "state" might not be perfect, are you truly "enslaved"? I mean, there are alternatives, but they aren't better:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Wild_(film)
Slab City is featured in the movie Into The Wild. The movie sends you through many of these out of the way places on Chris’s journey through the North American West.
...but also take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Wild_(film) and the story behind it for a more cautinary tale.
> Literature, fiction and cinema are all full of similar tales (not all in mountain scenarios) and so I expect that this "ability" is part of being human.
Cast Away with Tom Hanks is an example of that. Not sure if The Terminal or Into The Wild or Martyrs also had that concept, but it would've fit.
I wonder if (extreme) trauma can cause people to become so-called 'paranormal'.
As a South African growing up in a rural area, I always saw Into the Wild as an example of how Alaskans—or other people who don't die in the woods—with common sense are thrown under the bus in favour of general Americans with more gripping stories that unfortunately revolves around a couple of stupid decisions.
It's a great story to make a movie about, but isn't the daily life of an Alaskan a great story too? It appears that it isn't seen as a cautionary tale at all, but an instruction on how to "go back to nature".
More so after Into the Wild became a movie (not mushrooms)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McCandless
Movies are a visual medium. The problem with the movie versions of Fight Club and Into the Wild is that they show dumb people doing bad things, but those dumb people are played by beautiful actors who are photographed very flatteringly. So people watch them and come away not thinking “man, that guy was dumb and bad,” but “man, that guy looked cool, I want to be like him!”
Maybe not one, but 3 books:
Into the Wild (book and movie): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ArZ7VD-QQ When I was in high school I was considering the same path as Christopher took, but then I heard about him and I learned from his story. "Happiness only real when shared"
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6289283-born-to-run This is how I got really hooked up to triathlon and ultramarathons. Great book, I lent it to many people and changed some of their lives too.
Learning PHP and MySQL: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40544.Learning_PHP_and_MySQL The book is ok, not great, but it changed my life. This is how I learned to program.
But I would say that other media also had an impact. Like poems:
"If—" by Rudyard Kipling: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH5txHlSOUI
Then there are some short videos: The Race: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM5A1K6TxxM Godspeed: https://youtu.be/pNSWTwB-_bk "The Hubble Ultra Deep Field" by Deep Astronomy: https://youtu.be/oAVjF_7ensg
People do these things sometimes. “Into the Wild” is really a film about a complete buffoon who dies because he doesn’t take a topographical map.
Sure. <Intrepidly goes off-topic> .. Into The Wild was just the guy being a spoiled ignorant delusional dick, I thought, really not impressive. Jungle was far better. You almost persuaded me the guy in 127 Hours ate his arm off the first time I read that haha. (Um he didn't, did he?!) Am writing this in case you didn't see Dersu Uzala (the Kurosawa version), one of my very favourite movies. The world before cities was a different world, like you say. <Totally off topic> Incidentally, it's my theory that Yoda is taken from Dersu. (As Star Wars is a remake of Hidden Fortress)
> Depends how hungry you are. If the alternative's dying, most people would.
Yeah, survival movies like Cast Away, Into The Wild, and 127 Hours (I just saw the latter) underline that people do weird things to survive including diet-wise. But I also saw the voluntary coin of the story in the beautiful documentary Happy People: A Year in the Taiga. An animal lives in freedom and relative peace, until it gets hunted and killed. That's different from ~45 days of prison life a chicken here gets. Can't compare that 1:1 and judge the former as non-vegan. Its as close to vegan as it gets due to being natural.
Are you sure growkits are illegal? Truffles?
Although nowadays I am rather conservative regarding recreative use of entheogenics Azarius ships their growkits seemingly to entire Europe [1]. Anecdata: it is fairly easy to grow champignons and psilos. The kits I used were complete with straightforward guides.
I wrote "psilos" because there is also A. Muscaria, though it has less severe effects care must be taken when plucking food in the wild (and I am unsure if they'd be an option for your specific use case). There are some great guides out there allowing you to distinct species but as Sean Penn's Into The Wild [2] shows one mistake can be fatal. There's a Dutch community on FB about plucking mushrooms in the wild, but its focusing on its culinary usage. As I said, there's also some guides (in the form of books) available.
BTW, do you know if and why psilocybin works (better) than LSD for your use case?
[1] https://azarius.net/smartshop/magic-mushrooms/grow-kits/ (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated, used to be a customer back in the '00s)
[2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0758758/
J.D. Salinger, Syd Barrett... I hate it when pop culture romanticizes isolation. These people need help. Good example is Christopher McCandless (movie: Into The Wild), whose decomposing body weighed only 30 kilograms when it was found.
On one hand you have Zarathustra, the sage coming down from mountain after 10 years of meditation to spread the wisdom. On the other hand you have everyone else, decaying, dying slowly and suffering in silence.
Reminds me of the scene from the Into the Wild movie - McCandless is working in a McDonalds-alike fast food joint, and the camera lingers on a signs that says "It's O.K. to waste fries"
What a horrible title.
Into the Wild was a movie about a homeless traveler. It cost $15million to make.
> I am actually surprised I have never heard of any fatalities.
There are loads of toxic flowers, plants, and trees.
As for your question. I guess because people generally don't live like Into The Wild [1].
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0758758/
Intelligence (being well-read, habitual 'mapper') should come before appearance. All these bearded hipsters, imitating the same personage from the "Into The Wild" movie or each other, are so ridiculous, especially in India or Nepal, where they seemed to believe that they belong to some alien super-intelligent race or something. But when you are trying to talk to them, they cannot express anything interesting, but a small set of current memes and cultural codes.
One such hipster once told me that he is from a different tribe of humanity, and commented two minutes later, that "the eachquake was nice, I learned a lot". And he isn't even acting - he is just that.
Status symbols must be not vearable. It must be healthy looks and open-mindedness - the effects of possession of at least some intelligence (evolution do favour looks of healthy youth, not purchased status items marketed as such. Not being able to grasp this simple fact means one isn't qualified even for a hipster).
BTW, real intelligence and real spirituality does not require any special attributes to make it self-evident. On the contrary, it is inversly correlated with appearance - the dreaded-and-tattooed hippues in rags marketed for tourists are the most primitive. Then come yogis, sages and babas. Breaded hipsters comes next.
As for status symbols to impress waiters and clerks, well, they could be much subtle and cheaper that a ₹1 lakh bag. Usually, the matching set of clothing which reflects your personal taste - texture and quality of a fabric, matching colors, simplicity of being good-enough is enough.
For some reason this post reminds me of movie "Into the Wild"
You don't need to rate movies or even have a Netflix account to get this data. For this particular example, go here (found by googling 'the social network netflix'):
http://dvd.netflix.com/Movie/The-Social-Network/70132721
You'll see they suggest {Beyond the Sea, Into the Wild, The Blind Side, Good Will Hunting, and Prefontaine}.
Krakauer's books "Eiger Dreams" and "Into The Wild" (the latter also a good movie) are worth a read as well. And I've listened several times to his audiobook versions of all three.
More than anyone else I've read, he captures the compulsion and the self-doubt of people compelled to pursue such ventures. My highest "climb" is Mt. Shasta, which is nothing in comparison to anything he's done. But I so understand that urge to go and get into the wilderness. It's a compulsion for some, and he documents it, and the vulnerabilities it implies, so very well.
The rest of the article aside, I really like the notion of travelling alone, at least once. It reminds me of a quote from one of my favourite movies, Into the Wild.
”The sea's only gifts are harsh blows, and occasionally the chance to feel strong. Now, I don't know much about the sea, but I do know that that's the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing the blind, deaf stone alone with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head. “
Not that you have to hitchhike alone to the Alaskan wilderness! Thats extreme of course.
Similar message as the movie "Into the Wild". McCandless's conclusion by the end was that "Happiness is only real when shared".
Would definitely recommend this movie as it portrays McCandless's tragic story with great heart.
Into the Wild is probably one of the best movies I have ever watched. It's a very powerful and emotional story.
I'd like to read the article to better understand the observations, but the full text and pdf links return "not found", so I won't trust an abstract without reading the whole thing. Please let me know if you have the article somewhere else.
About the sample bias, I agree with you, but if noone around you has ever heard or anyone dying of starvation in their lifetime (including your grandparents), the "sample" becomes more significant. Now, when people die of starvation, it's so extraordinary that they make movies about it ("Into the Wild" by Sean Penn - excellent movie, by the way).
"So what have they done lately?"
Not even counting foreign films, here are some darn good productions from the past five years:
Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Drive, Warrior, Black Swan, Inception, Inglourious Basterds, Up, Whatever Works, The Limits of Control, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, Ratatouille, The Departed, and The Prestige.
Like Christopher McCandless (upon whom the book and movie "Into the Wild" is based) rightly said: "Careers are a 20th century invention".
Not saying everybody should do what he did, but I have come to increasingly believe that everything should be questioned when it comes to choosing a livelihood - even the assumption that one needs to work for a living - since its going to be a big part of your life.
I did watch 'into the wild', and I didn't see him realizing at all that he was selfish or should've done something different. We're talking about that movie where the guy treks into Alaska and ends up in the abandoned bus, right?
I wasn't quite sure what to take away from the film (apart from 'trekking without knowing what you're doing is really stupid') but I'm quite convinced that the makers didn't mean the film to be 'he thought he should've worked to make others happy'.
Wiki page on McCandless: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless The speculation is that he died either from eating http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedysarum or Hedysarum with "Black Patch Desease" fungus : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizoctonia_leguminicola
I just watched the movie about him "Into The Wild" -- pretty interesting.