I read Krakauer's book, which was terrific, even better than his Into Thin Air, but even reading that book, which the movie embellished a lot of things that weren't in the book, I was left feeling plenty disgusted with this kid who thought he was the next Thoreau or whoever the hell he was trying to imitate.
The dipshit didn't even think ahead of what would have happened if he didn't make it out of the wild. No, he was a typical 24-year-old who thought he'd live forever. Instead, a pair of moose hunters had to come across his stinking corpse two weeks after he died.
And it is very possible McCandless was several decks short of a full card. It's hard to diagnose somebody long dead, but there was something clearly wrong with him.
Tramp obviously wasn't searching for anything. He was running from something, possibly almost everything.
"No longer to be poisoned by civilization,'' he wrote, "he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.''
Note the third-person reference to himself there. It's a textbook signal for schizophrenia.
Lost is a good place to be if you suffer from this particular mental illness too. Lost is a place removed from all the outside stimuli that make life horribly, and sometimes dangerously, confusing for a schizophrenic.
Normal people lack the desire to become lost in the wild. Normal people use maps, compasses and GPS devices to avoid becoming lost in the wild.
Over the decades, I've met a lot of the young men who've gone off to the wilderness to search for meaning or, just as often, adventure. They didn't change their names, try to forge new identities or contemplate killing a "false being within.''
Yep, something wasn't right there. The comments following this column are worth reading.
The same writer reviews the film here and the facts about McCandless's life.
