Whenever I watch a film based upon a book I’ve read my thoughts tend to follow a path similar to this, I read the book first and the movie was just so different. It missed some of my favorite parts. More so, there were scenes that I had read that painted clear pictures in my mind. When I saw them on the screen they were completely different.

In this case, what I originally imagined was already different from the historical event. With a novel, there is no “before.” Individual experiences shape how a scene looks, sounds, smells like and each reader’s mindscreen is perhaps “true.” This is part of the magic of writing: no matter how detailed a writer’s description of an event is, s/he can’t control what the reader will see in his/her head. The experience of written fiction is ultimately personal and relative.When reading non-fiction, does this change? What the writer writes and what the readers sees are never completely congruent. The secondhand experience remains relative, but does the truth? These questions are only compounded by the addition of a film based upon a book that reported on real events. Whether or not these questions are even relevant to “Into the Wild” is up for debate. After all, it never explicitly claims to be a factual account. It is far too free with style, narration and chronology to be “concerned with the truth of accountants,”as Werner Herzog would say.  

One of those stylistic flourishes that most interested is the inclusion of characters looking into the camera. A traditional reading suggests these four instances are an attempt to break the reality of the film–to remind the viewer that what is happening isn’t real, that actually there is a crew of people and a camera and a director and an actor and they probably shot this same scene a dozen times. It is a manufactured moment. But what about in a movie about something that actually happened? Rather than drawing attention to the artifice of production, I believe these shots reach for a hyper-reality. They say, “this is a moment and it is really happening. It happened back in 1992 when Chris McCandless did it; it happened in 2007 when Emile Hirsch did it while pretending to be Chris McCandless; and it is happening again right now as you’re watching it. You are here in the moment and Chris/Emile is looking at you. You are a part of it.”

And don’t forget to leave a comment about the film on the previous post for your chance to win a handmade prize.