Chris McCandless : INTO THE WILD

In 1990, 22-year-old Chris McCandless left a privileged life in Annandale, Virginia, and gave away most of his money, and began a cross-country journey. McCandless told neither family nor friends where he was headed. Months after he left, his car was found washed up in a ditch in the desert with no evidence. Two years after he left on his trip, McCandless was found dead in an abandoned bus a few miles into the Alaskan wilderness.

John Krakauer, author of the book upon which the film is based, used his investigative reporting skills to track the path taken by the young man. Krakauer wanted to know why McCandless would leave behind the trappings of the American Dream, as have some individuals throughout history, and search for something elusive and, to his mind, more meaningful. In his book, Krakauer refers to over a dozen authors, adventurers and philosophers in order to clarify the attributes of character that McCandless reveals in his relationships with the people he meets along the way as well as in his journals and postcards.

The film begins with reference to English poet George Lord Byron's poem, "Child Roland's Pilgrimage," written between 1812 and 1818. Both Krakauer and the film's director, Sean Penn, felt that Byron's personal ethos expressed in these lines from his famous poem helped to describe the character of McCandless.

The five lines referenced in the film are from canto iv, verse 178, as follows:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more