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Beitrag: McCandless - 'Into the Wild' (Gelesen: 3857 mal) |
Peter_Kamper
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Peter_Kamper
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Re: McCandless - 'Into the Wild'
(Antworten #1 Datum: August 31st, 2007 um 9:07:39am) |
 
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Titel:
McCandless died not from ‘innocent error,’ but from failing to prepare for wild.
By Dermot Cole
Staff Writer
Published August 25, 2007
INTO THE WILD:
It’s a shame that with the movie version of “Into the Wild” about to debut, the book of the same name still contains a major error that author Jon Krakauer should have corrected a million or so copies ago.
Krakauer wrote that 24-year-old Chris McCandless died in 1992 not from starvation, but because he made the “innocent error” of eating the seeds of wild potatoes.
Because he was eating “toxic seeds,” Krakauer claimed, “McCandless discovered that he was suddenly far too weak to hike out and save himself.”
The problem is that Krakauer based this version of McCandless’ final days on evidence that has been known to be false for a decade, but the author never bothered to update the book.
“Conclusive spectrographic analysis has yet to be completed,” Krakauer wrote, adding that “preliminary testing” by Professor Tom Clausen at the University of Alaska Fairbanks indicated that seed pods Krakauer collected from near the bus where McCandless died contained a poison.
“If true,” Krakauer wrote, “it means that McCandless wasn’t quite as reckless or incompetent as he has been made out to be. He didn’t carelessly confuse one species with another. The plant that poisoned him was not known to be toxic — indeed, he’d been safely eating its roots for weeks. In his state of hunger, McCandless simply made the mistake of ingesting its seed pods.”
“A person with a better grasp of botanical principles would probably not have eaten them, but it was an innocent error. It was, however, sufficient to do him in,” Krakauer writes.
In April 1997, the News-Miner reported that extensive testing had shown that the seeds Krakauer delivered to the University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists http://www.uaf.edu/ were not poisonous. Krakauer should have revised his book at that time.
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Peter_Kamper
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Re: McCandless - 'Into the Wild'
(Antworten #2 Datum: August 31st, 2007 um 9:08:12am) |
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I’ve written about this issue a few times over the years, but the question has never attracted attention Outside.
Now, for what may be the first time, a national magazine has picked up on Krakauer’s error.
In the September issue of “Men’s Journal,” writer Matthew Power touches on some of the harsh realities of the McCandless story as recognized by people who live in Alaska.
Power visited the state this summer and interviewed me, among many others.
I told Power that I have a lot of sympathy for McCandless and his parents, who must still be suffering. I was once 24 and I have a son who is almost that age.
It makes no sense to romanticize the young man’s death, however, or to suggest that it was something other than a lack of preparation that did him in.
“To sell the story, they’ve made it into a fable,” I told Power. “He’s been glorified in death because he was unprepared. You can’t come to Alaska and do that.”
Power is correct when he writes that McCandless “has entered the realm of myth and myths are shaped by those who can make use of them.”
Krakauer has portrayed McCandless’ failure to carry a map, bug dope, good boots, sufficient food, a decent rifle, an ax and other basic supplies not as proof of exceptional foolishness, but, of his intention to “give the wilderness a fair shot.” The author ascribed to McCandless a level of caution in picking out plants to eat and avoid that is strikingly at odds with his carelessness.
Choosing to interpret the story that way makes a more gripping and more profitable venture, both on the page and on the screen. It is not the complete picture of events, however.
Tens of millions of dollars are riding on the film version, the trailer for which portrays McCandless as a latter-day Thoreau “searching for himself,” a tried and true American character.
Power said that while Krakauer showed two sides of McCandless, “the hapless tenderfoot and the enlightened eternal seeker,” Penn’s movie deals exclusively with the latter.
“His McCandless is almost Christ-like. It is a deeply mythic take on a character who is largely a cipher,” Power wrote.
Penn made it clear he has no patience for those who don’t share his romanticized portrait of McCandless, Power wrote.
“There are few people in Alaska who have done anything comparable to what Chris did,” Penn told Power. “We’re not talking about a week with another buddy and ATVs, hunting. This was 113 days, 79 of them by choice. And he did pretty d**mn well.”
Had McCandless prepared himself, he would have done much better. His story would not have led to a book and a movie, but he might have survived.
BOOKS:
On page 162 of Krakauer’s book, he writes that the heaviest items in McCandless’ pack when he walked off the Parks Highway were nine or 10 paperback books, ranging from books by Thoreau and Tolstoy to Louis L’Amour. McCandless was not a “literary snob,” the author wrote.
Krakauer’s conclusions appeared to be based on what was found at the bus off the Stampede Trail, 25 miles west of Healy.
Fairbanks climber Jeff Benowitz said, however, that Krakauer was wrong. Benowitz left the books in the bus, the January before McCandless died, the Fairbanksan said.
He said that before he attempted a 200-mile ski/climb on Mount Brooks that winter, he picked up a pile of books from the Salvation Army and the transfer station, making his selections not on literary value, but because they were free or priced at 25 cents.
THE BUS:
Sean Penn told an interviewer from Outside magazine that filming at the actual site of the old bus on the Stampede Trail was out of the question. He said it would have been “kind of a rape of the area to have a whole crew there.”
The producers acquired a similar bus from Fairbanks and had it hauled to a site a few miles from Cantwell for filming the bus scenes last year.
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