To be sure, there are many elements of this film that one could take up and examine, and indeed a few reviews I’ve read have offered interesting critiques. However when I watched it with a friend recently she highlighted, I think, the fundamental flaw of the film: the celebrating of the sacredness of individualism, with all the unthinking that one expects from Hollywood.

First a quick proviso that the opinions below are ones that come from having watched the film directed by Sean Penn and not from the book or the documentary that dealt with McCandless. I make this point because I want to state that the criticisms are aimed at the character as portrayed and not the person who inspired it all. This is an important point for me, because while I can find it easy to be critical of a character in a film, since each action, articulation, and facial expression occurs as the director wills, contributing to an overall narrative-product, criticising the life choices of another person is somewhat more difficult. Casting stones at others is to too quickly forget the fragile nature of being human and all that that entails.

With that in mind, we take up the character of McCandless in the film. From the outset, we are led to understand that the character is an intelligent and deep-thinking individual, who seeks to undertake a journey that will ultimately see him entering the Alaskan wilderness in order to make a break with the materialistic society in which he has participated to date. He dreams of a self-sufficient life far from civilisation. He is disheartened with the current state of society, expressing at one point (to Wayne the farm owner who employs him as a combine driver) his dismay at how people can be so hostile toward each other as they blindly pursue their own interests.

But while criticising society (something he sees as external to himself?), he does not seem to dwell on obvious parallels with his own actions and their effects on his parents or sister. It only takes a modicum of empathy to begin to be aware of the anguish that losing a child to silence entails for a parent, not knowing whether they are dead or alive, left vacillating between hope and despair. (A principal failing of the main character is almost certainly his failure to see beyond his own expectations of the symbolic roles of his parents – ‘mother’ & ‘father’ – to the people who tried to be these roles, and who even if they failed spectacularly, were more than simply their success or failures in these narrow terms. I’ve seen myself how children, who are well into there thirties, fail to allow their parents to exist beyond these terms.)

The approach of the film seems to want to romanticise the notion of individual endeavour – striking out on one’s own and that this is what is most difficult and desirable. Yet, is it not more difficult to live in community with others, to compromise one’s personal desires for a shared life with others. And is not the character’s choice to cast off responsibility for his “social weight” (his ties to society) to pursue his fantasy emblematic of the materialist self-interest that we are led to believe he is so distasteful of? The character we see is not only supremely selfish, but is more interestingly, living an unexamined life, in the guise of an examined one.

Throughout his journey, the character’s thinking does not appear to develop at all, although the ‘chapters’ of the film seem to want to led us to assume that we are witnessing a journey towards maturity. McCandless, whenever confronted with a questioning of his motives for his leaving home, immediately falls back on reiterating his dream of hiking into the Alaskan wilds as if it were a mantra with which to scare away negative thoughts. His repeated deferral of examining his motives to reasserting his commitment to his fantasy is something that becomes more and more childish as the film progresses. In the final chapter that is meant to show some culmination of wisdom on the part of the character, we witness a scene where he sits in judgement of the old man from the gas station (I’m recalling specifically the scene of the main character with the old man when they arrive back at the young man’s camp. He stands, silhouetted against the evening sky with arms folded, looking down upon the old man, who looks up reverently.) And yet, at what point did the character appear to have learned anything from his journey? His willingness to judge the man is all the more irritating for its righteousness, as if he himself had ever sought to honestly examine his own actions and motivations.

The film concludes with the character realising that happiness is only real when shared with others. This he discovers while reading a novel in the last few days of his life. Earlier in the film the sister narrator tells us that McCandless was unhappy with the abstract thinking of college. Yet had he taken up seriously the abstract thinking encouraged in college he may well have come to his conclusion regarding happiness without having to face death alone in the Alaskan wilderness and causing untold heartache for his family.

I see nothing to celebrate in this film. It tells a tale of someone who walks away from his family, and naively holds to a fantasy of a self-sufficient life in the wilderness, repeating this dream as a mantra to avoid examining his life, until finally the fantasy collapses under the weight of reality; he is alone in a wilderness that he never prepared himself for. Perhaps if the purpose of the film was to highlight the pitfalls of naïve individualistic solutions to systemic problems, or the dangers of unexamined fantasies, it could be considered a good film. As it is, its ironic ending is all too tragic.

A few days ago I was queuing for a bus. I had been travelling all day and it was now late in the evening. I was in something of a stupor from the day, not really thinking about anything, just drifting slowly to the bus door with the rest of the crowd. There was a man against the street wall, begging with a tin. His face was black and grey with dirt and his hair, almost shoulder length, was all knotted up from want of washing. I vaguely took account of how others were treating him and took my approach from them. I ignored him. He continued to move down along the line asking for change. Then, still dreaming of how the shower would feel that I was planning for myself I became aware of a small, scraggy dog looking at the crowd. It was emaciated and had a pitiful, yearning look on its face. I realised that it was with the homeless man. Before I realised the implications of my action, I was reaching for change to give to the homeless man.

That was my crime.

What were my assumptions of this man? What had been the reason that seemed adequate to me to refuse a homeless person some change? Why had I thought it okay to give money for the starving dog, but not for the starving man? Was I judging him as somehow responsible for his poverty, and that the dog was just an innocent victim of a cruel world? Who was I to judge him? Who was I to think ill of him, who was I to refuse him something I did not need?

I knew nothing about him, and yet I was willing to hold fast to the few coins that I had on me. I judged him, and I had no right to. Another human being in need stood before me and I held fast out of concern for the not knowing of how to interact with someone who isn’t within ‘normal’ society. I held fast to avoid being conspicuous.

Shame on me.

“That is what I find so painful; the intrinsic worth of an individual exists only for him, and not for me; I can only get as far as his outward appearance, an absurd set of premisses…”

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others

 

How well can you know an object in your world is a question that has puzzled philosophers for as long as philosophers have been puzzled by their lot. Simone De Beauvoir in her novel The Blood of Others ponders over an extension of that first question: how well can you know another subject (a her or him) in your world?

Imagine for a moment that you go back in time and see your current partner in the arms of a former lover and he or she looks at their beloved as he or she now looks at you now. Can you mark the difference in that look? Is there a perceivable difference? Or is it just the face of your partner as it always appears when in love? Within the subject, behind those familiar eyes, what are the differences? No doubt there are a few, or perhaps indeed many, but can they ever be known by you or are they to be always unknowable?

Is that well used phrase in English – the object of my affections – as accurate as anyone can state the matter?

Is the object of your affections just so; an object that you can never know as the subject that they are to themselves?

But then perhaps that absence, that gap between him/her as an object in your world and the subject (him or her as they are to themselves) that you can’t know as such, is a necessity for what we label so loosely as love. In the end, to know your partner as you would know yourself: with those angry irrational wishes, those illicit desires, those moments where you rail against them in your mind, to know them as they know themselves, would be simply too much to bear. Our notions of love could surely not handle that reality.

Is that why one struggles with loving oneself? Is the irrationality, the contradictions between thought and action too much to cope with? Is that the window through which the comforting narrative sneaks?

A conversation with a friend a while back came across this issue while we were discussing jealousy. He made the excellent point that one of the hardest things for him to deal with was the idea that his girlfriend had sexual desires that went beyond him, that she enjoyed flirting and having attention paid to her from others, something that he admitted immediately after as enjoying too. What he found difficult to cope with ultimately was the idea that she was like him: a complete subject, and not solely an object devoid of such troubling elements. When conceived as the object of his affections, his girlfriend does not want to flirt with other men, because he is there. And perhaps that point is important to underline too, that it is his presence that obliges her to become an object, his narrative, his sense of self.

So is it always then that one´s lover has to be the object of one´s affections and not the subject? And is that necessarily so for love to exist?

What function does the hero play in the lifeworld of a person?

I had never believed that I had any heroes. For the past eight or so years I have tried to break the hold that possessions and those things that would seem to determine, or at least etch out, one’s supposed identity. So for example when I realise I’ve lost something, or broken something, the annoyance that arises is dealt with by realising that I’m still here and that whatever was lost is not so important. To such a list, there are the exceptions of course, one’s family and friends: the stoicism I try to practice has obvious limits. But it’s obvious that to get upset over an object is to invest the thing with value which it has never possessed in and of itself. I’ve tried to cultivate this approach in order to better hold myself to the world. When you lose something realising that you’re still the same.

However when I saw Tony Judt on the Guardian site, I was traumatised. Trauma as perhaps a psychoanalyst would understand it. Shock. When your capacity to think is frozen. Locked solid. I felt my eyes more heavily, they were welling up with tears. I felt scared almost. You see, until then I hadn’t realised that Tony Judt was a hero to me.

I had read him before I saw him in action. His writing still marks out for me what anyone trying to discuss politics should aim for: a measured and humane perspicuity that pushes the reader to want to understand more. His writing however was nothing to the impression he made upon me when I saw him on a London Review of Books panel discussing the Mersheimer and Walt “Israel Lobby” article. Several times through that impassioned debate, Judt used his time to synthesize the points made by others and to, if needed, challenge what he thought wrong with their statements. Through such actions, I got the impression that he was very concerned with the debate contributing to something and to carefully steady it when it seemed it could drift toward the vociferous ad hominem attacks and irresponsible misinformation that a discussion on Israel and Palestine can so easily take. He was at all times courteous, sharp and eloquent. He was to me, without me realising it, the paragon of what I wanted to be myself; clever of course(we all wish this for ourselves I think), but more, he was precise in his speech, measured in his sense of fairness when debating, enough to patiently listen to the points of others, but quick to counter when he thought they were being misleading. He was a gentleman, but a ferocious one.

A hero to be believable must be flawed, seen and understood as human. It makes what they are all the more incredible. Suffering those same bad days as you, falling into the traps of cliché and stereotype at times. But they don’t die. They’re not allowed to wither before you. They’re not allowed to do that. Perhaps they don’t realise that they have to hold up your lifeworld. The world as you understand the world is the way it is because they are out there being what you believe them to be. The world is doing okay because they’re fighting the good fight, while you do nothing. They do the things that you feel are important, and need doing, but that you believe only they can do. Only great people can do them after all. You certainly can’t do them. You can only follow like some sycophantic adherent, reading what they write, listening to what they say, retelling it to others who are willing to listen. They are perhaps in a way a medication for the ills that you perceive the world to suffer from. They struggle on your behalf, while you do nothing but grumble at the state of affairs and champion their last thought in the safe places where its mentioning doesn’t matter.

I write you, but of course I mean me. I is too heavy for me though, today I is buckling because I has lost something. So you will have to stand in, so that I can gain some distance. Abstract the event in order to take away the emotion, that it is after all the supposedly great feat of rational thought – remove the humanity from the equation. Mechanical reasoning.

I feel that I may cry at some point. But right now it is held back by a logic that marks such an action as ridiculous: I never met the man, I’ve no idea what he is like in his everyday life, how can I cry? But he was a pillar that my world needed to be right. He fought so that I didn’t have to, and he of course did so in a way that I feel I never could. That can no longer be the case now though, can it?

So as I’ve tried to train myself from resisting the hold that my possessions have on me, I have to now learn to set aside my heroes. Not to dispel their influence on my life, which will always be there no doubt, but rather how I have set them up to function in my life. I have used them to excuse myself from things that I believe important. It is for this reason that I write in the past tense. Tony Judt is of course not dead. Anyone who has read his recent essay Night can see that his intellectual dexterity and humbling honesty continues to hammer out incredible work. But what he was to me is no longer there. What I made him into is no longer there. He is as a consequence more real now. How Tony Judt deals with his reality today is something which my notion of him could not have supported. And I find that strength makes a demand on me to do more – to be active and try contribute what I can to what I think important.

There seems to be a need on my part to deal with this question before I can fully accept the fact that I’m starting to write a blog. I’m painfully aware of the ego-centric connotations of posting an idea on the internet. Why the need/desire to post online? Why not simply keep a notebook and spare people your drivel, your maundering, your invective “two-cents”? To this question, a close friend answered me by suggesting a society in which everyone kept a notebook, and that the ideas that were expressed within remained closeted away, never seeing the light of day, and more vitally, never growing beyond their initial expression. One might consider an idea that never goes beyond a private notation as one that is still-born; it meets no challenges to its assertions, it never needs to re-check its assumptions, it is never obliged to reconsider its position. In short, it cannot be useful. Perhaps for that reason, posting ideas online can be argued to not wholly be an exercise in inflating one’s sense of self.

But then another question comes up. Can blogs ever be considered a medium that encourages useful debate? To that question I’ve no answer, as I have to confess that I’ve only ever twice commented on something online and both  times I wasn’t really willing to return to continue a discussion. Perhaps in time the answer will become apparent to me.

Regardless of that last concern, I’m further paralysed by the apparent sacredness that surrounds the written word. Any idea committed to paper, for me, carries with it an implicit assertion that it is worthy of note. Anyone trying to write something has surely felt the heavy weight of the blank page, and the awareness of the potential of one’s thought being crushed into the disappointing reality of one’s inability to express that thought in its fullest. I want to get beyond this point, to not be intimidated by the aura of the written word.

So I suppose then one has to work on dispelling the myths, challenging supposed authorities: in the final regard, to simply try. One easy exercise I have to encourage myself is to consider the windows of the bookshops that I pass, and, eyeing that newest celebrity (auto-)biography, realise that there before me lies a cogent argument for book-burnings as being useful to a society.

The aura of the written word is well and truly lying in the gutters.