Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Into the Wild
2007 · Sean Penn · Into the Wild on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how small Gautier keeps Hirsch inside the landscape. (camera)
Eric Gautier frames McCandless as a speck in canyon, river and tundra, then switches to close handheld work for every encounter with a person. The wide framings come back whenever he is alone.
Payoff: The camera distance tells you what he went looking for and what it costs him, long before anyone says it.
Watch for the chapter titles that break the film into stages. (structure)
Jay Cassidy divides the story into titled chapters named for stages of a life, and cuts between the months in the Alaskan bus and the two years of hitchhiking that led there.
Payoff: The film holds its destination in view from the start, so your attention moves from what happens to why he went.
Listen for Vedder's songs arriving where a voice-over would be. (sound)
Penn drops Eddie Vedder's plainspoken folk songs into the road passages instead of narration. Between them, wind, water and road noise carry long stretches with no music at all.
Payoff: The songs give you McCandless's own romantic account of himself, in his register rather than the film's.
Watch how quickly each new stranger becomes a full person. (performance)
Penn gives Keener, Dierker, Vaughn, Stewart and Holbrook very little screen time and directs each to register completely. Every way-station holds someone who wants McCandless to stay.
Payoff: The film makes its case for other people through casting and faces, not through speeches.
Notice the few objects McCandless keeps: books, boots, a rifle. (setting)
Production design keeps his world spare and improvised, the bus dressed as a squatter's refuge. The affluent family interiors he walked out of stay cluttered by comparison.
Payoff: You can measure what he gave up by counting what is left in the frame.
Once you have seen it
Track how the bus scenes slow while the road scenes race. (structure)
Cassidy cuts the hitchhiking with propulsive momentum and lets the Alaskan sequences attenuate. Hirsch's body thins across them. The two timelines run against each other, one opening out, one closing down.
Payoff: The architecture makes the journey feel like freedom and the destination feel like a room getting smaller.
Watch for split screen, on-screen text and looks into the lens. (camera)
Penn and Gautier break naturalism with split screen, direct address, quoted text on screen and shifting aspect ratios. The devices arrive when the books he carries take over the picture.
Payoff: The film keeps marking which parts of his life he is living and which he borrowed from Thoreau, London and Tolstoy.
Watch Holbrook's face while he makes his offer to McCandless. (performance)
Hal Holbrook plays the widower Ron Franz plainly, holding still through the asking. He was eighty-two, and the scene drew the film's principal acting honors.
Payoff: This is where the film's argument against solitude stops being an idea and becomes a person you watch get refused.
Listen for Carine's narration returning over the wilderness images. (sound)
Jena Malone narrates as McCandless's sister, threading the family's grief and bewilderment through the landscape. The wilderness never gets to be only wilderness.
Payoff: Penn keeps the people he left inside the country he escaped to, so his solitude is never uncontested.
Carry this in: Watch how far back the camera stands when he is alone, and how close it moves when he is with someone.