Iconoclasts Takes Sean Penn into the Wild

When was the last time you left a theater wishing you could sit up all night with the filmmaker and discuss the movie you had just seen?

It happened to me recently after a matinee of Into the Wild, the true-life drama written and directed by Sean Penn about the doomed journey of self-discovery undertaken by a young man named Chris McCandless at the dawn of the nineties.

I’ll likely never have the chance to talk at length with Penn, but thanks to the Sundance Channel and Grey Goose Entertainment I was able to learn more about his interest in McCandless’ story. That’s because when I returned home, DVD screeners from the third season of Iconoclasts were waiting, including tomorrow night’s opener featuring Penn and Jon Krakauer, the author of the best-selling book about McCandless on which Penn based his movie.

Iconoclasts pairs innovators from different fields for stimulating, wide-ranging conversations that go much deeper than the standard television talk show. Each episode is shot in a different locale and structured in its own way. For example, in this episode Penn and Krakauer spend most of their time together in the remote region of the Alaskan wilderness where McCandless spent the final months of his life. This particular pairing is a bit different from the norm, in that Penn and Krakauer already have a close bond that was forged while working together on the same passion project.

For the record, I haven’t read Krakauer’s account of McCandless’ travels, and I am not particularly impressed with what I learned in the film about McCandless himself. Perhaps the book paints him in a more sympathetic light than Penn’s film, which depicts McCandless as a smug, spoiled, young man from a well-off east coast family, who cruelly severed all ties with his loved ones (this after receiving an education at Emory University, an offer of a new car at graduation, and a generous trust fund that still had $24,000 in it when he completed school). He then sets off in 1990 on a cross-country journey to prove that he could live without societal conventions, everyday comforts, and survive on his own. He died in 1992 at age twenty-four after surviving 113 days in a remote region of Alaska, living in an abandoned bus. The cause of death was the ingestion of poisonous berries he thought were safe to eat.