Today we’ll be watching “The Call of the Wild,” a 2007 documentary film by Ron Lamothe. It’s 1 hour and 48 minutes long, so unfortunately we’ll have to skip a few sections around the middle. The tight runtime also means that there won’t be much time for discussion after the screening. Therefore, in lieu of an in-person introduction, please read these notes. The questions at the bottom will be especially helpful to consider during and before the film:

Some back story. In 1990 a person named Christopher McCandless graduated from Emory University and spent two years traveling across America from his home in Virginia to California, Arizona, South Dakota, and on to Alaska. He hitch-hiked, worked odd jobs, and lived off the land, seemingly in pursuit of some way of living – perhaps solitary, ascetic, pure, natural, self-sufficient. Ultimately, he lived alone in the wild in Alaska for over three months, where he died in August 1992, apparently of starvation.

McCandless was the subject of a book, “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer, which was then adapted into a 2007 feature film (not a documentary) directed by Sean Penn. These are both mentioned in the documentary. Both narrate Chris’s travels during that time, even retelling minutia of his actions from journals he kept.

I have a few themes and questions that I invite you to think about as you watch, which I hope we might discuss on Thursday:

• Attitudes in the film about nature;
• Discussion of various desires to test oneself and one’s capacities as an individual, often as a human versus nature;
• If nature is a venue in which to test oneself, does that imply that it is anti-human in a way? a force which is destructive to human life?
• Does McCandless symbolize a normative ideal, a model for a way of living? Is he heroic? Or is he an anti-model? He clearly has a kind of anti-social drive, and if the human is a social creature, is the McCandless archetype a kind of anti-humanism? Almost like a beached whale: for reasons we don’t understand, leaving behind its own kind to thrust itself into a harsh environment to die.
• I also think there might be something in this film for you personally. I know it evokes personal feelings for me, about life, goals, and how to live. I suspect you might have similar feelings, especially since you are almost at the age McCandless was when he set off on this adventure.