John Krakauer, the author of the novel Into the Wild had an attachment to the young man Christopher McCandless from the moment he began hunting for answers about McCandless's adventure to become a man of nature.  Sean Penn, the cinematic director for the box-office film by the same name had a vision for Christopher McCandless's epic journey in his head from a time long before the first day of filming and the image formed when he picked up Krakauer's novel.  McCandless was a young man that graduated from Emory University with honors, but instead of seeking to find a career he chose to forsake society as a whole in order to live as one with nature in the harsh Alaskan wilderness.  Both Krakauer and Penn sought to tell McCandless's story and they each had a different stylistic flair that they imposed to inform their respective audiences.  Both the author of the novel and the director of the film also wanted to do justice by the young man and by his family and friends. In John Krakauer's novel "Into the Wild" Krakauer uses epigraphs, a nonlinear timeline, and seemingly breaks the fourth wall with readers in order to properly recant McCandless's journey and Sean Penn's utilizes shot manipulation of the camera, voice narratives, and a nonlinear timeline to put Christopher McCandless's adventure on the big screen.

Author and journalist John Krakauer was tasked with uncovering the truth behind Christopher McCandless's death and disappearance in 1992, but found himself more involved and biased than he had ever intended.  Before every chapter of the book Krakauer added in an epigraph as a way to provide background knowledge and to orient the reader as to what was to be expected in that specific chapter.  Chapter four is placed in Arizona and mostly consists of McCandless's times kayaking through the rivers.  Krakauer included an excerpt from Paul Shepard's Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature, "The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien ... To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles ... "  Not only does this speak of McCandless's current place in his journey, but also reinforces a major underlining theme of the book, which is of this religious aspect.  By no means was Krakauer referring to McCandless as a modern day prophet, but simply implying that he had a common trait as them.  McCandless went out on this pilgrimage as a way of self-discovery, much like many spoken of prophets and in doing so he cultivated a small following, people that wished to stay near him, through a light that emitted from him that other characters seemed to see.

The novel does not follow a strictly linear path.  The timeline jumps around and from place to place along McCandless's journey and also deviating between perspectives, sometimes even becoming Krakauer's own perspective as he hunted for answers and whenever he saw prominent parallels between himself and his muse.  Krakauer may very well have chosen this style, as it was possibly the way in which information was presented to him as he traced McCandless's steps and as he spoke to those that were influenced by the young man.  This timeline however allows for the reader to come along for the journey or for the investigation, depending on whose perspective it was currently in, and allows for this novel's unique trait of the reader knowing exactly what the author knows, and to know exactly how the journey ends.  Krakauer could have left McCandless's death as a shocking twist at the end, but we discovered it in the beginning, because that is how Krakauer discovered it first.  While his novel was entertaining it was not John Krakauer's intention to entertain, so much as he wanted to recite McCandless's and his own journeys.

One of the most interesting dimensions of the novel was in the breaking of the fourth wall, to a certain degree.  This would happen subtly, but a critical eye will spot when it deviates from an interaction between characters, into an interaction between a character and Krakauer and we were pulled along of the ride.  However, when these deviations occur it would not take the readers to a new scene, it would happen within scenes.  "This, Alex announced to Gallien, was where he intended to go.  Gallien thought the hitchhiker's scheme was foolhardy and tried repeatedly to dissuade him: "I said the hunting wasn't east where he was going, that he could go days without killing any game." (Krakauer 5).   This shows an instance where the Gallien that was with Alex in the novel shifted to become a Gallien that was with us, the reader, and with Krakauer, and this most likely occurred in an interview.  Krakauer's technique and style at using the readers and the fourth wall to his advantage managed to subconsciously bring the readers in deeper into the adventure.  

Director Sean Penn manipulated every shot the camera took in order to control how we felt as the film, and more specifically of how McCandless's journey, progressed.  The camera swept across one massive landscape after another throughout the film.  In the first major wilderness shot of the film the audience is shown a harsh Alaskan environment as McCandless, whom was miniscule in a shot filled with daunting mountains and a vast forest, walking away from a truck that served as the last trace of civilization that the young man would see.  This shot in particular served a variety of purposes.  First we are shown McCandless venturing into the wilderness, away from civilization, which shows us that he chose to live on his own and to forsake society.  As the film progressed we would learn that he has a complete disregard for society, even burning vital forms of his identification such as his birth certificate and social security card as well as burning money, a tool that he would not need in the wild.  Second, we known that Penn did not choose that aerial shot without purpose.  The young man is nothing compared to the vast wild, so small in comparison to everything around him and perhaps serving to foreshadow the man's would be fate.  Other forms of Penn's shot manipulation appear throughout the film.  As McCandless searches bushes for food, his motions jumpy, all the while the camera is positioned below him or within those bushes to show the actor's expression, ranging from utter panic to rejoicing as he finds forms of food.  Consistently through the course of the film the actor is shown walking either away from the camera or towards it, each serving their individual purposes.  As he walks away he is leaving behind someone or something, but as he walks towards the camera he is arriving in a new place of meeting new people.

Much of the film is narrated by various characters, most prominently Christopher McCandless and his sister, Carine McCandless.  A general rule that Penn seemed to have established for his film was that the characters tended not to narrate themselves, or the actions of other characters that they did not know.  For instance Carine McCandless, who was possibly the most prominent narrator between the two, narrated her brother's past as well as what the McCandless family underwent during his disappearance.  However the actions of characters such as Rainey and Jan Buress were narrated by Christopher McCandless, as he was the one who encountered them.  Oftentimes these narrations were coupled with a change of scene, and Penn most likely used the narrations as a way to assure audiences that the scenes were not being changed recklessly, but to further the story along.  They also allowed for the metaphorical gaps to be filled in and to answer basic questions, such as why Christopher McCandless chose to invent a new life for himself.

The voice narrations served a final purpose, which was to direct the viewers along as the time changed.  The film, much like the book, follows a very non-linear timeline.  One scene McCandless would be in the Magic Bus in Alaska and then in the next scene it would show some of the things he did while in Arizona, several months before ever getting to the Last Frontier.  While on his adventure to Alaska McCandless touched a great deal of peoples' hearts and changed many lives while in search of his own, but all of these people knew him as Alex Supertramp.  This non-linear timeline effectively shows that by jumping back and forth in time to show his interactions with these people which accounts for the gear and even the knowledge that he gained through these interactions.  Towards the end of the film Christopher McCandless/Alex Supertramp is talking with an older gentleman he met, Ron Franz, about the possibility of Franz adopting Supertramp as his grandson and Supertramp's reply of asking to discuss it later.  It then cuts to Alaska at the time close to his death, leaving the viewers still emotional over his and Frantz's talk.  A simple, linear platform would have hindered the viewers' connection to the movie by bringing the metaphorical emotional train to a screeching halt in order to show him traveling, and Sean Penn most likely understood this very well.

Both Krakauer and Penn wished for an above adequate depiction of Christopher McCandless's journey, but both men also had biases.  An important fact that should not be overlooked is that we, as an audience, does not know how much of this is true.  What we do know is that McCandless graduated from Emory University and he was from a financially stable household and he decided to tough it on his own in one of the world's harshest environments.  It is also safe to assume that the interactions between McCandless and other characters in the novel as described to Krakauer through said characters is also true.  However we do not know for sure that things happened exactly as Krakauer wrote or as Penn depicted.  As previously stated, both men had their own biases.  Krakauer saw much of himself in McCandless and as a result may have unintentionally given him the benefit of the doubt while on his adventure.  Penn has his viewers to consider and had to account for how his film would perform at the box-office, while still paying justified respect to the McCandless family.  In effect this made him depict Christopher as much more emotional that Krakauer described for the sake of drama and positive reviews for his movie.  Both men had a vision and both the author and the director saw it fulfilled, but nothing could have come about without the adventure of Christopher Johnson McCandless.

