Keeping up Appearances

In today's society, we tend to be very materialistic by concentrating more on possessions and ourselves, that we forget about everything else that exists. In the movie, In to the Wild, we witness the wild journey of the protagonist, Christopher Johnson McCandless, travel across the United States. A young and successful college graduate, Christopher, has a good job and a substantial amount of money saved in the bank. As a response to his father's overbearing environment, he spontaneously and spitefully decides to leave and give away his money, leaving him homeless. Christopher seeks to get away from such society by emancipating himself from his parents, friends and "a world of false security and money excess". He wanted to break loose from civilization to discover himself and learn more about the world he's been living in for so long. During his long journey of self-discovery, Christopher went through various tribulations, met great new people, and even changed lives of others around him. Because of family dysfunction, Christopher rejected life and family to pursue his desire to mingle with nature and seek his spiritual identity. In a society were the "consumeric hubbub of messages proclaiming that material persist, accumulation of things, and the presentation of the "right" image provide real worth deep satisfactions, and a genuinely meaningful life" Christopher was dissatisfied with himself and longed to find internal happiness through freedom. The change in identity and class the protagonist goes through in order to avoid the future of traditional and materialistic lifestyles has been influenced by the pressure society puts on us to live materialistic lives.

Christopher's transition from being a high class, college graduate to a low class, wildlife survivalist derives from the attempt to relieve himself from the society by which he feels oppressed. As a very passionate and clever young man, Christopher decided to abandon all of his possessions to explore nature. Unlike most young men of his age, he enjoyed reading books from authors such as Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau. He found them to be very inspiring and helpful. Chris came from an upper middle class family and graduated with a hefty trust found. In spite of all his wealth and possessions, Chris detested materialistic things because he thought they made people selfish and cautious and took away from their ability to self explore. He believed that "Focussing on attaining material possessions and social renown distracts from what is meaningful in life." (Tim kasser, 502). This dislike for materialistic objects was evinced when he strictly prohibited his parents from buying him a new car instead of keeping his old one. Hobbes once stated, "The right of nature is the liberty each man hath to use his own power". Chris would definitely agree with this statement because he felt restricted by society and its rules. He felt that a secure restricted future was not what he wanted because for him, "The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure". He believed that the laws of society and what everyone expected from him restrained him from achieving his full potential and gaining the freedom and happiness for which he longed. This is why he opts to live in the wilderness where he believed he would truly be free from societies ideologies and rules allowing him to find true happiness within.

Due to this longing to be free, Christopher spent all his life wanting to be emancipated from his parents because he always thought of his childhood as a heap of piled up lies. His father, Walt McCandless worked for NASA and was very well respected within the society for all his accomplishments. In spite of his fathers efforts to provide, Christopher had a deep hatred for his father because of their societal differences. Chris was a very opinionated and stubborn young man, while his father was what you called a "control freak". Chris saw him as a dictator and an extremist. He held his father responsible for the lies and destruction within the family. To show his point, Chris quoted Thoreau by saying that "Rather than love, than money, than faith, than fame, than fairness... give me truth". Tom Kasser writes '"what happens to the quality of our lives when we value materialism? The answer, as we have seen from the studies described, is, "The more materialistic