
- #Into the wilderness the movie movie#
- #Into the wilderness the movie full#
- #Into the wilderness the movie plus#
I have included the locations of each chapter’s beginning and of each literary allusion on the key, so you can easily find them if needed.īelow each quoted allusion, the guide also includes the name of the text, author, publication date, and a brief description of each literary allusion. When students hear McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) reading the quote, they fill in the missing words. Each chapter contains one to three thought-provoking and inspirational literary allusions.
#Into the wilderness the movie movie#
Instead, I chose to focus on the literary allusions and the structure of the movie by having students notice how the film is broken into five chapters students fill in the name of each chapter as it appears. I created this Into the Wild “literary allusions odyssey” movie guide for my students to use while watching the excellent 2007 film based on the book by Jon Krakauer about the life of Christopher Johnson McCandless.ĭid you know there are eight passages from a variety of texts sprinkled throughout the movie? There are references to works by Thoreau, Tolstoy, Pasternak, Wallace Stegner, Lord Byron, and contemporary poet Sharon Olds, the 2022 recipient of the Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry.įor this “literary allusions odyssey” movie guide, I knew that I did NOT want to create a movie guide that would occupy so much viewing time that students wouldn’t have the opportunity to simply watch and take in this beautiful Sean Penn-directed film. If you’re interested in showing the movie to your students, check out this product on my TpT store page. The viewing guide is also available on TpT at this link. I’ve created a Into the Wild Movie Viewing Guide built around the idea of a Literary Allusion Odyssey. Don’t miss its literary gifts!Īnd that’s it! Nine classic literary allusions packed into a beautiful movie to accompany your next unit on Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. This movie lets you dig deeper into Krakauer’s book. If you teach Into the Wild, spend more time than usual with the accompanying film. In other words, this is not a movie one uses merely as a reward for students having read the book. It’s the perfect movie to extend and deepen your Into the Wild unit and even though it’s 2-1/2 hours long, with so many literary gifts to explore, it’s time well spent. If there was ever a movie to “read,” Into the Wild is it. It’s easy to mistake the narration for his own writing (especially when details in the scenes echo imagery in the poem), but when his sister Carine (played by Jena Malone) asks, “Who wrote that?” Chris responds with, “Well, it sounds like it could have been one of us.” Jena Malone plays Carine McCandless and Emile Hirsch plays her brother, Chris, in this Into the Wild scene from graduation day at Emory University in Atlanta. For example, in Chapter 1, Chris recites the entire thirty-line poem, “I Go Back to May 1937” by Sharon Olds.Ĭhris reads the poem as he imagines his parents’ graduation days and the life events that occur after. The nine literary allusions are interwoven seamlessly into the narrative and in some instances form the narration. For example, the movie is divided into five chapters: 1) My Own Birth 2) Adolescence 3) Manhood 4) Family and 5) Getting of Wisdom. There’s a definite structure to the film.

If you’re unfamiliar with Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and the 2007 movie directed by Sean Penn, read this post. And guess what? I discovered SO MANY MORE literary references packed into this brilliant film!

However, I also noticed some especially poetic passages that piqued my curiosity.Īnd then I started to do some googling while I watched.
#Into the wilderness the movie plus#
To be sure, all those literary references were thankfully and thoughtfully added to the movie, but upon a recent viewing I started to pay particular attention to several lines in the movie… some especially beautiful lines that made me think, Wow, Chris McCandless would have been one heckuva writer! Sure, I noticed a few references to Thoreau, plus a few others from passages read aloud by McCandless (played by Emile Hirsch) from novels such as Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.
#Into the wilderness the movie full#
Literary allusions in the movie Into the Wildĭid you know that the 2007 movie, Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn and based on the book by Jon Krakauer, is FULL - and I mean FULL - of literary allusions? Granted, the movie’s inclusion of literature mirrors Krakauer’s book, especially when you consider that nearly every chapter is preceded by an excerpt from the literature that was found with Chris McCandless’ belongings after his death.
