Into the Wild

Last night I watched a movie called "Into the Wild" . A story of a young Alex who leaves the world to live in the wild. Its something he always wanted to do. He is fed up of the world he lives in, trapped in the college. When his parents offer him a new car, he refuses to take saying. :I dont need a Car, I dont need any Thing" His emphasis on this : Need and Thing talks about something deep that he is yearning for. He donates all his savings, destroys all his connections to the "civilised"world :the credit cards, Identity cards, Social security and drives away with a new identity : 'Alexander Supertramp', with an aim to reach and live in Alaska. On the way meets interesting people where he experiences a (their) different life: the Hippies, the vagabonds, the Old army man, the grain farmer, the socially marginalised. Once there, he lives in an abandoned van, living life all alone, writing his diary, hunting for food, reading, and exploring the life in wild. Inspired by the Idea of Happiness that Leo Tolstoy writes in his book 'Family Happiness and Other Stories' he decides to return only to find the river is flooded making it impossible to cross. He returns to the van for a few more days where he accidently consumes a wild inedible plant and wastes away to death. The end is so metaphorical , that once u turn to nature, to the wild, the return is impossible, the crossover difficult. A good movie which moves back and forth , in past and present of the boy's life, coupled with the narration by his sister. Its a tragic movie that at one level speaks of struggles between human and nature, at another, its of frustrations of civilisation.

But down below the surface its a story of parents who think the world revolves around themselves and fight like wild without realisng the consequences on people connected to them, especially their own children. Its the story of his parents which is reflected through his life. He and his sister are the consequence of what his own parents , their dramas , their fights, their love, their struggles which they innocently performed without caring that someone (their children) is at the recieving end, continuously getting hit, getting blown, getting meshed so much that their son leaves them all.

This connects me to another movie, a kannada movie called 'Prathama Usha Kiran': of a sister brother duo -Usha and Kiran, unable to adjust to the new life bestowed by the 'America Returned' parents: New School, new people, new language, new discipline at home, "american way of life": individualism, seperate rooms, parties etc etc. They respond to the alienation from their old ways of life in the village (they were left with their grand parents while their parents went to america on an assignment for three years), the affective connections with their grand parents, their cousin and aunt, the village school culture of adventure and above all from their own loving parents who had left them three years ago and never returned. The new parents (the mother who doesnt wear a saari anymore, the father who doesnt speak kannada any more, the father who doesnt like anything indian-pickles, his village, his relatives and way his own parents live) are disciplined and have everything but love. Usha internalises and resorts to a quieter life. She wets her bed every night. She stops going to school. Kiran runs away from the home. He projects himself as an orphan and moves away with some truck driver.

Children internalise all the drama that is staged in their homes and fashion their identity on that. Some would grow up as happy adults wanting to live their life in full, exactly like their parents. But some grow up as Sad adults who dont want to take responsibilities, as men and women who cant make relationships work, as some who run away from all that their parents did, all those institutions that their parents got involved into, not wanting to repeat histories. And Alex's story is exactly this who runs away from the life that his parents have given him. Many Parents never realise this.....that their children's lives are the seeds that they themselves unknowing sowed beyond bringing them to life knowingly.