The amount and variety of cultural products dedicated to the story of Christopher McCandless is nothing short of remarkable : from a highly imaginative biography ( Into the Wild , 1996 ) to a major motion picture by one of Hollywood reputed bad boys , Sean Penn ( Into the Wild , 2007 ), from a documentary ( The Call of the Wild , 2007 ) to a book of posthumous photographs ( Back to the Wild , 2011 ), from a personal memoir ( The Wild Truth , 2014 ) to another documentary ( Return to the Wild , 2014 ), Christopher McCandless ’ tragic and somewhat superfluous demise seems to be able to generate all types of narratives , as long as they include the word “ wild ” in the title . All that appears to be missing is a scholarly analysis of the phenomenon , which has only been considered so far from the very reductive critical perspective of post-colonial studies , as in Lisa Korteweg and Jan Oakley ’ s essay , “ Eco-Heroes Out of Place and Relations : Decolonizing the Narratives of Into the Wild and Grizzly Man Through Land Education ,” that merges two very different types of narratives , a documentary and a film , and bypasses their obvious differences in term of content and intent in order to promote the ideological concerns of post-colonial theory . The persistence in our collective imagination of what amounts to be in the end little more than yet another morbid tabloid-style news , that of the body of a young man found starved to death in an abandoned bus on an Alaskan trail , is however worth our attention , for it reveals a strange , extreme cultural paradox : if , on the one hand , the success of the diverse accounts of this particular event – the voluntary and ultimately deadly exile of a young man from society – clearly reveals a general , collectively acknowledged and shared rejection of our consumerist culture , it also stands as a perfect example of how the same consumerist culture has appropriated this very rejection in order to transform it into yet another product ready for consumption . Examining the different phases of the fictionalization process which has turned
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