People seem to interpret it a few different ways. The idea of "checking out of society" really appeals to some and he's heroic for doing it. Fight Club has a similar, almost cultish, following.
Although there can be a healthy way to distance oneself from the idiocies and chaos of modern society, there’s a difference between wise detachment and running away. I fear too many people are attracted to the easy way.
Movies are a visual medium. The problem with the movie versions of Fight Club and Into the Wild is that they show dumb people doing bad things, but those dumb people are played by beautiful actors who are photographed very flatteringly. So people watch them and come away not thinking “man, that guy was dumb and bad,” but “man, that guy looked cool, I want to be like him!”
I mean, both ideas exist in the movie; the idea itself was naive idealism and the lack of preparation gets him killed.. but what little time he had there was great.
The lesson: its a good idea, but don’t run in unprepared, and don’t think nature is without danger
As I remember the film, it was death by poison mushroom, risked due to starvation — I feel like it was a death depicted over maybe two weeks. I remember the overall stay being quite bearable.. until the winter hit, and everything went wrong; and death came swiftly and without mercy
But regardless the movie depicts it as a fairly slow, very painful, and a fairly pathetic death (alone, weak, with lots of regret and little to show for it), but still 90% of the movie was him running around in gorgeous nature shots and small towns.
Actually, I believe (at least in the movie) it came from eating a type of poisonous berry that he naively mistook for a very similar-looking nonpoisonous berry.
