Things that Didn't Make Sense/Questions

1. When Chris says to the hippie man he has a fear of water that made no sense to me because soon after, he's fully immersed in the water.

I can't answer this with much certainty, but I think it might be that Chris has a fear of deep water. He didn't seem to mind splashing around in water where he could readily stand up.

2. How was Chris able to survive in a cave for 36 days in or near Mexico?

Chris went on a number of solo wilderness adventures, and we don't have much information on the details of his daily life while doing these things. He always had money on him (and in Mexico he had a gun as well, so he might have shot lizards or something), but he probably packed in food supplies, and with a warmer ambient temperature, his calorie needs would have been significantly lower, so even if he lost weight, it would have been a very minor amount. To sustain his body weight in subarctic conditions, he would have needed something like 6500 calories per day, triple what he would need normally. So in Alaska he lost weight quickly.

3. Where were Chris' paychecks sent when he was working for Wayne (Vince Vaughn)?

Chris was, IIRC, paid in cash, but even were he paid by check,he was living with Wayne and Co. If money was sent to him after the end of the season (he spent several months working for Wayne in two successive years, which is not shown in the movie), Chris had opened more than one bank account (in his own name) on his journey, and he had plenty of ID, so he could have deposited the check to his own account without difficulty. That's what he did when he worked at the McDonald's in Bullhead City.

4. What was Wayne busted for?

He was arrested for making and selling illegal "black box" devices for tapping into cable TV systems. He served about 10 months. Remember the scene in the barn where Chris and Kevin are watching the FBI cars screaming up (which didn't happen, but never mind), Kevin said, "I told Wayne to leave them black boxes alone."

5. It made no sense to me how Chris was able to preserve a moose.

He wasn't able to preserve the moose meat - if he had been able to, he would not have starved to death. The chap on Wayne's farm told him how to do it, but he lacked the tools and the expertise and his efforts were a complete failure. The meat rotted.

6. Was Chris a rugged individualist, perpetuating a proud tradition, or just a crazy individual, well-intentioned but so young and woefully misguided? Penn never really grapples with the question.

A little of both, perhaps, or maybe neither. He was really not at all atypical for his time (early 90's and before). As pointed out in Ron Lamothe's documentary about McCandless, tens of thousands of young Americans, most of them male, were doing similar things, often dangerous things, to search for meaning, to have an adventure before settling down, to celebrate finishing school before starting to work, etc. etc. Things were different then, and the economic fears and obsession with getting a job had not yet taken hold on a large scale.

Chris's high school track coach pointed out that Chris was always one who heard the beat of a different drummer, and had his own way of looking at things and a great deal of self-discipline. He doesn't appear to have been "crazy" but he was a bit of a loner, though he did have some close friends in high school and certainly made friends along the way in his travels. By today's standards, he was woefully uninformed about what he needed for a summer in Alaska, but he apparently was confident because of his years of solo camping and wilderness exploration that he didn't appreciate the difficulties he would face, mainly the extreme scarcity of life-sustaining game (he needed more fats and carbs than he could readily supply, no matter how many squirrels he caught). We forget that information was not so easily come by in those days, pre-internet. You had to depend on libraries, which Chris frequented, even on his travels, and finding out the specifics about conditions in a particular northern area would have been a challenge.

7. Having acquired their needed permission for the rights to the project, Penn is understandably reluctant to portray the family as anything more than victims themselves. However, that leaves a vacuum where a motive should be, since Chris' relations with them are a partial key to understanding his adventurous
obsession.

Penn could not portray the parents in an unsympathetic light without their permission, or he would have faced a lawsuit for libel. Carine, Chris's sister, did not want the extent of the psychological abuse she experienced to be more than adverted to in the film. She has subsequently changed her mind and published a much more critical book detailing her recollections, along with passages of letters from Chris (from his college years).

8. Could the performances given by William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden, who play the parents, have been more fully realized? (I'm not sure where I stand on this.)

I don't know what you mean, so can't help you out. The ending where Chris sees the light and wishes a harmonious reunion with his family is pure fiction (even the line, "happiness is only real when shared" is not Chris's own, but a line from Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago). Indeed, we don't know whether Chris would have had any interest in contacting them later on or not, had he survived. It's one of many things we will never know.

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