POST 2: Chris/Alexander & and the myth of the noble/good savage in Sean Penns´s Into the Wild movie

                               

Alexander/Chris in the movie Into the Wild                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  The noble savage

2) Defintion of "The noble savage"

The idea of the noble/good savage was created in the 17th century and developed during the 18th century.The term "noble savage" is an idea people had: Without civilization, humans are essentially good; it is civilization that makes them act in bad ways. The idea started in the 17th century and developed in the 18th century. One of the first to express it was Shaftesbury. He told the would-be author “to search for that simplicity of manners, and innocence of behaviour, which has been often known among mere savages; ere they were corrupted by our commerce”. His counter to the doctrine of original sin, born amid the optimistic atmosphere of Renaissance humanism, was taken up by another author who lived at the same time, the essayist Richard Steele, who attributed the corruption of contemporary manners to false education.

In the eighteenth-century cult of "Primitivism" the noble savage, uncorrupted by the influences of civilization, was considered more worthy, more authentically noble than the contemporary product of civilized training. Although the phrase noble savage first appeared in Dryden's The Conquest of Granada (1672), the idealized picture of "nature's gentleman" was an aspect of eighteenth-century sentimentalism, among other forces at work.

3) a. Chris believes the wildness is the place of the freedom and there are only natural beauty which never touched by humans . For him our society makes us very materialistics and superficials, this world would be false. This is illustrated in the film thanks to the scene when he is in a restaurant with his family and he tells him the words things, things and things...".An other example is when he arrives in Los Angeles. During his traveling he is poor and he looks with the eyes of a trampman people in suits with refreshments in bars and it reminds him of himself when he was like them. In this moment he thinks the people is dominated by the money and makes us egoist and hypocrits. . For Chris the wild is a place where the greed doesn´t arrive, he looks her like an utopia. So he embody the myth of the noble savage in the way that he doesn't want to be influenced by society and civilisation.But we can say he isn´t one because Chris know the society and he noble savage must never touhed the society . Although he has similar ideas like the noble savage.

b. When Chris decides to go live in the wild he wants to life free of the society, discover the essence of the real life. Chris wants to find this freedom whih the society can´t give him and he tried to life with he is himself who take the decisions and to worry of the real importants things of the live, his life. For an other side he searchs a spiritual way of him and where he can understand who really is without the opinions of others. For concluded in one word he wants to see what is the "hapiness".

c. Logically Chris is unexperienced and he goes into the wild without any preparation. To begin Chris doesn´t know the principals methods of survival, for instance, in the scene where he goes hunting and sees a deer, he decides not to shoot it because he sees it has a baby. An other example is when he doesn´t take provisions when he goes in Alaska.That cotradictory because after he said he wants to live without materials things he finds the Magic bus and uses all the things n the bus. My last example is at the end of the film when he died for eat poison. It´s an example that he doesn´t know the dangers of the nature. For the ending we can say thanks to his ignorance he ends up dead.

d. For my opinion Chris is more of a romantic man than a good savage because the good savage doesn´t know what is the civilisation and i not the case of Chris so we would say is feelings are the feelings of a good savage.He is romantic in the side he looks the nature like an utopia without knowing the reals dangers of this lifestyle. For conluded we can say Chris thinks like this thanks to his experiences and not how a noble savage for is nature.

e. Initially we can think is imposible to life in the nature if we are lived in society because we are habituated at the comforts and easy live (we have homes, electricity, water,..) but it is possible.Because in this society a lot of people see like Chris the untrue where we live and in groups we can reboot of the beginig..For n other side the humans can survive in worriest situations (wars like Syria, holocaust, tortures...) But the solution is unification, a man can not survive alone, because as wolves or dogs we are an animal that should be in the group. If we remove the group as much as possible is that the man who is alone die.So if somebody goes alone the most possible is he dies. But if e wants goes alone urgently he needs some preparation, For me the smartest if somebody wants to go into the wild is an important knowing of the rules of survival and increasingly traveling in the forest for have a good visualization of the environment.

Personaly when I will be most old I will discovered like Chris, this world, but all the time with friends and communicate because I found too this world very superficial and we are destroying all the nature in the world so I want to see them before it will be to late