Analysis Of Into The Wild By Michael Gow

Everyone experiences discoveries differently. Discoveries can be sudden and unplanned or they can evolve from a process of careful and precise planning. They can be emotional, intellectual, spiritual or physical. Both texts Away composed by Michael Gow and Into the Wild directed by Sean Penn, demonstrate the idea that new understandings and renewed perceptions of others and ourselves can be a result of an individual discovery.
Away first published in 1986, is an Australian play centred around three families who represent different aspects of Australian society and culture in the 1960s. All three families set out on holidays that allow them to experience individual discoveries. For most, these discoveries allow the individual to be set free from their previous perceptions, problems and understandings of others and the world around them.
Into the Wild, an American drama survival film released in 2007, follows the true story of Christopher McCandless, his travels across North America and his life spent in the Alaskan wilderness in the early 1990s.
Both texts explore the ideas of discovery, Michael Gow’s play Away focuses on how physical journeys can lead to new revelations
Sean Penn’s main protagonist, Christopher McCandless is at first wounded by the materialistic lifestyle and the emotional lack of interest expressed by his parents, that he experienced going up. Penn shows the McCandless families materialistic nature through the use of flashbacks, specifically a scene with his parents kissing happily in their new luxury car — a symbolic reference to material success and wealth. This scene is then crosscut with chaotic, cropped shots of domestic violence and abuse. The superficial lives of his parents trigger Christopher’s need to seek change and discovery away from the urban life and landscape of the city and to “walk alone…into the