Perhaps the most striking moment of Sean Penn's 2007 film adaptation of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild is when Christopher McCandless, fatigued, ragged, and dying alone in the Alaskan wilderness, summons just enough energy to lift his body to a writing surface and scratch into his journal:
"Happiness is only real when shared."
Though "happiness" is at once the most relatable goal and the most elusive, the ontology of this statement is both important and generalizable beyond the search for happiness: what we feel inside is only meaningful--becomes real--when others can relate to and participate in it.
When I watched Into the Wild I watched most of it alone, my own thoughts operating in isolation. The film was expectedly disappointing, with occasional moments of force, and some whiney, self-indulgent background songs in the recognizable voice of Eddie Vedder. In case it's not clear, this is me thinking aloud.
And then I was joined by someone else for that poignant scene in which McCandless/Supertramp appears to turn, his happiness appears to turn on something bigger than his zealous pursuit of absolute self-reliance, and we learn that the happiness of sitting alone eating an apple on the roadside with no pressing commitments isn't as real or as meaningful as the happiness shared with each of the supporting characters that McCandless/Supertramp meets along the way. Here was a very young man dying alone, recognizing that somewhere he had gone catastrophically wrong. No matter the degree of critical optimism or Thoreauvian romanticization one applies to the final moments of the film, this was a scene of piercing regret. In the presence of another person, I was no longer alone in watching a man die alone; and then my bitter thoughts about the film turned reflective in new context. Without conversing about what we had seen, we were both made to acknowledge in the presence of one another that what we were watching could no longer be rationalized out of existence as an artistic shortcoming stretched beyond its emotive limitations by Eddie Vedder's sappy (and award-winning) score. Now we had to admit in the real world of us that there was a lesson here, maybe even a great moment in film.
The same kind of realization strikes us in much less complicated way when we watch a comedy with others versus by ourselves. You find yourself laughing aloud at Will Farrell in a room full of people, yet when you're watching alone you hardly make a peep. It's not that Will Farrell isn't funny when you're alone, but that your experience of humor changes in the presence of others.
In this context (and for another post), I wonder what people are thinking when they propose to teach novels, history, philosophy, religion, etc. online, to a bunch of isolated information-uptake vessels?
