Aftersun Film Club: Into The Wild

What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now? — Alexander Supertramp 

We continued our theme of Quiet Perversions —on yet another warm Kampala night, at Aftersun Film Club, following On Becoming a Guinea Fowl with something that felt like its spiritual echo—Into The Wild by Sean Penn. Two films about escape, inheritance, and the strange ways trauma rearranges things. It follows Christopher McCandless, a young man who walks away from his comfortable life to pursue a raw, unfiltered freedom on the open road. Renaming himself Alexander Supertramp, he travels across America, encountering strangers who shape him as he searches for meaning beyond convention. A masterful exploration of the tension between solitude and connection, and what it truly costs to reinvent yourself far from everything you’ve ever known.

The room felt awfully tender after the credits rolled.  During the discussion portion of our evening, An Aftersunette opened her contribution with the line, “Men will do anything to avoid therapy,” and it hung there, humorous yet deeply accurate. Chris McCandless is, in many ways, the embodiment of that quiet perversity: a young man running from one wound straight into another and calling it freedom.

Some thought he was selfish for vanishing without a word to his sister, for leaving her to shoulder the silence. Others insisted he lived more in his short life than most do in decades. He was young, they said, only a quarter through his story. Surely he would have circled back to her, eventually. Youth makes fugitives of all of us; time makes returners… right?

We disagreed beautifully. Some saw rebellion. Others saw a boy adventuring, trying to learn how to be with people in ways his childhood didn’t teach him. Even the hippies he met split the room. Were they freer than him, or were they running from their own ghosts, just barefoot and sunlit? Maybe running simply changes costume, not intention.

One thing that stood out to some was how he looked at couples. Curious, almost studying them. As if he believed love could be learned the way you watch birds or fire or rivers, slow observation, careful mimicry, perhaps.

What stayed clear was this: he learned from everyone, and somehow they learned from him too. Brief, sharp, human exchanges, warmth passed like a match between strangers.

On recognisable joy

There is a kind of joy that doesn’t fit neatly inside what people call normal, a joy that comes from choosing a life others don’t understand, even if it means disappointing them. Chris embodied that. His happiness wasn’t domesticated; it was wild, undressed, shaped by rivers, open roads, and strangers he’d never see again. To him, joy was worth the cost of misinterpretation. It’s why that line hits so hard: “What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now?” The question isn’t just about love, it’s about perspective. It asks whether joy must be recognisable to others to be real, or whether the truest joy is the kind only you can feel, even when the world mistakes it for rebellion, selfishness, or escape.

The movie beautifully explores what it means to be alone and what it means to belong. For example, itblurs the line between acted scenes and real encounters. Some of the people Chris meets, like the man painting the rocks, feel lifted straight from the landscape, untouched by performance. Their presence highlights the film’s fascination with brief, authentic human connections: moments that arrive suddenly, offer something real, and then dissolve. But also in how Chris forms deep bonds and still chooses solitude. The scene of him running with the horses becomes a kind of metaphor, a kind of stamp: joyful, unburdened, answerable to no one. Nature gives him freedom; people ask for closeness. The film suggests that both solitude and connection carry truth, and that the tension between them shapes much of human longing. One offers spaciousness, the other rootedness, and most lives sway between the two.

By the time the evening settled, Into The Wild had left the room, considering how fragile and precious our brief encounters can be, and how solitude, while clarifying, can never fully replace the warmth of being seen.

As always, 

Take Care

Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, ’cause “the West is the best.” And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild. – Alexander Supertramp May 1992

Blog by Loic