"He's a spy so its also a bit romantic, a bit ideological," he added.
Namely, the way in which so many accounts of it contribute to the idea of the cold war as a largely bloodless affair: not a hot war of real combat, but an ideological and faintly romantic war of spies, diplomacy and geopolitical grandstanding, of which the missile crisis stands as the ultimate example.
In 1898, the utopian feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote of "romantic love" and "maternal sacrifice" as ideological constructs: a bait and switch that kept women at home.
But I was also blindly looking for something connected to the west, something non-ideological, something imaginative and romantic.
But half a century ago, in the midst of the Cold War, the masses craved a hero who was virile yet romantic, spartan yet decadent, principled without being ideological.
His conjoined romantic and financial frustration leads him to espouse an outsider's ideology, a kind of ideological sour grapes — he claims to oppose high-society gatherings on political grounds and defines himself as a socialist, a "Fourierist".
"You had the whole ideological palette represented at the meetings, from reasonable to rather romantic to violent," said one of the sources.
Communication is vital for any romantic relationship, but even more so when you and your significant other have clear ideological differences.
The romantic despair of "Pierrot le Fou" is gone, replaced by a sense of realpolitik and ideological compromise.
And while Chris's fierce rejection of his parents' middle-class, suburban life contains elements of ideological critique, Mr. Penn and Mr. Krakauer persuasively place him in a largely apolitical, homegrown tradition of radical, romantic individualism.
