Cast Away
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
With Tom Hanks and Helen Hunt
Written by William Broyles Junior
Released on Universal Pictures DVD
REVIEW BY LOUIS PROYECT
Director Robert Zemeckis' Cast Away, made in 2000 and starring Tom Hanks as an air-crash survivor stranded for four years on a remote island, is the latest in a long line of artistic works that consider the question of civilisation (i.e., capitalist society) using this plot device.
In Daniel DeFoe's The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), the protagonist uses the tools civilisation has given him — his education and skills, as well as iron and seed etc., that is shipwrecked with him — to build a prosperous life.
As Marxist literary critic Annette Rubinstein pointed out, this is not an adventure story. Instead of asking, "What happened to him next?", we ask "What did he do next?". Crusoe's island becomes a prototype of capitalist civilisation, one that has the character of settled, genteel middle-class British society.
Written in obvious homage to Defoe's novel, Swiss pastor Johann David Wyss's (1743-1818) Swiss Family Robinson takes the notion of creating civilisation on an island even one step further. Instead of being the product of an inventive, lone British subject, Wyss's civilisation revolves around the bourgeois family, which depends on a division of labour on the island to succeed. His goal is not to show how the family is tested in life-and-death struggles for survival, but how a proper Protestant family should live.
To its great credit, Zemeckis' Cast Away dispenses completely with the idea that civilisation can be created on a remote island. The story of how this new attitude toward the genre unfolded is nearly as interesting as the movie itself.
William Broyles Junior wrote Cast Away based on some unusual first-hand experiences, living on a remote island for a week six years ago. He drank dewdrops from palm fronds, fashioned primitive stone tools and speared stingrays and crabs, eating their soggy innards raw. All of these activities are reflected in the Zemeckis movie.
For Broyles, the hardest part was emotional rather than physical survival. He told USA Today (November 29, 2000): "What's harder is the emotional survival. You need to find mental projects like remembering every meal you ever enjoyed. Your mind is your enemy as well as your friend."
One morning, a Wilson volleyball washed up on his island. "I started talking to it. It became my companion", said Broyles, who decorated it with shells and seaweed. This relationship with an inanimate object is captured in a highly dramatic fashion in Cast Away. Hanks' volley ball is decorated with his own blood, which keeps getting spilled in gruesome but realistic fashion throughout the film.
Tiburon Island in the Gulf of California was where Broyles conducted his experiment in survival. But he was not totally alone. He had recruited survival experts and Seri Indians (a hunter-gatherer tribe) in case of trouble. From the Indians — some of whom lived close to earth in their youth — he learned the value of resourcefulness. "They'd stop and pick up a rock or stick or skull and make it into a needle to sew with or a knife or a frame for a net", Broyles explained.
This kind of resourcefulness is clearly conveyed in the survival mechanisms of Hanks' character. Unlike in Robinson Crusoe or the Swiss Family Robinson, the detritus that washes up from the crashed Federal Express plane in Cast Away has no real value — at least at first blush. But Hanks turns a pair of ice skates into an axe and video tapes into rope.
Even more compellingly, he discovers how to crack coconuts using a rudimentary flintstone tool, make fire by rubbing two sticks together and to spear fish. Basically, Cast Away is a homage to the pre-capitalist societies that made these kinds of islands their homes before the colonists came to slaughter and exploit them. They in fact were the truly civilised people.
[Louis Proyect is moderator of the Marxism List, <http://www.marxmail.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, January 14, 2004.
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