The film Cast away, by Robert Zemeckis (2000), tells the story of Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), a systems engineer ironically expert in time efficiency, who works for the company Federal Express (FedEx) in order to make deliveries as fast as possible and who, after a tragic plane crash, is the only survivor, ending up on a small desert island lost in the Pacific. Starting from the analysis of the film under the perspective of personal identity, the relationship with time and the role played by the island and the sea, we intend to reflect on the emotional and psychological transformations of the protagonist, whose name indicates what will happen in the film: “C. (see) No land”.
From William Shakespeare’s The Storm (1610-1611) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) and Byron Haskin’s science fiction film Robinson Crusoe (1964), artists from various artistic fields have been intrigued by the idea of a human being marooned on a desert island. Tom Hanks mentioned that one of the reasons he wanted to make the film was to reinvent the concept “stuck on a desert island”, adapting it to the present time.1
And in fact the narrative construction is based on the division into two worlds that appear as completely opposed and apparently irreconcilable: on the one hand the globalised western world, in which Chuck Nolan, for professional reasons, lives obsessed with the need to control time and make it faster and more efficient. The logo of his transport company consists of angel wings under which we read “The world on time”. On the other hand, we have nature in a wild state, the power of the sea and of the storms, a desert island on which the protagonist has to learn to survive with the food and drinking water he finds.
A raccord for a dark shot, after Chuck’s first fight against a stormy sea, just after the crash of the plane he was on, shows us the passage from this urban, chaotic world, prisoner of time, to a wild world, of untamed nature, where time may well cease to exist. Through the light of lightning in the middle of the night, we see land, through the exhausted eyes of the protagonist. This dichotomy is accentuated by the very sound of the film, so that in the most devastating sequences, instead of being flooded with music, the entire soundtrack and even human language ceases, to allow the sounds of nature to dominate everything. Here, too, there is an absolute contrast with the part of the film before the disaster, in which Chuck speaks at a fast,
uninterrupted, anxious pace, only for us on the island now to hear his desperate cries, getting no
response: “Hello? Anybody?”. Almost until the end of the film, the sounds of nature, the sea and the wind will predominate, until the moment when we hear out loud the thoughts of the protagonist.
However, as noted above, only apparently are these two worlds irreconcilable. The awareness of time allows the protagonist to figure out how to leave the island safely. It is by marking on the stone of his cave the passage of the seasons that he realises when the best time is to try to leave the island, with the right tide and winds, in a makeshift boat. In that sequence he comments to Wilson, the volleyball that becomes his best friend, whose face is painted with his own blood: “We live and die by time, didn’t we? Let’s not commit the sin of turning our backs to time.”
Not only the volleyball (Wilson), but also the watch with Kelly’s photo, his fiancée, the island and the sea itself take on such an intense symbolic charge that they end up being personified, thus making use of prosopopoeia. All these elements help Chuck to survive. This emotional and social survival is just as important as physical survival. Before leaving for what would be a journey of almost no return, Chuck and his fiancée exchange Christmas presents, he gives her, among other things, an engagement ring and she gives him a grandfather clock with Chuck’s favourite picture of her. In a close-up the watch is shown with Chuck always setting it to Memphis time, their time: it is this need to control time that also helps him to save himself, for it is this imprisonment to memories and the past that will allow him to keep hoping for a possible reunion.
The construction of a personal narrative, as well as its permanent re-elaboration, are decisive in fostering the feeling of personal continuity in a determined time and space. The continuous generation of otherness, of different realities, reifies and establishes personal identity, structuring it as an unstable intertwinement between fiction and reality. Hence Bernardo Soares’ view : “Yes, tomorrow, or when Fate says, there will be an end to what pretended in me that it was me”. (Pessoa, 1982: 177). These reflections help to understand the importance of turning to the past to be able to survive and, also, the creation of another – Wilson – to be able to establish a dialogue that would allow survival, because “in the animal kingdom, the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.” (Gonçalves, 2002: 60)
Thus the desert island appears as a metaphor of life in this film that begins and ends with a high-angle shot over a crossroads, or were not Zemeckis an heir of the best classic American cinema, based on good screenwriters. A cycle closes, but the possibilities of choosing a certain path never end, or were we not all castaways learning how to survive on this island of ours.
[1] Cf. Cast Away in IMDB (Internet Movie Database), available on: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162222/trivia/?ref_=tt_trv_trv. Accessed on July 17, 2022.
Bibliography:
Blum, Hester. May 2010. “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies” PMLA, Vol. 125, No. 3. Modern Language Association: pp. 670-677
Oscar Gonçalves, Óscar. 2002. Living narratively. A psicoterapia como adjectivação da experiência. 2nd ed., Coimbra: Quarteto Editora.
Pessoa, Fernando. 1982. Livro do desassossego, by Bernardo Soares. Vol. 1. Lisbon: Ática.
Steinberg, Philip E. 2013. “Of other seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions,” Atlantic Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2. Routledge: pp. 156-16.