Time And Eternity: Cast Away Series

In one of the boxes, he finds a volleyball. Having cut his hand, and then grabbing the volleyball, his bloodstain leaves an image of a strangely compelling face. With slight modifications of his own, Chuck uses his own blood not only to create, but also to bond with his new companion. ’Wilson’ becomes the ’friend’ who keeps Chuck sane while he’s on the edge.

Only after four years does Chuck make a daring – and successful – escape from the island. He returns to civilisation a profoundly changed human being, but realises that he can’t pick up where he left off. On the plane flying home, his friend Stan tells Chuck they held a funeral for him. They put in his coffin a phone, beeper and Elvis CDs – which they had decided were the things that best represented his life.

Clip Two: All the Time in the World

Noland is sat in a house, in semi-darkness, talking to his friend. He has a drink in his hand, and is reflective. He tells of how he talked to Kelly when he was on the island; that even though he was totally alone, she was with him. He knew, or thought he knew, that he would get ill, or injured, and die. Everything had been out of his control . . . apart from one thing: his own death. The only choice he had, the one thing he could determine, was how and when and where it would happen. So, he’d made a rope, and climbed a hill to hang himself. He tested the rope first, to see if it would bear his weight, but the log he used snapped the branch on which the rope hung. He realised that he didn’t have power over anything. He couldn’t even kill himself properly! But all of a sudden, he said, a feeling came over him – like a warm blanket. He knew, somehow, that he had to stay alive, keep breathing – even though there was no reason to hope, and even though he didn’t believe that he would ever see this room again – so that’s what he did. And the tide came in, and washed up a sail . . . and here he is, talking to his friend, in Memphis.

But after all that . . . after everything . . . after his hope in the face of despair . . . he’s lost Kelly again. And he’s desperately sad about it. But, in the face of that sadness, he can remain happy that she was somehow with him on the island. And now? He’s got to keep breathing, once more. Tomorrow, he says, the sun will rise. And who knows what that could bring?

The Absence of God

Cast Away, to use a quote from the Berlioz requiem, is ’haunted by the absence of God’. In contrast, Daniel Defoe’s seventeenth-century novel Robinson Crusoe is filled with God’s presence. Crusoe is a man who rebels against his parents to become a sailor. He joins up with a ship to set out for the Seven Seas in search of adventure.

He becomes the sole survivor of a shipwreck, condemned to live out his days on a desert island. Though Chuck Noland and Robinson Crusoe experience similar circumstances – both being stranded on a desert island – Crusoe, in direct contrast, begins to contemplate time and eternity.

The book Robinson Crusoe is full of his thoughtful, probing encounters with God – his weaknesses, fears, temptations. It explores how Crusoe learns to love God and the world. He is someone who runs from God and who cries out to God. And this is what’s disappointing about Cast Away. In the end, the film only offers a picture of the person that seems far away from the reality of human experience. Crusoe’s pilgrimage rings true in a way that Cast Away simply does not.