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Through psychoanalysis, we have come to understand that cinema facilitates the representation of unconscious impressions and fears (Gabbard, 1997) and constitutes an unexpected source for exploring, at greater depths, experiences that are often beyond the intentions of film-makers and financiers. This seems to be the case with Castaway by Robert Zemeckis, which, conceived as a mass-consumption film, ends up revealing the typical anxieties of contemporary man having to come to terms with his most elementary needs and recognise his affective dependence. These anxieties extend from the vision of becoming a homeless urban reject to the modern nightmare of being suddenly reduced to affective homelessness, marooned on an ‘atoll’ of unreachable solitude. This may lead someone to ‘shipwreck’ on the analyst couch and, so, to undertake a long and difficult voyage.
The ever topical setting of the film is a ‘Robinson Crusoe’ (Defoe, 1719) desert island, where the individual comes face-to-face with his limitations. In the eighteenth-century world of Crusoe, the relationship with the inner and external environment, however apparently hostile and unknown, is in the end reassuring, showing the individual's capacity to take possession of the surroundings and become enriched through contact. On the contrary, Chuck Nolan (Tom Hanks), a FedEx manager, faces the paradox of being accustomed to living in an external environment of growing comfort and ease, in contrast to his inner world, where his relationship with his objects lacks continuity and he runs the risk of losing contact with them. In the novel, the island where Crusoe was shipwrecked, although at first deserted and inhospitable, gradually fills up with animals and eventually even a human being, called Friday. This involves the reader in an exciting and enriching fantasy. However, in Castaway, the modern spectator feels a growing anxiety, landing together with Chuck Nolan in a ‘world’ where life is increasingly suspended and sta