You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dear Sirs,
In response to the film review essay ‘The castaway self …’ by ( Int. J. Psycho-Anal. 2003; 84: 169-72.) I'd like to make two points.
First, the film is not entitled Castaway, but Cast Away. From an analytic viewpoint, that should be a fairly important and complex difference—allowing for many ambiguous shades of meaning in relation to the film's emotional and philosophical impact.
Second, the ending of the film is not ‘unresolved’ or ‘unhappy’. The symbolism of the winged package—linked to ‘angelic’ hope for new paths in life after ‘catastrophic change’—is literally pursued to its end, psycho-geographically, when Chuck No-Land (not Nolan) does take the road towards his new, mysterious, yet destined Muse.
He has a package of love that must be delivered to her, without which, his mere survival on the island where he was cast away is no more than a hill of beans.
His smiling realisation of this means that his previously stultifying (oedipal) crossroad is transformed (through the death of the technologically pseudo-omnipotent Father-Fedex) into the delivery of a regenerated and reciprocated love, which cannot be timed or planned—only received with Grace.
If that is an unhappy lot for us humans then we are indeed more castaway than Cast Away.
Yours faithfully
Neil Maizels
24 February 2003