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Dear Sirs
I thank Neil Maizels for his contribution to the discussion on my paper ‘The castaway self’ and on Zemeckis's film Cast Away.
First, as far as I understand the precise definition he underlines, I would certainly like him to go into the complex difference ‘allowing ambiguous shades of meaning’, that he suggests, but does not explain. He suggests I underestimate the different meanings between Castaway and Cast Away, a miscript I apologise for, but perhaps a creative misreading of the film. A film is made of pictures and I was fascinated by Zemeckis's pictures of the aircrash, of the modern shipwrecking, of the atoll and the raft; they made me think of a castaway dimension of the Self, a metaphor of an inner dimension, that sometimes leads people to desperation, sometimes to undertake psychoanalysis, looking for changement.
Second, I see the risk of a potential misreading of symbols and metaphor, a spoiling and forcing of the director's intentions when Neil Maizels writes ‘the winged package—linked to angelic hope’ etc. We probably act like ‘spoilers’, as Green wrote in 1992, any time we disassemble what is already represented in pictures, symbols, poetic metaphors. We do it in