You know where you send your mail from; you know where
it arrives. But what you don't know is where it goes to
get to its point of arrival. Between the insertion of a
letter into the vaginal void of the mailbox and the pressing
of the weary envelope into the palm of its recipient, a
black hole is constructed: a spatio-temporal dislocation
which anchors the untold narrative of its journey in a swirl
of unknowable sights and sounds. As the mail scurries across
the globe, its sealed content - covered by law - is as much
protected from in-transit scrutiny as it is prevented from
disclosing all it saw and heard on its travels.
The quaintly named 'dead letter office' implies that the
life cycle of a letter can be halted and short-circuited
by not arriving at its deigned destination. Centred on a
'dead zone' in-transit, Robert Zemeckis' Cast Away (2000)
is possibly less about the stranding of a human (Chuck Noland,
played by Tom Hanks) on an uncharted island and more about
the insertion of a human directly into the mail/freight
system and its inanimate direction of matter. Therein he
experiences the actuality of the uncharted: a passage of
time and space which all mail and freight suffers, endures,
overcomes. Noland becomes freight; Noland is delivered;
Noland arrives.
Noland's reconstitution as freight is strongly forecasted
early in the film through a series of jump cuts shot and
recorded from the point-of-view of a handled package. From
the middle of America to the centre of Russia, a package
is shuttled. We see what it sees, hear what it hears. Subjectivity
is heightened as we are lost in its dark jungle of illegible
dialogue, muted atmospheres, murky light, askew angle. Sudden
incursions of consciousness blast that unmappable jungle
as we momentarily glimpse our location - a bench top here,
a truck there - only to be thrown back into the unknown
as a hand grabs us or a roller door slams down in front
of us. Recalling Paul Schraeder's audiovisual reconstruction
of Patty Hearst's interiorized terror through the mind-deprogramming
techniques of the Red Army in The Patty Hearst Story (1981),
Cast Away transforms the auditorium into a desensitizing
zone where editing, layering and mixing work directly on
the audience. The materiality of this sensation - very much
the product of director Zemeckis' established relationship
with sound designer Randy Thom - is a great example of how
sound and image can be thoroughly aligned, combined and
fused throughout a film. A clear self-reflexivity drives
the film (right down to Noland 'time-charting' the journey
of a FedEx package mailed to himself in another country)
which has not merely 'allowed' such audiovisual precision
in the creation of what it would be like to 'become' an
item of lost freight, but also determined that it directly
affect the film's narration.
The emphasis on subjective perception is handled in two
distinct 'movements' which occur after the FedEx package
allusion yet before the landing of Noland on the island.
Firstly, the trip in the plane is a fascinating capture
of the strange dimension that is 'air travel'. Whilst actually
travelling great distances at incredible speed at impossible
heights - all of which are far beyond the physical limitations
of the human body - that same human body is confronted with
opposite forces and sensations, as one is rendered immobile,
inert and grounded. Journeys to the toilet become major
points of navigation; communication with flight staff a
logistical manoeuvre; and the simple stretching of limbs
a luxury. (Interestingly, Zemeckis and Thom have imaginatively
explored beyond these bodily constraints in the memorable
scene from Contact, 1997, when Ellie - Jodie Foster - travels
in the alien craft under alien dimensional-warp conditions.)
During this numbing stasis, the drone of the airplane engines
and its vibrational spread throughout the body of the plane
creates a humming dynamo of still energy, which itself induces
a psycho-acoustic claustrophobia of inertia. The atmospheres
in Cast Away portray this with great effect. Secondly -
after the plane has crashed into the ocean - the series
of blackouts which appear between the sporadic flashes of
lightning force the narrative to be gulped down into a spatio-temporal
void. Rather than 'see' what we could not possibly see at
sea in the dead of a black stormy night, we instead get
glimpses which create a series of subjective points which
tragically mark a line of dots on a map that no-one will
find. Noland becomes a message in a bottle on a dead sea,
not so much by floating into the unknown as by 'becoming
the undelivered'.
The lost island in Cast Away is literally and figuratively
the zone of the uncharted. It is a place where we - through
Noland as 'reconstituted freight' - hear and see all that
happens in the journey into the unknown which all mail and
freight undertakes between point A and point B. Notably,
Noland has to realign his audiovisual balance, and redress
its pathetic lean on the optical in our culture. The most
direct way to play on anyone's nerves is to subject them
to the sound of the unknown - be it by obscuring the source,
the point of emission, the agent of action, the clarified
content or even the means of production/reproduction of
a sound. Noland hears 'bumps in the night' which prove to
be strange fruit falling from the trees. No living being
generated these events; just the life of the island, devoid
of such directional presence. Eventually, Noland gets to
read the island in many ways, from the seasonal changes
in wind directions to the movement of fish underwater to
the many environmental sounds which define the terrain of
the island. Gorgeous sonic detail and delicate spatial placement
not only locate us within the aural dictates of Noland'
new world, but also create this acute feeling of having
one's audiovisual balance realigned.
When Alan Silvestri's music appears in the film - as Noland
finally leaves the island on his makeshift raft - there
is much to be considered in how and why it has been withheld
from the soundtrack to that point. Firstly, the absence
of music perfectly reflects the dehumanizing of Noland's
status as freight. The film has deliberately refrained from
using music so as to mark this absence of humanist commentary
on Noland' plight, for he has entered another psychological
dimension where there is little hope, scant aspiration and
zero respite from the harsh reality of survival. It is apt
that when the visibly dehumanized Noland appears on the
island some years later that he is drained of 'humanness'
and reconstituted as a walking pile of humus: part vegetable,
part animal, part flotsam. A human, he no longer is; music,
he no longer hears; sound, he has become. Secondly, the
music - quite obviously yet with dramatically powerful effect
- enters when hope and aspiration actually take hold within
his psyche. As he passes the barrier of rocks which shield
the island from the currents of the surrounding ocean, he
is inserted back into the passage of freight along which
the FedEx plane journeyed. Rooted on the island, he was
a dead letter; caught in the flow of the sea, he is once
again in circulation. The music cue's entrance symbolizes
all this in a material way as it matches an airborne helicopter-shot
which removes us from his horizon to evidence the space
beyond the site of his plight, and in doing so liberates
us from the sound of sand, the reverb of rocks, and the
timbre of timber which had acoustically built a sonorum
for his entrapment on the island.
'Realism' and 'naturalism' are highly suspect terms at
the best of times, and while the sound design of Cast Away
could very successfully be couched in those terms, there
is a deeper narrational and psychological tone generated
by Thom's work. Possibly one of the most beautifully empty
moments in the film - and easily on such a list for the
cinema as a whole - is when Noland is waiting for his wife
at the airport. Behind him, a set of monitors replay his
return to reality, coded within the official return of his
status back to human as an honoured FedEx employee at a
special press conference. The occurrence of this only minutes
earlier is now being televised nationally on TV. Alone in
a semi-soundproofed interior, he is still psychologically
displaced. He is still fraught by being freight, caught
in transit, ungrounded and as yet undelivered. Monitors
play out of synch - showing him 'live' yet delayed, exuberant
and relieved on TV but now tense and uncertain; large glass
windows show planes in transit at the FedEx depot - yet
their movement is muted by the double-glazed glass; the
ambience of nothingness - air conditioners, fluorescents,
carpet - hums uncomfortably, as its alien quality sonically
scars his aural consciousness. There is no gradual rise
of violins as we slowly track into Noland in anticipation
of a clearly telecasted happy ending. Matching this unsettling
existential moment, the film leaves us with just the distant
ringing of nothing and the low hum of everything.
In a strange way, this scene is an inversion of the chilling
climax to Michael Mann's Heat (1995) where Al Pacino and
Robert DeNiro stealthily elude each other behind a network
of cargo crates on the edge of the maze of runways at LAX.
No music occurs during this scene as they fight to the death,
accompanied by the most deafening roars of jet turbines
winding up, planes taking off and subsonic rumbles trailing
the departure of craft near and far. Heats zone of noise
is the psychic sonorum for the death spectacle which ends
the fatalistic arc of DeNiro's own dehumanized construction
as a ruthless criminal. Cast Away's cone of silence is the
flattened sonic plane on which Noland stands, dejected,
abjected and about to be rejected by a wife who cannot even
face him.
Fortunately for Noland, his new status not as freight but
as a parcel stamped 'Return To Sender' awakens in him an
act which he must perform. By returning to the sender the
one parcel he never opened - the one item whose law of protection
he never broke - he connects back to humanity and to his
own self-determined status as human. Mushy it might be -
but it must be noted that the beauty and power of Cast Away
lies in the material and phenomenal force with which Zemeckis
audiovisually narrates its story. Through such handling,
the sound design inevitably comes to the fore, and the 'mushy'
ending is a suitable narrative closure to a film that has
already supplied a surfeit of existential aural density.
As the credits roll - and long they are, too - the refrain
of music which hardly marked the film sails forth. But then
a quite magical thing happens which confirms the considered
modulation of humanism of Castaway: the sound of waves gradually
fades up and builds in mass, eventually overtaking the score.
Not through mixing, but in a compositional dialogue which
recalls the aquatic dialogue at the core of Michael Nyman's
seminal work The Sinking of the Titanic (1977). Silvestri
actively de-scores the orchestral theme by reducing its
arrangement across of series of repeated motifs which diminish
in length and tempo. The music thus becomes the ocean -
an ebb and flow of tidal call-and-response to itself; the
ocean thus becomes air - the totality of atmosphere which
carries sound.
