Movie 666

Best Supporting Corporation: Federal Express.

Is objecting to advertising in Hollywood films in the new millennium akin to objecting to the blueness of the sky or the brightness of the sun?

Has advertising in cinema truly become so commonplace that the paying audience is expected to somehow enjoy corporate love songs loosely disguised as cinema?

Because director Robert Zemeckis and the shameless salesmen at Dreamworks have assumed nothing less with their latest experiment in advertising called Cast Away.

Cast Away, as a movie, makes us yearn for the golden age of cinema when being marooned on a deserted isle meant living an ad free life fighting sharks and headhunters. Not only does this movie make us yearn for adventure, but for a more proper marooning by movies themselves — when going to a movie meant being joyfully “stranded” in an experience of sight and sound; stuck at sea in a world where commercial reality fades out as the cinematic image fades in.

Instead, the current dark ages of Christmas 2000 bring us a two hour homage to Federal Express and Wilson sporting goods.

Just as the opening moments of the cinematic experience have given way not only to “coming attractions” preview advertising, but ads for Coke and the Los Angeles Times, the body of the movie itself is now an open market for hawkers selling their wares.

Cast Away, cleverly slated for release just days before Christmas, positions Federal Express as the ultimate way to ship your last minute goodies. Federal Express employees are stodgy and efficient but professional (just like Federal Express would imagine you to imagine them to be), while overjoyed recipients of Fed Ex cubes and tubes glow like the star of Bethlehem on a clear night.

The first quarter of Cast Away might as well be repackaged as a Federal Express infomercial. We are treated to the nuts and bolts of the Federal Express delivery process as packages are shipped overnight from Texas to Moscow. Enter efficiency expert Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks), who reaches the low point of his on-screen career as he delivers a company values speech to a group of Russian trainees about speed and efficiency.

Of course, this corporate lullaby has the potential to change when Chuck is suddenly marooned on a South Seas island following a spectacular plane crash. And for some time following the wreck, Cast Away becomes as watchable as Survivor as Chuck kills crabs, makes fire, and sprouts long hair and a beard straight from a Wizard of Id dungeon.

Even on the island, however, Chuck is reminded of his corporate identity. He organizes the Fed Ex boxes that wash up on shore, ultimately opening all but one which he is someday determined to deliver to its rightful owner.

Indeed, Fed Ex is one of the few things that keeps Chuck from hanging himself on the island — that, along with his fiancee Kelly’s (Helen Hunt) photo and new friend Wilson — a blood stained volleyball made, of course, by Wilson sporting goods.

Chuck eventually escapes the island. And the first thing Chuck does when he gets back to his home country? Naturally, Chuck gives a welcome home greeting and public speech on behalf of Federal Express (thankfully, this scene is only implied, and not shown).

Some generous critics and lackluster viewers might be tempted to view Cast Away as a stirring meditation on corporate values and globalization. The studio itself might even present its corporate melodrama as an insightful exploration of millennial morality in a market driven world. Some truly misunderstanding viewers might accuse Cast Away of being subversive, forgetting that Hollywood, like politicians and news media, are not authorized to disparage their corporate backers.

To be fair, Cast Away makes a token critique of our commercialized existence — reflected in everything from the “doomed” Fed Ex jetliner sinking in the Pacific to the pager useless in the South Pacific to the man who would celebrate Christmas in the car on the way to the airport. Indeed, the initial scenes of Cast Away push the movie towards a critique of corporate culture and values. One brilliant scene in this regard occurs when Chuck and Kelly slow dance to the sound of copy machine.

But Cast Away does not complete its mission, making only the weakest attempt social critique. If this film truly sought to examine the globalized, technologized, commercialized world it depicts, it would not have plastered itself so shamelessly with Fed Ex propaganda; instead, Cast Away would have featured a surrogate company, a la Delos for Disneyworld in Westworld.

The argument put forth (generally by advertisers) that using such surrogate companies in movies is not “realistic” (since Fed Ex is an everyday part of life, after all), stands in direct contrast to the movie experience itself as a fiction-based experience. Not only this, but using actual companies and products versus implied or completely fictitious companies and products prevents any potentially negative evaluation of such companies and products or their associated industries. Movies like Cast Away do not feature scenes where people are “fed up” with Federal Express for blocking traffic or pay exorbitant fees to ship boxes. Instead, movies like Cast Away give us romanticized, public-image-conscious portraits of corporations and their wares. Cast Away gives us countless scenes of Fed Ex efficiency and revels in the purple and orange glory of the Fed Ex fleet lined up on the airport tarmac.

Cast Away is the most excessive example to date of corporate intrusion in the cinematic experience. In Cast Away, even the moon that lights the night sky looks distinctively like the Dreamworks logo. Cast Away is a movie that shows not only how low a man can go in his fanatical dedication to his job, but how low studios themselves have sunk in the interest of crass commercialism. Nothing about the film itself is quite so “cast away” as the integrity of its makers.

Related posts:

1. Self Destruction and Self-Promotion: Corporate Branding in Recent Cinema
2. Corporate AmeriKKKa Gets Two Weeks Notice
3. Beyond the Hollywood Domain: the Cinema of the Web
4. Stanley Kubrick and the Death of Cinema
5. Beverly Hills Chihuahua

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