Walter Coppedge

Abstract for "Robinson Crusoe in Hollywood"

No text is more malleable to shifting cultural perceptions than Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719). Such critical projections may be traced in the evolution of Crusoe and Friday in over sixty years of cinema. The earliest extant Robinson Crusoe (1926) portrays the adventurer as an archetypal English colonist and Friday as the gratefully subjugated native. Luis Buñuel's version (1952) emphasizes the sometimes surrealistic loneliness of the sailor and the power of his hallucinations. For Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1965), Byron Haskin situates an American in space who teaches and dominates an alien. Adrian Mitchell's script for Man Friday (1975) presents a grotesque Crusoe and the very noblest of savages in a scenario which portrays imperialism as deranged. Wolfgang Petersen's Enemy Mine (1985) contrasts an American cosmonaut with a reptilian alien; both end up learning each other's language, but the American comes to acknowledge the spiritual superiority of his one-time enemy. In Caleb Deschanel's Crusoe (1988) the Crusoe figure is a slave trader who must learn the cannibal's speech to survive. This Crusoe's education at the hands of the Savage teaches him respect and compassion. One final film which owes to Defoe the predicament of two alien human beings on a desert island, John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific (1968), illustrates the catastrophic consequences of an inability to communicate.