Robinson Crusoe in Hollywood
Walter Coppedge
Virginia Commonwealth University
No myth is more remarkably Western than Daniel Defoe's
Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is the progenitor of all solitary desert island
fictions which have now proliferated so abundantly that any work in the
desert-island genre has been called by one scholar a "Robinsonade"
(James 100-101).
I would like to show, briefly, how Defoe's tale published
in 1719 has become a locus classicus of criticism. And then I would like
to demonstrate, how over a period of more than sixty years, film translations,
versions, and variations revealingly trace shifts in popular consciousness
to accommodate such postmodern phenomena as poststructuralism, postcolonial
discourse, multiculturalism, and alterity.
A rapid survey of critical reactions to this hugely popular
tale is now in order. For Rousseau, the novel (the island portion) offered
a "complete treatise on natural education" (Shinagle 283). For
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Defoe's genius was that Crusoe was not extraordinary,
"merely a representative of humanity in general" (288). Wordsworth
was struck by the uncommon merit of his character and by the knowledge
displayed of the working of human feelings" (290). In these pages
Poe found "the potent magic of verisimilitude," the power of
the book arising from the "faculty of identification," which
faculty (like Keats's negative capability) "enables the mind to lose
its own in a fictitious individuality" (291).
Two of this century's most discerning writers considered
it a masterpiece. For James Joyce, in 1912, Defoe, a "truly nationally
spirit," introduced "the broad river of new realism" (354-355).
Virginia Woolf in 1932 recognized that the novel defeated expectations
of metaphysical revelation, offering instead God, nature, and man viewed
"through those shrewd middle-class unimaginative eyes," which
only see one tenth of what's going on (309-310). Woolf asks is "there
any reason why a . . . plain earthenware pot" should not satisfy as
completely as "man in all his sublimity standing against a background
of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky?"
(311).
In an impressive demonstration of reader response theory,
what these critical perceptions mirror are the minds of their authors.
Every reader brings to Robinson Crusoe (as to Hamlet, as to The Waste Land)
a template to be imposed upon the material. The pattern which emerges is
what the critic pays attention to, finds important, sees. Thus for Rousseau,
the value of the book is that it set forth the authority of nature as a
teacher; for Coleridge it was the triumph of the simple and unexceptionable
human being, and for Wordsworth the knowledge of psychology and resourcefulness
of character; for Poe, it was the very aesthetic which Poe ascribed as
the superior faculty in his Tales of Ratiocination; for Marx, the narrative
demonstrated the quantification of labor; for Joyce, it was a new experiment
in narration; for Woolf, it was the carefully observed and telling detail.
Just as each of these critical perceptions betrays the
consciousness of its author, so each metamorphosis of the story into film
will reveal the prevailing critical attitudes of a temporal context. I
propose now to demonstrate how the tale of Robinson Crusoe can offer a
Rorschach reading of the times. In Defoe, the first person narration necessarily
excludes any alternative perspective: there is only Crusoe's point of view.
In film, however, consistent points of view are so rare as not to exist.
The camera can be anywhere, and every perspective is in some way an editorial
comment (or as Godard observed somewhere every shot is a moral statement.
In the clips that follow, I shall comment where appropriate on distancing
(or identifying).
ROBINSON CRUSOE, 1926
We must begin with 1926, as three earlier versions and
adaptations from 1913, 1916, and 1922 have been lost. The picture in question,
Robinson Crusoe, is an English production and stars W. A. Wetherall. A
foreword informs the audience that the picture was photographed on the
very island in the Caribbean where Crusoe spent his years as a castaway.
The incident I focus upon is Friday's deliverance from the two natives
about to kill him. In the novel, Defoe describes Friday
- so frighted with the Fire and Noise of my Piece; that
he stood stock still, and neither came forward nor went backward. . . .
[I] gave him all the Signs of Encouragement that I could think of, and
he came nearer and nearer, kneeling down every Ten or Twelve steps in token
of acknowledgement. . . . At length he came close to me, and then he kneeled
down again,and kissed the Ground, and laid his head upon the Ground, and
taking me by the Foot, set my Foot upon his head.
In the ensuing battle with an enemy, Crusoe's savage,
or "my Savage" as he calls him, borrows Crusoe's sword and "at
one blow cut off his Head" (Shinagle 158-159). The next day Crusoe
gives Friday a pair of linen drawers, a vest of goat skin, and a rabbit-skin
cap. Crusoe points out: "It is true, he went awkwardly in these Things;
wearing the Drawers was very awkward. . . ." (162).
In 1936 sound was added for re-release as a children's
picture, the voice-over coming from a well-known children's program host,
Uncle Don Carney. Uncle Don's voice provides a curious hypertext to the
images we are about to see. What is interesting is Friday's frantically
digging in the sand, his fear exaggerated for comic effect--another version
of Step'n'Fetchit's "Feets, don't fail me now!" Moreover, there
is no display here of Friday's boldly cutting off his enemy's head. Finally,
Friday's assumption of Crusoe's grotesque garments reveals volumes. It
looks ahead (or behind) to colonial adoption of imperial attitudes and
to American missionaries in Hawaii and Samoa forcing women to cover them-selves.
Although the film replicated Master's pleasure and Friday's submissiveness,
the cinematic dramatization of Crusoe's attitude tellingly conveys that
superior confidence which made empires possible.
MR. ROBINSON CRUSOE, 1932
Six years later the most dashing screen figure of the
silent screen, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., attempted to revive his fading career
with Mr. Robinson Crusoe, a film he produced and which Eddie Sutherland
directed. Described by the New York Times as an "amusing satirical
skit" and praised as "artful, jolly, and imaginative," the
picture was filmed in Tahiti. Crusoe takes a bet that he can live on a
desert island for a year. Most striking about him is a fund of Yankee resourcefulness
and ingenuity and the heroic individualism which Fairbanks epitomizes.
The Friday figure is a native so innocent that he considers radio tubes
suitable for adornment. After Friday, comes Saturday, a European woman
playing a native in a grass skirt. Variety recognized the picture as a
minor effort: "good on the eye, but as entertainment will impress
the kids mostly."
THE ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE, 1952
In 1952, the great surrealist poet Luis Buñuel
filmed an account which at first viewing appears to be a fairly straightforward
retelling of Defoe's story. Unfortunately no video of this picture is available,
but I have interviewed the star Daniel O'Herlihy, and I have seen the picture
twice. Initially, Buñuel emphasizes the dark and angular pirate
ship, weighted with chains and weapons, and rats clustering together in
the hold. The island, however, is spacious, green, and sunny, a paradise
which strongly contrasts the civilization Crusoe has come from as a slaver.
Bountiful nature provides, and the pastoral Robinson Crusoe prospers.
Emphasizing Crusoe's terrible solitude, Buñuel
added a scene in which Crusoe takes himself to a valley where he shouts
the 23rd Psalm. The hills echo his words, confirming in their reverberations
his loneliness. In two other added scenes, Buñuel injects a hallucinatory
quality. Crusoe is ill with the calentures; in his fevered tossing his
sternly patriarchal father appears--not to help him, but, as he says, to
forgive him for his disobedience, even though God will not. Crusoe takes
an axe to kill the phantom father. In a second scene he hallucinates after
five years on the island a convivial tavern scene where he carouses with
fellow drinkers. When he knocks over a tankard, the delusion fades; he
comes to his senses, puts his head down on the table and sobs.
As Crusoe becomes the lord and master of all he surveys,
he increasingly comes to take on the characteristics of a deity. On a walk,
dressed in his strange attire, he encounters two beetles whom he addresses
as "my little friends." In a familiar Buñuelian shot,
he picks up an ant which he displays on his palm: "I'll feed you--here's
a morsel for you--go on, get him!" As Gillian Parker remarks "Crusoe
has ceased to be the rebel and made himself over into the image of the
patriarchal god--deranged and arbitrary, perhaps malicious" (22).
Buñuel breaks with previous tradition showing
Crusoe as dominator and Friday as slave. The two develop into friends after
an initial period of paranoia on Crusoe's part. He is the relief to the
terrible solitariness we have witnessed earlier, and equality operates
in their joint work. But when the English vessel comes to take them away,
Crusoe attires himself in the dress of a gentleman and Friday wears the
clothes of the ordinary sailor. Pastoral egalitarianism will not exist
in mercantile England.
ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS, 1965
In 1965, in Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Byron Haskins underscored
Crusoe's removal and isolation by situating him in space. The Crusoe figure
is an astronaut pulled into the gravitational field of the red planet.
This American carries with him the hubris of the imperialist. Here again
the one who names the names has the power. The astronaut makes no attempt
to understand the language of Friday who is escaping from cruel masters.
In this exchange the superiority of the American to the alien, the Other,
is never questioned. Friday submits.
MAN FRIDAY, 1975
Adrian Mitchell's script for Jack Gold's picture Man
Friday offers the most heavily revisionist version of the Crusoe myth.
Here the story of the two on the island is seen through Friday's eyes,
and the result is a savage discrediting of traditional Protestantism and
imperial pretensions. Were Crusoe not so grotesquely deranged and were
not Friday the noblest of noble savages, the film would have been more
interesting and not so simplistically unbalanced. Friday recounts his version
to his tribe, who suggest a touring company of Hair, complete with tribal
songs and macramé outfits. In a series of varied scenes Crusoe instructs
Friday on English sport, Protestant theology, economics, dance, and education.
Here are three scenes: [CUT TO CLIPS]
ENEMY MINE, 1985
Crusoe once again becomes an American warrior astronaut
in Wolfgang Petersen's Enemy Mine (1985). This time Friday--the names no
longer apply--has become not just an alien human being but an alien of
a reptilian species. The American is brash, confident, and evidently imperialist
in his support of a war for economic reasons against the enemy Dracs. Once
again the matter of language acquisition arises. The first scene shows
us literally an example of poststructural criticism as the shelter built
by the American collapses after the Drac pronounces it "not solid."
The second scene demonstrates the spiritual superiority of the alien civilization
which the American comes to respect and learn from. The film, not so slyly,
subverts any American pretension to superiority.
CRUSOE, 1988
Our penultimate example, Crusoe, is an extraordinarily
beautiful picture filmed in 1988 by the cinematographer Caleb Deschanel,
now turned director. Deschanel updates the setting to Tidewater, Virginia,
1808, the last year the importation of slaves was constitutionally permitted.
This young man is a confident slaver returning to Africa for some fresh
merchandise when the ship encounters a terrible storm. He establishes himself
successfully, but his subsequent encounter with "cannibals" is
strange and mysterious. They are not childlike simpletons, but inscrutable
beings obviously of some sophistication. Crusoe frees a sacrificial victim,
whom he christens "Lucky"--lucky, as he tells, because there
is no one to sell him to. He tries unsuccessfully to teach him table manners.
The next morning he has disappeared. Crusoe, out looking for him, encounters
only his separated head, and a pile of ashes and bones. His assassin is
a second "cannibal" who shows himself Crusoe's superior, outwitting
him easily despite Crusoe's firepower. They achieve an uncomfortable truce:
here is a scene once again portraying language as the instrument of the
dominant culture: [CUT TO CLIP] Finally Crusoe is educated: he releases
the cannibal brought aboard on American ship as a specimen for study, and
the one-time slaver has now become the liberator.
The final picture I shall introduce owes to Defoe only
the premise of two men on a desert island, each of whom is to his opponent
a dangerously inscrutable Other. Despite the fact that the film was made
almost 30 years ago, this picture by one of our most thoughtful filmmakers,
John Boorman, retains a depressing timeliness. [CLIP]
What these vignettes threaded together have shown is
an evolving poststructural consciousness. We have moved from the early
unquestioning racial stereotypes of the silents, to the existential question
in Buñuel, to the extraterrestrial subversion of cultural assumptions
in Petersen, to the recognition of the necessity of mutual respect of the
Other. Unless we happen to enjoy the enlightenment of mystics, this mystery
of the Other is necessarily with all of us, whether we navigate the blue
waters of this terrestrial ball or explore the jewelled lights of the dark
and beckoning heavens.
WORKS CONSULTED
James, Louis. "Unwrapping Crusoe: Retrospective
and Prospective Views." Robinson Crusoe:
Myths and Metamorphoses.
Ed. Lieve Spaas and Brian Simpson. London: Macmillan, 1996. 100-101.
Parker, Gillian. "Crusoe Through the Looking-Glass."
The English Novel and the Movies. Ed. Michael
Klein and Gillian Parker. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1986.
Shinagle, Michael, ed. Robinson Crusoe (Norton Critical
Edition). New York: Norton, 1975.
Ellis, Frank H., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations
of Robinson Crusoe. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1969.
FILMS CITED
Robinson Crusoe (GB, 1926; USA 1936): Film, b&w
Mr. Robinson Crusoe (USA, 1932): Film, b&w dir.:
Edward Sutherland
The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Mexico, 1952): Film,
col. dir.: Luis Buñuel
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (USA, 1964): Film, col. dir.:
Byron Haskin
Man Friday (GB,1975): film, col. dir.: Jack Gold
Enemy Mine (USA, 1985): Film, col. dir.: Wolfgang Petersen
Crusoe (USA, 1988) dir.: Caleb Deschanel
Hell in the Pacific (USA, 1968): Film, col. dir.: John
Boorman