Stranded on a deserted island in the Pacific after a crash of his cargo plane, FedEx employee Chuck Noland must fight for his survival thousands of miles from the nearest human being. This — in short — is the plot of the 2000 movie Cast Away. The central theme of the film is man’s will to live and portrays different spheres of survival. In this piece, I wish to take a closer look at what the movie wants to teach us about the value of having a purpose in one’s life.
After having come to terms with the fact, that he was unlikely to be found by anybody and that there was little chance of him escaping the island, Noland had to think of how to survive on his new island home. In the days after his arrival, FedEx packages from his plane washed ashore and he opened one after another to explore whether the content could be useful to either his survival or better yet his escape. One package though, which has a pair of wings printed on it, he left closed.
Using the items from the boxes and some ingenuity, Noland managed to exploit the island’s food sources, drinking coconut water and collected rainwater, eating coconuts and fish he catches using a self-made speer. This, together with the rudimentary shelter he built for himself, provided for his basic physical needs.
Attempting to make a fire, he badly cut into his hand. Enraged, he threw items around, including a volleyball from one of the boxes. He drew a face into the bloody handprint and from now on treated this volleyball as his companion, in an attempt to provide himself with at least some form of social interaction.
With his basic needs met, he survived on the island for four years, adapting ever more to his castaway lifestyle. Yet when a large section of a portable toilet washed up on the island, Noland decided to use it as a sail to escape. He built a raft and did manage to leave the island with it, sailing on the open ocean for days, eventually being found by a passing cargo ship.
Back in civilization, he was cheered as a miraculous survivor but soon learned that the world he once knew had changed. His wife had moved on and re-married. There was no return to his old life anymore.
Sometime later, Noland traveled by car to Texas to return the package he had left unopened and had brought along with him back to civilization. When no one answered the door for him, he decided to leave the package at the door and along with it a note that read: “This package saved my life. Thank you. Chuck Noland”.
It is this package and the content of Noland’s note that I wish to look at in greater detail.
From a purely materialistic point of view, it seems silly to believe that this package contributed to Noland’s survival in any meaningful way. After all, he had never opened it, so how could it have been of any use. And why did he not open the package, possibly foregoing resources important for his survival on — or escape from — the island?
This point is satirically portrayed in a FedEx commercial, aired during the 2003 Super Bowl, drawing an alternate ending to the movie. In it, the character of Noland (though portrayed by another actor) manages to deliver the package back to its sender in person, whom he proceeded to ask what it contained. To this, the woman simply replied “Just a satellite phone, GPS locator, fishing rod, water purifier, and some seeds. Just silly stuff.”
While it is unlikely, that the package would contain this very specific mix of items, that would have ensured Noland’s escape from the island merely days after opening it, the possibility exists, that the items in the package could have improved his life on the island in some way or indeed aided his escape. Why, then, would he not open this package?
In his works, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche discusses, again and again, the issue of the inevitability of suffering in human life. Life, so it is described by Nietzsche, is short — and in the grand scale of things it certainly is — and full of painful experiences: physically, emotionally and spiritually. Buddhism knows this idea as well, describing it with the (oversimplified) summary of the Buddha’s teachings on suffering: “life is suffering”.
In modern times, life has become less physically painful, when compared to even the recent history, where millions regularly died gruesomely of famine, plagues, and wars. Yet suffering has all but been eradicated, even in the modern, industrialized, Western world. It has for most merely shifted from physical suffering to emotional suffering, taking forms of loneliness, depression and other mental illnesses of the sort, drug addiction, painful relationship break-ups, stress — all the way into burn-out — and countless other troubles.
What keeps us staying alive — and hence endure the suffering of life — and keeps us from merely ending our lives, is the existence of purpose. We are willing to endure the sufferings because we are dedicated to a purpose in our lives. Some are able to articulate their purpose very clearly, for most though their purpose is of a more implicit nature: upholding your family by raising your kids or caring for your elderly parents, excelling at a career or an athletic discipline, and still for many: living a life worth reaching an afterlife, living a life that we believe will please God (the understanding of which can vary widely between religions and even within denominations).
Nietzsche’s perhaps most famous quote, from his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is: “God is dead”, which many falsely believe to be a statement expressing disbelief in the existence of a deity. Instead, what this statement is meant to describe is that, since the advent of the Enlightenment Era, religion — the belief in God — has continually been losing its role as the provider of the meaning in the lives of people in the West, an issue later described by psychologist C.G. Jung as “the spiritual problem of modern man”.
So what comes of a life, that has no clear source of meaning? What does one do, if life seems pointless and devoid of purpose? This is where the package in Cast Away comes into play:
Noland’s situation on the island exemplifies the hardship of mere existence. He is isolated from any human contact by thousands of miles of water, causing him to increasingly turn insane from lack of human interaction. His physical life is a brutish one, dramatically visualized in the film by having to smash his own tooth out with an ice skate, due to a dental problem. His situation is so dire, that he at least once seriously considers suicide, building a manikin and throwing it off a cliff on a rope, to see if it would hold his weight when hanging himself with it.
So what keeps Noland going in the face of this suffering is the purpose he defined for himself. Just as he created his semi-imaginary volleyball-companion — allowing him to remain relatively sane by emulating human contact — he gave his own life a purpose: delivering the package. He set himself the goal to one day escape the island to deliver the package. Having this purpose as a drive to guide, if not every single action, certainly the trajectory of his undertakings, allowing him to face and overcome the hardships he was presented with.
While we do not know, whether Noland was familiar with the work of Nietzsche, he certainly embraced his teaching: he overcame the suffering of life by setting a high goal for himself, which he deemed worthy enough to justify enduring the pain of his existence. Without setting such a goal, it is likely he would not have had the courage to leave the island on his improvised raft and perhaps one day gone through with his plan to end his life.
In this sense, even though he did not have a physical, tangible utility from the package itself, he benefited from turning it into a visual representation for his purpose of returning to civilization. In that way, the psychological, or — if you will — spiritual meaning of the package far exceeded anything it would likely have been in the physical realm. It manifested his will to survive. And thus — in a way — the meaning of the package, a completely artificial, fictional concept, became more real than almost anything physical ever could. With this, Cast Away teaches us a deep lesson about the nature of our reality:
