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While we are waiting for Dreamworks’ The Legend of Bagger Vance (starring Matt Damon as a white golfer who discovers the Meaning of Life from a mysterious black caddy played by Will Smith), let's go to the movies.
 The Legend of Bagger Vance and Men in Black  |
For instance, we all remember the brouhaha about whether the 1993 movie Rising Sun actually represented Japan-bashing. Yet none of us seemed to have noticed that the two male leads in that movie, Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, were busy reenacting (or maybe "perpetuating" is a better word) one of the oldest fictional partnerships in our Western culture.
Englishman Connery played the part of Robinson Crusoe, while Snipes, a descendant of slaves, played his Man Friday. Not that those were their characters’ names, of course. Not that either man realized what they were reenacting, either. Nor can either man be blamed for his part in perpetuating the myth.
What Connery and Snipes were doing was battling an alien economic system in order to save the Protestant Work Ethic.
Rising Sun was just a movie, you say. Just a story being told. But a story is an artifact, a technological construct, a shell, a machine, a vehicle for an image or a meaning that's somewhere inside. A story is also a cultural construct laden with deeply held assumptions we may not ever know we hold about the "real nature" of our society. Racism can surface in the work of a storyteller who is not even aware of it and who might even repudiate it if he noticed it. Yet, in effect, the storyteller has become a courier of culture, an unwitting pawn in a polemic.
In his 1951 essay "Robinson Crusoe as a Myth," Ian Watt runs us through the basic Robinson Crusoe story, which on the surface is an exotic novel of travel and adventure common in the eighteenth century. One of the things he does is reminds us that our "sense of the story" varies from the one actually written.
Robinson Crusoe, for all we think it may be, is actually a defense of Defoe's bourgeois Protestantism, a Puritan fable that praises the middle class and its work ethic. Most importantly for Watt, Robinson Crusoe "lives in the imagination mainly as a triumph of human achievement and enterprise, and as a favorite example of the elementary processes of political economy."
Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719 and, as George V. Higgins points out in his book On Writing, "thus acquired his lasting if arguable reputation as the maker of the first novel in the English language."
Because it was the first mass-produced novel for a mass audience, Robinson Crusoe not only changed the way that stories were told, but also who told them. Tales of epic heroes were traditionally told around campfires just before the battle. Hopefully the epic hero's courage and strength and determination would rub off on tomorrow's cannon fodder. The epic was always told by his sidekick. "I watched him ride out among the Enemy and slaughter them like they was wheatgerm!" The tale was always told in the third person.
Robinson Crusoe, however, is told in the first person. "I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen who settled first at Hull." From its opening words, the reader knows Crusoe is speaking only for himself. In its closing words, Crusoe again defines himself alone: "In this vessel, after a long voyage, I arrived in England the 11th of June, in the year 1687, having been thirty-five years absent."
Robinson Crusoe is not a classical or traditional hero. Those early heroes defended their society against outside threats, or saved those whose lives were in danger. Crusoe is no epic hero. He is a more self-centered, self-absorbed individual. He lives alone on a desert island. Only after two decades alone does Crusoe discover and rescue Man Friday. Crusoe is a survivor, of course. But he does more than survive. He continues and prospers. In solitude he struggles against all odds and succeeds! He was on the island for "twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteen days."
Although Defoe wrote two sequels, what Western society valorizes are Crusoe's days on the desert island with Man Friday.
Robinson Crusoe spawned Johann Wyss's book The Swiss Family Robinson, which spawned at least three feature films of that same name, which in turn spawned television's Lost in Space, and that in turn spawned Steven Spielberg's Earth 2 and the 1998 big-budget feature Lost in Space, starring William Hurt, Mimi Rodgers, and Gary Oldham, which delighted in repeating the classic TV phrase "Danger, Will Robinson!"
Three dozen other Robinson Crusoe movies have been made, including a disastrous 1996 version starring Pierce Brosnan and a 1975 English version entitled The Erotic Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
In the summer of 2000, CBS TV scored a major hit, its highest summer ratings in six years, with its "reality" show Survivor, which was based on an earlier Swedish television program called Expedition Robinson. Even normally lucid critics gushed over the show, using phrases like "shared national experience" and "a pop culture phenomenon."
And let’s not forget Gilligan, the Skipper, the Millionaire, His Wife, the Movie Star, the Professor, and Mary Ann — all on Gilligan’s Island.
Western society mythologizes those Crusoe days, retains from the story what its unconscious needs dictate, and has promptly forgotten the rest of the story.
It’s not a pretty story. It’s racist and dehumanizing.
And we still pay good money to be entertained by it every day.
NEXT: Out for adventure and exploitation
