Word: castaway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...quite Samoa: it sends a Congressman to Washington, but he is not allowed to vote; its 38,000 people are counted as "U.S. nationals" but cannot cast ballots for anything except island leaders. In the early 1960s, the Federal Government started pouring planeloads of money into its castaway dependency, partly in the spirit of idealism, and partly with an eye to its unmatched, and strategically useful, harbor (last year, Washington sent $45 million in direct aid to a community with one-sixth as many people as Mesa, Ariz.). Yet the U.S. has never bothered too much about the legal niceties...
Well-made fictions like Fatal Attraction prosper because they seem more persuasive than fact. Nicolas Roeg's Castaway has another challenge. Just try believing that a bright, spirited woman like Lucy Irvine (Amanda Donohoe) would answer a man's ad for a desert-island mate and set out for a year alone with an impractical chap like Gerald Kingsland (Oliver Reed). But it did happen, and Roeg and Writer Allan Scott have made an engaging movie based on Irvine's memoir...
...Castaway too derives its energy from a reversal. Turns out that Lucy is the one with a taste for solitude and the practicality that survival requires. Gerald is there to catch naps, sun and only the occasional fish. Even a sexual strike by Lucy cannot force him to build a decent hut or a productive garden. There is perhaps a parable here, which Roeg does not force: that woman, however liberated, will build a nest, and that man will wander, if only in his mind, no matter how circumscribed...
Following the intricate expansiveness of her much praised novel Machine Dreams, the gifted Phillips, 35, has here assembled a collection of loose ends: first-person monologues revolving around barefoot girls, post-hippie gypsies and other street-smart naifs. One story is a kelped and matted address delivered by a castaway young woman to the baby inside her; another, the erotically charged rural reminiscence of an old lady; a third, the juiced-up riff of a 20-year-old rock 'n' roller, strutting his stuff with the swagger of the vulnerable...
Robinson Crusoe, apotheosis of the desert island castaway, throws one of the longest shadows in literature. For more than two centuries, he and his black companion Friday have provoked countless imitations, parodies, cartoons and advertisements. But from the earliest days, in addition to the parasol and firearm, the beachcombers have also carried some heavy moral baggage. Rousseau considered Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel vital to the education of ambitious youth; Coleridge regarded Crusoe as the "universal representative"; and Karl Marx found the plot an illustration of basic economics...