Millennial Cinema

Relationship of Cast Away to other films of the late 1990s and early 2000s

A  change was on the horizon and the face of that change was coming closer into focus with each passing day. The persistent ticking of the clock pointed to one inevitable conclusion. The world will be different when we wake up to face the new dawn. Questions rang out across popular media and opinions formed in public forums about what will happen. A nervous twitching picked at the edges of our minds. Some did not admit that they were susceptible to its effects, some quietly contemplated its meaning, while still others shouted out predictions and calls to action.

For one thousand years, civilization stood firmly on the calendar. The first digit in the year portion of the date had never changed in recent memory. Nations have risen and fallen, businesses grew and an entire sector of the economy matured in the shadow of the change. That first digit, which had up until this point, remained a solid '1', was now set to shift. Trivial when looked at from this perspective, but its impact on the culture was substantial. 

Millennial cinema, is the term used to describe films with narrative and symbolic devices that are a response to the cultural, societal, political, and technological change that occurred at the end of the 20th century. Many of these films posses properties that direct the audience to contemplate the meaning of a significant shift in time and the ripple effects that follow.

The overwhelming technological improvements in the late 1990s made it possible for powerful computers and mobile phones to become a staple for thousands of homes across the first world. Familiarity with this new device in the home was the result of a period of social and emotional reaction to its presence. The personal computer and the cell phone changed the way in which human beings interacted with time and the physical world that surrounded them. Suddenly, foreign influences had a medium that was could relay information faster than traditional mail and through this medium came images of exotic places updated in near to real time and people across oceans could become friends, do business, and even fall in love. 

The creation of this new domain of human interaction elicited a response from society. Films like Johnny Mnemonic (1995) , Contact (1997) and The Matrix (1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) explicitly show a world in which the presence of high technology has dramatic effects on the characters in the story of the film.  More implicitly, films like Cast Away (2000) show this presence in a subtle way with a focus on the human reaction to the world that technology has augmented.


These films represent a social and emotional reaction to the technological advancements of the late 1990s and the early 2000s

The main character of Cast Away, Chuck Noland, is first presented in the film as a hectic FedEx employee. He lives in a world in which technologic progress has made the world a much smaller place, small enough to have a relationship although he is constantly traveling because of his work. This augmented reality is a direct produce of technology much like the dystopias presented in the more explicit films such as  The Matrix,  Johnny Mnemonic, and  A.I. Artificial Intelligence. The worlds in these films depict a reality that is heavily changed by the power of the computer and robotics. These films relied on CGI, or computer-generated imagery to create virtual world for the characters. This new method of film making was becoming more important as a tool for conveying social fears and hopes. (139, American Cinema of the 1990s) The major conflict in these films is the relationship between the main characters and the virtual or augmented reality in which they live.  

For Chuck Noland, although he does not reside in a virtual world, his reality, prior to the crash is significantly augmented by technology to the degree that Noland's mind can move from country to country, and timezone to timezone, while maintaining productivity and strength. Technology allows for this high impact stress to be accommodated. Noland's experiences are functionally equivalent to the explicit technological transformations that take place in Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix. Where Trinity and Neo, in The Matrix shift between their 'real' and 'matrix' selves through a technological device, Noland can shift between continents through cell phones and high technology aviation. Both scenarios when given their context and characters end up showing the same relationship between humans and their new tools, e.g. technology.  

Email users create and send messages from individual computers using commercial programs or mail-user agents (“The History of Email”). This new medium of communication changed the world in which the people of the late 1990s and early 2000s perceived the world. Prior to email, communication was often slow and expensive. The traditional physical mail could transmit information around the globe, but often that process 


would take weeks for a single piece of mail to reach its destination. Intangible messages could be sent with an equivalent speed to email via international calling, but this mode of communication was often too expensive to use on a regular basis. 

Email was developed on the back of a much larger system with far-reaching implications that made the world seem less vast. The Internet was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s and came into its own during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some of the major backbones of the Internet passed from government funded projects to the private sector in 1995 (Leiner et al). With it came its general availability to the public. 

This virtual world brought information from around the globe about places and people that were previously outside the sphere of influence for the public. The new virtual domain augmented the reality of the world by allowed the flow of information to take place at speeds previously unseen. 

On of the fundamental fears that was constantly talked about in public media was the issue of the impending doom of Y2K. The year 2000 would bring about a zero-day catastrophe that would bring the civilized world to its knees. Computers that have been running programs since the late 1970s did not account for the shift in the first digit of the year. Without assistance from programmers, the computers would simply flip the year to 1900 and all mission critical information would be unable to be sorted chronologically. The effects of this concept would turn back the clock on banking, trade, military, government, and a whole host of other arenas. The humble computer would end the progress that had been made with computers since the 1950s.

Fear in the United States, perpetuated by media outlets brought those who were aware of the potential for a zero-day event to a nervous state. All the predictions did not come true. The massive financial resources spent by governments and companies to fix the problem in the years leading up to 2000 had paid off. The population was left stunned that everything went according to plan, for the most part.  Over $300 billion is estimated to have been spent on the remediation required to minimize the impact of the date switch (“Y2K: Overhyped and oversold?”).

The public did not know exactly what was going to happen during the change in the calendar year. Many claims and predictions were made that ranged from fear-mongering to responsible calls to preparedness.  “The year 2000 problem represents a potentially difficult time for all of us. However, let's not lose sight of the fact that it's a temporary bump (or pothole) in the road – not the end of the world” (48, Y2K Citizens Action Guide). 

The release date of Cast Away was nearly a full year after the anti-climactic event of Y2K as it was released on December 22nd 2000. Although the production began in January of 1999 and the script was developed over the course of several years prior, the cultural significance of the film's place in time is significant. The anti-climax of the Y2K event was a symbol of a change in time. This, coupled with the simultaneous change in century and millennium, left a mark in the social conscious at the time. 

In many ways late millennial films express a symbolic rebirth for the characters in the story. In The Matrix, the main characters, Trinity and Neo, are born again in a new world after the tyranny of the robots is usurped. A similar symbolic shift is expressed in Contact. Scientists on Earth receive communication from an extraterrestrial intelligence and experience a cultural shift in priorities. Another instance is in Cast Away. Upon being rescued from his raft in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Chuck Noland is brought 'back from the dead' and attempts to find his place in the modern world. Thinner, wiser, and traumatized, Noland struggles to find meaning after his transformation on the island. All of these rebirths are found in millennial films and represent a struggle to find a new life after a rebirth.

The collapse of the technological systems in The Matrix, and Noland's ability to survive on the island point to a reaction in the public mind about the value of wealth and technology and what that means for the natural, analog, world of nature. The world before technologic progress was able to sustain the world's population and the fear that technologic collapse would lead to a revival of older, traditional  survival methods was present in the public mind. Robert Theobald, economist, “The Y2K bug provides us with an opportunity …. It is a time for us to ask what we really value and how we can preserve the ecological systems on which all life depends. (Y2K Citizens Action Guide).” 

Cast Away shares a strong relationship with other films that were made available to the public audience around the shift in the calendar year and the millennium. A prevailing theme is the technological progress that the 1990s made and the social reaction to the augmented reality that was suddenly available for people to take part in. The world became a different place to exists in, much different than the organic, and analog world, in which ideas and communication was kept apart by pure physical distance and speed. 

The theme of rebirth after a major shift or change is another symbolic device that is found in many films that came out around this time. The Y2K symbolized a potentially catastrophic event that could bring the advanced and modern world to its knees. The fear was that despite the world's significant investment in technology that the world on January 1st 2000 would be one dominated by hunger, sickness, and the recovery from such a disaster would progress into a world not unlike the way of life that had been in place since the last millennial shift, the year 1000. 

The emotional and societal reaction to this rebirth is another major theme found in millennial film. Noland's struggle to find meaning after his transformation, and the new world in Contact  after the discovery of life outside of Earth, point to new psychological hurdles to regain a sense of place in the dramatically different world in which people of the 1990s and early 2000s where living in. 

Works Cited

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“History of Email” Oracle Education Foundation Wed. 19 Apr. 2011.

Holmlund, Chris. American Cinema of the 1990s: Themes and Variations. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2008. Print.

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