"Cast Away" as an anti-communist film (SPOILER CITY!!)

Rating: Null/10 (18 June 2001)

One element of this pleasant piece of film or video wallpaper that everybody (even the Russian!) has missed in the comments is that there is a definite anti-communist undercurrent to the film. How so? you may ask. It's simple [ACHTUNG!! SPOILERS AHEAD]. In the rolling pan shot early on where Nicolai gets Hanks' package, one sees workmen taking down a marble plaque of V.I. Lenin (the Soviet state's founder) of the building Nicky has run into. The wheel boot the Moscow militsiya (police) put on the important FedEx truck is red with a yellow hammer-and-sickle (emblem of the USSR) painted on it. The Russian workers Hanks lectures to through interpreter are sullen. What does all of this mean? Literally it means that the cash strapped Russian Fed. is too poor to get new wheel boots or paint them the Russian tricolor, and it is too slowly "de-Sovietising" the country (the film is set in 1995). Symbolicly it says that the idea of communism has fallen to the new ideology of FedEx, or more broadly, the world's multinational corporations. The workers, sullen in their aging warehouse are the product of a failed system that could not compete with capitalism. The translator is their spokesman, bring up the fact that Hanks' character once stole a child's bike to make a delivery. Like Thomas J. Watson of IBM, Hanks' ruthless character is the company, it's best architype. Now to the island. Here we see the castaway story as one of individual initiative to survive. Chuck only has his brains, his courage, etc. to live on the island and then get off. And Chuck, the manager, survives, while the plane crew (workers) perish. The island story is similar to the James Bond novels and films, where the individualist fights the collectivisers (in "Cast Away" the island ecology itself) in the name of his bourgeoise government. Then, when he gets back, he goes about doing his job, delivering those packages (substitutions, of course) as best he can. He is his job. The rest of the film is about his relationship with another managerial type, which is the "human element." What I have brought up is the ideological, economic aspects of Zemeckis' picture.
I'M NOT A MARXIST, I SWEAR IT!!!!!!!!!!