Desert Islands and the Liquid Modern

Barney Samson

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030570453
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030570460
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

This book investigates desert islands in postwar anglophone popular culture, exploring representations in radio, print and screen advertising, magazine cartoons, cinema, video games, and comedy, drama and reality television. Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's theory of liquid modernity, desert island texts are analysed in terms of their intersections with repressive and seductive mechanisms of power. Chapters focus on the desert island as: a conflictingly in/coherent space that characterises identity as deferred and structured by choice; a location whose 'remoteness' undermines satirical critiques of communal identity formation; a site whose ambivalent relationship with 'home' and Otherness destabilises patriarchal 'Western' subjectivity; a space bound up with mobility and instantaneity; and an expression of radical individuality and underdetermined identity. The desert island in popular culture is shown to reflect, endorse and critique a profoundly consumerist society that seduces uswith promises of coherence, with the threat of repression looming if we do not conform.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

B. SamsonDesert Islands and the Liquid Modernhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57046-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introducing the Liquid Modern Desert Island

Barney Samson¹

(1)

London, UK

Abstract

This introductory chapter is structured around two watery concepts: the etymology of the word ‘island’ as watery land and Zygmunt Bauman’s theorisation of the liquid modern. Difficulties arise when one interrogates the idea of a ‘desert island.’ What is an island? What does it mean to be desert(ed)? Who counts as an inhabitant? The introduction surveys and then complicates various contradictory meanings that have been attached to desert islands in post-war popular culture, outlines the critical context and groundwork of the following chapters and summarises the book’s argument.

Keywords

Island-nessDesertednessSolid modernityLiquid modernity

End Abstract

1.1 Island-Ness and Desertedness

In Disney’s film Tangled (2010), an adaptation of the ‘Rapunzel’ fairy tale, handsome thief Flynn Rider describes in song an avaricious vision: he imagines himself “On an island that I own / Tanned and rested and alone / Surrounded by enormous piles of money.” As Flynn sings, the film cuts to a close-up of a cauldron, with a sponge floating in soapy water (Fig. 1.1). He places a unicorn figurine on the sponge, figuring it (and by extension himself) as the sole occupant of an otherwise uninhabited island. This representation contrasts with that of Corona, the island kingdom that is Rapunzel and Flynn’s ultimate destination. Corona is an inhabited island joined to the mainland by a road bridge. Unlike Flynn’s ‘sponge’ island, Corona resists being contained by the cinematic frame; in the film’s closest approximation of a totalising view, the island is obscured by hundreds of floating lanterns (Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.1

Flynn Rider’s sponge island

(Still from Tangled, 2010. © Disney Enterprises, Inc.)

Fig. 1.2

The island kingdom of Corona

(Still from Tangled, 2010. © Disney Enterprises, Inc.)

These two contrasting island representations contain various characteristics that have historically been assigned to islands. Focusing on the post-war period that Zygmunt Bauman calls the “era of liquid modernity” (2006, 188), this book engages with the ways in which desert islands in anglophone popular culture have complicated and destabilised these meanings. Ottmar Ette would dispute the designation of Corona as an ‘island’ kingdom. For Ette, if streets “continue beyond the island … then they succeed in continentalizing the world of islands” (2007, 115). Ette’s analysis is arguable (and is productively complicated by Godfrey Baldacchino’s collection Bridging Islands, 2007) but highlights that islands have often been conceived of as separate spaces, somehow qualitatively different to continents. This raises the question of what an island is. The OED definition of a “piece of land completely surrounded by water” (OED Online 2020) is practically meaningless: so is every land mass, if one zooms out far enough. The OED goes on to tell us that the word ‘island’ is derived from the Old English ‘ígland,’ and ‘íg’ from ‘éa’ (water); thus ‘islands’ can be seen as etymologically ‘watery’ (cf. Beer 1989, 16). The relevance of this watery definition can be observed in a consideration of Mont-Saint-Michel, the French tidal island and medieval abbey, to which Corona bears a close resemblance. Historically, Mont-Saint-Michel could only be reached at low tide, when its sand flats were revealed. Such fluctuating geophysicality challenges any definitive understanding of how to distinguish ‘island’ from ‘continent.’ A raised causeway was built in 1879 and a new bridge in 2014, apparently “continentalizing” the island, in Ette’s definition. However, in March 2015, a “super tide” completely submerged the bridge (Fleury and Raoulx 2017, 14), re-constituting Mont-Saint-Michel as an island disconnected from the mainland. To continue the water-based metaphor, what constitutes an island is “slippery” (Edmond and Smith 2003, 5).

Recent critical theory has emphasised the importance of water to conceptions of islands. Kamau Brathwaite’s conception of tidalectics, a cyclical vision of islands, takes as its founding metaphor not the border but “the ripple” of water (cf. Naylor 1999, 145). Elizabeth DeLoughrey developed this in her call for the development of an “archipelagraphy” (2001); Elaine Stratford also advocates “[t]hinking with the archipelago” (2013, 4). Philip Hayward has coined the term ‘aquapelago’ to refer to an “assemblage of the marine and land spaces of a group of islands and their adjacent waters” (2012, 5). Each of these approaches prioritises island connectedness and owes a debt to Epeli Hau‘ofa’s distinction between “viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands’ … in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships” (1994, 152–53). The representation of islands in another Disney film, Moana (2016), depicts such an archipelagic connectedness. The opening voiceover narrates a Polynesian creation story: “In the beginning there was only ocean. Then the Mother Island emerged. Te Fiti.” The stylised animation shows first a personified island and then a “sea of islands,” interlinked by the leafy green tendrils that Te Fiti sends forth (Fig. 1.3). Tui, the island’s patriarch and Moana’s father, has banned her from sailing past the reef. He presents a reductive ‘Western’ view of islands as bounded: “Motunui is paradise. Who would want to go anywhere else?” Moana defies Tui and eventually convinces him that the islanders should, like their ancestors, be archipelagic voyagers.

Fig. 1.3

Te Fiti and the creation of a sea of islands

(Still from Moana, 2016. © Disney Enterprises, Inc.)

Elizabeth DeLoughrey suggests that “the desert-isle genre” places a particular emphasis on “the boundedness of islands” (2007, 20). Desert Islands and the Liquid Modern complicates DeLoughrey’s assertion by examining the ways in which recent desert island representations challenge such delimitation. The OED defines a desert island as “an uninhabited, or seemingly uninhabited, and remote island” but cites an early seventeenth-century source that refers to “desart Islandes inhabited of wilde men” (OED Online 2016; cf. Riquet 2019, 15). This contentious description provokes the question of who counts as an inhabitant (cf. Beer 2003, 40), with troubling implications: the suggestion that an island is empty can stand as a validation of colonialism (cf. Weaver-Hightower 2006, 295). Johannes Riquet points out, via Jean-Michel Racault, that “the very notion of the desert island is flawed” given that there must be somebody there to describe it (Riquet 2019, 15; citing Racault 2010, 13). Even the term ‘deserted’ seems to imply that somebody w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introducing the Liquid Modern Desert Island
• 2. (In)Coherent Desert Islands: Desert Island Discs and Bounty Chocolate in Print
• 3. Community on the Desert Island: The New Yorker Cartoons and Gilligan’s Island
• 4. Repression and Seduction: The Blue Lagoon and Bounty Chocolate on Screen
• 5. Mobility, Instantaneity and the Desert Island: Cast Away and Lost
• 6. Anxiety and Eroticism on the Desert Island: Dear Esther and Love Island
• Back Matter