The Contemporary American Survival Film

Cassice Last

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501393198
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The Contemporary American Survival Film investigates and breaks down the contemporary American Survival Film (from Cast Away onwards), focusing on film, television, literature and video games.

In the contemporary (and highly popular) American survival film, a lone figure is lost, trapped or stuck. Whether a desert island, cramped canyon, floating raft or the Alaskan tundra, the space cuts the characters off from their loved ones, communication technologies, transport or a means of escape. The sun burns flesh, the dry air dehydrates, the lack of food starves, the snow chills bodies and the sharp rocks pierce limbs.

This book examines this survival space across film, television, video games, literature and online, asking four questions. Firstly, what does the post 2000s survival space look and behave like, how is it new or distinct? Secondly, the natural environment seems to hold all the power. How responsible is the setting for triggering narrative events, does the character have any agency at all? Thirdly, the environment damages the human body. How does this corporeal destruction interact with the notion of a specifically American fleshiness of the American survivor? Finally, could/would one ever willingly choose to enter the survival space and why? How is this survival space employing, rejecting and reworking past rubrics?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction: Entering the filmic survival space
• 1 Desert island risks: Cast Away’s island as the twenty-first-century model for survival
• 2 Spaces of (dis)empowerment: Agency in 127 Hours and three survival gameworlds
• 3 Surviving (un)productive wounds and bodily transformations in The Shallows and Survivor
• 4 Choosing the American survival space with Bear Grylls and Christopher McCandless
• Conclusion: Human versus where (are we now)?
• Bibliography
• Filmography and other media
• Index
• Copyright Page