Evangelism Summer 2001

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Cast Away, directed by Robert Zemeckis (20th Century Fox, 2000), 143 minutes.
Joe Versus the Volcano, directed by John Patrick Shanley
(Warner Brothers, 1990), 97 minutes.

If you haven't been to the movies in ten years, don't worry: Tom Hanks is still playing a sympathetic schmo who gets shipwrecked on an island in the South Pacific, faces grave dangers, and comes out not only alive but enlightened. In 2000 it was Cast Away. In 1990 it was Joe Versus the Volcano. Helen Hunt replaces perennial Hanks co-star Meg Ryan in the newer version, but otherwise the two films have a lot in common: Homo economicus goes on vacation, gets in touch with his animistic spirit side, and then returns to civilization like an unrhyming ancient mariner, a wiser and humbler man.

In 1990's Volcano—billed as "A Story of Love, Lava, and Burning Desire"—Hanks plays Joe Banks, a hypochondriac advertising librarian for a medical supply company in Long Island City. The film opens with the superimposed script of a fairy tale: "Once upon a time, there was a guy named Joe who had a very lousy job." We then see Joe and his colleagues in scenes reminiscent of classic labor films like Metropolis and Modern Times, in which sheep-like employees daily endure grinding dehumanization. Joe's path to work is an uneven sidewalk laid out in a bizarre maze that, when seen from above, forms the logo of American Panascope, "home of the rectal probe." It is to that metaphorical location that Joe ends up shoving his job when a doctor informs him that he has a only six months to live because of a "brain cloud."

The next day, a mysterious billionaire makes Joe an offer he can't refuse: live like a king for as long as it takes to sail out to a remote island named Waponi Woo, and ...

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