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Columbia River Plateau, Washington.
The only part of Castaway that truly lives up to the movie’s grandiose ambitions is the ending. Tom Hanks finally delivers the package he’s been protecting for four harrowing years to a mysterious woman in rural Texas. He leaves her ranch, finding himself at a literal dirt crossroads in the middle of nowhere. Skies are blue, sun is shining, and nothing but earth stretching out around him, far as the eye can see. Standing alone at the intersection, he is, for the first time, without purpose, obligation, or agenda. And from the beauty of the shot, we are meant to take this as a good thing.
I’ve always dreamed of wide swaths of negative space. Perhaps I am just a Romantic at heart. What a fantasy that would be! It is a pipe dream that has been nurtured and kept alive by many over the years. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is full of sublime-porn: hauntingly told portraits of landscapes deliciously desolate, such as the shores of Antarctica or gorges in early China. Henry David Thoreau up and left the monotony of daily life for the quietude of Walden Pond. Emily Bronte could not be torn from her beloved Yorkshire moors. Eastern cultures seem to have a more intuitive, historical relationship with emptiness.
Anyway—don’t you want to be on this road? On foot would be acceptable, given the autonomous, bare-bones nature that this sort of venture would so obviously require; in a car would be better, for maximum wind-in-hair sensations; on a bike would be best, combining the best of both worlds. In this fantasy, it’s always daylight, always sunny, always summer.
