Undergraduate Writing Prize 2015 Alice Kaplan Institute ... Allen-Niesen_ 2015... · Undergraduate...

Undergraduate Writing Prize 2015 Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Northwestern University Jean Gimbel Lane Prize - Best Visual Studies Paper

Globalization, Oceans, and Robert Redford: JC Chandor’s All Is Lost as Allegory for the State of the American Dream

by

KYLE ALLEN-NIESEN

Course: “Oceanic Studies: Literature, Environment, History” (HUM 302)

Quarter: Winter 2015

Professor: Harris Feinsod

© 2015. Kyle Allen-Niesen.

Kyle Allen-‐Niesen Humanities 302 Final Paper

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Globalization, Oceans, and Robert Redford: JC Chandor’s All Is Lost as Allegory for the State of the American Dream

JC Chandor’s 2013 movie All is Lost features a solo sailor, who must fight to

survive the effects of shipwreck, inclement weather, and indifferent container ships

in the midst of the Indian Ocean. Starring Robert Redford, the film is more than just

a fine example of a survival movie and a vehicle for Redford to display his acting

chops. From the first scene, Chandor, who’s previous film was the snappy Wall

Street drama Margin Call, seems determined to illustrate the ways in which global

capitalism has become like the fury of the sea -‐ an uncompromising, mighty force of

nature with which an individual can struggle, but never overcome. Where Margin

Call focused on the loss and confusion experienced by those on Wall Street during

the last financial crisis, the silent struggles of Redford’s character in All is Lost reflect

the turmoil and fight for survival experienced by those living on “Main Street” in

modern America. The protagonist, known as “Our Man”, is forced to improvise to

survive after finding all that he knew well stripped from him by a wayward shipping

container and a raging storm in the Indian Ocean. In the same way, Americans who

had lost their jobs and homes in the wake of the Great Recession were forced to

confront a new and difficult reality where global capitalism does as much violence

as a raging storm. In JC Chandor’s All is Lost, Robert Redford’s portrayal of “Our

Man’s” individual struggle to survive in the face of the hostile and impersonal forces

of the ocean and the globalized shipping industry conveys a bleak portrait of

contemporary American reality wherein the vast majority of people, cast adrift by


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the last financial crisis, struggle against the isolating and indifferent forces of global

capitalism.

Chandor is intent on portraying the ways in which capitalism has become a

force of nature and has imposed itself on the sea from the first frames of the film. All

is Lost begins with a peaceful seascape, but as Redford begins his voice-‐over (the

only real lines of dialogue in the film) the black wedge of a shipping container

separates the sea from the sky. Taking up the most of the camera frame, the opening

serves as clear foreshadowing that the consequences of globalization and modernity

on the sea will feature as a villain in the film. Much like the cover image on Allan

Sekula’s Fish Story, which features a picture of a container ship sailing into rough

weather, this first image of a wayward container shows the ways in which

“modernity dissolves the edifying unity of the classical maritime panorama”(Sekula

106), cutting into the soft blues of sea and sky with the rigid edges of the black

container. It is this container that tears a hole in the hull of “Our Man’s” sailboat,

isolates him by knocking out his electronics, and begins his long struggle to survive.

Much has been made about the choice of Robert Redford to play the solitary

sailor who fights to the last against the indifferent might of the forces of nature.

Most known for playing roles in films that would never be featured at the Oscars,

Redford’s reputation as an old, silent, rugged American actor who’s heyday had

come and gone fits perfectly within the allegorical message of the film. Redford’s

weathered handsomeness conjures a certain image of the American dream, because,

as film critic Molly Lambert puts it, “Redford [has] regularly played beautiful upper-‐


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class men (like a male Grace Kelly)”, creating the portrait of what Joshua Clover calls

“the consummate Californian”. Clover argues that Redford embodies “mid-‐20th-‐

century Americana, without reference to the non-‐Caucasian—a vision that was

kitsch even in its youth”. Yet this image is precisely the one that Chandor wants to

highlight, as it is the Americans that most identify with this image who are the

greatest victims of global capitalism. Redford’s age hints at this potential

vulnerability from the beginning of the film. Before he is forced to abandon his ship

the Virginia Jean, viewers see him struggling to climb the mast, repair his ship, and

even carry his supply of potable water. Even in the screenplay the character has

been carefully crafted to be relatable-‐ without any biographical facts, he is a vessel

for viewers to project their own desires and associations. Never even given a name,

the character is only referred to as “Our Man” in the script, recalling Joseph

Conrad’s Lord Jim, where Jim is referred to by Captain Marlow (and Conrad, in the

Author’s Notes) as “one of us”(306). Instead of as a sailor in the Merchant Marine,

however, the prototypical American as painted by Chandor is a well off but aging

Baby Boomer, a product of the peak of America’s mid-‐20th century hegemony.

Redford’s character then, is clearly a stand-‐in for the American people, and for the

state of the American dream of individual success and happiness.

When one considers the details of the plot, the allegory to the plight of the

American people becomes wrenching. Redford’s sailboat is his home, and its sinking

leaves him “homeless” – just as the past economic crisis sank the home values of so

many Americans, drowning them in debt and forcing foreclosures, thus casting them


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out of their homes. Once aboard a life raft, Redford is forced to constantly improvise

to survive, just as Americans, often out of homes and out of jobs, were forced to

adapt to a new reality in the aftermath of the crisis, taking lower-‐paying jobs and

struggling to make ends meet. The consequences of the Great Recession thus act as

the contemporary American parallel to a sailor cast adrift on the high seas. Both

have been cast out of relative comfort, and forced to fight to survive in new and

hostile conditions where the enemy is not a rival nation, but a set of powerful

impersonal forces. As film critic Wesley Morris notes, Redford’s “foes are simply

weather and time”. Likewise, as George Packer puts it in The Unwinding: An Inner

History of the New America, Americans have been “watching structures long in place

collapsing — things like farms, factories, subdivisions and public schools on the one

hand, and ways and means in Washington caucus rooms, taboos on New York

trading desks and manners and morals everywhere on the other”(Packer, 3). It is

perhaps this feeling of disorientation and collapse that Winslow Homer was trying

to portray in his painting Lost on the Grand Banks, which Allan Sekula describes as

“two poor lost dory fishermen, momentarily high on a swell, peering into a wall of

fog”(Sekula, 3). The fishermen are faced with certain death. Our Man, too, is

confronted by mortal danger in his inflatable raft; the frequent shots of the raft from

the ocean below show its shadow as it eclipses the sun, the growing darkness a

visual representation for the steady decline of strength and hope as time passes

with no sign of rescue.


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As All is Lost progresses, Redford undergoes a transformation, tumbling

down the Crusoe-‐ian ladder of the Homo Economicus, and is forced to revert back to

past forms of survival on the sea. From the moment the movie begins and “Our Man”

loses his all of his electronic equipment thanks to the wayward shipping container,

misfortunes and obstacles steadily take away the tools a modern sailor uses as a

bulwark against the dangers of the sea. Like Robinson Crusoe, who before his as

marronage lived as a wealthy Brazilian plantation owner and a man benefiting

immensely from the levers of capitalism, Redford’s character is presumably wealthy

enough to own a luxurious and well-‐equipped sailboat. Our Man mirrors Crusoe’s

fall into primitive island-‐living in his actions while adrift, learning how to use a

sextant, desalinate water, use charts and logs as navigational tools, and navigate by

the stars. Desperation drives him to revive old skills and methods of living at sea, a

regression that even takes the form of the cliché message in a bottle. In the end, he is

left with nothing but the capacity to make fire, and, lacking the ability to control it,

ends up a man without any tools at all, struggling to stay afloat. While Crusoe on

land can be held up as an early example of the Homo Economicus-‐ the economic man,

individually striving to produce and profit, Our Man represents the ways in which

that idea has aged. His profit has been made – its what bought him the boat in the

first place. The rest of the movie shows the stripping away of all he had gained. If

one were to graph the narrative arcs of both stores, the nadir of Crusoe’s narrative

arc would occur at his marronage, and would climb as he built himself a new life one

the island. Conversely, Our Man’s story is one of linear decline, a constant struggle to

keep his head above the x-‐axis, or the water line.


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The only moments of hope for Our Man during the movie come when he

floats on his raft into the shipping channel, and encounters the massive container

ships of globalized capitalism. Chandor uses containers, and the ships that carry

them, to signify the ways in which the global economy has become as impersonal

and indifferent as a force of nature. The container ship, which has radically reduced

the human presence in maritime industries, simultaneously isolates and is isolated,

ensuring that Redford’s attempts to signal the ship are frustratingly

pointless. Crews on modern container ships are a fraction of what would have been

needed to sail a small merchant marine vessel. When combined with the complex

shell game of ship ownership meant to exploit legal ambiguity on international

shipping, the result is that “most ships and crews”, according to Lincoln Paine, “have

been rendered all but anonymous, stripped of their national identities by flags of

convenience and made invisible by their displacement to the industrial wastelands

on the margins of the ports they serve”(Paine, 599). Allan Sekula argues in The Fish

Story that the consequence of this isolation and anonymity is that “ships become

increasingly indistinguishable from trucks and trains, and seaways lose their

difference with highways”(Sekula, 49). The notion of Our Man alerting a container

ship to his presence, then, is as absurd as a man in the middle of nowhere flagging

down a speeding train. The images of Redford holding his flares and shouting

“Here!” at the ships recall the hatchling bird asking an enormous power shovel, “are

you my mother?” in P.D Eastman’s classic children’s book, as both illustrate the

smallness of individuals in the face of the monumental machinery of modern

capitalism. Our Man’s last attempt to flag down a container ship, where he sets his


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papers on fire and ends up setting the whole raft aflame, features a scene that

mirrors the key moment in Lord Jim. Jim, as the oncoming storm begins to howl and

the captain and engineers are preparing to abandon ship, unconsciously deserts the

ship, later recounting, “I had jumped … it seems”(Conrad 81). Our Man’s final plunge

into the sea, in much the same way, is a moment lacking intentionality, as he almost

slips out of the raft just as it begins to burn in earnest. As Redford floats in the sea,

finally subsumed by that which he had fought so hard and so long, he continues to

maintain a stoic demeanor. But while Our Man never breaks down, it is clear at the

moment when he ceases to struggle and accepts the ocean’s persistent pull towards

the depths that he most desires peace paralleling Conrad’s observation in Lord Jim,

where “ the desire for peace waxes stronger as hope declines. Those striving with

unreasonable forces know it well – the shipwrecked castaways in boats, wanderers

lost in a desert, men battling against the unthinking might of nature”(Conrad 64).

Our Man, having fought to the last, has accepted that all is lost.

While Winslow Homer’s Lost on the Grand Banks illustrates the hopelessness

of Our Man adrift during the middle of the movie, the ending of All is Lost, featuring

an ambiguous scene of rescue, more closely parallels Homer’s Life Line, where an

unknown savior attempts to lead a victim of shipwreck to safety. The final image of

the film features Redford swimming up out of the sea, having sank down, to a small

boat which materializes out of the light of the moon, grasping an unknown hand as

the final screen fades to white. An obscured savior, face covered by a piece of

windswept cloth, also figures at the center of Life Line, where both rescuer and


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rescued sit precariously above the surf on a zip line. A daring rescue underway,

Homer leaves the question of whether the operation will succeed unanswered.

Similarly in All is Lost, the question of whether the rescue really happened or was

imagined by Our Man as he sank is left up to the viewer. Redford and Chandor, in

interviews after the release of the film, said in an interview with LA Times film critic

John Horn that audiences had been split on this issue. And yet, it seems that the

rescue must have been imagined, as rescue would imply that the very mechanisms

of globalized capitalism that plagued Our Man from the very beginning ultimately

saved him, upending much of the allegorical meaning of the movie. Combined with

the fact that the small boat he sees materializes out of the light of the moon and the

highly unusual fact that the final screen fades to white (and not black), it seems

likely that Our Man imagines the final scenes. While the final image of reaching out

for the hand of rescue has brought comparisons to the near-‐touch of Adam and God

in Michelangelo’s famous Sistine Chapel scene, it seems more likely that Our Man is

envisioning a maritime – rather than religious – form of salvation. Like the

dangerous mirage of an oasis for a man lost in the desert, nothing could be more

welcome for the shipwrecked sailor than the sight of rescue.

Ultimately, Chandor’s allegorical film paints a bleak picture of the American

people and their most dearly held ideological beliefs. Far from experiencing "the

American Dream", the residents of "Main Street " have been buffeted by the strong

winds of global capitalism. The "container ships", man-‐made monstrosities, will not

stop for an individual in distress -‐ their owners and operators are just as captive to


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the processes of globalization and economic competition as the "sailors" adrift. All is

Lost is a masterful movie in its portrayal of the struggle of man vs.

nature. Chandor's point is that the modern economy, created and nurtured by man,

is just as indifferent and impersonal as a storm on the ocean, and just as likely to

leave individuals adrift and struggling to survive in its wake. Man, then, is now

capable of creating artificial forces just as capable of unthinkingly destroying a life

as a hurricane. While man has always struggled with nature, Chandor illustrates

that now he must contend with a new, even more powerful foe of his own creation.

If Redford’s fate is representative of the consequences, then the future is indeed

grim.


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First image of the film-‐ a visual representation of how "Modernity dissolves the edifying unity

of the classical maritime panorama "

Homer's famous painting, sold to Bill Gates, of two fishermen lost in a growing storm

Homer's famous scene of rescue-‐ not unlike the final frames of All is Lost


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One of the first images of All is Lost, the shot mirrors Sekula's cover photo in Fish Story

Cameramen shoot the raft from the ocean below, as it creates an eclipse of the sun


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Bibliography

Chandor, JC dir. All is Lost. Before the Door Pictures, 2013.

Clover, Joshua. “The Seafarer”. The Nation. November 5, 2013.

Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Eastman, P.D. Are You My Mother? New York, NY: Random House, 1960.

Homer, Winslow. Lost on the Grand Banks. 1885.

Homer, Winslow. Life Line. 1884.

Horn, John, “Robert Redford faces elemental challenge in 'All Is Lost’”. Los Angeles Times. October 11, 2013.

Lambert, Molly. “All is Lost: The Formidable Robert Redford Takes on the Ocean”. Grantland. December 3, 2013.

Morris, Wesley. “New Country for Old Men: On Last Vegas, The Counselor, All Is Lost, and Bad Grandpa”. Grantland. November 1, 2013.

Packer, George. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.

Paine, Lincoln. The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.

Sekula, Allan. Fish Story. Dusseldorf, Germany: Richter Verlag, 1995.

Sekula, Allan. “Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking Traffic In Photographs)”. October 102 (Autumn 2002): 3-‐34.

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