Analysis Of The 1997 Adaptation Of Robinson Crusoe

Postmodernism: The Death Of True Art and Humanity, An essay on the 1997 adaptation of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is a 1997 American survival drama directed by Rod Hardy and George T. Miller, starring Pierce Brosnan in the titular role of Robinson Crusoe. The movie is based on Daniel Defoe’s novel, Robinson Crusoe. The novel is believed to be the first English novel and it was originally published between 1718 and 1723, during the Neoclassical era of literature. The story is an epic tale of survival, arguable heroism and it bites violently at the colonial tendencies of the English people.

Postmodernism in art has included a move toward non-referential, non-linear, abstract forms; a heightened degree of self-referentiality; and the collapse of categories and conventions that had traditionally governed art. Postmodern thought has led to the serious questioning of the so-called metanarratives of history, science, philosophy, and economic and sexual reproduction. Under postmodernity, all knowledge comes to be seen as ‘constructed’ within historical self-contained systems of understanding. It is these negative, perilous effects of the conscious attempt to deviate from and flout certain conceptions in art and human life that this text sets out to assess, using instances from the film and the novel, in a way of contrast and comparison.

The film opens to a fictionalized Daniel Defoe being offered to read a castaway’s autobiography; he grudgingly obliges and begins to get engrossed in the narrative. At the beginning of the novel, however, we are introduced to a man who has natural inducements to go to sea, to explore; a man who, despite the stern warnings of his parents, decides to leave his homeland; a man characterized by a somewhat fanatical, unrestrained quest for knowledge, just like the Neoclassical man — the classical man, too, by extension, because the Neoclassical era was basically an imitation of the old Greco-Roman values, ideas, behavioral patterns and possibilities, and style. Compared to the postmodern man in the movie, who grudgingly accepts to read a book, the antique man in the novel, has a natural tendency to read, to know. Postmodernism has reduced intellectual prowess to nothing, replacing it with an invigorated thirst for wealth and desire to express, even when there is nothing to express.

In the Neoclassical era of literature, the era, as has been earlier stated, that birthed the novel, the writers wrote essentially to satirize; they wrote to criticize, to lampoon and bring to bare certain societal ills, thorns or vices. They wrote to correct these vices, as is expected of a satire and the works were real: real in the sense that they reflected the societal values, and decay, of that era, without any form of alteration or restraint. What we find, however, in the film is a terrible misrepresentation, mis-telling and poor reproduction of the great English novel. The film fails totally in retelling the tale in several ways: the actors are too unprofessional, too unskilled, and this affects the quality of the film; the film is not properly directed — there are too many lapses in it. A critic, in fact, once called it ‘laughable’. In contrast to the deftly calculated pace of the novel itself, the film does not allow for proper immersion; things happen too fast and this makes the story unrelatable, unreal. The adaptation is a awfully sad reproduction of the respected novel; it is a huge disgrace, a terrible condescension to Arts in general, and this is the effect of postmodernism. This is the way it is: let us just out something out there and gain quick acceptance. The postmodern man, although exposed, is not capable of patience or the ability to think clearly; his mind has been so muddled up that hardly does he even know who he is anymore.

Postmodernism masks incapability and insufficiency as deviance and this is what we find in this film. The postmodern man is so comfortable with mediocrity that he now sees his substandard, new-fangled ideas as proper or ideal. This, in conclusion, is what postmodernism has reduced Arts and Humanity too, a plaything.

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