Interstitial Eardrums of Jason Robards

"Man has a tropism for order."-- Miss Lonelyhearts, p. 30

There is a subtextual chill in the opening to the turn of the century Cast Away (2000). Tom Hanks is at the peak of his power as Chuck Noland, and Hollywood decided to do something useful by appropriating Federal Express to make us worry about the future behemoths, like Google and Amazon. Precision and exact empirical measurement toward the best efficiency model is no protection against the fact that humanity spins on a large egg shell in the 93 million mile sweet spot from our star for no reason except one: Process will always find a way if there is a way. Process simply is what it is, and phenomenology may be able to offer some observations about intentionality and the directional nature of self-awareness, but consciousness is a process, not an object. Sartre claims we have to objectify it in order to exposit it but not in the motifs that made Hanks one of the last great American superstars. This discounts Cloud Atlas, which should not have been filmed, though any writer understands Mitchell's impetus to do what any other writer does with the capital on acclaim. For Hanks, it is about faith in the trajectory. It may kill you, as it does in Road to Perdition (2002), and it may be mawkish and badly written in made for television format, as is the case with the young Philadelphia, which needed a better focus and a less multitudinous  outlay: Robards as the happy hating partner in the firm is the only cast member who brings any life to this staid legal drama which only barely wrestles with the reality of infectious diseases to expose civil liberties for pleasant cream puffs.

Why did Robards excel towards the end of his life with the ferocity of emaciation? It is there in the social uptake of the 1980 Melvin and Howard, but what is the gravity Jason uses? He understands the nature of pain, even anguish, that unalterably takes Hanks out of the world in his great treasure island movie. Hollywood, being Hollywood, is not going to be explicit about the price tag of Noland's survival once he gets back home and urged to "sign for" anything he needs, but damage changes who and what we are, even in the quieter possibilities of a more nuanced relationship after battle.