Desert Islands and the Liquid Modern by Barney Samson

Author:Barney Samson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030570460
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

For Bauman, the dominant discourse of solid modernity was the ‘Joshua discourse,’ which envisages “a world split into managers and the managed,” where the “managers, designers and supervisors … jointly wrote the script for others to follow” (2006, 54). Liquid modernity, on the other hand, is characterised by “the absence of a Supreme Office” (2006, 60), such that the radically individualised individual has to decide which objectives to work towards. An uninhabited island has the potential to dramatise this “unstructured, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics” (Bauman 2006, 8): castaways have sole responsibility for how they live. The practice of space in The Blue Lagoon dramatises the tension between these paradigms. The castaways first settle on the beach, literally and figuratively between the unexplored ‘interior’ of the island and the ocean that connects them to ‘home.’ In a montage set on the rocky shore, the children play and Paddy teaches them survival skills. They build a shelter on the edge of the beach, which—as noted by Dening in relation to real, historical island experiences—is a space of negotiation “between here and there, us and them, good and bad, familiar and strange” (1980, 32). Paddy fails to successfully inhabit the role of authority figure. Soon after their arrival, he chases the children along the beach as they refuse to wash in the sea: “We don’t want to go swimming!” objects Emmeline. The children still have an Edwardian sense of propriety, with Richard explaining that they “don’t have our bathing costumes!” A later reversal of this shot shows that the children have changed: naked, they run down the beach in the opposite direction as Paddy calls “Come back here and put your clothes on!” As the children become progressively more independent of the societal expectations of ‘home,’ Paddy comes to represent the “rules and modes of conduct” to which the solid modern subject was expected to conform (Bauman 2006, 7). The sequence represents the children’s ability to behave as liquid modern “diasporic wanderers” whose behaviour adapts rather than being fixed (Jay 2010, 97). Unlike many earlier desert island narratives whose protagonists seek to bend the desert island to their will, reconstructing it in the image of ‘home’ (Robinson Crusoe being the supreme example), here the beach is represented as a space in which the “law-proffering authorities” of solid modernity are lacking (Bauman 2006, 63), and where new identities can be explored.

The topos of ‘home’ (and its structuring of “life-politics”) is present in the stereoscope image cards that wash up on the beach. However, the images are presented in such a way that their potential to be authoritative is undermined, as they exist between diegetic and extra-diegetic representational modes. A black and white image of a wedding fills the frame as if to suggest that it constitutes extra-diegetic commentary visible to the viewer but not to the protagonists (Fig. 4.2). The ontological status of this image is complicated by the fact that it ‘swims,’ out of focus, which destabilises its function

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