1. The set-up.
I finally went to see Cast Away. It was one of those mass-culture juggernauts, which meant references to it would become part of standard discourse. And I had read several reviews by trustworthy critics which indicated the movie had something more going for it than the usual Hollywood pap.

What nobody had mentioned, and what stunned me, was the fact that, whatever else it may be, Cast Away is a 150-minute commercial for FedEx: product placement carried to its ultimate, logical conclusion.

Tom Hanks is a FedEx manager who scoots about the globe getting various shipping centers to function at top efficiency. In the 30-minute set-up before he gets to his desert island, we watch him work, and the screen is constantly filled with FedEx logos: planes, packages, signs. The dialog is like an in-house FedEx promo (FedEx people do it like THIS!), complete with the occasional disparaging remark about UPS.

Even during the hour-long middle of the movie, with Tom on the island, we continue to be brand-bombarded. FedEx packages from the plane crash keep washing up on the beach—not entirely inconveniently: poor Tom probably wouldn’t have survived without the tools he fashions from their contents. Tom maintains his sanity by making a head from a volleyball in one of the packages. He talks endlessly to "Wilson" and at one point even reminds Wilson that there are other volleyballs in the world, mentioning "Spalding" as a possible rival.

Realism? Maybe a kind of capitalistic verismo? Sure, you can make the argument that the movie is showing us our world and ours is a world of brand names.

But let us not forget what advertisers and those who create and sell advertising know into their very marrow: exposure counts. While the constant product placement in Cast Away can be seen as "realism," its role as advertising can not be denied. Movie as 150-minute commercial.

Nobody complained. Not even the critics. The critics in fact generally praised the movie, and the worldwide audience embraced it to the tune of hundreds of millions of box office dollars.

2. The pay-off
A few years back I was teaching a class of newly arrived Vietnamese refugees. Their knowledge of English was such that if they could have spent their entire lives either driving on a freeway or ordering food in McDonald's they would have had little need of ESL class. But there they were, and there I was. There we were, together in the classroom situation. So desperately needy were they for basic English that by the end of the second week I was dangerously near the bottom of my bag of teaching tricks.

One day we found ourselves drawing pictures of any outdoor scene they had experienced in the United States. When they finished we would talk about the experience (ho-ho), etc., etc. Things were going well, drawings were produced, monosyllabic utterances were exchanged, approval was given or withheld by the teacher, etc., etc. Until we came to Mr. Ha's drawing.

In the course of the class, I had already learned that in Vietnam Mr. Ha had worked as a commercial artist. For today's assignment, he produced a highly detailed rendering of a visit he had made to the Port of Houston. Clearly, Mr. Ha had a remarkable visual memory and the drawing talent to put what he remembered on paper.

In the foreground were docks and warehouses where one saw longshorepersons busily operating the various complicated equipment involved in loading and unloading ships. In the background was the busy port fading to the horizon. In the middle distance, docked at a wharf was a large freighter, rendered in side view. Mr. Ha had clearly worked hard to reproduce all the many small details he had observed about this freighter, including the name of the shipping company, which was painted in very large white letters along the side of the ship.

The company that owned this freighter is one of the largest shipping companies in the world, and I had seen their ships often in the Port of Houston and elsewhere. This company paints its name very large on the side of all its ships; the letters must be a good 10 feet high. Mr. Ha had even reproduced the sans serif font the company uses. But there was one slight problem. He had carefully printed out, all caps:

L-Y-K-E   L-I-N-E

The reader may perhaps know this company, and know what Mr. Ha had left out. The name of the company is, LykeS LineS. Mr. Ha, observant, careful artist that he was, had seen everything about the panorama in the port. Everything except two giant, white S's on the side of the ship.

For you and me, the company is "LYKES LINES." For Mr. Ha, the company was "LYKE LINE."

Why? Because Vietnamese has no consonants at the ends of words. All Vietnamese words end in vowels sounds. Every ESL teachers knows and struggles with this fact. Teachers quickly understand that Vietnamese speakers do not even HEAR the final consonants in English. Why? Because they know, from their own language that such sounds are not important. Not worth paying attention to.

But the little drawing lesson with Mr. Ha showed me that not only do Vietnamese speakers not HEAR the final consonants. They do not even SEE them. For Mr. Ha, the two S’s didn’t even exist.

Of course those letters (and those sounds) existed, and they were important. But not for him.