The character of Daffy in The Beach is anything but simple to explain. At first he’s a nuisance and a mystery, but as his memory is recalled by Richard, his importance is made apparent. Daffy, like Richard, escaped from everything he could and not surprisingly, his life as well. The course of the film documents Richard’s travels to Bangkok where he finds modernity pestering him there and then to the beach where he still cannot escape the forces that compelled him to escape in the first place. Daffy’s ideals and attitudes toward the beach manifest themselves in Richard’s hallucinations. Much like Sal, Daffy cared more about the idea of the beach than the reality of the people living there. The memories Richard has of him cause him to finish what Daffy couldn’t, destroy paradise in order to salvage it. In a deleted scene, Richard remarks to Sal of Daffy, “If you don’t like paradise, where else is there to go?” Why is Daffy important? What do his attitudes toward social modernity and escape shape the film and frame its themes? Are Richard’s hallucinations of Daffy also a means of escaping from the upsetting reality of the beach?
Daffy’s screen entrance is marked by his obnoxious screaming in the hall about everyone being “bastard parasites.” Richard hesitantly speaks with him and Daffy describes the beach, how it is “perfection” and a “total fucking secret.” But, he also goes on to say that when he was living there he deemed himself the “procurer of the cure” and that the other inhabitants refused. Daffy presents both the “optimistic fantasy” and the “pessimistic modernity” described by Keith James Hamel in his article “Modernity and Mise-en-scene.” Hamel writes extensively about the manner in which modernity is often manifested in film through kitch. Daffy calls the beach both perfect and then speaks of its need for a cure. This seems contradictory, but it is more accurately part of the complex emotional reaction to the complications of the unforgivable and the unforgettable aspects of modernity that cause both the need for escape to the island and the need to escape from it.
After Richard has lived in this “paradise” for a while, he is stranded on “the hill,” with the sole objective of retrieving the map he foolishly copied for some tourists he met, he becomes totally isolated. He confesses in a voice over: “the longer I was away from the community, the less I missed it.” This is when Richard reverts back to the only instinct he knows: escaping reality by placing it in the context of a video game, the simplest way someone of his age can interpret such a “primitive” situation. He simplifies his thinking and no longer cares about anything except the farmers (his “defenders”), the forest (his “territory”), and the tourists (the “invaders.”) Richard is the only one with “the overview” and the ability to manipulate the situation and “at the center of it all” is Daffy, who “shows him the way” and the manner in which to manipulate it.
The scene that immediately follows the aforementioned voiceover is one where Richard has a hallucination about Daffy. The camera beings level with Richard crouched on the floor of the forest and it moves up as he stands up. His attention is being drawn away from reality and pulled into a hallucination. He is staring into the forest and the trees blur as the starry sky did when he and Francoise were on the island before they arrived on the beach. This time it is not the perfect sky he sees with the eyes of infatuation, but the ceiling of his prison that blurs. The shot moves back and forth between Richard and the image he has of himself walking down the hall in the hotel into Daffy’s room, as he did after he found the map taped to his door, before he had any use for Daffy. When Richard gets to the door Daffy, ashen and blood-speckled, grabs him and pulls him into the room. There are gunshots in the walls, the wind is raging and paper is flying everywhere. Daffy has a rifle set up aimed out the window. He preaches about “cancers” and “parasites.” As Richard looks at him pumping rounds in the unknowing victims, Richard looks through the binoculars and sees the perspective of Daffy. He looks at the four tourists and how they collapse onto the sand. Daffy yells, “It starts with four, but they multiple.” Their faces are totally blank and there is no blood. It is a sanitary unemotional slaughter. The fact that Daffy does this with a kind of childlike enthusiasm, it resembles the way one might react to the objective of a video game. By converting the idea into such an acceptable one, Richard no longer feels upset by it. Richard says, “I’m with you all the way, Daffy.” The atmosphere is disturbing and sounds of gunfire bombard the scene, as does Daffy’s incessant screaming. Richard and Daffy both have a kind of unsettling gleam in their eyes.
Everything Daffy says in this scene is saturated in warlike intolerance. His mind is stuck in Vietnam. He dehumanizes the tourists as “big chunkie charlies eating up the whole fucking world,” in much the same way soldiers in Vietnam dehumanizes the North Vietnamese in order to kill them. Vietnam ushered in an era that we still occupy, of the United States going into other countries and killing anyone they see. Modern warfare has made civilians targets instead of armed forces, which has blurred the boundaries of war. Daffy treats the four tourists on the beach in a similar fashion. He likens the threat of the “domino effect” of Soviet Communism to the battle to protect the idea of the uncorrupted island paradise. Richard watches as Daffy glorifies the extermination of the “invaders.” Richard believes getting the map back to be his only concern. After that, he can send the tourists on their way and everything can go back to the way it was before. The perspective that Daffy gives Richard appeals to him in his delirium. He begins to understand and “admire” Daffy even though he is a “nutter.” Daffy’s philosophy becomes the answer to redeeming paradise and keeping it free from invaders.
Daffy’s unique feelings toward the beach inspire Richard, making Daffy in his death a figure in the film that is not judged by the same criteria any of the other characters are. Richard’s perception of Daffy causes Daffy to take on a kind of superhuman importance much like Tyler Durden in Fight Club. His philosophy is to do anything in order to destroy the modernity that is consuming the world and occupying all the former goodness of the idea of supposed primitive society. He convinces Richard that tourists, analogous to the consumer culture of mindless drones, are ruining the few good things that are left. “Year zero,” that Daffy says several times, recalls Tyler Durden’s “Ground zero.” The community on the beach may resemble what Tyler would want the result of Project Mayhem to be: simple, fair and uncorrupted. But, as Daffy points out, this is not what it really is. It has its own elements of modernity and its social hierarchy. Just as the middle class American society portrayed in Fight Club buys into the advertisement-driven optimistic fantasy of what life is like, so do the people on the beach believe that their ideals are being met and that they are happy, if only because they think they should be. About halfway through the film, Francoise asks Richard if he’s happy and he says, “I guess. You know, the beach is perfect.” Even though the beach does not seem like the world outside, the people who populate it are nonetheless from that world and bring with them socially inborn ideas about what society should be. They believe it to be glamorous to the extent that they do not realize it’s not actually that different. It’s a microcosm of what modern society undoubtedly is. This community is a group of people like any other, but this group of people had these ideals, which cannot be challenged by reality.
In a separate delusion following the one mentioned earlier, Daffy says, “It’s all up to you, Richard.” Through Richard’s introversion, Daffy becomes his commander; he is now imparted to finish what Daffy did not, fixing the beach by destroying it. The only things that Daffy ever actually says to Richard are full of bittersweet sentiment. He describes both the perfection of the beach, but also the refusal of the inhabitants to leave. They are infecting the island with their modern ways, violating the very nature of the paradise, making another world that needs to be escaped from. Every individual person on the beach has a pact with his or herself to seem content and to keep the dream alive no matter what challenges it.
The unhappiness of the people in the community is demonstrated very well through the scene in which each person dictates to Richard what they would like from the mainland. They are obviously dependent on the existence of the modern world, but they feel morally superior by not literally living in it. They ask for batteries, industrial strength soap, hair conditioner and make-up remover. If they had honestly rejected the very concept of modernity, they would reject its products as well. They want to have it both ways. The fact that Richard has sex with Francoise when she’s with Etienne and then has sex with Sal despite Bugs’ warning shows that this society they’ve created does not satisfy them. They still need an escape, a new escape. Their need, like a virus creating antibiotic resistant strains of itself, breeds new and more specific needs for escape. Each escape just raises the expectations for the next. The concept of viruses has great importance in this film. One must wonder what the virus is: the people, their ideals, their inherent modern way of living, Daffy, Richard, Sal? This is similar to the realization “Jack” in Fight Club comes to when he finds out what Tyler is planning. A hobby turns into something much more volatile and it’s no fun anymore because it becomes something to be escaped from as well.
In his final voiceover, Richard says, “I still believe in paradise,” but he knows that it can’t be looked for. Sal believed so much in the beach that when she refuses to shoot Richard to appease the farmers, she kills herself and, at the same time, her dream. She, like Daffy, deluded herself. They refused to move back into the real world. Their conception of perfection never materialized, but they yearned for it with unparalleled fervor. Sal says, “We have so much here to inspire us.” She says that it’s the people, not the location that keeps them going. It’s their ideals that push them to continue to struggle for some semblance of purity. Their collective desire was not enough to make it come true, though. It was Sal who tried to keep order and supported the removal of anything unpleasant, such as Christo and his suffering, to keep up the image of the beach as the paradise they all believed it to be. Their utopia had no room for suffering or tragedy, nor anything else that we all would consider a part of life itself. Even while on the beach, these people escaped into their own ideals of what it should be like in order to keep going.