How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Iconic Movie Volleyball I Happen to Share a Name with

Everybody remembers Tom Hanks yelling "Wilson!" in "Cast Away." But did you have to grow up hearing it?

There are movies that you love in part because of the memories you hold of them, from childhood favorites that are practically imprinted in your brain to blockbusters improved by a particularly amazing screening. Less talked about is the opposite: films you hate because they’re attached in some way to a moment or experience you want to forget.

Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” is a horrible movie, yes, but I probably would not feel as strongly repulsed by it had I not first seen it in theaters with a 110-degree fever and spent the last 20 minutes puking my guts out in the bathroom.

But no film looms over this writer’s life as largely as “Cast Away,” Robert Zemeckis’ survival drama about Tom Hanks getting stranded on a deserted island, which I also never actually watched the whole way through until well into adulthood. If you don’t understand why, take a second to scroll up a little and read that byline.

You can probably understand where we’re going here.

I was born in 1999, a year before “Cast Away” hit theaters on December 22, 2000. In a “Sliding Doors” moment I think about quite often, my parents had two names they were still debating upon my birth: the very conventional George and the somewhat less-so Wilson. Family legend (or perhaps Mom and Dad trying to shift some blame) has it that it was one of the neonatal nurses who convinced them to go with Wilson.

The name itself, according to a phone call with my mother I took while writing this essay, came indirectly from her family tree: it was the name of a friend and business partner of my great-great-grandfather (or maybe great-great-great? We don’t really remember), one my grandmother suggested. Notably, though, it wasn’t his first name; it was his last.

“Wilson” is a very common last name in general; it was the tenth most popular last name in the U.S. during the year 2000. It’s considerably more rare first name, however, apparently ranking around the 500s in given names during the ’90s and since sliding down to the 600s in the 2000s onward.

Growing up, I never met anyone who shared it as a given name, and there were a scant few places where I saw it used by a public figure or a character in film and TV. By my recollection, there was:

• The author of “Where the Red Fern Grows,” a novel that traumatized me in 7th grade English class.
• The next-door neighbor in “Home Improvement,” a show that I only saw via Nick at Nite reruns at 11 p.m.
• The subject of the “Phish” song of the same name, which I only ever heard about from an aging hippie director at a theater camp I went to the summer before high school.

And then, of course, there’s the Wilson of “Cast Away,” arguably the most famous person (give or take your definition of a person) to bear the name.

The box office hit follows Hanks’ FedEx systems analyst Chuck (famously, they show a lot of the company’s branding in the movie), who is the only survivor of a plane crash that lands him on a remote island in the Pacific Ocean. He has no way of contacting the outside world, and only a handful of (FedEx!) packages to help him survive.

One of these packages contains a brand-new volleyball, who Chuck names Wilson after the Wilson Sporting Goods company. Hanks decorates the ball with a smeared bloody red handprint to give him a friend of sorts on the island, and uses him to conveniently talk through his thoughts for the audience’s sake.

I first became aware of “Cast Away” when I was around 7 years old, at the Maine house of family friends my parents took me to visit one summer. On their living room TV, I sat through a random 30 minutes or so before I changed the channel to Cartoon Network because “Pokémon: Lucario and the Mystery of Mew” was playing.

I do remember vaguely thinking it was funny and cool that the volleyball shared my name, and I did witness The Scene. You already know the one. The climactic moment in which Chuck takes a raft out to sea to try and escape the island, only for Wilson the volleyball to fall off his vessel and float away, leaving a heartbroken Chuck to bellow, at the top of his lungs, “Willllsooooooooon!” in a cadence that is both extremely memorable and extremely imitable.

Apparently, 7 years old is the prime age to introduce your kids to “Cast Away,” because that following school year was also when I started to become aware of my classmates — and some adults who thought it was fun to tease an elementary schooler — greeting me with their best Hanks’ impression. As a kid, it’s pretty customary to get your name mocked on the playground at least once in your life, but as far as names with Anglo-Saxon origins go, few had as easy or obvious a punchline as Wilson did in the mid-2000s.

The first time I heard it, I probably thought it was funny: the tenth and twentith and two-hundreth time? Not so much.

Getting the “Willllsoooooon” yell at me in the hallway of school, at summer camp, when I was introducing myself to new people, became a constant I always had to expect and prepare for. It also, annoyingly, did not stop after fifth grade or even eighth grade, continuing through high school and well into college. As I got older, I also had to field genuine questions from people about whether my parents named me after Chuck’s volleyball, who I began to regard as my mortal enemy.

As you can imagine, people using your name as a punchline, no matter how benign or harmless, isn’t exactly a positive experience for an admittedly thin-skinned and insecure child/teen to deal with. It made me hate the name to the point where I went through an angsty, overdramatic phase during which I considered changing it. I tried occasionally to make a nickname stick, but people always told me “your name is perfect for you,” presumably because I was the only person with the first name that they had actually met.

If anyone were to ask pretentious teenage me in high school, I would have told them that “Cast Away” is one of the worst films ever made, an overly sentimental and vacuous bore that deserved none of the $429 million it made at the box office. Yes, I was basing this off of 30 minutes I half-remembered seeing during my childhood, but I had a grudge against this film, Robert Zemeckis, and sort of Tom Hanks (“Toy Story” and “That Thing You Do!” were enough to elevate him to thin ice), and was too stubborn to ever budge against it.

Of course, once you get to real adulthood, yelling “Willlllsoooooooon” at someone you just met becomes significantly less socially acceptable, and slowly the references trickled to a crawl. They never completely stopped, and choosing to go into writing about movies for a living did not exactly help, but it became an occasional annoyance instead of a constant.

About two years ago, on a random weekday evening, I decided to take a step that I had refused for years. I was going to actually sit down and watch the film people had associated my name with for my entire life. I typically go into every movie trying to keep an open mind, but I did not have pure intentions here: the stubborn part of me wanted it to be bad. I wanted to hate it. And I wanted to watch that scene where Hanks wails over losing a volleyball in the water and think that it was cheap, dumb, and embarrassing.

Instead, like many people who watch “Cast Away,” I cried.

Actually, really watching Zemeckis’ film, I found a movie that’s a lot more raw and stripped-down than I was expecting from him (not to denigrate the man who gave us “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”), with little of the sentimentality that sometimes overburdens his productions. The opening is slow and the ending is a bit of groaner, but the bulk of the film that’s simply Chuck trying to survive on the island is riveting, methodical stuff, pure competence porn, as you watch him slowly but surely adapt to living in the wild and improve his techniques until he’s finally able to escape.

The Wilson of it all initially registered as a false note while watching, but eventually I appreciated what it added, both as a reflection of how Chuck is slowly going stir-crazy alone on the island and as a clever way to provide a film with mostly just one character the vague shape of a two-hander. And Hanks gives maybe his greatest performance ever, a committed turn that fully lets you buy into the isolation and desperate circumstances and creates genuine pathos between him and his inanimate friend.

So when the “Willllsoooon” moment hit, despite having heard that moment quoted back to me more times than I can ever possibly count, I found myself surprisingly moved by it. On paper, it’s a ridiculous scene: the reason why it’s so famous is arguably that it’s so silly for a grown man to mourn the “death” of a volleyball. And yet, in the context of the movie, it doesn’t feel like it at all — between the stirring Alan Silvestri score that plays and Hanks’ performance, which goes all out in depicting his sadness at losing Wilson as real, deeply devastating grief, the scene manages to transcend any sense of silliness to be fully emotionally enveloping.

Watching it made me vaguely annoyed that a film scene so good could be reduced to just a cheap joke my whole life.

Did “Cast Away” become my favorite movie? Absolutely not, but with some distance from my childhood — and some recognition of the importance of having a sense of humor about yourself — I’ve learned to appreciate the film. And while having my name turn into a movie reference the year after I was born may not have been exactly ideal, I can choose to look on the bright side: my name is one people have always immediately remembered.

I have Tom Hanks and a very special volleyball to thank for that.