mythological matrix and high modernism in Apocalypse Now (article)
RMJon23
newsgroup...well, you may "be" right. I'd argue that it DOES belong, and maybe
you haven't "been" reading him closely enough. Yea, and verily I doth find it
weird this appeared in Interview. -rmjon23)
Interview, August 2001 v31 i8 p78
SHOTS IN THE DARK. (Brief Article)(Critical Essay) GRAHAM FULLER.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
APOCALYPSE NOW, NOW
Apocalypse Now Redux, as the reedited version of Francis Ford Coppola's Vietnam
war odyssey is called, contains 53 minutes of footage omitted from the 1979
cut. The "new" scenes humanize the conflict by softening the protagonist,
Willard (Martin Sheen), as he heads upriver to assassinate the rogue American
colonel, Kurtz (Marion Brando), who has gone on a rampage with an army of
Montagnard tribesmen and American deserters and crossed over into Cambodia.
In a "new" comic sequence, Willard steals the surfboard belonging to the air
cavalry colonel, Kilgore (Robert Duvall), incensing its deranged owner and
building a hitherto unsuspected bond between Willard and the boys on the Navy
patrol boat. They have further cause to like Willard when he buys them the
sexual favors of the USO Playboy bunnies with fuel for their downed helicopter
at an abandoned medevac camp. But when Chef (Frederic Forrest) and Lance (Sam
Bottoms) try to get it on with the bunnies, one twitters on about birds and the
other about being abused in her job; the suggestion that the sexual exploiting
of girls is akin to sending boys to war is problematic, to say the least.
Neither Phillips (Albert Hall), the boat's captain, nor Willard touch the
bunnies, but we learn of Phillips' fatherly feelings toward Clean (Larry
Fishburne), when he buries the dead boy at the beginning of the restored French
plantation sequence. Over dinner, the French patriarch (Christian Marquand)
regales Willard with an arrogant imperialistic history lesson, concluding, "You
Americans fight for the biggest nothing in history." His bickering relatives
stalk out and Willard spends the night with a young widow, Roxanne (Aurore
Clement) in an opium haze. The tender scene reveals Willard's
vulnerability--but who's to say Roxanne isn't a Beatrice or that she and her
family aren't ghosts?
Coppola and editor Walter Murch restored one scene involving Kurtz. He reads to
the incarcerated Willard a Time magazine report of an intelligence officer's
commendation of America's progress in the war to President Nixon. Kurtz sneers
at this obvious lie and we would see him as a more humane man at this point if
he hadn't decapitated Chef the night before.
The dreamlike plantation interlude aside, the restored footage balances both
the film's combat sequences and its complex mythic subtext, the power of which
is undiminished. After the press screening I attended, I overheard a young
woman telling her girlfriends she had expected Willard, having ritually
executed Kurtz, to succeed him as the ruler of his Montagnard cult. Willard has
fulfilled his destiny, preordained by ancient myths, to become the new king,
but he leaves carrying Kurtz's memoirs.
The air strike on Kurtz's compound that back-grounded the credits on the 70mm
print is not included here. The last image we see is the one of Willard's face
superimposed next to a pagan idol as Kurtz whispers, "The horror! The horror!",
a quote from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness; T.S. Eliot, whose poems are in
Kurtz's library, had once intended these words as an epigraph to The Waste
Land. The film ends, then, "not with a bang but a whimper"--the last lines from
Eliot's "The Hollow Men," and the last spoken by the crazed photojournalist
(Dennis Hopper).
Whether she knew it or not, the woman at the screening was invoking the
Arthurian Fisher King myth, inscribed by Eliot in The Waste Land as a metaphor
for moral and spiritual decline in the 20th century. The Fisher King is a
pan-cultural mythic figure that Sir James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, and
Jessie L. Weston, in From Ritual to Romance (two more books glimpsed in Kurtz's
quarters) traced back to pre-Christian fertility cults. Because the Fisher King
is maimed or sick, his people have become infertile and his country a
wasteland. A knight can replenish the land by healing and succeeding him, or,
as in the case of Willard, terminating Kurtz's command "with extreme
prejudice."
The Conrad-Frazer-Weston-Eliot web is the key to understanding what Karl
French, in his A-Z guide to Apocalypse Now, recognizes as its role in "the
spiritual continuum that links modern myths to those of Christianity, Hinduism,
Buddhism and pagan rituals." The film's skein of references draw the Kilgore
brand of slaughter and the mutilations carried out at the Breughelesque hell of
Kurtz's temple into a timeless cycle of decay and rebirth. This is Apocalypse
Now's secret history--and its window into the past that existed before history.
Graham Fuller is Interview's Film Writer at Large.
1.618 (fka 227)
As with all of the articles you've posted (and I've read) I'm always left with
the urge to research some subject (or five) further and a few things to think
about. That alone qualifies it, imo, let alone the subjects discussed
(mythology, fertility cults, shifting reality-tunnels, poetry, Playboy, etc.),
the mindset it invokes and the layered doh-see-doh of coincidancing rawstuff.
Thanks again,
R
"RMJon23" <rmj...@aol.comnotrash> wrote in message
news:20010830031233...@mb-mf.aol.com...
: (If the reader doesn't think this belongs in a Robert Anton Wilson
: newsgroup...well, you may "be" right. I'd argue that it DOES belong, and
maybe
: you haven't "been" reading him closely enough. Yea, and verily I doth find it
: weird this appeared in Interview. -rmjon23)
:
: Interview, August 2001 v31 i8 p78
: SHOTS IN THE DARK. (Brief Article)(Critical Essay) GRAHAM FULLER.
:
: Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
:
:
: APOCALYPSE NOW, NOW
(schnipe)