Apocalypse Now: Working Papers

I've now taken my posts about Apocalypse Now and gathered them into a single downloadable PDF, which you will find at my Social Science Research Network Site. I've appended both the Abstract and the Introduction to this post.

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Abstract

This is series of informal essays about Apocalypse Now that argues that the movie as a whole takes the from of a classic rite of passage as described by Durkheim and van Gennep. Particular attention is given to the opening montage, the trip into the jungle for mangoes, the sampan massacre, the final parallel killings of Kurtz and the caribao, and parallels between characters. There is a descriptive précis of the whole film that organizes it into five large sequences and screen shots throughout.

Introduction: Shakespeare Couldn’t Do This

I don’t know just when I bought Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier. But it was several years ago. I watched the film, most likely the original first, and was blown away: Shakespeare didn’t do this, I thought. In the spectacle department there’s no contest, just as Shakespeare wins the poetry competition.

Was I then thinking that Apocalypse Now was comparable to The Bard?

Yep, that’s what I was thinking.

[The horror! The horror!]

I still think so, but won’t bother to argue it. The Bard, after all, is untouchable, mythic, beyond category. Francis Ford Coppola, on the other hand, makes wine on the side.

When, for whatever reason, I finally decided to post something on the film, I decided to post doubts (see listing of posts below). And I had no firm intention to do any more than that. But, once I was in, I was in. I figured I’d do two, maybe three more posts. I had no intention of doing eleven posts, and I’d have done a twelfth if I hadn’t decided to start working on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Apocalypse Now — too much then?

I’ve watched the film again, though over two sittings one day apart. It’s gorgeous, powerful, perhaps great. But I wonder how it will play in 50 years when no one will have been alive during the Vietnam War and no one will remember eagerly buying The Doors’ debut album, the one with The End as the last track on side two.

That’s the music Coppola uses to frame the film. We open with Willard working on a binge while the Doors preach on the sound track. And we close as Willard terminates Kurtz’s command to that same music.

It works, it really does. But I don’t think The End will survive on its own. It’s not going to become a classic. Perhaps Apocalypse Now will keep it alive. Perhaps not.

The film’s Wikipedia entry provides ample material for those wishing to bank on the film’s enduring value. For example:

In 2002, Sight and Sound magazine polled several critics to name the best film of the last 25 years and Apocalypse Now was named number one. It was also listed as the second best war film by viewers on Channel 4's 100 Greatest War Films, and ranked number 1 on Channel 4's 50 Films To See Before You Die. In a 2004 poll of UK film fans, Blockbuster listed Kilgore's eulogy to napalm as the best movie speech.[42] The helicopter attack to Ride of the Valkyries was chosen as the most memorable film scene ever by the Empire magazine.

In 2009, the London Film Critics' Circle voted Apocalypse Now the best movie of the last 30 years.

That’s impressive. Heck, the film IS impressive. But will it last?

That same Wikipedia entry quotes Roget Ebert’s 1979 review as saying, "Apocalypse Now achieves greatness not by analyzing our 'experience in Vietnam', but by re-creating, in characters and images, something of that experience". Is that enough for greatness? And from just whose experience is this something being re-created in that film? A soldier who survived ‘Nam; one who didn’t? A mother, a brother? A farmer, a lawyer, a CEO? A draft dodger, a war resister? A stoned hippie? I don’t know.

"This is the end, my only friend, the end . . . "

Mimi does Jim(my)? Channeling 60s rock! Yeah. Check it out (the history, I mean).

Paley's visuals sure take the piss out of the metaphysical pretensions of Morrison's Lizard King poetics.

Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is unleashing them on the world under a copyleft license.