Metphor in Apocalypse Now Chapter 3 Part 2 of

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

This is your dream. This is your nightmare. —Lines from one draft of Apocalypse Now

One of the permutations of life=chaos is life=dream, since dreams are themselves chaotic. And just as the main metaphor life=chaos varies according to context and presentation, so its permutation life = dream has itself spawned diverse sub-sub-varieties. One of these begins with Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (1899), which takes its diluted version of stage seven from Buddhism by way of Arthur Schopenhauer. Despite talking about the unconscious, Schopenhauer reduces Buddhism to a philosophy, i.e., to a conscious level, which for stage seven involves an acute awareness of entropy and pain. Based on that limitation, Kurtz expresses it as a nightmarish “horror” at the “heart” of life.

Graves hypothesized that all stages lay dormant in each individual as Jung presumed his archetypes did. What gives poetic resonance to such metaphors as life being a tale told by an idiot or its being a horror is that they approximate the beginning attitude of stage seven. Conrad’s version has continued to evolve throughout an entire stream of wasteland literature, rock songs, and even such movies as that controversial adaptation of “Heart of Darkness” Apocalypse Now. It begins with a man waking from terrors to a life that cannot be distinguished from nightmare—even though it is also the exciting existence for which he longs. Inherent within it is the notion of a suspect unconscious, but also the hope that the nightmare may lead to some illumination that is its cure.

“Heart of Darkness” constitutes the original troubling vision. Subsequent evolution resembles psychological amplification as practiced by Jung or his follower James Hillman, who had patients meditate on their half–conscious metaphors to face the major decisions of their lives. Jung thought of “visual imagery and metaphor as an abstract cognitive faculty in its own right” (Hunt 8). That “Heart of Darkness” inspired amplification is not surprising, since Marlow, the central narrator, is said to tell tales with “meaning ... not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine”(Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 5). Since, according to the novella’s basic trope, the heart is dark and empty, meaning must be for it elsewhere, de-centered.


Similitudes and Metaphors of Oriental Religion

In the last paragraph, the narrator of Conrad’s frame story says, “Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha” (Conrad Heart of Darkness, 79). Rather than superimpose Marlow and Buddha (metaphor), the text shows the former posed like or posing as the latter (implied simile). Unlike the film, this novella is almost as reserved as Schopenhauer.

In Marlow’s tale, life should be rejected because it is a nightmare—a lesson supposedly known in the East but not yet learned by the West. Schopenhauer taught that the arts could provide the West with a form of meditation on phenomena to distance and wean aesthetes from the will to live. To the extent that will implies a desire to follow as preordained plan, some dissociation from it may loosen frozen states. Buddhism adds that this loosening leads to an ineffable change (which Jung interpreted as the manifestation of the Self). Conrad, however, does not present a very developed version of stage seven and even what he provides is more than some can understand.

The critic Albert Guerard, for instance, remarks: “Perhaps the chief contradiction of “Heart of Darkness” is that it suggests and dramatizes evil as an active energy (Kurz and his unspeakable lusts) but defines evil as vacancy” (Guerard 35). Actually, the lusts are objectionable because they constitute attachment to life but the vacancy may be their cure. Conrad distinguishes between tranquil capitulation and gloomy, brooding resistance against the inevitable: “The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. ...Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute.... [until in final darkness] the serenity became less brilliant but more profound” (Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 4). According to the Schopenhauerean interpretation of Buddhism, Buddha’s enlightenment is a brilliance consequent upon accepting the burst of energy from darkness-engendering entropy—whereas resisting it (futilely) makes the West gloomy.

Ultimately, however, the West may become reconciled to the darkness, the disappearance of consciousness, achieving “serenity” that is “profound.” In ‘“Henry James, an Appreciation,” Conrad writes: “Wherever he stands, at the beginning or the end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to his passions or his passions to his gods” (Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters, 17). Amid images of the end, Marlow apparently chooses the way of spirituality rather than of passion, of serene assent to life as mere dream, preparatory to the dreamless sleep of oblivion.

Being (despite its higher aspirations) a stage-five, commercial product, Apocalypse Now clings to excitement and passion. Near the movie’s beginning and end, trying to order the chaos of his life, instead of sitting in a meditation–like pose, the Marlow-character, Willard (Martin Sheen), does Tai Chi, actual meditation, but in motion. It has an Asian religious origin, yet with application in the martial arts. First, in his room, he enacts the ritual, dressed only in his underpants, the scene superimposed on shots of forest and fire. The rotating ceiling fan merges with attack helicopters in memories of savage battle—a cinematic metaphor for his divided state of mind. He seems drunken or deranged. (Indeed, Sheen actually was the former.) Soldiers arriving with Willard’s assignment evidence shock at his semi-nudity, the state of the room, and his altered consciousness. Further imposed on the scenes is Willard’s voice-over from some later time, so that the multiple layers of the scene fuse past, present, and future. According to Biró, cinematic metaphor inherently involves an apocalyptic end of time: “Metaphors appear to have but one role: to annihilate, to devour time” (Biró 118). More precisely, this devouring swallows but does not annihilate time, which remains, straining against containment.

Emblems of its passage continue to emerge during the river trip—a metaphoric plunge into the past, analogous to a movement into psychological depths. Motoring amidst firestorms toward the destination of his mission, a shattered Buddhist temple, Willard again does Tai Chi as voice-overs by his future self create an apocalyptic sense of inevitability to the scene, charging its trivial details with strange significance. Finally, among the barbaric warriors and broken Buddha statues of the temple, his martial–arts meditation prepares him to assassinate Kurtz, a man he identifies with closely. Willard says, “There is no way of telling his story without telling mine. And if his story is a confession, then so is mine.”

In the film’s allegory, the murder resembles suicide. Based on considerable evidence, Willard repeatedly states that Kurtz lusts for oblivion—a desire shared by Willard. In a scene that came to Coppola in one of his own nightmares, Willard smashes a mirror—a cinematic trope for self-hatred and internal fragmentation. Willard’s predecessor shot himself in the head, implying that suicide may also be Willard’s fate, the only way to end the dreamlike journey. The Schopenhauerean serene distance of Conrad’s Marlow has given way to filmed evocation of a death wish. The movie shows Buddhism in ruins—shattered temple, splintered minds. It ends with Willard’s face superimposed on a half-submerged statue, while Kurtz’s last words, “The horror, the horror,” echo in his mind.

Although Buddhism actually has a highly developed ethical system, American movies often imply the opposite. The “Zenist” characters in such films as Point Break (1991), for instance, pursue not true Zen but some amoral mind-trip sprinkled with a few borrowings from Asian religions. Thus, the Tai-Chi-practicing Willard is interminably suspended in choice between right and wrong. Little better, traces of Christianity in Apocalypse Now tangle with the other religious strains.

Christian Relics

Kurtz (Marlon Brando) sits reading aloud from T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” The poem begins with a quotation from “The Heart of Darkness”: “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” (Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 70). Therein, before his demise, the film character’s doom is already written. In “The Hollow Men,” Eliot shows his acceptance of Christian morals, but rejects the doctrine of an Apocalypse. The world will succumb to entropy, ending with a “whimper,” not a “bang.” Therefore, within an apocalyptic movie, the poem is an anti-apocalyptic voice, fused with the rest by Kurtz’s quoting out of context. However, he has the whole in front of him as well as “The Waste Land” and related books (e.g., Ritual and Romance, and Frazer’s Golden Bough). He could be on a line of thought that led to Eliot’s eventual conversion to Christianity. Kurtz displays obsession with integrity and commitment, shown in his constant denunciation of practically everyone for hypocrisy and his preparations to die as a sacrifice. The movie’s allusion to Frazer, however, further complicates Christian imagery, for Frazer implied that Christianity was at root a series of fertility metaphors.

Unlike Coppola’s Godfather series (1972-1990), where the mobsters are condemned for hypocritically merging Catholicism and crime, neither Kurtz nor Willard is overtly Christian. Without religious solace (since the Buddhist images function to disorient rather than substitute for Occidental values), the voyagers face a conjunction of life, madness, damnation, and nightmare. To one sailor, for instance, the metaphoric melding of Cambodia and Hell is so close that he fears dying there will bring eternal perdition. Willard says that he has been sent there “for his sins.” Even in “Heart of Darkness,” the voyage to Kurtz was a Dantesque descent (Feder, 280-92). In Apocalypse Now, the napalm almost never stops its burning rain.

Sensual Mysticism

It had everything—sex, violence, humor. —Francis Ford Coppola, Hearts of Darkness

In addition to Oriental and quasi-Christian imagery, one more element is superimposed on the beginning—The Doors’ song “The End”—an appropriate choice because its author, Jim Morrison was a poet much influenced by Eliot. The song has veiled erotic imagery, somewhat in the manner of “The Waste Land.” The lyric moves from crazed children waiting for rain to an invitation to ride a serpent to a body of liquid, then a repeated proposition to someone called “baby.” Morrison’s “King’s highway,” or ridden “snake,” and goal, the “lake” suggest anatomical details. Comparably, in his “Celebration of the Lizard,” a bedroom scene among the “sheets” leads to the “snakes of rain” ( Morrison 40). Although the phrase “the end” overtly referred to that song’s ending concerts, Morison associated it also with orgasm as in his poem “Always a Playground Instructor” (Morrison 123). In his poetry, however, as in Eliot’s, the eroticism is also mystical, mixed with religious allusions to Buddha, Christ, and shamanism.

Echoing Morrison, whose words are interspersed with his own, Willard says that the river “snaked” through the jungle, so he is riding the serpent to his goal. As with Eliot’s, Frazer’s and Morrison’s imagery, the movie’s end (Kurtz’s sacrificial death intercut with that of a water buffalo) brings a fall of rain. The Cambodians “worship [Kurtz] as a god,” and he accepts this Frazerian fertility god/king role, dying because he believes nature demands it. Almost as unconventional, the character Kilgore flies into battle with Norse Valkyries as his fierce, Wagnerian muses. Furthermore, in the 1992 documentary Hearts of Darkness, the first scripter, John Melius, mentions that he used the image of scantily clad playboy bunnies on the riverside as analogs of the Sirens from Greek mythology encountered by Ulysses. Although as originally released the film cut the most sexual scenes, these surface in the Redux version (2001).

This Film is not a Film

The movie Francis is making is a metaphor for a journey into self....The journey is not over for Francis. —Eleanor Coppola (Hearts of Darkness, 1992) I’m thinking of shooting myself. —Francis Ford Coppola (Hearts of Darkness, 1992)

At the 1979 Cannes festival, Coppola said of Apocalypse Now, “My film is not a movie; it’s not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s crazy....And little by little, we went insane.” Howard Karen interprets the metaphor “It is Vietnam” in terms of Coppola’s disasters. “....The misguided optimism that led Americans to defeat in Southeast Asia was amply evident during production.... In the end, of course, it was what was onscreen that counted, and the film is remarkable, even more so today than when it opened in 1979” (Karren 96). Coppola’s remark, however, applies also to the film itself, which tries to break down the barrier between reality and illusion. Originally, the project was to have been under the direction of George Lucas to pursue a documentarylike approach—an American Graffiti with corpses. For Coppola, however, the river journey became both reality and a metaphor of movement in time back to sacrificial rites of loin-clothed tribals. During production (and later in the Redux version), he included an expensive French plantation sequence, representative of French conquest in Vietnam. This was shot in blurringly thick fog.

Coppola pushed documentary realism to surrealism, a vision of dynamic, non-linear order. During filming, he had a near-death experience, complete with journey down a dark tunnel and sense of rebirth. Apologetically, saying that he was afraid he sounded like a religious lunatic, he explained that the movie had behind it an “epiphany” of what man has always had to learn, eternal renewal fusing the seeming opposites life and death (Hearts of Darkness, 1992).

One aspect of metaphor is to suspend awareness of differences. This movie, built on metaphor, conflates “Heart of Darkness,” Armageddon, life, death, nightmare, hell, and a country wracked by exponentially escalating armaments. It evokes paranoid fears of destruction (as do accounts of its vastly over-budget, catastrophe-prone production). Given that the movie constituted for Coppola only part of a shamanic journey, Apocalypse Now may have been therapeutic—a step toward higher complexity, albeit a step into chaotic darkness—a perilous step, though one that received considerable recognition including eight nominations for Oscars and four for Golden Globes.

The Greatest Films site (http://www.filmsite.org/apoc.html) contends: “This war story's screenplay, written by John Milius and Coppola himself (with a separate credit for Michael Herr for Sheen's narration), became a metaphorical backdrop for the corruptive madness and folly of war itself for a generation of Americans.” Even in the title, there is a dangerous wish for exciting but destructive change, yet as the Jungian cultural critic Michael Hill remarks in his Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse As a Rite of Passage, the American fascination with imagery of Armagedon does have the positive function of opening individuals and society for transformation.

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 3 Part 3

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