// The Journal of Cinema Discourse //

Apocalypse Now:

A Celluloid Book of the Dead

By John David Ebert

"Hollywood is cranking out a lot of films these days, but few of those films are truly visionary. The only truly visionary film to come out this year is Apocalypse Now. "

--Steven Spielberg

FACSIMILE TRANSCRIPT

WEST COASTIES

With Charlie Smith

Guest: John David Ebert, author

The Celluloid Goddess & The Biomechanical Dragon

CS: . . . you have this interesting chapter on Apocalypse Now , which you say was a key film for you in putting all these pieces together. Why?

JE: Well, I was about eleven years old when I first saw it and it just hit me like a thunderbolt. Of course, I didn't understand what I was looking at, but that didn't matter, because the world that Coppola set up in that film is so hypnotically beautiful that it really was like journeying to another planet. I went back to see it on two consecutive weekends, though I had to sneak in, because the picture was R-rated.

CS: Your response was strictly visceral. . .

JE: At the time, yes. It was like when I'd seen Star Wars a couple of years before, it was just totally amazing. When myths are working, they bypass the intellect and go straight into your nervous system where the images work like keys to open up all these little neural floodgates and you feel excited, without knowing why. It's only when myths are dead, as Joe Campbell used to say, that they need to be interpreted. Part of the reason I wrote this book was to try and find out why these films affected me the way they did, because as a literate adult, you've trained your mind to think abstractly and it wants to know why the body is affected in a certain way.

CS: So, at what point did you really begin to try to "understand" the film?

JE: I was a sophomore in college majoring in English, and at the time, I was still reading the things that I'd grown up on, mostly science fiction novels, Stephen King, that sort of thing. I was taking a basic intro. to lit. course and we started reading T.S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land," which I couldn't understand but I was fascinated by it, so I went out and bought the Cliff's Notes , and suddenly, the possibilities of what you could do with literature opened up to me. The way Eliot had created this tapestry woven out of myths and symbols was a completely new experience.

Then one night, I happened to be watching Apocalypse Now on my v.c.r., and I noticed that in the concluding sequence at the Kurtz compound, the camera pans across a shelf of books, amongst which are a copy of Frazer's Golden Bough and Jessie L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance , the same sources Eliot had listed in his footnotes to "The Waste Land." And then I realized that Kurtz was reading Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men," which was inspired by Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness , upon which Coppola's film is based. So I decided to read The Golden Bough , where I learned about this myth of the periodic slaying of the king, which Coppola had built into the conclusion of his narrative.

CS: Now, describe for us what that's all about.

JE: Well, the ending that's in the film wasn't in the original screenplay by John Milius, and I think Coppola just felt that Milius's ending, in which Kurtz and Willard go out fighting side by side against Army helicopters as they attack Kurtz's compound, was ridiculous. I mean, it's a kind of comic book, Rambo-style ending. But a friend of Coppola's named Dennis Jakob came in at this point and said, "Look, what you've got here is 'The Waste Land' and The Golden Bough ," which was closer to the original ending of Conrad's novel, anyway, so he realized that it made sense to structure his conclusion around that myth.

CS: This actually came late, then, into the production, didn't it?

JE: Very late, yes. In fact, he'd already been shooting scenes from the Kurtz compound with Marlon Brando before deciding on this. But in drawing from The Golden Bough for his conclusion, he was able to make explicit certain themes that were already implicit in the narrative.

CS: His or Conrad's?

JE: Both. Take this idea of ritual regicide: killing the king when he's no longer fit to rule. The idea of Marlow going up river to retire Kurtz from his trading post, where he's accumulated all of this ivory, has a mythic sub-structure buried in it, possibly because Conrad's novel is set in the Congo where, according to Frazer, ritual regicide was actually practiced. I think it's an interesting coincidence that Coppola's narrative is displaced to Cambodia, where Frazer says that regicide was also practiced.

CS: So why is the king killed?

JE: According to Frazer, the king is killed for one of two reasons: either because he's showing signs of decrepitude or else, in accord with a predetermined cosmic cycle, such as the orbit of Jupiter, which completes its revolution around the sun every twelve years. In Apocalypse Now , he's killed not because of physical debility, but mental. And the reason that you have to kill the king when he begins to weaken is because he embodies the spirit of the land's fertility and if anything happens to the vessel that contains that spirit, then it will adversely affect the land and the crops will start dying and the cattle will stop reproducing and you wind up with a waste land situation, as in the Grail romances, which Jessie L. Weston discusses in her book From Ritual to Romance , where the wound of the Fisher King is linked with the dying of the land.

But there is an older myth--going back, perhaps, as far as the Neolithic--behind all of this in which a dying and reviving god is linked with the alternations of annual cosmic cycles, as in the case of Attis or Adonis, who undergo death and descend into the underworld, and since they are vegetation spirits--according to Frazer--the plants die and you get winter, as in the story of the abduction of Persephone. So the rebirth of Attis and Adonis, for example, was celebrated in the spring because that's when the vegetation returns and this is why the resurrection of Christ was also assigned to that season. In the festivals associated with the god Attis, by the way, there was practiced in Rome a ritualized bull sacrifice, in which a candidate for initiation would climb down into a pit over which a kind of metal or wood grating was pulled while a bull that was then placed on that grating was stabbed to death with spears and the initiate beneath baptized in the bull's blood. So Coppola's brilliant idea of editing the carabao sacrifice into a montage with the killing of Kurtz actually brings his narrative even closer to the spirit of The Golden Bough.

CS: Brings it closer because. . .

JE: Well, very often the slaying of the king would also be associated with the killing of bulls, since for example, in Egypt, the pharaoh, in the early dynasties, anyway, was associated with the bull, an animal form of Osiris. The god Dionysus, likewise, was in the form of a bull when he was torn apart and eaten by the Titans. And the Greeks, by the way, regarded Osiris as the same god as Dionysus, since they were both associated with wine and sexual fertility.

CS: Why a bull, specifically?

JE: Because the bull links the heavens together with the earth, since on the one hand, its horns are associated with the crescent moon, which dies and resurrects every month, and on the other, because he pulls the plow that digs furrows into Mother Earth, fecundating her with new life.

CS: So the bull is a kind of symbol of regeneration, in other words.

JE: That's right. In the Zoroastrian creation myth, for example, there is a Primal Ox which is slain by Angra Mainyu, the Dark One, and from its semen spilling onto the ground all the earth's animals are born, while from its spinal marrow grow all the plants.

CS: So the practice of ritual regicide, then, evolved out of this older agrarian myth of sacrificing the bull?

JE: Possibly. There's a further complication to all this, which has to do with a Bronze Age astronomical overlay on top of the older agrarian mythology. In India, for example, the king used to be killed at the end of a twelve year cycle, which is one complete revolution of the planet Jupiter around the sun. In Greece, though, kings tended to be killed at the end of four or eight year cycles, as Robert Graves demonstrates in his Greek Myths. Every eight years the full moon coincides with either the summer or the winter solstice. Also, every eight years, the planet Venus winds up back in exactly the same position with respect to the zodiac. Think, for example, of the story of King Minos, who had seven boys and seven girls sent to him at eight year intervals.

CS: So, would you say, then, that some knowledge of Frazer is crucial for understanding Apocalypse Now ?

JE: Certainly the ending, anyway, which all the critics complained about when it was first released, claiming that it was murky and confusing. But the real problem isn't the film, it's the critics, most of whom are either disliterate or just spend so much time watching movies that they don't have any left over to read books. The film critic David Denby, for example, realized this and so he went back to Columbia to take their Great Books courses.

But a cultural archaeology of Apocalypse Now would reveal all these other texts that have been absorbed into its narrative, like Wagner's opera Die Walkure , for instance, or Michael Herr's Dispatches or Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala or Werner Herzog's great film Aguirre: the Wrath of God, from which Coppola borrows some of his imagery. Anyone who really wants to understand Apocalypse Now should become familiar with those basic texts, and then the film will no longer seem murky or obscure, anymore than Eliot's "Waste Land" does after you go to the trouble of doing secondary research on it.

But we're living in an age in which people no longer read books, and so, as a result, the ones who don't will lose out on this whole idea of the process of initiation into the mysteries of something by reading. That's one of the great things about literacy: it's a long, slow, tedious process, but it can yield immense rewards. Neil Postman has this wonderful little book called The Disappearance of Childhood , in which he argues that the notion of children as fundamentally different beings from adults is actually a recent invention, one that goes back to the seventeenth century. In the Middle Ages, he says, they were just regarded as miniature adults and they could be sent off to war or join the crusades, as in the Children's Crusade, but with the advent of the printing press, the idea of becoming educated through reading books became prevalent, and so reading itself became the initiatory process which demarcated the idea of "child" from "adult." Now, with our electronic meltdown of literacy, though, we're losing the distinction again as we remedievalize our society through the spread of disliteracy. How many sitcoms on television, for example, feature literate adults who make references to classical books or poetry? And when they do, as on Cheers or Frazier , it's only to portray intellectuals as pretentious snobs or frauds. As a result of the dumbing down of our culture, consequently, it's getting more and more difficult to differentiate children from adults in any other than a legal sense.

So critics, likewise, when they go to see difficult films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Apocalypse Now , or A.I., become frustrated when the films don't immediately yield up their secrets, which most of them believe should be just transparently obvious, as most films, in fact, are. But there is a kind of image literacy that, paradoxically, can only be developed through the reading of books, and since the art of reading is dying out--just look at some recent titles, The Gutenberg Elegies, The Death of Literature, The Twilight of American Culture --so too, complex and difficult works--the cinematic equivalents of "The Waste Land" or Ulysses --are being made less and less often.

CS: So it was in college, then, as a student of English literature, that you began to make these connections between myth and film.

JE: Yes, and then right about the time I was reading Frazer, a friend of mine recommended Joseph Campbell's book The Hero With a Thousand Faces , which I started reading that winter. The Campbell-Moyers interviews were premiering on PBS at the time and there again, as I listened to Campbell talk, I could barely understand what he was saying, but I knew instinctively that I wanted to learn about everything he was talking about, so I ended up spending the next ten years or so not only reading and rereading his books, but also the books of the authors who had shaped and influenced his vision, like Spengler, Nietzsche, Jung, Schopenhauer, Kant, and so on. I was delighted to learn that The Hero With a Thousand Faces was the primary mythological text at the root of Star Wars. Lucas developed his story using the stencil of what Campbell calls the "monomyth," a term he got from Joyce.

CS: Isn't it true that Lucas was originally slated to direct Apocalypse Now?

JE: Yes, that's right, it was a project he was going to do with John Milius, which they originated in 1968. Lucas tried to get it off the ground after the failure of THX-1138 , but nobody was interested, so he made American Graffitti. And then after the success of that film, he wanted to do Apocalypse Now for Columbia pictures, but that fell through also. So by the time Coppola was ready to produce it, after The Godfather Part II , he asked Lucas to direct, but Lucas had already started writing Star Wars and Coppola, at the time, wanted the film to be done for the 1976 bicentennial, so Lucas said, "Go ahead." Lucas's film would have been very different from Coppola's because he had intended to shoot it in a 16mm documentary style using real soldiers and snippets of news footage.

CS: Didn't Orson Welles at one point want to film Heart of Darkness ?

JE: Yes, before Citizen Kane. He originally wanted to do that first, but the budget would have been too high to do it the way he wanted. I think it's appropriate that the director who finally made Heart of Darkness was Coppola because there are a lot of interesting similarities between the two men. Coppola reminds me more of Orson Welles than any other director, and even Coppola himself has remarked on this. Both men started out strong with a couple of masterpieces, but then both alienated themselves from Hollywood. Both had a tendency to dissipate their talents, having these occasional flashes of the old genius, like when Welles filmed his version of Kafka's The Trial.

CS: That's a great film!

JE: Isn't it? He just creates this whole landscape , it's amazing, I mean, he doesn't just show you the office in which K works, he envisions this factory warehouse with rows and rows of desks that go on forever.

Or, in Coppola's case, The Godfather Part III and Dracula were both flawed films, but they also hearkened back to Coppola's early genius. The opening half hour of Dracula , for example, is fantastic. He based that whole battle sequence on the big one in Welles's Chimes at Midnight.

CS: A lot of people didn't like the third Godfather movie.

JE: I loved it, although I recognize that it isn't as good as the first two. But I think the last forty-five minutes, which is borrowed from the climax of Hitchcock's remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much, is the best sequence in the entire trilogy.

CS: Apocalypse Now, I take it, is your favorite film?

JE: Along with 2001: A Space Odyssey , yeah. I particularly like the way Apocalypse Now and 2001 fit together. 1 I sort of envision the two films as this giant plant, with the roots going down into the soil in Apocalypse Now and the flower turning up toward the light in 2001.

CS: Explain that.

JE: Well, look at the metanarrative of 2001: the story has this basic, archetypal structure that begins with humanity in a state of bestial darkness and then follows its course upward to an apotheosis of light in the heavens. In Apocalypse Now , we've got the opposite pattern: we start out in the world of waking daylight consciousness --notice that the opening scene, in an oblique allusion to The Trial , involves two men who arrive at Willard's room in order to summon him to his mission, but first, they have to wake him up from sleep [that's a traditional metaphor for spiritual enlightenment; the Buddha's name, for example, means the "one who woke up,"]-- then we gradually descend, layer by layer, into darkness. Remember, the story is based on Heart of Darkness. Instead of leaving the earth behind, as in 2001 , we're boring right down into the middle of it.

CS: I don't follow you.

JE: Well, if you look at where the story ends up, its goal is Kurtz himself, right? And Kurtz is envisioned by Coppola as this sort of rebel angel who has defied the authorities and set up his own kingdom in the Cambodean jungles. So, in that sense, he's like Satan in Dante's Inferno, who is actually stuck upside down in the earth's core. And Coppola's whole narrative, very consciously, I think, is one long extended journey into Hell, and in that sense, his epic belongs in the same literary tradition that produced The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Ulysses. It's almost as though he's taken the descent into hell episode of those works and blown it up to become the narrative pre-occupation of an entire story, the way the Egyptians, for example, did with their Books of the Dead, which are actually the prototypes for this underworld journey. Apocalypse Now in fact, reminds me more of the Egyptian Books of the Dead than anything else: in the Book of the Netherworld, the sun god Ra journeys down a river through the kingdom of the dead, where he encounters various obstacles, such as giant serpents and monsters, that have to be overcome. Eventually, he achieves union with Osiris, the ancient god of the dead, from which point he is then enabled to be resurrected. In Apocalypse Now , we have the same basic narrative: Willard as the solar hero who journeys through the Underworld to meet the Lord of the Dead, namely, Kurtz, from which point he achieves regeneration, which is why we see rain falling in the last scene.

CS: You especially feel this hellish atmosphere in the Do Lung Bridge sequence.

JE: Right, where they blow up the bridge every day and then rebuild it every night. That's exactly the sort of repetitive behavior that you associate with the Greek underworld where Sisyphus has to keep pushing the stone, or Tantalus, above whose head is a rock that perpetually threatens to fall, or in the case of Prometheus, who's pinned to the Caucasus mountains where an eagle comes and tears out his liver every night and it regrows again every day, like an alcoholic's.

And then when they approach the bridge itself, you see all these creepy people in the water yelling after them, dragging suitcases like refugees, and it reminds me of the sequence in the Inferno where Virgil and Dante have to cross the River Styx, which is near the circle of those who have committed violence against others, and the waters are full of all these people and centaurs washing in the blood of their own violence, and they shout after Virgil and Dante as they float past.

Kubrick's film, on the other hand, is more of an updating of Dante's Paradiso , which begins with Dante's ascent to the moon while invoking the god Apollo as his patron. And the rest is all about his journey upward to the throne of God through the Ptolemaic spheres encasing all the planets. 2001 , likewise, is a journey through the planets which was originally supposed to conclude with the Stargate sequence taking place near Saturn--as it does in the novel--the uppermost sphere of the Ptolemaic cosmology. And Kubrick and Clarke put all of this together at the same time as the Apollo missions are carrying us to the moon.

So 2001 ends with the transfiguration of man as this Star Child, whereas Apocalypse Now ends with this lapsed regression of a man--" kurz " means "short" in German--who's fallen short of his ideal of becoming a Superman.

CS: And both films, as you've mentioned, were inspired by works of mythological scholarship.

JE: Yes, Apocalypse Now was inspired by The Golden Bough and 2001: A Space Odyssey by The Hero With a Thousand Faces . In fact, Stanley Kubrick was the first director to consciously draw inspiration from mythology for the making of a film. 2001 marks the beginning of the myth movement in Hollywood.

CS: Which is the organizing theme of your book, if I'm understanding it correctly.

JE: Right, all the films I discuss are in one way or another heirs to Kubrick's film.

CS: Is it fair to say, then, that 2001 started a kind of mythological Renaissance in the film industry?

JE: Well, I think of it as analogous to Botticelli's Primavera , which was the painting that set the whole ball of High Renaissance art rolling. Before that painting you rarely ever saw motifs from Greek myth in Renaissance art. But after it, there's a whole flood of works based on the recognition of equivalencies between pagan myth and Christian myth. 2001 , likewise, which came out in 1968, inspired a whole generation of filmmakers to take myth--and mythological analogues in science fiction--seriously. Steven Spielberg in 1977 picks up the lead from Kubrick with Close Encounters of the Third Kind , which he deliberately modeled upon 2001 . The monolith, for example, becomes the cosmic mountain of Devil's Tower, while the Star Child resurfaces as the leader of the aliens who steps out of the Mother Ship at the end. And then George Lucas, meanwhile, is the next director after Kubrick to read The Hero With a Thousand Faces and draw inspiration from it; in his case, for Star Wars , the special effects of which would have been impossible without the high standard Kubrick had set in 2001 .

CS: So is this trend toward what you call the "visionary" in film primarily an American phenomenon?

JE: No, it's global. The Australian filmmaker George Miller, for example, the director of Mad Max and The Road Warrior , also read and metabolized Joseph Campbell, whose work inspired his films. Peter Jackson, likewise, is from New Zealand and one of the main reasons why his Lord of the Rings films are so good is precisely because they were made by an outsider to Hollywood. The only people in Hollywood nowadays who could make big budget special effects films of that kind of quality are established giants like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg or James Cameron, because they have complete artistic control of their work. The rest of Hollywood, like the pop music industry, is just corporate management, and so produces the cultural equivalent of fast food garbage like Armageddon or Independence Day or most of the superhero movies.

But then, if you consider the films of the German director Werner Herzog, or the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, both of whose works were inherently mythological, then you can begin to see that this is just a part of the Zeitgeist. Tarkovsky's Solaris and Herzog's Aguirre both appeared in 1972, the same year Coppola's The Godfather came out. So, if you put together all the films that we're considering here, you're talking about not only the most financially successful films of all time, but the most influential, as well. Film after these guys was never the same again, just as painting was never the same after Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian. And they made possible a whole new generation of visionary filmmaking that took off in the 80's. Consider classics like Alien and Blade Runner , which would never have been possible without Star Wars , or James Cameron's Terminator movies or The Abyss , which owe such a huge debt to 2001 .

CS: Getting back, then, to your comparison of 2001 and Apocalypse Now , I've often had the sense that the two of them are in some way revisitings of Homer's Odyssey , which is one of my favorite works of world literature.

JE: Yes, in fact, John Milius rather heavy-handedly pointed out how the Playboy bunnies represent the Sirens and Kilgore is the Cyclops and so forth, but that's too literal. I think the main resemblance has to do with the fact that both films are similarly structured using a very loose, episodic scaffolding, exactly like the great epics that flourished before the novel put them out of business. And both films also draw from the archetypal sea voyage: in 2001 , you have the spaceship that resembles a human skull and spinal column sailing through the oceans of outer space, and in Apocalypse Now , you have this little boat that travels along a serpentine river. In Heart of Darkness , Conrad even says that the river resembled "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land."

Now if you put them both together, that sounds a lot like the imagery of kundalini yoga in which you have this serpent that travels up through the interior of the spinal column--the body's river of cerebrospinal fluid--landing on these chakras that are like islands of consciousness along the way. Notice that in Apocalypse Now , near the beginning, just after Willard has introduced you to his crew, the camera pans quickly past the character Chef, where we see that he has this huge tattoo of a cobra on one arm. In kundalini yoga, the whole process begins when you use a certain kind of breathing technique to awaken this tiny white serpent that lives in a cave at the base of your spinal column. And then there's the fact that the symbolism of some of the episodes corresponds very closely to the qualities assigned to the chakras: you have Willard's state of spiritual inertia, representing chakra number one, where the sleeping serpent has to be awakened; then you have the whole sequence with Colonel Kilgore, personifying the will to power, which is what the third chakra is about; and then the erotic sphere of the Playboy bunnies corresponds to the second chakra, which is located at the level of the genitals. And then there's this moment near the end of the film when Kurtz is discoursing and says that he had this revelation that was like being shot with a diamond bullet, and he points right to the center of his forehead, which is the location of the Ajna chakra, the sixth in the series, and that chakra is actually the middle eye of Shiva from out of which he shoots thunderbolts that illuminate the mind through shattering ignorance concerning the illusion of maya . In Tibetan Buddhism, moreover, the thunderbolt is called a vajra , and it contains a diamond within it, since the diamond body is an analogue of one's own immortal, indestructible nature.

CS: This raises the issue, then, of what Coppola himself was consciously doing in his film. Are you saying that he deliberately put these references to kundalini yoga in it?

JE: No, we're just playing around here. These associations are my responses to these films, and that's it. Someone else is going to see another picture entirely. The film critic Roger Ebert--no relation--on his DVD commentary to Dark City mentions that once while they were screening that film in Boulder, Colorado, someone in the audience got up and started talking about how the film takes the point of view of The Eye of the Spirit, rather than The Eye of the Flesh--which is just another way of saying that it's a visionary, and not a realistic film--which he thought sounded interesting, although, as he says, you can never prove that your interpretation is correct because there's no way to prove that it's in the film. I would guess from the terminology and the location in Boulder that the person was a Ken Wilberian--whose approach to symbolic traditions I think is just deplorably left brain, very rigid, very systematic--and that since Wilber's terminology and system was what the person was carrying around in their head, then that's what they saw in the film.

From my own point of view, I just want to make clear that I'm not taking the approach of a Jungian who would say that the whole film just represents the individuation process, end of story. Any kind of formulaic approach of that kind, be it Freudian, Jungian, Wilberian or what have you, is really just a defense against having to learn. I think the best comment on the approach I'm taking is by Heinrich Zimmer when he says in the prologue to his book The King and the Corpse that if we think we know what the symbols of mythological stories already mean ahead of time, then we're closing ourselves off to a dialogue and killing the symbols with prefabricated interpretations. That, I think, is also what James Hillman is saying when he insists that you shouldn't try to interpret imagery, because the moment you've pinned down the meaning of the snake in your dream, you've killed the image. And he has a point, although I think he's just as uncomfortable with these images as Wilber is, only he's taking the opposite approach and insisting on not interpreting them at all instead of Wilber's pigeon-holing them into these little categories.

But in his book Revisioning Psychology, Hillman makes this other point about "psychologizing," and this has to do with perceiving hidden archetypes in our concepts and ideas. For example, he looks at the theory of evolution and sees the myth of the Goddess and her growing son as the operative archetypes there. Or he looks at Freud's Ego vs. Id and sees it as a translation into scientific parlance of the myth of the hero slaying the dragon. Or how the philosophical idea of the tabula rasa , the mind beginning as a blank slate that can only be filled up by experience, is really concealing the story of Sleeping Beauty. I think these are brilliant arguments, but I also think he's contradicted himself, for if it's true that we can translate concepts into images then why not the reverse? Why can't we translate images into concepts, thereby setting up a dialogue between both hemispheres of the brain?

So my whole premise in Celluloid Goddess involves translating images and stories into verbal discourse, but not thereby reducing them to this or that interpretation. Because the other important figure in my hermeneutic is William Irwin Thompson, who insists that myths can and should be translated into concepts as long as we regard every one of these approaches as valid. They all have something important to contribute and we shouldn't ever get stuck with this idea that we're cracking a code and we've got the key to the exact cipher, like the astro-mythographers Hertha von Dechend or David Ulansey who look at mythic images and stories and provide finalistic interpretations of them as coded ciphers of astronomical phenomena. Yes, the Roman cult of Mithras does involve the constellations of the celestial equator in the Platonic month of Taurus, and the image of Mithras slaying the bull may be a vision of the god Perseus killing Taurus and thus signalling the shift into Aries, but I doubt it. As we've discussed earlier, the bull sacrifice is an ancient image that pre-dates the astronomical myths of the Bronze Age. You can find representations of so-called tauroctonies on the walls of Catal Huyuk going back to five or six thousand b.c.e. and they have nothing to do with astronomy, but rather with this death-rebirth rhythm of the moon, and the crops and the human soul as it transmigrates from one body to the next. In Hindu mythology, furthermore, the image of the goddess Durga slaying the buffalo demon Mahisha is the same image as the Mithraic tauroctony, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with astronomy. So Ulansey misses these other connotations.

CS: What do you think, then, is the role of the creative artist in all this, I mean, how much conscious control over his material does he need to have in order for these associations to be valid?

JE: That's what the novels of Thomas Pynchon are all about--but I think the point of view that you take toward it depends on how you see the role of the artist. And of course, it also depends on the artist, because some have more conscious awareness of these things while others are more naive. Somebody like James Joyce, for example, had complete control over what he was doing, and everything that you, as a scholar of myth, are finding in that work is "really" there, not just in your head, because he was so meticulous about these things (despite what the Deconstruc-tionists say). A more naive artist like Malcolm Lowry, on the other hand, in the case of his novel Under the Volcano , is only sort of half aware of what he's doing, which is how I see the role of Coppola in his film, whereas I see Kubrick's relationship to the symbols in 2001 as more like Joyce's in Ulysses . So I don't think Coppola was aware of most of these connections, but they're not accidental, either, for anyone who's studied Jung knows that the unconscious has an intelligence and a formative capacity all its own, which is entirely separate from the deliberative, problem solving intelligence of the waking mind.

Joe Campbell used to say that myths and symbols are alive, because they're the translation into pictorial imagery of the various kinds of consciousness of our bodily organs. So myths, he says, are rooted in the organs of the body, which is nice, but I would go a step further and say that the organs of the body, in turn, have been shaped by an invisible formative field which Rudolf Steiner calls the etheric body and which the Chinese call chi , and since the etheric body is, in turn, rooted in the Earth's etheric body--its self-organizing, Gaian, plant-like mind--then myths and symbols are communications to the waking mind, not just of the body's organs, but of the very consciousness of the Earth itself. So as an artist, once you start dipping into that well of the universal imagination, you find out that what you had thought was under your conscious control isn't, it's alive, like that island in The Voyage of Saint Brendan which really turns out to be a whale when the priests land on it and start performing mass.

CS: So you see the artist as more of a conduit of a larger force. . .

JE: Yes, I think the artist who knows how to listen to his or her inspiration is listening to the same centers within us that produce our dreams, which we have almost no conscious control over whatsoever, but yet they tell these little stories. They're communications from a deeper Intelligence, and I see the artist, likewise, as a person who is embedded, as we all are, in fact, in a kind of Universal Intelligence that has orchestrated the stars and planets and atoms and everything else, only his waking mind is more permeable to this Intelligence than most people's are.

So, for example, in Coppola's case, his decision to base the climax of his film on The Golden Bough turns out to be the right one, because the Intelligent energies within the film itself then pick this up and it resonates like a thread of gold all throughout the preceding narrative. Take, for instance, the intercutting of Kurtz's death with the slaying of the bull, which makes you realize that Kurtz is the bull and that he has been this ubiquitous mythological Presence all throughout the film in the form of bovines. We recall, for example, an earlier scene during the Kilgore sequence when a bull--or a cow--was being hoisted into the air by a helicopter while a priest performs mass near a bombed out church on the battlefield below. That shot, by the way, reminds me of the opening of Fellini's La Dolce Vita , where we see a helicopter transporting this giant crucifix over a church in Rome.

Then there's this wonderful sequence where Kilgore is handing out what he calls "deathcards." When he shows us the back of the card, there is this insignia for his air-cav regiment, a thunderbolt. As he's doing this, we notice that in the background behind him is a white bovine tied to a fence. Well, I just think it's a curious "coincidence" that the whole sequence, as I've mentioned, has the same will to power symbolism as the third chakra of kundalini yoga, and that that chakra is associated with the Hindu god Shiva whose animal form is a white bull named Nandi, and the thunderbolt is what he shoots out of the third eye in the middle of his forehead. Now that kind of thing certainly isn't intentional on Coppola's part, but it's an example of this dream-like Intelligence making connections of its own.

CS: You keep making these analogies between movies and dreams. Are you saying that films are collective dreams?

JE: In a sense, yes. Researchers at Duke University supposedly took EEG readings of people who sat for hours watching movies and the kind of brain waves which they identified were delta waves, the same ones associated with REM sleep. So there is a certain analogy, but on the other hand, you have to be careful because though dreams and films come from the same source, namely, the creative imagination, it isn't just the case that films literally are dreams. They are more like dreams that have been filtered through the sieve of a specific waking consciousness that is in turn embedded within a particular culture that has very specific structures which that culture imposes upon its imaginative material. Heidegger, in his theory of aesthetics, says that a work of art sets up a "world" that is really only alive within the boundaries of the particular horizon of a specific cultural epoch. The way in which stories were told in India, for example, at least before it started copying Western narrative forms after the expulsion of the British, is not necessarily the way they're told in the West. The literary genre of tragedy, for example, doesn't work over there because you've got this idea of reincarnation which completely undercuts the tragic pathos. (Satyajit Ray's beautiful realist film Pather Panchali doesn't count in this sense, because it isn't based on classical Hindu models, but on Western realism). Or the way you find the stories in The Arabian Nights layered and nested within each other is a lot like the way you find them in The Pancatantra, but not at all as you would find them in Western literature, where we like to have a more linear, developmental point of view, as in the novel. Those structures are culturally embedded, whereas dreams are like this pure, raw magma of images and intuitions that boils up from within. I think the novels of William Burroughs, which are these plotless anti-novels with no beginning and no ending, are probably the closest I've ever come to a mode of storytelling that really replicates that of dream. I think it's ironic, in light of this, that when David Cronenberg made Naked Lunch into a film, he unconsciously plugged it into Campbell's linear hero journey narrative, since he has Burroughs going into the Underworld, where he communicates with these mysterious personifications of his own unconscious who help him write the anti-novel Naked Lunch.

CS: So what does all of this have to do with what's going on in the mind of the average viewer watching these films?

JE: Nothing, on the surface. But subliminally, the person's unconscious knows all about these things and is quietly responding to it. That's why I had those visceral responses to these films as a kid, because this stuff works on these deeper levels.

CS: What's your favorite scene in Apocalypse Now ?

JE: I have two: the whole sequence with Kilgore and the concluding sequence with Kurtz. When the film came out, most people loved the Kilgore sequence but became restless with the Kurtz episode, which critics complained about being confusing, which I think is just wrong. Some critics made exactly the same complaints all over again when the long version of the film, Apocalypse Now Redux, was released in 2001.

CS: Which version, by the way, do you prefer?

JE: The longer one, definitely.

CS: Why?

JE: Because it brings in more of a sense of humor and also a feminine erotic element that was almost entirely missing from the film before. Especially the Medevac sequence with the Playboy bunnies which, in associating one of the girls with birds, retrieves the old motif of the bird goddess. Notice how Chef, the one with the cobra tattoo, is who she hooks up with. That's not an accident, since the two are linked iconographically with the bird and the snake which appear together throughout the history of mythology. The bird--like the dove in Christianity, which was taken over from the dove of Aphrodite who, in turn, had inherited it from the Sumerian goddess Inanna--personifies the eternal powers of the Spirit, whereas the snake is associated with the Spirit bound to the earth, and hence with the rhythms of Time. The bird is linked with the sun, which is eternal, and the snake with the moon, which dies and is resurrected. This gives us a clue as to why the character Chef dies by having his head cut off, because he is in the role of the dying and reviving serpent god. There's a Polynesian story, for example, about an eel who comes to visit this girl who likes to swim in her favorite water hole, and then one day the eel turns into a man and becomes her lover. But he tells her she will have to kill him by cutting off his head and burying it, which she does, and later when she comes back to visit the grave, the first coconut tree has sprung up from the head. Or, in the story of Cupid and Psyche, where Psyche's sisters insist that she cut off the head of her lover because he might be a sort of giant flying serpent, like Qetzalcoatl. In the story of Orpheus, whose lover Eurydice is killed when she is bitten by a poisonous snake, he is eventually torn apart by maenads for having renounced the love of women after his failure to bring Eurydice back from the Underworld, and his head drifts upriver to an island, where it becomes an oracle.

But the whole Playboy bunny sequence was always one of my favorites because it's a sort of asymmetrical image of the Kilgore sequence, only from the point of view of Eros rather than Thanatos. If you notice that the lead bunny who's dancing is wearing a cowboy outfit which parodies the whole cowboy persona of Kilgore--whom they refer to over the helicopter radios as "Big Duke," John Wayne's old appellation--and one of the others is dressed like a Native American, subliminally, it links in your mind with the previous sequence of Kilgore destroying an entire village, just as the cowboys performed genocide on the Native Americans. And if you look carefully, you can see a white saddle on the tip of the Playboy helicopter, which echoes the line from the previous sequence when Willard narrates how the air-cav has traded in its horses for choppers.

CS: Fascinating.

JE: But to get back to my two favorite scenes: I've mentioned, then, that the helicopters are really disguised horses and Coppola is very direct about that. The attack on the quiet agrarian village takes on these historical resonances of horseback-riding Indo Aryans--whose primary gods were thunder-hurling deities like Zeus and Indra--coming down on these peaceful, settled agricultural societies in a series of waves beginning around 4500 b.c.e., the last such wave occurring around 1500 b.c.e. Or, with the added layer of Wagner's music, you can think of the Viking invasions just suddenly appearing along the horizon out of the sea and smashing up these Irish monasteries.

Now, I think it's fun to look at all this through the lens of Picasso's painting Guernica , because you can find some interesting resonances. In the far left of the painting, he has a white bull with an eye, like Shiva's, in the middle of its forehead, and in front of it is a pieta of a woman holding the shattered pieces of her son or lover. That's the myth we started by talking about, of the slain bull god, which is rooted in the agricultural world. Then, in the foreground, he has this screaming horse with its fallen rider. The horse was domesticated around 5000 b.c.e. by Indo Aryans who came riding down about a thousand years later and smashed up the agrarian goddess and bull worshipping societies of Neolithic Old Europe. And it was the later wave of Indo Aryans on horseback in 1500 b.c.e. that went smashing into the peasant populations and started wiping them out, yet they laid the groundwork for at least three great civilizations: the Persian, the Hindu and the Greek. And they brought with them, moreover, the hero myth of the dragon slayer. That's what the air cavalry, from this point of view, represents in Coppola's film. And you find the same thing, horse-riding marauders preying on peasants, in films like Kurosawa's Seven Samurai or Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev.

In Picasso's painting, notice, the rider has fallen: there's a new age coming about, signified by a visual pun of the pupil of an eye and a lightbulb. Horse- power , the Age of the Machine, that is, has put an end to the heroic age of the caballero. The story of Don Quixote is the twilight of that whole mentality. And in Apocalypse Now , the horses have been replaced by the helicopters, although behind them, we still sense the ghosts of the world that was displaced by the machine, for Coppola has chosen "Ride of the Valkyries" from Wagner's opera Die Walkure as his soundtrack. The Valkyries, remember, rode flying horses and they would hover above battlefields, where they would swoop down to pick up the souls of dead soldiers and carry them off to Valhalla. (I think it's interesting, too, to consider the three Playboy bunnies in relation to the three women which Picasso has depicted on the right half of his canvas; both are an updating of the traditional Three Graces theme).

Now, if you take the agrarian world of the bull and the nomadic world of the horse--by the way, the pairing of horse and bull is a motif that goes clear back to the Paleolithic where, in the caves of Lascaux, for example, they would always appear together--you can line them up iconically as the worlds of Kurtz and of Kilgore, respectively. The two kinds of heroes we've been discussing, the dying and reviving agrarian god--Osiris, Dionysus, Attis--and the dragon-slaying warrior hero--Zeus, Indra, Yaweh--are the mythic beings which most typify these two worlds. I think part of the genius of Coppola's film is that his two most memorable characters, Kilgore and Kurtz, fit perfectly into these archetypes (sometimes, I'll admit, the Jungian approach is irresistible). Kurtz is the dying and reviving bull god and Kilgore is the thunder-hurling, horseback-riding warrior. These are the two great mythic hero types that history has given us. In Native American myths of the Southwest, they're known as Child Born of Water and Monster Slayer. The shamanic hero of the mind--who indeed does walk a razor's edge between sanity and insanity, as Kurtz discusses when they play the tape of his voice in the beginning of the film--and the external warrior hero of the outer world.

So Coppola's film is really quite rich in this kind of imagery, if you know how to read the language of images, which is what mythology teaches us.



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