A Movie Review: Apocalypse Now

The movie begins with the plainness of unhindered experience. The quiet calm that insures our experience from the undercurrents of our inherent power and our will to power, our unseeing possession and uncontrollable control. Impossible stillness in the mind generates its own desire, despite the intimidating immensity of life; we assert our dominance over nature- and in doing so, invite nature over ourselves.

Movies aspire to explore this dynamics for artistic gain. The aesthetic capacity aroused in the act of self-contemplation- it feeds on our godlike ability to be both ourselves, immeasurably bound to bounded experience; and the product of our thoughts- a reverie of contemplation that trivialises the great external themes. This division is no mere dualism; it contains irreconcilable modes of meaning that can only be bridged by man in his act of experience, in his reactions, made in rawness and detachment, one at the same time. Impact and insight, thus, become the methods of art; they draw you in to give detached insight meaning. No movie I have seen wields such force of psychological impact, yet the beauties of tempting passion and detachment. Like life itself, it transcends it boundedness; it injects all meaning into it.

The technical brilliancy of the movie has been avouched for. Coppola himself acknowledged the ambitions of the project: it does not aspire to represent, but to be life itself. Few movies achieve the immediacy and importance of life experience; that it substitutes it completely in my viewing, and resonates in the quiet moments thereafter, is proof of the success of Coppola's execution of his first intent.

Part of its success rests in the perfection in scene after scene. They are nuanced yet exhilarating; it neither simplifies nor censors itself. Through its fidelity, it invites viewers to a truer experience. The screenplay and thematic progression achieves pacing and balance; the trail upriver is arduous, boring, frustrating, terrifying. Politics, civilization give way to jungle, jungle gives way to man. Psyche resides at the end of experience.

Of course, the inevitable descent into nature culminates in the truest discovery man has capacity to experience: that of insanity. Nature returns man into his failed state, the price and reckoning of being the nothing out of which he was born.

Nevertheless, this is arguably not the final conclusion of the film, as some critics choose to believe. Its climax lies not in man's conscious discovery of himself in all his rawness and experiential instincts and horror, for these are all subconsciously known, but in the conduct of man's totality; the synthesis of his domesticity and animalism, in the French plantation outpost, of progress.

Internal dialectics rip apart the arguments of the film. The unbearable rawness of combat unhinges breaking points, and forces men to ironic detachment. In an incomparable movie scene, LTC Bill Kilgore orders a massacre of villages and the VC played to music of Wagner. It beautifies destruction in its recoil from the horror of it, and murder becomes a matter of an aesthetic means to overcome guilt and terror. The surfboard and the crew filming death on the beach; men have snapped into their broken detached states; yet the rawness of horror consumes them. Men have no control over their fates, and they submit to death and death-making.

We condemn them, but in retrospect, they are but victims of themselves and their powerlessness in the setting of war. The primacy and invariable truth of the immoral man, who "kills without passion", absolves them. The final effect of the later arguments Col Kurtz expounded in self defence is to negate our compassion and horror at the killing- the film refutes itself in a dialectic between the first and second parts. Civilized moral outrage is made irrelevant when confronted with the inherently nihilistic construct of man; moral judgements guided by an understanding of consequence is submerged by the liquid primacy of the present. Col Kurtz's arguments achieve validity because they are raw, and rawness is truthfulness when translated from experience.

The scenes of the French stronghold, then, form the centre and climax of the film that unites the didactic elements together. Detachment and rawness, love and violence, union and hatred, come together in fleeting, fragile and romantic vision of truth. This truth isn't complete- it must lie in the edge of the realms of experience and meaning, rawness and detachment. Lovers must be vicarious, a projection of ancient yet personal desires; it must lie beyond a unspeakable curtain. The greatest insight in the film, sublimed into the truest experience, is spoken in a moment both of passion and detachment; sex is an incomplete form both of love and violence. Yet it is sustainable, good, and true. The scene is the uniquely precious counterpoint to the horror of the plot, of life. It rejects the combination of love and violence to create death, to generate possession and betrayal, to blow up the helicopter in place of a lost daughter with a grenade. It becomes a means to create life, and to realize the tragedy of man's creation as a product of opposing, incommensurable forces, that can only be dealt with by passion and understanding that knows yet asserts itself. The French scene contains references to all the other main scenes in the movie, as it contains the solutions, in a metaphoric stronghold, the final centre (to shore up our remains).

The movie closes with a final didactic; the opposition of the necessity of noble lies to the dangerous gain wrought by understanding of man's truths. This is Col Kurtz legacy: two forever competing solutions, to reconcile man's need for truth and his idea of a good life.

Meaning And Existence

Existence is a property which relates other properties not to concepts of properties, but to a universalisation of the particular, a concept to an experienced form.

Therefore, if existence is an empirically verifying/affirmative quality of meaning, then the concept of existence must rely on the conceptualization of the experentiality of existence as well as the meaning of existence; it must include existence's own mode in its description of the property of existence.

In conceptualizing the template of subjects rather than the subjects themselves, one faces the difficulty of propertifying an experience which is felt rather than thought, or, to put it more clear
ly, universal rather than comparable with others. Existence has nothing else other than non-existence to compare with; its mode is not a meaning- it is a mode unto itself.

Therefore we are stuck. The inability to deconstruct existence into concepts, and thus relate concepts with existence in a a conceptual, rather than experiential way, as well as the complete dependence of our world view on these two mental wheels - this would seem insoluble.

Where might future solutions derive from?