Munich and the Swelling Gray Line of Terrorism

by Christopher Barr

“Despite all the lunacy of the last century, all the absurdity of war and genocide, we believe that human beings are rational and are made to seek truth.”

  - Timothy Radcliffe 

 

“We kill for our future.  We kill for peace.”

Munich is a magnificently shot film directed by Steven Spielberg, his last great film to date.  The events of the film take place during the aftermath of Black September, a massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics perpetrated by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).   The Israeli government forms a secret retaliation task force which they call Operation Wrath of God.  

The issue here is how do you defend against this form of terrorism, how do you maintain civility in the wake of the uncivilized?  What laws are available above book that can defend against this madness, there aren’t any, so the issue now becomes; to keep madness from the door the civilized must become mad as well.

“Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.” Says Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir as she sanctions a black-box operation to hunt and kill all involved.  11 men had a hand in the Munich assassinations and they must be all killed.  Avner, a low-level Mossad techie, is team leader with four specialists, the wheel man, the bomb maker,  the document forger and the cleanup man, all assigned to help execute this undercover operation.

The men keep their search in Europe, avoiding all Arab countries.  They hunt down their first mark and sloppily kill him thus beginning their long retaliation campaign.  As they hunt down these men, it becomes apparent that they don’t know what they did and what capacity were they involved in the Munich massacre.  They are following orders passed down by the Israeli government and those orders are not to be questioned.

One of the most fundamental fallacies of war is the majority on the ground fighting don’t even know what they are fighting for.  Maybe they are told generalizations like, ‘you are fighting for your freedom’ or ‘you are fighting for someone else’s freedom’.  The issue here is the concept of following orders without question, turns an often gray situation into a black and white one.

This upsets what’s right-from-wrong into what’s right-for-us and wrong for them.  This is a blow for blow boxing match between two opponents that keep getting mad each time they take a hit to the face.  This is the unfortunate nature of man; this is our legacy and future because that’s all we know.  We are not going to do what it takes to bring actual peace to the world because we can’t, that project is too big.  The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, for what is right is right for those in power, not for what is right for the world.

After the squad kills their second target, the Palestinians retaliate against this Israeli retaliation with letter bombs mailed to various Israeli officials around the world.  Most of which were discovered before opening but not all, causality continue to affect both sides of this ongoing war.  The result of this line of thinking is the encroachment on the territory from one group upon another.  This rivalry of such groups becomes a battle for the soil, a war for the land and the division of the classes, breaking one city into two, the city for the poor and the city for the rich.   In the case of this war the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is where the bulk of the Palestinian territories are located and the wealthier, more prosperous Israelis reside on the land north, east and south of the region.

Avner and the group go to a safe house where they are confronted at gunpoint by PLO members, things calm down and Avner and one of the Palestinian men have a heartfelt conversation about the ongoing conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians in a stairwell.  The Palestinian, believing that Avner and the group are Germans, states that the world will be rid of all Israelis as Palestine and other Arab countries align to defeat them.  He says that the rest of the world will see what the Israelis do to them and will welcome their defeat.

Avner tells him that he will never get the land because they have nothing to bargain with, it’s simply not their land.  The Palestinian says that they will fight forever; there will always be more generations of Palestinians to make the world unsafe for Jews.  Avner tells him that the world will see them as animals to which the Palestinian explains; the world will want to know why they are animals and how they have become that way.  This conversation just as the conflict itself never meets a middle ground.  The Palestinians want the land that is currently Israel and Israel understandably doesn’t want to give it up, so the bombs will continue dropping.

This peaceful conversation in a stairwell during the middle of the night between a Palestinian and a Jew, sums up the conflict people have always had with each other - home.  Wars are fought over homes, the land that generations of people fought to keep.  Nations are invaded for a number of reasons; usually it’s to spread the territory of an empire like in the cases of Alexander the Great or Napoleon, often it is to destabilize for access to resources, like in the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan.  Sometimes it’s just about the land itself, a place to call home.

During the getaway, after blowing up their next target, Avner comes face to face with the very Palestinian he had a conversation with in the stairwell.  That Palestinian was then shot and killed in the street by one of Avner’s team members as they drive away.

The squad continues to deal with the moral implications as they shoot and kill their targets while they zig-zag across Europe.  They struggle with implicating innocent bystanders while they blow up hotel rooms and embassy offices.  Their struggle is that they are Israeli men but first and foremost they are human men, with moral codes.  They don’t want a little girl to blow up in the place of her father, they don’t want their bombs to destroy buildings, killing everyone one in sight.  They see that the job is morally dirty so they want to keep it as clean as they can.  

Avner goes to a bar in his hotel for a drink and meets Jeanette, a beautiful woman who propositions him to come up to her hotel room.  Avner declines the offer and goes up to his room but then later finds Carl, his clean up man, dead in his bed.  It turns out Jeanette is an independent contract killer. 

This world is a place of intersecting secrecies, Avner and the group are among many that operate performing various clandestine attacks as they cross paths with the CIA, MI6, KGB and the Mossad itself, who are unaware of Avner and what he and his team are doing in Europe.  They go to a Dutch river boat and kill Jeanette for killing Carl.  They shoot her while she’s naked and leave her that way on her porch, exposed and disgraced for what she did.

The gray areas here are so thick they’re black, different people, doing different jobs, representing different countries all out killing the Other, the problem here is these men are confused as to whether they should be seeking righteousness or should be seeking power while they exact revenge.  Sometimes its business like with Jeanette killing Carl or its personal, like Avner killing Jeanette.  The Israelis blow up a refugee camp filled with hundreds of Palestinian families and the Palestinian Liberation Organization kills more Israelis.  The problem here is one can’t make any sense out of this because it doesn’t make any sense at all.  Its cyclical chaos and it’s subjective in its nature, because if they’re two sides that think they are both right, then all the fighting is so neither of them sees themselves as being immoral.

There document forger, Hans has been killed, leaving only three of them left to kill the six remaining targets.  They are attempting to plug the holes as the water keeps pouring in, but yet they continue because that is their job, that is what they have been ordered to do for God and country.  Obvious paranoia sets in, they are being hunted by the Palestinian opposition under the same military code that’s existed since the first arrow was made from rock and wood; If you kill ours than we’ll kill yours, if you kill ten of ours than we’ll kill twenty of yours, if you kill twenty of ours than we’ll kill a hundred of yours………

Avner, fearful of being retaliated upon, searches his place that he’s staying for intruders, checking under the bed, and then he cuts open the mattress looking for a bomb.  He checks the phone, taking it apart; he checks all the places that he himself with his team has planted bombs to kill their targets.  He then does what he’s heard other men such as himself do in the past, when they have found themselves a target for assassination, he takes his blanket and sleeps in the closet.  While he does this, his bomb maker is killed by a planted bomb.  Now it’s only Steve the driver and Avner left.

After a failed mission to kill the mastermind behind the Munich massacre, Avner goes back to Israel and is thanked for what he has done.  Back there he has become bit of a hero to those few that have heard of what he and his team accomplished.  This is a point in the film where Avner wonders what have they done and to what end?  The Nietzschean ‘Superman’ is never to be a man that dominates or overtakes the weak, he is a man that is able, due to his awakened mind and his ability to critique his thoughts, to overcome all our laws and breakthrough all our charms, spells and formulas that turn their backs on nature.  Courage and intelligence is what fuels this aspired man, rather than the greed and jealousy of lesser men. 

At this point all the Mossad wants is Avner’s source, the man that connected him with the locations of all his targets, the man that is to remain a secret from any government.  Maintaining his loyalty and word to that man, Avner refuses and walks out and goes to New York where his wife and child live.

The film waits until the closing scenes to show the massacre in Munich, September of 1972.  The nine Israeli men are gunned down while bound in two helicopters as the German police close in on the Palestinian perpetrators at the airport, eventually killing all of them.  It’s a demonstration of sheer madness really, something that seemingly defies definition.  

While home the paranoia doesn’t go away rather it gets worse, he begins to worry for his family’s safety as the walls close in on him.  He meets with his Mossad contact, Ephraim in the end who assures him that he is not a target or his family.  Avner wants to know if what they did was murder, he wants to know why did they kill them men for only new men, more vicious motivated men, to take their place? 

This film asks questions and provokes argument, which is a good thing.  Terrorism is not black and white and there is no real definable good versus evil because there are reasons behind terrorism.  Reasons that might not translate too well for the opposition or to rational thinking people, but never the less – reasons.

The final scene of the film slowly moves over the New York City skyline and stops and holds on the haunting image of the Twin Towers.  Here the viewers are to take a minute and realize that those towers stood during the time of the films events, but yet today they do not, they had been destroyed by the time the film was released. The scene is foreshadowing the potent terror to come by the hands of supposed terrorists.  This is to evoke a visceral, unsettling reaction which if I recall at the time of the film’s release, it did quite effectively.  Subliminally the image of these towers, ghost-like in the distance, raises the question of whether or not these events in the film are somehow linked to the destruction of the twin towers?

I would argue that in some ways they are linked because if we are to believe that terrorists attacked America on September, 11, 2001; then this attack was a retaliation for being attacked.  This is the fundamental flaw in justifying terrorism because terrorism itself breeds more terrorism; the ends never justify the means.  In the end, Ephraim offers Avner and his family to return to Israel, for him to come home.  Avner says he will not be going back to Israel and instead he’ll be staying in America, then Avner offers Ephraim to come to dinner and ‘break bread’ and he refuses.  This is a conflict of ideologies, Ephraim is an Israeli Jew willing to die for his homeland and Avner, in his eyes has just turned his back on his mother country, his political obligations, thus you don’t break bread with a non-Israeli.

Politics would be more simple if man were more simple Plato says, but he asks why hasn’t this occurred, why hasn’t any of these ‘Utopias’ happened?  Plato concludes that greed and luxury are what prevents these idealized societies from manifesting into being.  Men are not content with the simple life, they are competitive, ambitious and jealous, they soon tire of what they have and pine for what they have not.  They seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.

The ‘cycle of violence’ will continue as this film leaves us with an ambiguous notion that, ‘if you are not with us, you are against us’ way of thinking.  That’s why Ephraim was disappointed when he said ‘no’ to Avner’s dinner invitation; he just lost a friend and a homeland comrade.  The unfortunate moral to this dilemma is diplomacy is the shadow of illusion, the cycle of violence will continue because the concept of the enemy doesn’t seem to know the difference of whether it is looking out the window at its perceived enemy or looking into a mirror at itself. 

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” 

- Frantz Fanon

Transformers: Age of Extinction and No More than Meets the Eye

 by Christopher Barr

Transformers: Age of Extinction did not follow its marketing tagline that states; “The Rules have Changed”, rather it remained a racist, sexist, homophobic, Michael Bay-hem, hodgepodge of robots smashing robots while pathetically dull human characters run around and underneath them, screaming their ungrateful, superficial faces off, to an extreme.  The camera shots are almost always panning and saturated with product placement.  The movie becomes a commercial for Bud Lite, Victoria’s Secret and Chevrolet more than a movie about the battle between good and evil or any possibility of character development and story.

Age of Extinction is a movie with no people in it, it is a movie where 'man' in the Michel Foucault sense, is a mere invention, and in the case of Transformers, a horribly bad one.  The archeology of our thinking and the history of ideas have all been uploaded into computers and have become what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls "mercantilization" commodified by corporations, judged on their commercial value and not on their truth, and they are then sold to us, the naïve, didn’t-know-better consumer.  The movie has larger-than-life machines popping out off the screen with cardboard cut-outs that represent the human side, drained of any risk of growing but fashioned in the latest in ‘cool’ clothing.   

Technology has become the new religion, the new source of belief.This movie has manifested its technology into somewhat relatable robots.  One's with eyes and a mouth for it to speak to us humans from, robots with feelings, and sadly in the case of this movie, robots with more feelings than the humans they claim to care about.  Other than this being a dreadful movie, we should be alarmed to say the least about these implications; knowledge has become externalized and in some cases, weaponized.  Our philosophy is no longer searching for truth within the knowledge we have available to us.  It means to package and sell it, control and censor it in fundamentally diverse and unique ways, but at what cost?  The loss of the human imagination to the uploading of manufactured ideas, suppressed and delimited by corporations is where the new world is heading, as we are crop-dusted in saturation and blinded from critical thought.

“The intellectual faculty is what separates human beings from other life forms.  It’s associated with higher, distinctly mental processes, such as reasoning, abstract thinking, knowing, understanding, and also judging, believing, forming opinions, feeling higher emotions, and deliberating and choosing.” 

 - Aristotle

When knowledge becomes data it is no longer the undefinable matter of minds, rather it becomes a commodity in the form of alien robots that have come to earth to save us all, (from ourselves so it seems) to put us back on the idealized course of good.  This robs the mind of deep thought which is required to construct ideas and create notable discourse.  All the great thinkers of the past have the great thinkers of their past to thank for creating a path for them to walk along. Sigmund Freud’s ideas about the mental state of the mind didn’t just come to him; he had influences like Nietzsche and Plato to thank for his eventual contribution to the mental sciences.

The corporate and governmental business plan is to maintain a dumbing down, a numbing of the population to keep control over them.  They want them to remain in the Rousseauian proverb of being, “…born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”  These movies are idea absorbers; they paralyze the mind and tranquilise the will.  Their function is to medicate their viewers into an Invasion of the Body Snatchers sort of state where lethargic complacency maintains its hold.  These movies reduce the viewers to infancy so dependency on the system is all they know.  This controls the frontier of innovation so inventions, cures to diseases and political candidates can be monitored and policed if necessary, so corporate shareholders remain confident with their investments.     

  

Edward Said says that 'Every empire tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires'.  The American empire drinks from the same well of arrogance.  It lives under the illusion that technology will save us all as long as they control and profit from it.  They don't see as empires before them didn't see, that their superior view of themselves is the nail in the coffin they didn't think was coming.Transformers is a story of American arrogance and superiority, a story filled with propaganda that is selling the image of the great narcissist; I am right and they are all wrong.  It’s keeping everything controlled so the corporations that sponsor it and the American military that consults for it, will get the brain-washed zombies they need to maintain their own existences.

Some fascinating threads that do weave through Transformers lie in the area of artificial intelligence.  An area of study that asks, "What does it mean to be alive?" “Can metal under the right technological circumstances feel pain and or suffering?"  “The question within the context of the story is; are Transformers living beings?  Certainly with their miraculous capability to change shape as complicated mechanisms, does support that they are intelligent beings with state of the art technological abilities, but are they alive, can they die or do they just stop working?

Our machines are heading toward, and in some cases arrived, becoming thinking things that operate under their own decision making processes.  Robots exist in the real world, thinking machines that, as they evolve, will become weapons.  Drones are manned by soldiers on military bases so they are not quite autonomous yet, but they soon will be as the technology advances to the point of robot self-awareness.  Where will their morality come from in the real world, where will their views on good and evil reside?

Optimus Prime has always maintained a moral responsibility.  Kant has stated that if we are going to follow what is right then we should do so universally, in all cases.  The Autobots and the Decepticons have been fighting like the Christians and the Muslims for years.  They have been fighting so long that I’m sure most can’t even remember what they are really fighting for; they are just fighting for the sack of fearing the Other.  Megatron is the fascist that Optimus Prime feels he needs to keep at bay.  Optimus Prime is the optimist in these stories, he’s the hope we all cling to while we traverse the fantasy into a world where there are heroes, and not just men fighting over profit shares and resources at any cost.

The end of Age of Extinction was quite similar in scope and insanity as the first three; it was loud and unrelenting with very little pay-off.  The Dinobots team up with the Autobots to save the day.  Like the corporate slogan in the movie; the past is history, the present is past and the future is now, spells a sad day yet again where this form of Americana sludge can be shilled out to millions of viewers.  The corporate program is well in affect; keep purchasing to define your life and remain subordinate to those that rule over us all.  The Decepticons are the corporation, they are the government and we are the Autobots that fantasize about freedom but when we leave the theatre we remain in chains, unable to transform our way out of it.

“The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.”

- Jean Baudrillard

Apocalypse Now and Surviving Yourself on Your Journey Within

by Christopher Barr

“The king who is without blemish has a flourishing kingdom, the king who is maimed has a kingdom diseased like himself thus the Spartans were warned by an oracle to beware of a ‘lame reign’.”  

 – Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance

"Have you ever considered any real freedoms?  Freedoms from the opinion of others... even the opinions of yourself?"   

- Kurtz

Apocalypse Now, inspired by the Joseph Conrad 1899 short novel Heart of Darkness, opens with the sound of helicopter blades cutting through the air.  The screen fades up with an East Asian bright green jungle and a hazy blue summer sky as helicopters pass through the foreground.  The Doors’ masterpiece epic “The End” chimes in, adding a dream-like atmosphere as yellow flare smoke smothers the green and blue background, consuming it.  Just as Jim Morrison’s haunting voice sings the first line of the song, “This is the End” napalm is dropped, turning the jungle ablaze, torching everything on the ground, melting hope as the chaos of war blankets the air.

U.S. Army Captain of Special Operations Benjamin L. Willard lies in his bed as hallucinating images of his past Vietnam tours invade his consciousness.  Thoughts of the bloody war and the mountains of madness marinate in his mind, leaking into his unconscious while plaguing his dreams, the Ouroboros of war, the serpent eating its own tail, the circle keeps coming around.  His cigarette sizzles in his hand beside a half empty brandy bottle and the fleeting safety of a hand gun.  He can’t escape the end as he begins it again.  The ceiling fans become helicopter blades as Morrison melodically drifts in the air like cigarette smoke.

Willard is in Saigon, holding himself up in a dilapidated hotel room.  Thinking, drinking, waiting for thoughts of the swallowing jungle as the four walls of boredom, of uselessness close in on him, as he waits for a mission, he thinks of the distance between the hyper-real atavism of the jungle and the ‘safety’ ‘security’ and banality of back home in America.  He feels like he’s getting softer, losing his instinct for battle as his enemy grows stronger, acclimating to the jungle, that place where the trees are kings.

Finally a mission arrives….

….I thought about a snail crawling across the edge of a straight razor.

The mission is a top-secret assignment to follow the Nung River into the blackest, deepest remote heart of the Cambodian jungle and terminate rogue Special Forces Colonel Walter E. Kurtz of his command.  The highly decorated Kurtz has given himself over to the darkest side of war, the darkest side of humanity, the darkest side of himself.  Willard is ordered by his military superiors to infiltrate the Colonel’s illegal command of Montagnard troops and execute him for disengaging from the civility of ‘human warfare’ and into the abyss of inhuman conduct.  Clearly the moral lines are blurred here.

Kurtz has stepped away from the symbolic economy that binds civilization from drifting into meaninglessness.  He has returned to the madness of the jungle where human beings were once birthed out of, taking Henry David Thoreau’s argument that “all good things are wild and free” and that the laws of man suppress rather than protect civil liberties, to a sadistic and psychotic end.  Thoreau’s argument would apply better to Wyatt and Billy in Easy Rider or Lester Burnham in American Beauty but unfortunately these freedom-seekers had to symbolically die to keep the machine of human progress, financially moving forward.  The agents of control within the system must attack and eliminate all cultural resistance that has important political implications that oppose the status quo.  The established order must always make it clear that this form of conviction and behavior is intolerable and must be suppressed at any cost.   Kurtz, being a Special Forces, Green Beret officer that has fought many successful battles, would be all too aware of the consequences of political and military dissention.

The hypocrisy here runs thicker than the Nung River and Willard knows it.  Sending a military-sanctioned assassin to kill a former military-sanctioned assassin in the middle of a blood-dripping war was, as Willard points out, “It’s like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”  Here, ownership is implied; rules are not universal; they are owned by the ‘ruling’ class and assigned to the people accordingly.  As mad as Kurtz has become, the military seems more concerned with their authority to inflict their rules than the Lord of the Flies direction the Colonel was heading, and as we see later, has long passed.

Willard joins up with a U. S. Navy (PBR) patrol boat, commanded by Chief and crewmen Chef, Lance and Mr. Clean.  They start the journey into darkness while trying to avoid the Viet Cong, who they call “Charlie”, while snaking through the enemy’s backyard.  The boat meets up with an attack helicopter squadron commanded by the reckless Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, during the aftermath of an assault on the Viet Cong, to which Kilgore and his little army claimed victory.  Willard requires Kilgore to safely escort him and the PBR crew to the mouth of the Nung River.

Beguilingly enough, Kilgore is a supremely confident commanding officer that has more interest in Lance, who is a world famous surfer on Willard’s crew than the mission Willard’s on.  Kilgore decides to helicopter Willard, his crew and their boat up to their point of destination, certainly not because it’s the safest point along the mouth of the river but because there are surfer waves at the beach.

Charlie don’t surf!!!

Kilgore orders the whole infantry to load up and head out.  A dozen helicopters ascend up from the jungle line in the distance, at first looking like dragonflies as the rising sun shines bright behind them.  One of the most iconic moments in the history of American cinema follows.  The wave of helicopters advance toward a beachfront where Charlie is hiding out, then Kilgore orders the music to be turned on loudspeakers attached to the bottom of a helicopter.  The roaring triumphant sounds of Richard Wagner’s epic Ride of the Valkyries blasting for all to hear, including Charlie.  This is Kilgore’s ‘shot across the bow’ warning to intimidate the enemy before they attack them in a battle, which the poised Kilgore already knows they won.

Once they reach the beach, bullets and missiles fire away as the opera screams down on the scuttling Viet Cong.  This campaign is massive in scale with bombs dropping all over, blowing up village structures and bridges.  This symphony of disaster is finally topped off with a colossal napalm drop, annihilating the whole area past the tree line, sending it and anyone among it, into a man-made fire pit of hell.

In spite of the bloodshed happening all around as they land, Kilgore, along with commanding the invasion, is maintaining his concern with getting the perfect wave for surfing.  He wants to see Lance surf and the battle, literally at their doorstep, be damned.  He wanted Charlie’s surf as well as his life, he wanted his victory.  Willard, the passive eye, listens to Kilgore talk about the feeling napalm has over him just after it destroys everything in its path.

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning, you know one time we had a hill bomb, for 12 hours.  When it was all over I walked up, we didn’t find one of them, not one stinking dink body.  The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill, smells like… Victory.” 

- Colonel Bill Kilgore

…Someday this war is going to end.

Willard and the crew of the patrol boat leave Kilgore to winning his war and make their way up the river, the river that ends with Kurtz.  They stop and Willard and Chef go into the thick of the jungle to get mangos.  While in there, hiding behind leaves the size of kitchen tables, a tiger jumps out at them.  Both men rightfully run back to the boat, with Chef yelling hysterically, “Never get out of the boat!!”  The deeper they go up the river the less linguistically symbolic everything becomes.  The assignment of meaning begins shifting from the comforts of societal ideology to a much blurrier undefinable void.  The tiger was an encounter of the Real; that moment before meaning is carved up by language.  The Real resists symbolization and is therefore frightening, as most things unknown are.  As they move up the river they begin to encounter a form of reality that is indifferent to symbolization, while leaving the more definable, linguistic world behind them.  Like Dante’s journey into the heart of darkness, these men are leaving the safety of assigned meaning behind them.  This tiger signals their escape from the language cage of symbols and meaning and into the true reality of the world.

Similarities can be seen in Steven Spielberg’s early masterpiece Jaws (1975), where three men leave the comforts of rural definable civilization to hunt down and kill a shark, in the ambiguity of the ocean where linguistic meaning has no stake.  The shark has no interest in what defines these men, it doesn’t have religion and laws, it doesn’t have fear and preference.  It is nature, and these men have to let go of the tether binding them to land and become nature itself to defeat the creature, while realizing that it was never about negotiation and that it was always about survival of the fittest.

“Never get out of the boat, absolutely god damn right, unless you were going all the way.”   

 - Willard

Willard looks over Kurtz’s military file while the boat draws deeper into jungle.  He tries to understand how a man so well trained, so highly decorated, loses his mind and drops off the face of the earth.  How does a man decide to leave it all and live in the dark jungle with a bunch of savages that treat him like a god?  Freud would say he was returning to the phallus, he was rejecting the symbolic authority of society and retreating back to the womb.  He’d say Kurtz was a man in search of the love of his mother’s nurturing gaze before everything became symbolic, before everything became false ideas and confused in language.   

The patrol boat docks at a military supply station for possible R&R, where they pick up fuel and other supplies and then watch a couple of Playboy sirens dance on a stage for a hundred young horny American soldiers.  While the models dance, the soldiers become restless and storm the stage to get to the girls.  This is one of the many points in this film where the so-called order clashes with the reality of chaos.  Like most levels of restraint in civilization, this was a clear case of ‘doing what’s expected of one’ losing out to ‘doing what one truly wants’ outside of the rule book imposed on a person in society since birth.

Who really are the savages?

As they move up the river, madness becomes more common place in the form of unbridled freedom.  A sort of freedom that most in society would never read the fine print, the cost of actual freedom is something that most would never wish to cash in.  I would argue that the majority of people wouldn’t be able to comprehend what they stand to lose to get actual freedom.  To do that, they would have to be willing to lose themselves.  In a religious soaked world, most aren’t willing to give up themselves after death let alone doing it while they are still alive.   The illusion of freedom it appears is enough for one to get through the labour of a day.

The crew pulls up beside a boat with Vietnamese people aboard to do a routine inspection.  Chef reluctantly boards the boat under Chief’s orders and pushes the few people on it away as he looks through vegetables and rice bags, finding nothing.  He gets closer to the back searching the cargo when a young Vietnamese girl rushes toward him; Mr. Clean plugs her with bullets as Lance joins in on executing the remaining people on the boat, in a flurry of panic and the fearful unsettling nature of the precarious environment.

The war isn’t just getting to them, it has got to them.  The rules of right and wrong, good versus evil might as well be wearing camouflage and blending into the natural blanket of the earth.  These soldiers have arrived in madness as the tether to civilization, and the comforts of the superstructure, wears so thin that it has become transparent.  These men are lost, lost to the whims of chaos where order can no longer be found.

….this whole system is fucked, with all its binding rules that support only those that benefit from it, living high on their fucking castle tops while ideas and imagination is ripped from the inevitable uninspired.  What the fuck is wrong with this world….what the fuck is wrong with people?  The bricks are there to build imagination; the river of ideas can flow freely.  But yet here we are, lifeless, hollow, stuffed, and directionless.  This world sickens me with its greed, its desire for more for more sake…. Empty…..

Willard saw it all as a lie, a patch-up job to what’s truly underneath it all, insanity, madness, and yet the very man he was assigned to assassinate was himself, ‘insane’,’mad’.  The ambiguity here is as thick as the file Willard is using to psychologically dissect Kurtz, the Freudian ‘primordial father’ he must kill.

They arrive at the Cambodian border, ‘the asshole of the world’, the last vestige of civilization, with a huge symbolic sign over it that reads, ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter”.  Willard and Lance leave the boat and trek into the guts of an everlasting battle where bullets aimlessly blaze by and circus music plays.  The carnival of madness, this circle of hell is thick with smoke and blood, yells and screams key off the ivories to the unintentional whispers of Mozart.  They climb into the trenches where there is an artery of terrified crazed soldiers shooting into the darkness at nothingness, where the assigned enemy becomes ambiguous and lost in lunacy.  There is no longer leadership, there is no longer order, laws and politics become slug in the river, and signifying order becomes a dream lost in psychedelic purple haze. 

Willard and the crew try to hold it together as they fade into Cambodia, where the claws of the jungle grow thicker.  They descend deeper into the inferno as they get shot at by faceless enemies that no longer take the figure of people.  The enemy now is deep within as they sail past the decayed scraps of yesterday’s battles, symbolically travelling back in time from the so-called height of civilization to the back jungle of early man.  This artery to the heart of darkness grows profuse with blood, a vessel pumping toward Kurtz.     

They sail up the river with dead bodies lining the banks.  They are entering the center of the insane asylum of the world where only the mad reside.  They continue to travel back in time before the time when man became ‘civilized’.  No longer are they dodging the bullets of the Viet Cong, now tribal arrows spring from the full swaying trees and descend upon them like bladed rain.  Chief is killed but not before he tries to take Willard with him, the man he places blame for this tour into insanity.

They arrive at the compound, at the temple, at the end, Willard, Chef and Lance are all that remains of the crew.  They pass by huge Christian-like crosses and shrines with many severed human heads on sticks, tongues hanging.  A blanket of white-powdered tribal people line the banks as the boat enters a Lovecraftian mouth of madness.  These tribal people part their little boats as Willard and the crew sail down its throat, as if they are being gulped in.

They land ashore where they are met by a complete bat-crazy America photo journalist, who has drunk the same psychotic poisonous, dogmatic margarita as the rest of ‘Kurtz’s children’.   They all see Kurtz as this messianic figure, a poet, a philosopher as the fumbling crazy journalist rambles on that he “should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”  There are two ways at this point we can look at the poetry of T.S. Eliot, a clear influence of Kurtz.  One, and likely more obvious, is the misuse and misunderstanding of the poet.  The misinterpretations of the literal versus the symbolic, as well as actual understanding, as oppose to the regurgitating type like with the journalist, where it is never made clear whether he even knows he’s quoting Eliot or not.

Then there is a second point on Eliot’s poetry, was the poet aware, or should he even be responsible, for the seemingly negative use of his poetry as a dogmatic gospel to indoctrinate blind followers.  I would certainly argue, like J.D. Salinger who came after, Eliot wrote what he felt and left the rest to be open to interpretation, as he should have, for the obvious reason that once it is set loss upon the world, the world will consume it as it sees fit in spite of any alternative desire by the artist.

Willard walks toward the temple where Kurtz is holding up.  Human heads lay all over the place with flies buzzing around all the rotten corpses.  Kurtz’s soldiers watch Willard as he and the jumpy journalist walk toward the temple, a place that exists in the 20^th century but feels like a time warp back to the Aztec civilization on the brink of extinction.

Kurtz’s tribal troops take hold of Willard and hold him down in the mud, as if cleansing him of all his symbolic baggage.  A muddied Willard is brought into the temple to meet Kurtz, a silhouetted figure cutting in and out of the shadows, not quite settling on light or dark.  They sit and talk, man to man, soldier to soldier, killer to killer.  Willard is then caged where the executioner has now become the prisoner, here, bad luck was his god, bound to bamboo, dripping in mud while listening to the cries of psychosis.

In case Willard had doubt of his place along this circle of hell, Kurtz reminds him by dropping the severed head of Chef on his lap, to which Willard understandably freaks the fuck out.  Drained of hope, drained of water, drained of life, Willard edges toward the line between life and death as Kurtz fades in and out of the light.  Is he an angel there to cleanse Willard of all his misguided societal sins or is Kurtz a demon, slowing Willard toward the gates of hell where fire is everlasting?

Mistah Kurtz-he dead

A penny for the Old Guy

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw.  Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without color,

Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom

Remember us-if at all-not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

– T.S. Eliot

A pile of little severed inoculated arms.

Willard roams free among Kurtz’s fortress; they talk about morality, horror, fear…..  Kurtz talks and Willard listens.  He talks of men, not monsters, moral men that are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment. 

“You have a right to kill me but you don’t have a right to judge me.”

During a tribal dance outside of the temple a sacrificial cow is brought out.  They dance, joyfully around the quiet beast while holding spears.  Knowing that Kurtz is prepared to die, Willard like a snake in the wild, like a serpent of the sea, hides in the shadows along the fringe of the tribal gathering as rain falls from the sky like little specks of star dust.

This is the End, My only friend.. the End.

Kurtz laments over planes dropping bombs and slaughtering thousands while doubts arise over whether is it morally acceptable for said planes to use the word “fuck” painted on them or not.  At this point, Kurtz looks back and sees the predator, the executioner, the savior as Willard lifts his machete high in the air.  Does Willard see himself in Kurtz?  Is Kurtz a part of himself that needs to die?

In one of the finest uses of editorial juxtaposition in film, while in the bunker, Willard swings the machete as the tribal native’s swing their machete’s outside in the rain, hacking into the back of the cow, splitting its flesh wide open; while simultaneously Willard swings into the shadows as the compliant Kurtz welcomes each blow.  Blades of light and shadow quilt the frame as Jim Morrison echoes “The End” into the amber air.

The horror………

The horror……..

Kurtz is dead.

In silence as Willard looks at Kurtz’s bloody corpse on the floor, the tribal people pull and tear at the flesh of the slaughtered sacrificial cow.   Kill the God and a new God must arise because belief cannot be left to its own devices, it must be tethered to a structure that fortifies it in the symbolic order.  Meaning requires assignment as Willard walks out of the temple victorious while hundreds of natives kneel before him, a man that they believed to be their new king, their new god.  Willard quite rightfully and quite sanely rejects the position and drops his weapon, walking out with Lance, as the natives and soldiers drop their weapons.

The film ends with Willard completing his mission but it doesn’t leave us on a happy note.  Rather, it leaves us acknowledging the emptiness of not being fulfilled.  It leaves us with the bleak reality of our place in the grand scheme of things.  We hope for Willard’s sake that after hitting the lowest pit of hell that up is his only recourse.

On a societal scale, Apocalypse Now is about the failed enlightenment of the industrial age.  The age of reproduction followed as the workers become less part of the development and more part of the cog.  We are the hollow men of connection and the stuffed men of consumerism.

The rules and beliefs that we all assume define our reality are clearly, not only put to the test, but in some cases are seen as obsolete.  These mere representations of reality are a discourse that must ascend the shadows of philosophy classes and into the mainstream of thought, in order for change to occur.  Like Charles Marlow at the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Willard looks toward the horizon and sees decay and death in the distance, but we can only trust that the silver lining in the horizon is the ripple effect, that was generated by Willard rejecting the kingdom of Kurtz for a more promising future of hope.

“To whom shall I hire myself out?

What beast must I adore?

What holy image is attacked?

What hearts must I break?

What lie must I maintain? In what blood thread?”    

- Arthur Rimbaud,  

A Season in Hell.

........The Horror

...................The Horror