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Apocalypse Now and the Bhagavata Purana: the End of the World as We Hardly Know It

Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now has normally been read as one of the films—even if possibly the best—on the Vietnam War, and it does seem inappropriate to deny the obviousness of its surface level. The paper is rather trying to show that there is much more to it than meets the eye. First, if the reading of the title itself is to be consonant with such a reading, it follows that the apocalypse happened in the here and now of the film’s plot. In other words, the apocalypse has already happened and we have ever since been living in a post-apocalyptic world. The central argumentation of the paper, however, is leading towards suggesting Vietnam and its war only as a backdrop for something irreducible to a single place and a single event. The film’s title is open to both an outward and an inward interpretation and is applicable both to the film, with its characters, and to the production set, with its team. At this point inviting ancient India becomes quite promising. For what if the apocalypse and the now should be taken from the viewer’s perspective, too? What if the apocalypse has been happening all along? The Puranas, epic compendia of ancient India, list the apocalypse among its obligatory subjects, but the usual understanding of it as a one-time, or even cyclic, dissolution of the outer world is here compounded by a long-term apocalypse corroding the world by the moment, and an inner one, which in fact is the ultimate spiritual emancipation. All of these are included in the final reading of the film.

Apocalypse Now; Bhagavata Purana; apocalypse; kali yuga

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