ࡱ> {bjbjzz 2"  xx...8f\4.I   tvvvvvv$_ #:ix^D  [[[.  t[t[[$ mV`0I,K#FK#$K#$<[[IK# >:Igor Grbi Department of Humanities Juraj Dobrila University of Pula Apocalypse Now and the Bhagavata Purana: the End of the World as We Hardly Know It What if the apocalypse, the ultimate event generations on generations have been preparing for, has actually already happened? What if we have misunderstood its meaning and misconceived its looks? If what happened is basically the same as suggested by someone's very insightful reading of Beckett's most famous play: Godot did come, but Vladimir and Estragon failed to recognize him. This is at least what seems to be implied by Apocalypse Now, the title of Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film, that, lonely grudgers apart, has universally been acclaimed as one of the greatest war films of all times, or even as one of the greatest films ever. The outwardly loose adaptation of Heart of Darkness sucks out the very essence of Conrad's novel and injects it into the setting of the Vietnam War, with no losses in the process. These, then, are the supposed time and place of the apocalypse. The present paper will first concentrate on the film seen precisely as a coherent unfolding of its title, founding its interpretation on Apocalypse Now Redux, the 2001 version, meant by Coppola to supplant the former version (besides various technical improvements, what is far more relevant to my discussion is some fifty minutes cut out from the original film and now resurrected). My attention will next move back to the title, its further implications and possible readings, expanding it into embracing ancient Indian literature, especially the Puranas, texts dealing with the creation, existence and disappearance of the worlds. The meanings given there to the apocalypse ( rather, to its ramifications into different kinds of apocalypse ( should substantially help us towards a much profounder understanding and appreciation of the film, but also of the truth behind the apocalypse itself. I first saw Apocalypse Now one July. It was thirty degrees centigrade outside and God only knew how many inside the small art cinema crammed with people outnumbering the chairs. I profusely sweated throughout its two hours and a half (it was a dozen years before the longer, Redux version), what from the heat, what from the overwhelming scenes. At the end, while being squeezed towards the exit gate, I realized I felt simply crushed by the film. During the next three or four days I could not get rid of it. That was good, it meant I had undergone a great experience. It was still uncertain, though, whether that meant it was a great film, too. I spent the next three or four years patiently identifying and extricating all too personal sympathies I was able to get hold of, and growing into a matured conviction that, even granting some of the criticism taxing it with excess and incoherence might be well-founded (something I also intend to tackle further in the text), Apocalypse Now is simply a masterpiece, a grand work with almost every single moment of it coming out from a flash of pure vision. The film starts on a recognizably apocalyptic note, thus immediately introducing both its tone and theme: the camera glides along a tropical forest devoured by napalm fire. A vast majority of traditions prefers fire as the only or primary means of the world's dissolution, a myth represented at the global level. As we shall increasingly realize, the film heavily relies on a mythological framework, which is crucial for our interpretation, too. The forest, on the other hand, is a staple symbol of the primeval world, or, at the interior level, of the unconscious, one getting lost in it both in a physical and a spiritual way (the most famous Western example of the latter is, of course, Dante's Divine Comedy, beginning "In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost."). A second viewing of the film can thus offer an experienced reading of the forest and make one understand that a further, interiorized sense of the apocalypse is safely anticipated as early as in the introductory sequence. Poetry is not missing from the beginning of Coppola's film either: the flapping of the helicopters' blades blends with the Doors' "The End" ( "Of our elaborate plans, the end, / Of everything that stands, the end" ( whose apocalyptic moment is more than obvious. A beautifully significant detail, but easy to overlook, are the broken helicopter blades falling through the fire. At this stage of the film, setting the mood and preceding the story proper, they become the more charged with valencies transcending the mere physical level of helicopters that are normally taken down as part of a war's matter of course. True, helicopters belong to the USA Army, so their destruction can legitimately be read as indicating the failure of the American imperialist project, in Vietnam at least. In a more modest war film the interpretation would likely stop at that. However, once we begin to realize the far-reaching import of Apocalypse Now it becomes necessary to deepen our reading and see that detail as yet another symptom of the whole of man-made ( of man's ( world falling apart. Against the lyrics of "The End", we are witnessing the human spiralling back into the primordial mass, or are rather engulfed by it. This extension of a merely military reading is further corroborated by the appearance of a ceiling fan in a civil hotel, whose revolutions and sound overlap with those of helicopter blades. Parallel to the blades falling is the fan that seems to be losing momentum. Finally, fading in into the scene is the head of Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen), but turned upside down, unlike the fan in the right half, another early indication that the apocalypse is a fact concerning first and foremost man personally. In the course of the following three hours we are given enough time to understand this is meant in an inward rather than an outward sense. The very human, even private, dimension of the apocalypse is further adumbrated by Willard's dazed monologue introducing the story. It is then that we hear: "I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one." The diction of the second clause makes it clear that the oncoming journey up the Nung River is to be seen as a journey to hell. Willard's journey has to do with punishment, with expiation, with being translated into a dimension affecting the very ground of his identity. Indeed, the journey brings a continuous succession of images and sights that can remind one of Dor illustrations of Dante's epic poem, put into fiery colours and turned completely surrealist, bizarre and, colours notwithstanding, so very dark. This is the apocalypse as seen from outside. At an inner level, the apocalyptic forces precipitate the characters into some kind of madness. Hardly anyone in the film seems to be normal. The very category of human normality is constantly questioned and deconstructed amidst a humanity represented as a burning amalgam of one aberration upon another. Compositionally, the film consists of three parts: before the journey, the journey, and Kurtz's (Marlon Brando) compound. For practical reasons I shall refer to them by ordinal numbers. Though one might readily presume that the last part, being the destination of the journey, must play the central role, it remains sufficiently unresolved to make the second part a decent rival, with its masterful amplification of inner and outer hell. The patrol boat journey up the Nung has nothing to do with the picaresque-like enterprises we typically meet in war films (and war itself!). Indeed, this is how Willard's superiors see it, this is how himself sees it when embarking on the venture, but once he becomes engrossed in Kurtz's dossier it becomes increasingly clear that the mission from his monologue is to be understood in a spiritual, rather than a military way. The journey turns out to be an initiation, a rite of passage into the liminal spaces of human existence. As such, it is to be subsumed under the mythological hero's journey (quest), elaborated particularly by Joseph Campbell (mostly in The Hero with a Thousand Faces), or, in psychological terms, under the path of individuation, as presented by Carl Gustav Jung. What Campbell calls the monomyth begins with the hero's separation from his present world, initiation into the mysteries of another, and return to the world which, due to the initiation, will never again be just the former, but deepened by the acquired experience. In Jung's perspective, the path of (or to) individuation implies gradual assimilation of numinous archetypes into one's conscience, from the shadow, through the anima (or, in women, the animus) and the great mother (or, in women, the old wise man), to the self, one's comprehensive identity. Such a journey is triggered by a call, in Campbell's terms, while Jung speaks of an inner crisis forcing one to reach beyond one's own persona (the superficial, public identity). In Coppola's film ( as befitting the ironic mode of our present age, described by Northrop Frye (see especially pp. 33-67) ( the critical call has been parodied into a military order, coming completely from outside the seeker. A journey leading to a contact with the other side requires an appropriate state of mind. "[I]t is wiser not to investigate the dark aspects of nature too closely," writes Jung's disciple Marie-Louise von Franz, "but rather to pass them by as the ancients passed their chthonian gods, trembling and with covered heads bowed in awe. Evil has its divine depths, into which it is irreverent to look" (82). Whoever does confront these aspects has to be aware of the fact that it largely depends on him whether the experience will turn out to be a great blessing (assimilating contents that will lead closer to the final integration of the self) or a great curse (being crushed by the numinousity of the encounter). The confrontation requires a feeling of reverence, a stance of delicate and cautious wakefulness. All of which is missing when the crew leaves upstream, to the source! They are excited young men navely expecting unadulterated adventure: Lance Johnson (Sam Bottoms) is all about getting his tan, Clean (actually Tyrone Miller, played by Laurence Fishburne) a rock'n'rolling teenager stuck to his radio, Chef (actually Jay Hicks, played by Frederic Forrest) a good-tempered saucier stumbling into the forest in his search for mangoes and finding a tiger instead. The older Chief (actually George Phillips, played by Albert Hall) exhausts his role in being in charge of the boat and fond of Clean. Every one of them is, after all, on a classified mission, moving towards an unknown destination and purpose. It is only Captain Willard who is aware of the target, and he is increasingly becoming obsessed with Kurtz's personality as he peruses the dossier. One of the motives reverberating with the religious dimension of the quest is the cow (or buffalo). Such a reading is clearly established by the scene of the ritual killing of a buffalo in Kurtz's compound, towards the film's end, to which we shall return later. It reminds us of the cow hanging from a flying helicopter at the Air Cavalry base, that is, at the beginning of the journey. The image is closely followed by a military chaplain saying the Lord's Prayer on the explosion-ridden river bank. More than that, soon afterwards Willard's boat is dropped onto the river by a helicopter, and the image of the hanging boat strongly resembles the previous image of the hanging cow. A plausible interpretation would be that, at the time of the apocalypse, religious upholding is supplanted by sacrilegious destruction, but the parallelism also stresses the spiritual character of the forthcoming journey. (A very similar meaning can be attached to the fact that the first women to appear in the film ( besides the Vietnamese functioning as a mere backdrop ( and the only ones, actually ( besides other Vietnamese women and the French lady at the plantation, with the latter being absent from the original version anyway ( are the Playboy Playmates, coming out of a helicopter and staying sinisterly attached to it, either by holding on to it or climbing it. At the apocalypse, the female principle of fertility and life survives only as a trivialization of itself and an extension of the male principle now dedicated completely to annihilation.) At the next post Willard collects the mail and hears from the soldier handing it they are now "in the arsehole of the world". We are once again reminded of Dante's Comedy and Satan's anus, at the bottom of hell. The journey is a progression down its circles. True, its infernality is constantly represented by unforgettable visuals (Vittorio Storaro won the Oscar for Best Cinematography), but subtler than that is its internal aspect: the madness that keeps flooding the film as we watch. General Corman's (G. D. Spradling) words pronounced at the lunch at which Willard is acquainted with the target of his mission serve as an introduction to the theme: Well, you see, Willard, in this war, things get confused out there. Power, ideals, the old morality, and practical military necessity. But out there with these natives, it must be a temptation to be God. Because there's a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph. Sometimes, the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. Things do get confused. At the beginning of the mission we meet Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who in no way responds to the war around him as a situation out of the ordinary. For him, war is normal, even desirable (he ends his squatting monologue with evident regret in the final words that one day the war will end). His is the most memorable line of the whole film: "I love the smell of napalm in the morning." The only thing that can compete with his love for war is his love for surfing. It is an uncanny experience to see how these two combine: his order to napalm some of the nearby forest in order to give him some air to breathe and waves to surf is delivered in a matter-of-course attitude. Significantly, however, the later napalming spree will negatively affect the favourable waves. At the end of the world, characterized also by a darkening of the mind, what one adores destroys the adorer, just like here the beloved napalm destroys Kilgore's cherished hopes of riding the river, just like the natives deifying Kurtz are ruthlessly killed by that very Kurtz. As I have already said, practically no one in the film seems to be quite normal. Although a war enthusiast, it would be highly unjust to say that with Kilgore this implies a love for spilling human blood (the symbolism of the two words hidden in his surname should be tackled with cautiously). What he loves is rather the action of the war, the challenges it offers, the high adrenaline present in constantly living on the edge. He is certainly not devoid of humanity (hinted at by personally assisting a Vietnamese woman with her child), although it is extremely superficial (he personally gives water to a dying Vietnamese soldier, much to the chagrin of his own soldiers, but quickly abandons him once he learns the famous surfer Lance is here at his base). However much Kilgore seems to be deranged, it is part of the film's amplification poetics that he represents only the tip of madness. We are carefully being led to the moment of real nightmare: the massacre of all Vietnamese civilians on the sampan boat they stop for a routine check. It is the first unmotivated killing, completely unnecessary and the more terrifying for the fact that it has been performed by a teenager, the already highly nervous Clean, and finished by a Willard preventing first aid to the wounded woman and finishing her off instead, not to divert them from their target. It was the way we had over here of living with ourselves. We'd cut 'em in half with a machine gun and give 'em a bandaid. It was a lie - and the more I saw of 'em, the more I hated lies. Those boys were never gonna look at me the same way again, but I felt like I knew one or two things about Kurtz that weren't in the dossier. Maybe the boys did look at Willard in a different way from that moment on, but nobody feels the need to reproach anybody for what happened, nobody is troubled by a notion of responsibility, and certainly nobody seems to have any problems with his own conscience. The drastic decline of conscience reflects in fact an apocalyptic decline of consciousness (the etymology of the two words is the same in very many languages). From that point on the crew are plummetting towards insanity or, in Willard's case, towards an ever deeper absorption in the figure of Kurtz. There is a pregnant moment in the film when the crew arrives at one of the posts on the way and Willard asks a draftee: "Hey, soldier, do you know who's in command here?" Staring at him, the soldier enigmatically answers "Yeah" and leaves. I do not think it would be stretching the point to suggest the gap is to be filled in with something like "Of course I know, can't you see, it's the Devil himself". Once again, it is only in an outside sense that we are in Vietnam (or, later, Cambodia). Inside, hell is where we are at the now of Apocalypse Now. Where the crew ( or what is left of it ( finally arrives, the apocalypse is already going on. The tribal people that come to meet it are white with ash smeared all over them. They are utterly pale. Already dead. As Tim Dirks finely observes, these ash-covered natives standing in their dugout canoes wearing only loincloths are a perverted version of the landing of a Western ship in sun-drenched Tahiti (Dirks). We can amplify this observation by adding that it was Tahiti, more than any other exotic island, that figured as paradise on earth in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century imagination. Which is the exact opposite of Kurtz's compound. (There is another similar contrast a few scenes later, with Kurtz, the lord of the present hell, reminiscing about his childhood going down the Ohio and coming across a large garden of gardenias, "you'd think that heaven just fell on the earth in the form of gardenias.") Structurally, the whole film is a pretext for finding and standing face to face with Kurtz, the mad warrior poet, the hight priest of his self-made temple caricature. His pontifical role in that heart of darkness is stressed by his bald, monk-like head, that hardly ever emerges into the light. He actually comes very close to being the god himself of that world, its tremendous, nihilistic incarnation. The world around him is then simply his emanation. To confront him is Willard. He is the mock hero who has to slay the dragon in order to finish his own quest and begin the journey back home. In this final section of the film we are given to understand ( one last time, and this time perfectly clear ( that it is only his quest, indeed: Chef is decapitated, while Lance, the only survivor besides Willard himself, ends up evidently swallowed by the corroding mental process begun on the boat. Kurtz is the lord of the apocalypse, where the latter, following the line already established in this text, is to be understood in an outward sense. He is the lord of the decaying world around him. Inwardly, he is rather the victim of the apocalypse. Here we should be reminded that apocalypse literally means revelation, uncovering. It is the unveiling of another, or rather the other world (which is definitely not to be reduced to afterlife, its common synonym). The nature of its content and the force of its impact are something that has to be uncovered only very slowly, cautiously, under the guidance of somebody waiting on the other side, preferably. The alternative is almost certainly madness, being overwhelmed by unconscious materials let loose. A detailed psychological interpretation of Kurtz or Apocalypse Now would require a different kind of text. I can here only use as much of it as needed for my present purpose and once again suggest Jung's work as an illuminating approach to psychological phenomena seen primarily as spiritual issues. Kurtz stepped beyond the falsity of our everyday world, only to replace it by a world he did not manage to make his own. Instead, he was appropriated by it and turned into its rampant vassal. Before leaving for the mission Willard is told by his superiors that Kurtz has adopted some unsound methods (another lexical homage to Conrad's novel). Now, in the darkness of his abode and his soul, Kurtz asks Willard: "Are my methods unsound?" The captain answers: "I don't see any methods." It is an allusion to Polonius, of course, who, observing Hamlet's behaviour, says in an aside: "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't" (2.2.205-206). Hamlet's was a pretended, calculated, systematic kind of madness. In Kurtz all hope of any illumination has been shattered by a genuine, comprehensive dissolution of the human, which is the counterpart of the apocalypse going on outside. The image combining the two aspects are the dead bodies at the compund, the leftovers of Kurtz's mania. And this is yet another carefully prepared part of the film's amplification. The first violence we were exposed to was directed by Kilgore's cowboy-like lunacy, which, however sinister it might have seemed, had very much of playfulness to it. There is nothing of the kind in the boat massacre, where civilians become the only victims, of an act that is no longer orchestrated by humans, but by Moloch using humans to destroy other humans. In the last part we can see how he manages to use them to destroy their own selves. There is pure horror, indeed, in countless bodies lying all over the bank, piers and steps of the compound, hanging from the trees, reduced to heads mounted on stakes. The sheer number of these remains and the incredible places in which we find them scattered probably rank high among the charges accusing the film of exaggeration. But such literal readings remain blind to the hightened level of the film's reality and spoil it by forcing realistic claims on what in every of its moments exists only as subtle surrealism. The utterly deranged photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) seems to know better. Here is the whole of his relevant soliloquy: "This is the way the fucking world ends. This is the way the fucking world ends. Look at this fucking shit we're in, man. Not with a bang. A whimper. And with a whimper, I'm fucking splitting, Jack." The privacy of a whimper is here to remind us that the apocalypse is not just a matter of outward annihilation, but also something concerning the individual as such. On the desk of priest-king Kurtz we see a copy of J. G. Frazer's classic The Golden Bough, a seminal work on the ritual, sacrifical killing of the aged king in order for his land to be liberated from sterility. The king hes exhausted his beneficial mana and it is now the hero's task to end his mutated, destructive rule so as to let the flow of life pervade the country again. "The hero of yesterday," writes Campbell, "becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today" (326). It is a variant of the father-son motive (here only secondarily expressed through the age difference ( which, after all, seems quite slight ( but rather through the difference in their military grades), a relationship antagonistic only because dialectical in the economy of the world. The world being here captured at its apocalyptic moment, however, some major distortions of the perennial myth have appeared. The obvious willingness with which Kurtz allows Willard to kill him has baffled not a few critics and ordinary viewers, but it should not come as a surprise, actually. It perfectly fits into the sacrificial pattern, in which the desiccated king not only suffers, but even wills his own death, since the substitution by younger, fresh blood makes possible for the whole of his world to renew itself. The religious character of the killing is stressed by the overlapping ritual killing of a water buffalo at the hands of the natives (the animal has been following us ever since it first appeared hanging from a helicopter). Amidst tribal cries accompanying the buffalo ceremony, ready to perform what he was sent to perform, Willard is shown emerging from water, a symbol of the unconscious and regeneration, face painted in war colours. The mirror of the water recalls the hotel mirror from the beginning of the film which Willard smashes with his bare fist, causing it to bleed, a prefiguration of the present sacrificial blood. Moreover, we see many natives with faces equally painted or masked. One's own personality is being relinquished, drowned in the waters that consume every singularity. So far so good. But Willard does not inherit Kurtz, and the waste land seems to remain waste even after the dethronement of the apparent cause. Actually, at the end of the film Willard does not really look as the traditional hero at all. Coming out of Kurtz's quarters ( that, even if they might not be a literal temple (another symbol of transformation), definitely resemble one ( the people welcome Willard as their new god. He slowly moves his head to one side, so that half of his face remains sunk in shadow, irresistably evoking the lighting of Kurtz's head. In his hand he is clutching Kurtz's manuscript on total extermination. A shift towards identification with him is thus beyond doubt. The rain that sees Willard and Lance out of the compound is the same rain that has been falling throughout the film. It is not life-giving. Although the mythic pattern has been faithfully repeated, in the apocalypse the mythic regeneration does not work any more. We are not witnessing further evolution of the world, but its involution. God is present only as a parody, as Almighty, code name of the headquarters calling Willard via radio waves. The quest is aborted. Put in alchemical language, it has been a seeker's opus magnum, but with no release from the nigredo stage. The last we see of him is his face disappearing behind a traditional stone sculpture. Organic, individualized, conscious life disolves into the unconscious, pre-individual, anorganic. In an alternative ending of the film, in fact, the camera lingers for unusually long not to be significant on one such stone image, veiled in smoke, debris and darkness, only occasionally letting it into the light (just like it did with Kurtz). "This is the dead land / This is cactus land / Here the stone images / Are raised" ("Hollow Men"). To draw a tentative line on our treatment of the film up to the present point. Apocalypse Now has had very many reviews, some of them even obscurer than the film itself (admitting the film is at all obscure). Accusing it of excessiveness is to ignore its pivotal tone: this is a film about the apocalypse, and an apocalypse is an excessive event. Everything in the film serves to render that tone visible, audible, experienceable. James Berardinelli takes the final thirty minutes of the film to represent "a gargantuan misstep". But so is all of the film. At the opposite pole there are those vacillating between seeing the film as "either the masterpiece of an artist, or a disgusting commercial exploitation of a not-so-distant human tragedy, or both" (Roberts and Wallis 148). But what could possibly be commercial about a three-and-a-half-hour garganutan misstep of madness, darkness and horror? It is also misleading to consider it a film on the Vietnam War (the "not-so-distant human tragedy" from the above quotation), neither did Coppola himself come any nearer the truth when, in a news conference at the Cannes Festival, he famously declared that his film is not about Vietnam, but is Vietnam itself. However, he also said, and on the very same occasion, that his film is not a movie. And that seems more to the point. Apocalypse Now is a vision. It surely got rid of its author and his intentions. The vision took the reins, which is why Coppola was left despairing over the self-willed meanderings of "his" film, finding it particularly difficult to give an ending to something that has to such an extent outgrew him (which is why several endings remained even once the film was released). Yet more significant is the following statement of Coppola's: "[I]t struck me like a diamond bullet in my head [he is here using Kurtz's idiom!] that I wasn't making the film, the jungle was" (qtd. in Roud). We have already been introduced to the forest as a symbol of the collective unconscious. Symptomatic of the "numinous" nature of the film is also the fact that its shooting so profoundly affected the persons involved, as well as the process itself. They were in the jungle, says Coppola, with too much money, too much equipment, and "little by little we went insane" (qtd. in Roberts and Wallis 146). As if it had been the participants' opus magnum, too, their challenging quest. From the first day of the shooting to the last day of the post-production labours it took almost four years for the film to be considered finished, a strikingly unusual length. The expensive sets were destroyed by a typhoon, there were problems due to the civil war that had just started in the Phillipines, the budget rocketed from the initial dozen of million dollars to almost thirty-one, making Coppola mortgage the very house he lived in with his family. There were serious health problems. Martin Sheen even went as far as declaring he had chosen to have his heart attack, he had needed it, in order to die as his old self ("Martin Sheen (Apocalypse Now)"). It was apocalypse for both Willard and Sheen. So what if the apocalypse has already happened? If Apocalypse Now is a film on the Vietnam War, then this is the conclusion that follows. My argumentation, however, has all along been leading towards suggesting Vietnam and its war rather as a backdrop, a possible stage for something irreducible to a single place and a single event. I have also tried to show that the film's title is open to both an outward and an inward interpretation and applicable both to the film, with its characters, and to the production set, with its team. It is at this point of my investigation that inviting ancient India looks so promising and inspiring. For what if the apocalypse and the now are not to be taken only from the film's or the filmmakers' perspectives, but also from the viewer's? And what if the apocalypse has already happened, but we did not notice when it was happening? Lord Shiva dances the worlds into dissolution (just as, not infrequently, he is said to dance them into existence, which should come as no surprise since God must comprehend everything, including the apparently irreconcilable opposites). The most common Sanskrit word for our ordinary meaning of apocalypse is pralaya, literally dissolution. Note that Shiva does not destroy the universe, does not annihilate it. Rather, he dissolves it into its prime matter, for new universes to emerge. The most elaborate accounts of pralaya are to be found in the Puranas, later Hindu texts that practically function as universal histories. I am choosing to deal here with the Vishnu Purana (Book 6, Chapters 1-5; pp. 620-644) and the Bhagavata Purana (Zr+mad Bhgavata MahpurGa in the Works Cited; Book 12, Chapter 4; pp. 680-684). It is irrelevant that these are Vaishnava and not Shaiva Puranas, for pralaya is a staple Puranic topic, and the accounts given in the two above Puranas are best suited to my present purpose. When it comes to the end of the world, the most prominent Puranic contribution is the awareness that we should more truly speak of different kinds of pralaya, of the ends of the world. The first kind is naimittika pralaya, the occasional or incidental apocalypse. At the end of every kalpa ( one day of Brahma, comprising 4,320,000,000 solar years ( the three worlds (heaven, earth and the intermediate region) dissolve into the naimittika pralaya, the night of Brahma, which is going to last as long as his day. It is a cyclic alternation between the Creator's staying awake and going to sleep. The substance of the world, however, remains intact. Only its form is dissolved. Of further interest is the division of one kalpa into one thousand revolutions of four yugas, ages of the world, each of which is worse than the preceding one(s). The last of the four yugas is kali, the black age. Needless to say, it is the one we are living in (if the apocalypse has indeed not already come). Kali yuga is characterized by overall degeneration, total collapse that precipitates the world into another naimittika pralaya. Among the traits of people living in such an age we recognize the situation present in Apocalypse Now: people in kali yuga "will ever remain perturbed in mind", "will kill even their own people". Just as the ever-functioning mythic pattern fails at the arrival of the apocalypse, so in kali yuga "[t]he mind (of a man) does not attain absolute purity through worship of gods, asceticism, control of breath, friendliness (towards all), a bath in sacred waters, observance of sacred vows, charitable gifts and muttering of prayers", all of which normally leads the mind towards purity. (These symptoms are given earlier in the Bhagavata Purana, Book 12, Chapter 3; pp. 679-680.) The second kind of apocalypse is prakrtika pralaya, natural, primordial. When Brahma's life, lasting one hundred Brahma years, has come to its end ( for the Creator is just God's demiurge, himself perishable and expendable ( it is time for God (Vishnu) to take a nap. This prakrtika pralaya will last 311,040,000,000,000 solar years, just as long as Brahma's life. It is an apocalypse dissolving into prakrti (primordial matter) even the tanmatras (subtle elements), the ahamkara (ego principle) and the mahat (principle of cosmic intelligence). The ultimate recalling of all the aggregates, which are subtly physical even at the remote levels we believe to be too subtle to have anything with the physical world. It is the suspension of existence, when, in the words of the Bhagavata Purana, "the potencies of the Supreme Person as well as of the Unmanifest (Prakrti), are completely and helplessly withdrawn (into their substratum)". In macrocosmic terms, it is the furthest an apocalypse can go. In sage Shuka's description of it to king Parikshit we shall recognize much of the sights and sounds that have stayed with us after Apocalypse Now: [T]he fire characteristic of the period of dissolution then burns the subterranean regions, already desolate [...] Being burnt above and below as well as on all sides by the rays of the sun and the flames of fire, the cosmic egg [i.e., the cosmos] now looks like a burnt ball of cowdung. Then a strong and violent wind characteristic of the period of final dissolution blows for (a little) more than a hundred years, so that the sky gets enveloped in dust and assumes a smoky appearance. Next, O dear one, numerous hosts of clouds of various colours pour down showers for a hundred years roaring with violent peals of thunder. Then the universe within the cosmic egg is swept by a single sheet of water. Everything being submerged in water [...] We see huge quantities of fire and water in the film. These classic instruments of ending the world even sensorily make for associating Apocalypse Now with prakrtika pralaya, too. Properly speaking, it is impossible to distinguish the naimittika and prakrtika pralayas from a Western, Christian point of view, the latter being a noncyclic, nonperiodical perspective recognizing only a compact temporality. However, both correlate with our understanding of the apocalypse. But the Puranas do not stop at that. Sage Shuka of the Bhagavata mentions a third apocalypse, termed nitya, which means constant, eternal. Indeed, what if the apocalypse has already happened, and we did not even notice that it was happening? Even more, what if it is happening all the time, second by second, and we cannot notice it? Now, this is an apocalypse that begins to involve even us, the viewers of Apocalypse Now. Let us one more time turn our ears to the wise Shuka: Some men, knowing the subtle state of things, O tormentor of foes! declare the creation and dissolution of all created beings from Brahma downward as going on all the time (every moment). The successive stages that are gone through by (all) changing things (such as a stream or the flame of a lamp) serve as an index of the constant appearance and dissolution of the body etc., (of a created being), which are being rapidly worn away (every moment) by force of the stream of Time. The (successive) stages (of growth and decay etc., of created beings) brought about by the aforementioned Time, a manifestation of the Almighty, which has no beginning or end, are certainly not perceived (even) as the stages of movement of luminaries (coursing) in the heavens. Naimittika and prakrtika pralayas are plain enough for everybody to see. Nitya pralaya requires rather to be taught. One has to be made aware of it, to awaken to it. Actually, it, too, is perfectly obvious, but, drenched in time, it dulls our perception into inertia that takes it for granted. The perennial decomposing and recomposing of the world around and inside us is an evergoing apocalypse that we euphemistically call existence. In Buddhism there is the parallel concept of kshanika vada, the doctrine of momentariness. Everything exists only for a moment (kshana), coming to birth and immediately being replaced by something that only apparently maintains the identity. The Buddha therefore rejects any idea of considering reincarnation as substantially different from what is taking place all the time: what happens to us at the moment of our death is only an enhanced version of what has been constantly happening to us while we are alive. The personality is a compound of ingredients that keep coming and going, which is why it makes no sense to talk of the soul as a fixed identity. We are constantly reincarnating, and constantly becoming somebody or something else. The implications of the kshanika vada vision are many and far-reaching. Most importantly, it introduces a healthy relativization into the hierarchy of moments. If every moment is essentially the same rebirth and redeath endlessly repeating, it becomes very difficult to seriously privilege one moment and minimize another: any moment is as good as any other. And this is the right time to introduce the fourth kind of apocalypse. The fourth pralaya is known as atyantika, beyond end, absolute. It is ultimate spiritual emancipation. In itself, this is nothing new, it is admitted by almost all Indian religions and philosophies and is commonly termed moksha, letting go, release. The genius of the Puranas is in their having recognized that it is to be counted among the pralayas. It is the final, most exquisite apocalypse. Instead of the world disappearing and ending man, here man disappears and ends the world. The world has finally been seen through as only an imagined veil covering the true essence (here the true etymology of apocalypse!). The essence has never ceased to be ( in fact, it is the only "thing" that really is ( but it has all along been hidden by maya, the illusion of our mind. Kshanika vada, as developed by the mahayana branch of Buddhism, found here its ultimate application: nirvana (the Buddhist term for moksha) and samsara (the world, maya) are the same thing. Any of our moments, being just a bubble, can be exposed for what it really is: a hollow protuberance on the underlying sea. With the last two kinds of pralaya, Apocalypse Now becomes a title that can very well involve the viewer, too. Any now of his life is the stage of an apocalypse, and at any now can he cut loose of the enveloping time, be reduced to eternity, which we wrongly like to define as everlasting time: it is the non-lasting now. Naturally, these additional meanings of apocalypse are open to Benjamin Willard, too. Atyantika pralaya is an extremely personal affair (others can help you towards the sea, but it is you who has to step into it and dissolve), and Willard is in fact on a hero's quest, the only one who knows the purpose of the mission. It is he in whom the experience of the outward apocalypse began corroding the system for a potential collapse towards the inner apocalypse. The will carved into his surname might eventually come to epitomize a triumph of his daylight will power, or its capitulation to the true source of all our wills. Most probably, such speculations are rather far-fetched. In no way does Willard seem to be a saint on the threshold of enlightenment. Still, I take whatever has here been said to be true on principle. On principle, the water Willard emerged from minutes before killing Kurtz is both the deluge water of prakrti pralaya and the baptismal water of atyantika pralaya. But then, apocalypse is ultimately about us, the viewers, not about the characters. And our present kali yuga, however bad it is, still offers grand opportunities. In such a degenerate state of mankind God alleviates the criteria for moksha. Vyasa, the reputed author of all the Puranas, was heard one day exclaiming: "Excellent is the Kali age!" When asked for the reason, he answered: The fruit of penance, of continence, of silent prayer, and the like, practised in the krta age [the yugas are now enumerated from the best to the worst] for ten years, in the treta for one year, in the dvapara for a month, is obtained in the kali age in a day and night: therefore did I exclaim, "Excellent, excellent, is the kali age!" More than that ( excellent, excellent indeed! ( according to the most accepted count, kali yuga is going to last for another 427,000 years. So, instead of fearing an apocalypse from outside, why not timely dedicate oneself to an apocalypse within? Here, and now.     Grbi  PAGE 19 Endnotes  Part of the mythic aura enveloping the making of the film is Coppola's alleged idea to ask Morrison to create music for Apocalypse Now. Morrison, however, died even before the film was begun so the already existing "The End" was used, which, in fact, is the right song for the occasion. Explicit references to the apocalypse, either literal or by paraphrase, include the deranged photojournalist's intimation to Captain Willard that "this is the way the fucking world ends" (actually a quotation from Eliot's "Hollow Men", without the adjective, of course) and the Apocalypse Now writing cursorily seen in Kurtz's compound (which originally did function as the title, too, since the first distributed version was totally bereft of any opening or closing credits, title included).  Notice also that the Nung River is a fictional replacement of the actual Mekong. A river not belonging to this world can then neither be traced back to a source belonging to this world.  Some have even argued that the Kurtz finale is completely redundant, watering down the self-sufficient effect created by the journey (see, for example, Berardinelli' review). Though I can understand such a point of view, I can hardly agree with it. It is easy for me, however, to sympathize with those claiming that the Playboy Playmates and, especially, the French plantation episodes, introduced into the Redux version, water down the growing intensity and were justly cut of from the original version (which contains only the very functional Playboy Playmates' show, omitting the afterparty with Willard's crew).  Here we cannot go deeper into Campbell or Jung's theories. As for the latter, the interested reader can consult any of the classic introductions to his concepts, such as Man and His Symbols by Jung and his collaborators, Jolande Jacobi's Die Psychologie von C. G. Jung, or An Introduction to Jung's Psychology by Frieda Fordham.  For a balanced, though sketchy, interpretation of Kilgore see Duvall's interview ("Robert Duvall (The Godfather, Marlon Brando), 1991").  This is iconically showen at the moment Willard leaves the compound, when we find Lance (who, ever since he "buried" Chief in the river, has not pronounced a single word) standing among the natives and coming out only at Willard's hint. There is also a nice parallelism connecting Willard, Lance and Captain Colby (Scott Glenn), Willard's predecessor who instead of terminating Kurtz joined him. At different times we see all of them swaying in meditative martial moves: Willard in his hotel room, Lance on the boat just before arriving at the destination, Colby in a misty background against a close-up Kurtz delivering one of his talks. They all approached the same threshold, and crossed it differently.  The ideal is expressed by Kurtz himself in the first part of the film, when together with Willard we listen to his taped voice. So we hear Kurtz say that it his dream to crawl like a snaile along the edge of a straight razor. He will later personally say to Willard: "You must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they're not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies."  While working on her documentary, Eleanor Coppola, director's wife, discovered the ceremony among the Ifugao people of the Philippines (where the shooting of Apocalypse Now actually took place). She called her husband to see it and he used it for the film (E. Coppola 134, 167).  "[T]he mirror of the waters [] does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it [] [T]the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face." (Jung 69)  See "Apocalypse Now Alternate Ending" in Works Cited.  As part of his personal metamorphosis, Sheen made Coppola, after repeated requests, let him really smash the hotel mirror and bleed with no aid accepted ("Martin Sheen (Apocalypse Now)").  For practical purposes, the present text uses common English transcription for rendering Sanskrit words. This has also involved adaptating citations with different transcription strategies to create uniformity and prevent confusion.  Note that the duration corresponds to our scientists' rough estimation of the age of the Earth.  Is this the water Willard emerges from? I shall come back to this idea.  The episode is described in Chapter 2 of the Vishnu Purana (p. 627). Works Cited Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Robert M. Durling. Vol. 1. New York, Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1996. "Apocalypse Now Alternate Ending". YouTube.com. 22 Sep. 2011. . Berardinelli, James. "Apocalypse Now Redux". 2004. 24 Sep. 2011. . Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1949. Coppola, Eleanor. Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now. New York: Simon & Schuster,1979. Coppola, Francis Ford, dir. Apocalypse Now. Zoetrope Studios, 1979. ---. Apocalypse Now Redux. American Zoetrope, 2001. Dirks, Tim. "Apocalypse Now (1979)". Filmsite. 23 Sep. 2011. < http://www.filmsite.org/apoc.html>. Eliot, Thomas Sterns. Selected Poems. New York: Mariner Books, 1967. Franz, Marie-Louise von. Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche. Trans. Michael H. Kohn. Boston, London: Shambhala, 1999. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1957. Jung, Carl Gustav. "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (1934).The Integration of the Personality. Trans. Stanley Dell.. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1941, pp. 52-95. "Martin Sheen (Apocalypse Now)". 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