The Horror

Have you ever considered any real freedoms?

Freedom from the opinion of others... even the opinions of yourself.

-Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now

It worries me a little when Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz begins to seem sane.  You need to know that Apocalypse Now is one of my favorite movies, and it is a favorite because it combines the rather insightful exploration of the human psyche from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, with some really great acting by Duvall, Sheen, Hopper, and especially a truly menacing and bald Marlon Brando.  One of the things that elevates the performance it gives us something that we rarely see in movies: ambiguity.  Kurtz is certainly unhinged, he's brutal, he is certifiably off of the deep end and in the grip of some pretty full blown psychosis, but he's also kinda sort of right about a lot of stuff, particularly the darkness and violence of war.

Brando was a nightmare to work with at this phase of his career, he made irrational requests and by all accounts got a little bit too in character when it came to playing a genocidal maniac hiding in a jungle ruin.  Making Apocalypse Now, reported sent both Francis Ford Coppola (director) and Martin Sheen (Captain Willard) into a state of nervous breakdown.  What they produced, however, stands up as one of the true works of prophetic art in cinema, and by that I don't just mean a good movie.  There are lots of good movies that tell a good story and maybe even have a bit of an edge to them, but what I mean for the purposes of this classification is a movie that challenges the audience to see something about themselves that they probably would rather not see.  War movies have a certain gravitas in this area and Apocalypse Now opened the door on our collective experience in Southeast Asia and led to other films which plumbed the depths of the soul of this American Empire (Full Metal Jacket, Platoon), but even those powerful films were sort of second tier reflections on violence and basically just reiterate the truth that war is hell.

It also does something else that, I think, is a quality of prophetic art: it provokes a strong feeling.  Either you love it or you hate it.  There's not a lot of middle ground.  I have watched it many times, and I always come away with a feeling of having been somewhere dangerous.  But I know people who have watched it and just felt confused and maybe even a little offended.

Other movies that provoke similar reactions are Citizen Kane, by Orson Welles, and Blue Velvet, by David Lynch.  They are doing remarkable things in telling a visual story, but they also run a high risk of alienating a good part of the audience.  I think really good art, whether it's painting, writing, music or cinema, ought to occasionally take that risk.  When it avoids that risk it runs towards insipidity, which is the affliction of a lot of popular music, television and movies.

Like it or not, art is a commercial venture.  I almost wrote that art has become a commercial venture, but then I remembered that it has sort of always been that way.  After all, the old joke is that most truly innovative and brilliant artists (think Van Gogh) were unappreciated during their lives.  While that is not as true as we sometimes think (for instance Basquiat had a few years of commercial success before kicking off at 27), there is always a bit of a tug of war between making "pure" art and art which is marketable.

A few years ago, my daughter, flush with the thrill of having scribbled enthusiastically for a while, thought she would like to be an artist when she grows up.  As her father, I am suitably impressed with her artistry, I think the things she makes are beautiful, and I will encourage her in any way I can.  She may even have the sort of eccentricity it takes to actually be an artist some day, but unfortunately I know she is probably going to need a day job.  As one who dabbles in writing, I have somewhere an inclination that I would like to do it more.  I see some very bad writing littering the bestseller lists.  E.L. James, Nicholas Sparks, Stephenie Meyer and her sparkly vampires, all make obscene amounts of money for writing terrible novels that have had the good fortune of becoming popular.

And no, I'm not a snob, I understand that not everyone can be Steinbeck or Fitzgerald, I understand the need to read things for fun, I have read Harry Potter, as well as The Hunger Games, as an adult, for fun.  But I question the system that encourages the cynical production of formulaic tripe, which is essentially pornography, and I'm not just talking about Fifty Shades.  Let's take the prolific Mr. Sparks, who has, thanks to my wife, wasted at least a dozen hours of my life by telling the same story over and over again: boy meets girl, boy and or girl have problems, and maybe even die, but love is great anyway, and even death can't stop a happy ending.  Add scenic, romantic setting, comic relief, two attractive young actors gazing intently into each other's eyes, steamy love scene that still manages a PG-13 rating, blend, serve and roll around in the piles of cash that people will shovel into your driveway.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you pop culture...