Willard’s symbolic “crucifixion”, unconscious captivity in the container, as well as subsequent recovery suggests the death, entombment and resurrection of Jesus. When placed side by side with the documented reality of the war, which reveals a complex structure of political forces at work, a director’s attempt at theologizing and thematizing Vietnam into a single united auteurist vision risks coming off as inauthentic and simplistic. The second issue is the ending itself, specifically the portrayal of Kurtz. I was also interested to see George Lucas expand the iconic Star Wars trilogy into the six episode epic of Anakin Skywalker’s fall into and resurrection from the dark side. In the process of this montage, the sculpted face of the Buddha appears next to the face of Willard, the two of them filling the entire screen.

The film has had several different cuts released since its initial theatrical cut, but Ridley Scott insists that the definitive version of the classic film is the final cut. She grew up in Vietnam and studied film in the U.S. and the U.K. The title of a popular sports film became much more than a reference to a baseball team or even the chewing tobacco it was named after when I recognized that Kevin Costner’s “Crash Davis” – baseball’s version of Theseus – symbolically slays Tim Robbin’s Minotaur in Bull Durham. In this respect, Apocalypse Now appears less of a war film than an entry in the cowboys-and-Indians tradition whereby the white protagonist must cling to the goodness of civilization in the face of pure barbaric evil. The film seems to be suggesting that Willard and Kurtz are somehow connected by this “circuit cable”, as Willard continues: Even Ken Burns’s 10-part 18-hour documentary series The Vietnam War, which proposes to examine the war from both sides, is equally guilty of this. Willard has completed the Hero’s Journey through the heart of darkness, died and been resurrected, unified the chakras, and attained Buddhahood. The tantric snake is representative of the energies travelling up the spine through these centers. Cigar smoke curls in the air. This cut was re-edited by Coppola and Walter Murch and features a new Technicolor dye prints with additional footage originally left out of the theatrical release. Outwardly, it is a statement on the insanity of warfare in general, and the Vietnam War in particular. The Colonel has gone renegade, taken control of a Montagnard army in Cambodia, and gone about waging the war on his own terms. In fact, Vietnamese voices are rarely even heard, and when they are, they are bodiless, a mere aural complement to images of graphic casualties. With Francis Ford Coppola’s “final cut” of Apocalypse Now making headlines at festivals, critics have been presented with an opportunity to reevaluate the legacy of the film, yet again there is familiar (and by now well-rehearsed) praise for the film’s frenzied visual feast and its legendarily difficult production. The panoramic signposts are all there—dark tropical forests, huts and rice fields—and are part of iconic images in film history. Poseidon punishes Minos by causing his wife Pasiphae to fall in love with the bull, and their offspring is the Minotaur – a creature with a man’s body and a bull’s head. THE FINAL CUT, released this year, splits the difference at 182 minutes. There is a lot to love about FINAL CUT (much of which the theatrical cut shares). Willard’s journey begins when he meets Colonel Kilgore, the commander of a helicopter cavalry unit who also happens to be obsessed with surfing. This theme is further taken up at the River Outpost scene, in which Willard trades one valued material commodity – some diesel fuel – for what is evidently viewed as another commodity: “a couple of hours with the bunnies.”, I find it interesting that Coppola chose the name Do Lung Bridge as a major dividing line in the film. Using the symbols of various cultures, he also makes the point that there is a similarity to be found in human psychology and spiritual traditions worldwide, and that many of these traditions, while varying in their local costume, are intended as a means to the evolution he suggests. Through the Pairs of Opposites Apotheosis & Return Coppola has changed the setting to the Vietnam War. While Willard remains conspicuously inverted, Buddha’s face stands perfectly upright. At the second and third chakras, the psyche is concerned with sexuality/reproduction and the attainment of power in the world. So when you ask me why we want to stay here, Captain, we want to stay here because it’s ours, it belongs to us. Without resilience, Le Ly Hayslip could not have survived her ordeal of being raped, forced into prostitution, and abused at the hands of her American husband, who was supposed to be her savior. I felt like he was up there, waiting for me to take his pain away. Using the Power of Story to Transform Your Life”, Sponsors and Advertisers Issue 8 Winter 2015, Holding Center: Ecopsychological Portraitures on the Poetics of Place, Becoming Real: Seeing Through the Eyes of the Velveteen Rabbit, A Soul Unleashed: The Archetype of Partnership, Dangerous Beauty and the Art of Relationship, Talking About “Dreams and Bones”: Bonnie Bright in Conversation with Authors Russell Lockhart and Paco Mitchell, Review of Jung and Phenomenology By Roger Brooke, Jung in the Garden of Eden: A Myth of the Transformation of Consciousness, Traveling the Royal Road: A Personal Encounter With the Word Association Test, The Coming Storm: Prophetic Dreams and the Climate Crisis, Trauma and Homecoming: Finding a Sense of Place in the Space of Trauma, Frontispiece for Liber Novus: Biblical Texts on Folio Page One of the Red Book, Artemis without Arrows: Aggression Lost and Found, Wotan in the Shadows: Analytical Psychology and the Archetypal Roots of War, American Cerberus: Meditations on Pit Bulls and the Underworld, Stones, Spaceshots, and Shadow Siblings: Symbolic Review of Far Side of the Moon, Review of Change Your Story, Change Your Life: Using Shamanic and Jungian Tools to Achieve Personal Transformation by Carl Greer, Trickster and a Comedian Walk into a Bar: The Sacred Art of Transformation, A Spoonful of Depth Brings the Soul to Life: The Psychology of Mary Poppins, Disenchantment, Disillusion and Dissolution in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath, A Hymn to Nature: Entering the Wilderness, Graphological Portrait of Isolation: Emily Dickinson and Today’s Society, Living on the Land: “The Earth Itself to Nobody”, Fana and Pathologizing: Sufi Ego-Annihilation and James Hillman’s Idea of the Suffering Soul, Forest Vibrations * Sacred Lights” Childrens Video: New Myth #42, Jerusalem Stone: A Confession of Faith in Stone, Bricolage: Psyche’s Eco-Healing Agent by April Heaslip, A Horizon in Every Direction: Engaging the Soul of the Great Plains and the Smoky Hill Trail, The Role and Value of Dreams in a Post-Apocalyptic Future, Dreams in the Talmud and in Depth Psychology, On Becoming a Psychologist: An Archetypal Love Story by Robert D. Romanyshyn, The Shadow of Yoga: Reflections on the Soul/Spirit Distinction by Jason Butler, Jung’s Reception of Friedrich Nietzsche: A Roadmap for the Uninitiated by Dr. Ritske Rensma, A Jungian Interpretation of the Jewish Tale Miriam’s Tambourine by Natasha Morton, The Soul of the Soldier: An Archetypal Inquiry into the Rhetoric of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder by Ipek S. Burnett, Why the Men Went into the Woods: Jungian Psychology and the Archetype of the Wild Man by Dennis Pottenger. Do you read me? But given that there is a dark side inherent to all of these qualities (warfare, selfishness, and exploitation to name a few), it seems we all have an apocalyptic battle to be fought inside of ourselves – a battle between forces of a purely animal, selfish nature, and those of a compassionate being who understands we are all in it together. Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). So finally, when all is said and done, what does “Apocalypse Now” actually mean? In another of my favorites, Bill Murray explores the comedic ramifications of Karma and reincarnation. Everything is remarkably civilized. Perhaps Kurtz represents the human mind taken to its extremity when not informed by compassion – a mind obsessed with material matters and tortured by conflict between the logic of war and the injury it does to his soul. The Minotaur is confined in a labyrinth. Given Coppola’s whimsical use of the name Hau Fat (how fat) to represent a center of American materialism in Vietnam, and his moniker for the surfing crazed Colonel Kilgore, it would make sense that he employed a similar device in naming the bridge.

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