Apocalypse Now, Being There, Dasein
Dec 09, 2008 — 55 comments

Apocalypse Now may be the greatest movie ever made. There are movies that contain an equal amount of greatness, but I don’t think there are any that surpass it. I won’t go on about how amazing the cinematography is, the Flight of the Valkyries scene, the fact that it might be the greatest novel-to-movie adaptation of all time (along with Fight Club, No Country for Old Men, Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange…) or how ridiculously awesome in every way the last quarter is. Instead, let me focus on the line everyone knows, Robert Duvall’s famous “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” The whole speech he makes there is amazing, but all anyone remembers is that line. The problem is that the greatest line is at the end of his speech – a line without which the speech itself is almost meaningless – and it is always ignored. He says “someday this war’s gonna end.” He looks around, then gets up and leaves. It’s impossible for someone of my limited mental capacity to explain the subtle brilliance of this closing statement. You could write 100 pages on what it says about war freaks, pacifists, the nature of human conflict and on and on. It’s subtle. Subtlety is lost today.
People gravitate toward what is simple and memorable, subtlety is rarely immortalized (ergo any music awards show). Everyone needs everything force-fed, brightly colored and think hard-proof. Corporations running the media and entertainment industries take full advantage, but politicians are the worst, because they use this public desire for the easily digestable to mask their actual intentions. If it’s subtle, people generally miss the point, and they use this against us, bludgeoning us with vague, meaningless, optimistic slogans over and over. And the public loves it. They switch back and forth on every subject, lie constantly, but the inane, nonspecific optimism persists, and people follow.
The ultimate satirization of this phenomenon is Jerzy Kosinski’s book, Being There. The story follows Chance, a man with limited mental abilities and zero experience in the world outside of the Old Man’s house, where he works as a gardener. The Old Man dies, Chance is set forth into the world, where he is hit by a car owned by a powerful financial advisor and friend of the President. He befriends Chance, and begins to see economic wisdom in his vague and optimistic garden-related philosophy: “In the garden, after the summer comes the fall, then winter, spring and summer again” Chance says very little, and nothing specific, and people begin to see him as an important government advisor, a man on who’s word the entire economy and the nation itself rests. The book is short, the language is perfect, clear and concise (Kosinski said he wanted the language to be “invisible,” so that the reader would only see the events being described), and it’s a brilliant and extremely relevant commentary on our current political and economic situation.
Jerzy Kosinski
The working title for Being There was Dasein, which is a term used by Martin Heidegger in a philosophy called Phenomenology. Roughly translated from German it means “being there,” and, being way too complex to go into now, it basically is used to describe a person’s current state and time of existence. I studied Phenomenology in college, and since then I have tried to incorporate many of the themes and ideas it confronts, especially those regarding time and its relationship to existence, into my paintings.
Landschaft by Odd Nerdrum
Back to subtlety. Subtlety is why I like art. I believe it is the main characteristic of a good landscape painting. A painting can be a pretty picture, skillfully executed with subtle color variations and details. But if you look closely, you can also find some sort of meaning, defined implicitly by composition, symbols, colors, everything you see. Most people wouldn’t look at one of my paintings and immediately think of Phenomenology. But if they look a little deeper, they can see how it relates to them, to their current state of existence. But you have to grasp the subtlety (if you’re counting, I used some form of the term “subtle” 11 times in this post. Subtle right?)
The Mill by Rembrandt
Read Being There. Now. Then go watch the movie, it is equally as amazing as the book.
Dec 22, 2008
Got to include a shout out to the great Peter Sellers if your going to praise the movie; the guy is brillant.
Jan 10, 2009
Peter Sellers, sure. But gawd dang guy, being there, who even remembers that film today in the climbing wake of blago’s departure…. I for one give it the best re-visited film of the year award. I love the Apocalypse, but being there is a tickle you can’t itch until the credits finish rolling. Keep the lessons in great film coming, you’re insight is rather on the ball.
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That’s the best asnwer of all time! JMHO
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