Deep Inside Popular Culture

There can be hidden depths sometimes to popular culture.

One of the strangest that comes to mind is something that may be vaguely apparent to many people, as it relates to one of the most popular films from the past 30 years.

Apocalypse Now is a strange film in parts, about the desire for the military administration to put an end to a rogue Cololel who ‘has gone native’ somewhere in Vietnam.

The soldier sent to fulfill the mission of the government eventually locates Kurt where he has set himself up as some kind of reclusive deity.

It is a film full of strangeness, and perhaps nothing is stranger than the talk between the Hunter and the Hunted in the darkness of
 the cave at the end of the film where Kurt very much makes a willing sacrifice of himself, and makes it clear that he has been expecting this confrontation.

Anyone that is particularly interested in cinematic imagery may be aware that the camera pans across some of the books in his library at the very end, as if to give an insight into the extraordinary thinking of this extraordinary man.

One of the books that appears only in one or two frames as the camera moves through the cave is James Frazer’s  extraordinary anthropological work, ‘The Golden Bough’ which is as its title proudly announces a treatise on magic and religion, and it remains today one of the most important works on the anthropology of ancient man.

The second book that is also clearly visible if you take the trouble to look frame by frame is a little known work that will be unfamiliar to most people entitled ‘From Ritual to Romance’, by Jessie L. Weston. One of the reasons why this book has been so little read is that it is an academic work that is hard work, and not for the fainthearted.

I have taken the time to read it, and it is fascinating. It looks at the Arthurian legends and relates them to the previously existing pagan legends as far back as Babylonian vegetation myths.

In other words, as it was written in about 1920 it is not so different in subject matter to the content of Frazer’s work.

Both books together, along with other works such as the Bible, shed interesting light on the nature of what might be uppermost in the mind of the soldier that has gone native.

Few films have so entered into a sense of the culture of the 20th century as this extraordinary work, and I think it is worth making some exploration of those depths to which it seeks to explore.