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God is Dead; Nietzsche Nietzsche is Dead; God (Quoted from a novelty tee shirt of unknown origin. ) Although this statement may be absurd in its inability to recognize the depth of Nietzsche's metaphysical argument, its simplicity betrays the essence of what might be described as the post modern dilemma, a dilemma which has stricken all conscientious filmmakers. The Herculean strivings of modernism have given up to the romantic pining of cultural relativity, which has been swallowed by the wake of nihilism and its Cain, Deconstruction. The pantheon of heroes has been relegated to a carnival of freaks and fools. In the world of the visual arts Marcel Duchamp excised the concept of the creative individual and the value of classical aestheticism through his ready made's. In architecture, Peter Eisen man broke Le Corbusiers machine for living, and created the perfect setting for dysfunctional domesticity, through his series entitled House (each house was delineated with a numeric post-fix). In music electronic sampling has allowed composers to assemble symphonies of found art, and in the realm of philosophical literature John Barth scarred Sartres existential super-hero, leaving the reader of Barth in the same state of catatonic emptiness that plagued his protagonist in The End of the Road.
Frederic Jameson writes But as Individualism begins to atrophy in a post-industrial world, as the sheer difference of increasingly distinct and eccentric individualities turns under its own momentum into repetition and sameness, the quest for a uniquely distinctive style and the very category of style came to seem old-fashioned. Meanwhile, the price to be paid for a radically new aesthetic system in a world in which innovation and fashion-change have become the law ([an] example is Schoenbergs twelve-tone machinery) that price, both for producer and consumer, becomes increasingly onerous. The result, in the area of high culture, was the moment of pastiche in which energetic artists who now lack both forms and content cannibalize the museum and wear the masks of extinct mannerisms. (Jameson 82 - 84) Following this absence of idealism nothing is forbidden, neither kitsch nor clich, nor sacred nor profane. Truth can only be supported through consensus, and the majority in the artistic world agrees only to an overwhelming sense of irony.
In the world of film, the romantic aspirations of early filmmakers like Fritz Lang, D. W. Griffith, and Charlie Chaplin suffocated in their infancy, as films became systematically produced in the genre format by studios. The fresh heroes of the silent era became tired clones in the worst of cases and distorted caricatures of their forebears in the best of cases.
These latter cases are what Jameson refers to as pastiche. Jameson explains, All of these films use the pre given structure of inherited genres as a pretext for production which is no longer personal or stylistic in the sense of the older modernism. The latter has of course been described in terms of reflexivity, of auto- referentially and the return of artistic production onto its own processes and techniques. (Jameson 84) The former of the two is explained by Jameson as such; The moment of the meta generic film [film as pastiche] can also be approached by way of a degraded version which is contemporary with it but can be read as the formers opposite, the expression of the same historical impulse in non reflexive form. This is the whole range of contemporary nostalgia culture, what the French call la mode retro pastiche which, in a category mistake that confuses content with form, sets down to reinvent the style, not of an art language, but of a whole period (the Thirties in Bertoluccis Il Conformists [ 1970 ], the Fifties in Lucas American Graffiti [ 1973 ]... )...
such celebrations of the imaginary style of a real past constitute so many symptoms of a resistance of contemporary raw material to artistic production. (Jameson 84) Creating a film in this manner is an artistic and ideological regression. It is an act of despair in a culture where the romance of absolutes has become obsolete. Three films which exemplify the embrace of this existentially barren cinematic landscape are Orson Welles Citizen Kane, Francis Ford Coppolas Apocalypse Now and Stanley Kubricks The Shinning. The first of these films, Citizen Kane opens with a series of dissolves that draw the viewer over a fence and through a window to Xanadu, Charles Foster Kane's crumbling imperial estate.
Inside Kane lies dying. These increasingly voyeuristic shots climax in a extreme close up of Kane's mouth as he whispers the word Rosebud and drops a snow globe to the floor, where it shatters. The snow globe that Kane drops to the floor, shattering it as his life fades, is a symbol of his own over-simplified view of his life. It is his own take on the formative points and reasons for his life, his childhood, the stolen love and discipline of his mother, his purity and the possibility of what his life could have been. As such it also symbolizes his vitality, his wholeness, the ghost in the machine, without which a first hand observation of his being cannot be had. As the globe shatters, his spirit dissipates in a final exhale; the word Rosebud.
From this point on, his life can only be related through the subjective lenses of those who knew him in a multiple personality narrative, much like Conrad's Heart of Darkness. His spirit bleeds to the floor as water to be evaporated, leaving only a shattered glass image of his past self. Robert Carringer writes, What emerges is not intended to be a composite image of an Aristotelian Character-in-the-round, but rather a patchwork of imputations: free-floating fragments that, as in a kaleidoscope, keep resolving themselves into different configurations. (Carringer 186) After the globe shatters, in a seemingly anticlimactic moment, the viewer is allowed a subjective shot through a piece of the shattered glass. The distorted image seen through the shattered globe is a reflexive device intended to allow the audience to realize that even given a first person view of Kane, from his own perspective, we are still given a sentimental, nostalgic image of him. Even Kane cannot grasp the complexity of his own life. Carringer writes, Since the camera imparts information in these sequences that is not known to any of the characters, it has been a common practice to assume that the point of view in them is omniscient, like something in an eighteenth-century novel (one critic has even described these sequences as being the Gods-eye-view) and that they reveal the kind of definitive information about Kane that is missing in the narrative testimonies.
Such an interpretation directly violates the underlying rationale of multiple personality narratives. Welles himself cautioned that Kane is never judged with the objectivity of an author. (Carringer 186) As a plot device, in conjunction with the word Rosebud the globe becomes a ruse, as Hitchcock would put it, a McGuffin. It is diversionary to think of it in terms of a thematic device unless one thinks of it as the subject leading to the antithesis of the intended theme. It is not the truth. It is ignorance of the truth in reflecting an assumption that the truth can actually be perceived. As a plot device, it means nothing more than the hypothetical meanings that are attached to it by certain characters [the multiple personality narrative]; it really is only a mechanism for dramatizing and exploring attitudes and points of view.
Hitchcock has a name and a definition for such a device: In any spy story you have to say to yourself, what are the spies after? We always called this thing the MacGuffin because actually, when you come down to it, it doesnt matter what the spies are after. The characters on the screen worry about what theyre after, but the audience dont care because they only care about the safety of the hero or the heroin. Like one of Hitchcock's rolls of microfilm or wine bottles filled with uranium, Rosebud is a red herring, an object used to raise false expectations or to provide false clues. Every aspect of the film leads to the conclusion that there is no objective truth, that our perceptions are finite, and limited to such a degree that one cannot even explain his own identity. From the ironic use of a newspaper and newsreel production company as reflexive sets (both of which are organizations that feign to tell the truth, while figures like Kane manipulate the news to fit their purposes, men like Rawleston, the stylized news editor talk of angles, and journalists like Leland admit to never believing a word they wrote), to the many differing tales of Kane and his persona as dictated by his acquaintances, no objective information can be found.
Even the clips of Kane from the newsreel at the films beginning are edited and narrated, or shot from a shaky 16 mm. Camera, suggesting a distorted point of view. Idealism and the quest for heroism, like those found in the young Charles Foster Kane's manifesto to the public are na ve and futile gestures. The attack on idealism and the existential being given in Coppolas Apocalypse Now (a film which, other than its existential barrenness is a War genre film) is best understood in terms of Nietzsches description of the roots of aesthetics through the Dionysian and the Apollonian. In the words of Charles Guignon, This term [Dionysian] refers to the primal totality of nature, where nature is understood as a creative, dynamic life force that exists prior to all division and articulation into individual forms.
It is the Primordial Oneness, the substrate of the universe, that underlies and makes possible the familiar world of discreet phenomena we encounter in every day life The Dionysian [which Nietzsche saw as most pure in music]is contrasted with a form-giving, individuating force called the Apollonian. The god Apollo is the patron of reason, control, and stability, and his formative influence is seen in such plastic, visual arts as architecture, painting, and sculpting but also in the measured, controlled cadences and imagery of epic poetry. (Guignon 87) Nietzsche believed that the Apollonian was representative of all western Platonism, or the desire to find an underlying reason for being. It was his belief that the formal relationships and categories we use in practicing the Apollonian are artificial constructs of our inherent logical systems and communication. The Apollonian subverts the true form of the universe, the Dionysian. It was Nietzsche's belief that in embracing the Dionysian, one could rise up beyond the limits of society's limiting constraints (laws and mores are products of the Apollonian) and open a path to the maternal womb of being. (Guignon 88) In the opening of Apocalypse Now that is exactly what Captain Willard, the protagonist is doing. In the background the viewer sees a shot of napalm going off as the music of the Doors and an image of the interior of Willard's room begin to fade in.
The Doors are, of course known for the acts of Dionysian debauchery that their music promoted during the late sixties to early seventies. Our first glimpse of Willard is of him coming to a drunken, climax of violence and insinuated sexuality, as he dances nude, shadow boxing until he finally strikes a mirror with his fist, shattering his own image and falling to the floor in tears. This is our first glimpse of Dionysian enlightenment according to Coppola. As Nietzsche predicted, as the veil of maya, (Guignon 88) the Apollonian is removed, the initial reaction is terror and anguish. Willard's first instinct is to revert to the Apollonian, which he does by putting on his uniform and entering his personal crux to Apollonian culture, the post of his commanding officer. In the post of his commanding officer and is offered a meal as they discuss the assassination of Colonial Kurtz, he is offered a choice of roast beef or whole shrimp.
Close ups of the food reveal that the beef is well prepared, cut, cooked and already sliced, removing the eater from the Dionysian moment of violence associated with eating meat. The shrimp on the other hand, is whole, including head, eyes and antenna. Willard's commanding officer, the general remarks that if Willard were to have the shrimp he would never have to prove his bravery to him again. Willard chooses the beef and metaphorically digresses to the Apollonian.
The extent to which the others at the post are representative of the Apollonian is depicted through uniform and language. The Uniforms that the men wear are obviously Apollonian. The language is a bit more subtle. Throughout the conversation they refer to Kurtz as obviously insane. Kurtz has left the confines of western Apollonian structure and is dismissed as mad. The others at the post also constantly use euphemisms for the intended assassination of Kurtz, referring to it as a termination of command.
Such euphemisms are constructed to remove the speaker from the Dionysian reality of violence. When Willard finally meets Kurtz, we find the latter to be what Nietzsche would call a Romantic, a subscriber to what Guignon calls a teleological meta narrative. One such meta narrative, the one which Kurtz seems to subscribe to exists as follows; Once people were spontaneous, childlike and free, but then society came along and distorted their nature; still; there is hope that we can achieve a better kind of society where people again will be pure and free. (Guignon 90 - 91) Kurtz mirrors this sentiment when he relates a story to Willard, in which he refers to the natives as crystalline and pure. The persona of Kurtz is also suffused with images of post romantic literature. On his desk sit T. S.
Eliot's The Wasteland, Jessie L. Westons book From Ritual To Romance and the Bible. Kurtz himself reads a passage from Eliot's The Hollow Men. [The Wasteland] is a poem about spiritual dryness, about the kind of existence in which no regenerating belief gives significance and value to peoples daily activities, sex brings no fruitfulness, and death heralds no resurrection He further acknowledged [previously acknowledging the use of the Ideas of Westons From Ritual to Romance] a general indebtedness to Sir James Frazier's Golden Bough in which Frazier deals with ancient vegetative myths and fertility ceremonies. (Abrams 2370) After reading the poem and attending a ritualistic killing that ushers forth the rainy season, Kurtz allows Willard to kill him embracing the Dionysian in a final statement; The horror! The horror! The horror! In a note to Willard, Kurtz instructs the captain to bomb them all.
Once again, as Nietzsche predicted the initial reaction to nihilism is apathy and anguish. In the closing shots of the film, Willard's face is superimposed against that of a stone idol, suggesting that in embracing the Dionysian, in destroying the romanticism in Kurtz Willard has realized his life is as meaningless as the myth he has destroyed. In Kubricks The Shining, the films protagonist owes his very conception to the writings of Nietzsche. Like Apocalypse Now and Citizen Kane, this film is a pastiche, specifically a film in the horror genre. But unlike past horror films, there is no hero to stop the evil incarnate. One of the central mysteries to Kubricks film is the question, why does jack appear in the last image of the film, in a photograph of the Overlooks ballroom taken in 1921 (one can assume) before Jack was even born?
In another surreal scene from the film, Jack talks to a servant at a phantom party in the Overlook and accuses him of being Charles Grady, Jacks predecessor as caretaker of the overlook. Grady replies saying, I beg to differ with you, sir, but you are the caretaker, you have always been the caretaker. Throughout the film, Jack also refers to his responsibilities to the Overlook, and in a conversation with Danny, his son, his desire to stay there forever and ever. All of these elements are references to a concept of Nietzsche's known as the Eternal Recurrence of the Same.
The idea of eternal recurrence was an ancient Stoic doctrine, which held that a finite number of elements governed by a fixed number of necessary connections will, over an infinite number of time, repeat the same patterns over and over again. (Guignon 96) According to Nietzsche the effects of such a realization could be shattering. Given the absence of free will, and a teleological reason to ones life, one might become apathetic. On the other hand, given that ones life can only occur one way, one might feel obligated to act. The reality of eternal recurrence would lie as the heaviest weight upon your acts. (Guignon 98) This seems to be the doctrine that Jack has been led to follow. He is obligated by the overlook, a miniature of the cosmos, to act as he does.
That is why his responsibilities weigh upon him so heavily. In this film, like the two others, there is no underlying reason for being, there is just being. There are no heroes, only beings. The lack of answers which these movies promote, the post modern dilemma is bleak. But, this seems to be the only answer left in the artistic world. It is true that the last argument, proposed by Kubrick might be faulty given new evidence which points to an infinitely expanding universe, but this offers only more ambiguity, not answers.
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Research essay sample on Charles Foster Kane Point Of View
