Death To The Fisher King: Willard And Kurtz

1310 Words6 Pages
The appropriateness of From Ritual to Romance appearing in Apocalypse Now lies foremost in the fact that it was this book that inspired T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, a poem that addressed Eliot’s reaction to the dislocation he felt following World War I. Coppola pays homage to Eliot by including both his poem and the book that inspired it in the modernized cinematic portrayal of Coppola’s response to the dislocation and moral ambiguities brought about by the Vietnam War. There is, however, more at work here than a mere homage to the influential poet. That Coppola should include From Ritual to Romance indicates a deeper commitment, a fact that is furthered by the physical placement of the book in the movie. On Kurtz’s table we find three books: The Bible, The Golden Bough, and, as mentioned earlier, From Ritual to Romance. Between these three books there is contained a broad spectrum of religious ideology ranging from early Pagan Rituals to Modern Judaism and Christianity, and in between, operating as a pivot, Weston’s work. Of the three, in relation to the movie, Weston’s is emphasized, as evidenced by its pairing with Eliot and also in that the film’s two primary characters, Kurtz and Willard, both embody the central theme which Weston sets forth in this work: namely, the understanding and inhabiting of an ethical and religious viewpoint which accounts for and addresses the imagined or tenuous division between Pagan and Christian belief systems. In terms of specificity, the film embodies some obvious and not so obvious elements of the standard grail quest as pointed out by Weston. That the story takes place along a river is appropriate in its parallel to the Adonis cult. ‘The presence of water, either sea, or river, is an important feature in the Adonis cult, the effigy of the dead god being, not buried in the earth, but thrown in the water.” Willard, of course,
Open Document