Deconstruction and Reader Response

As I expected, the preoccupation of many of the responses this week was centered around the film Apocalypse Now. My classmates seem to find the movie as fruitful for analysis as I do, applying both the Deconstructive/Post-Structuralist methods we read about and the Reader Response angle of attack. The access points to the film range from very personal to highly theoretical, and reflect a variety of different moral/ideological schematics applied to the same central point of interest. This, to me, shows the effectiveness of both the Deconstructive and Reader Response modes in encouraging us to take inventory of both our own reactions, visceral and academic, to the text, and the various "fissures" or points of difference that we noted over the course of our exploration of the movie. Furthermore, as several of my colleagues point out, these methods are just as fruitful in application when one looks at King Lear, as the play is full of oppositions that are eventually broken down in the mind of the reader and in the text itself. Overall, this has been a very productive week on the response front, and I greatly enjoyed reading the insights of my fellow grad students.

Sarah Feldberg

I see Apocalypse Now, much like The Matrix, as a comment on the "death of all meaning." I saw Kurtz as the embodiment of the canon (I thought it interesting that he was a sinister and ambivalent figure - I thought in this way Coppola, like Conrad, trades on the notion of the learned man as a Faustian figure - this is also apparent in other nineteenth century fictions - i.e. the works of Hawthorne and James) and his death, of course, as the death of the canon. To return to the film's beginning, I thought the scene where Captain Willard cuts his hand and bloodies his bedsheets right before he's summoned to kill Kurtz looked like the scene of a birth. I thought it was interesting that "surfers" - affluent West Coast white boys - were an elitist sub-culture in Vietnam (and in America at the time). I thought the use of Wagner by the American troops was significant, as Wagner is often associated with fascism and nazism. I thought Michael Ryan's critique of the film's overt racism was engaging, though I think that Apocalypse Now, much like Heart of Darkness, sometimes "deconstructs" or criticizes discourses of racism and colonialism. For instance, Coppola seems to emphasize the irony - and the tragedy - of the scenario that unfolds when a Vietnamese woman throws a grenade into an American helicopter - moments earlier, viewers saw American soldiers bomb a Vietnamese school; this woman's insurrection seems entirely justified in light of this, and it seems short-sighted, imperialistic and sadistic when the flippant and often-criticized general calls her a "fucking savage."

Peter Murray

Reader-Response theory offers and alternative to the hierarchy of New Criticism and its universal themes. According ro Rosenblatt, the transaction between reader and text produces meaning. In the efferent mode, the reader focuses on the information in a text. In the aesthetic mode, the reader establishes a personal connection with the text, which reorients his or her understanding of the text. This approach differs from the New Critics' universal themes insofar as the reader individualizes the text's theme. The aesthetic mode participates in revealing a text as well as a reader's sense of morality. In addition, this theory fixes the problem facing New Criticism of finding the perfect analysis. Indeed, Reader-Response theory welcomes multiple readings and multiple interpretations. Instead of claiming that universal themes exist in the text and that is what makes a text canonical, Reader-Response criticism suggests keeping a text alive ad infinitum through the aesthetic mode.

Veronica Bruscini

King Lear and Apocalypse Now each feature evident ideological structure, especially as regards the power of language in forming identity. Rhetoric shapes language to impact an audience, weighing reactions to any given work through judgments and evaluations of the text's worldview. The "text," be it literature, film, or any other cultural production, employs various tropes to guide an audience's reaction and align their valuation with the creator's point of view. For example, the layers within King Lear's language include cultural codes which, though written to recognize and reflect the political concerns and ideologies of Shakespeare's day, remain potent illustrations of the ways language crafts social codes and cultural identity. Contemporary audiences have ample experience witht he influence of convention and the authority of language in shaping daily perceptions of reality.

Thorsten Schwaben

There are particular scenes that contradict Ryan's point of view that the movie advocates heroes and strong militarism, being in favor of conservative policy and blaming the mess on liberals. Ryan is using the binary conservative-liberal to interpret Apocalypse Now. However, I would argue that the film is based on irony to a large extent. Can you take Kilgore seriously? This guy with his cavalry hat (which, unlike a helmet, cannot resist a bullet), his obsession for surfing (think of the scene with the injured Vietnamese when Kilgore is about to take care of him but leaves the scene unsolved because he hears about the surfer guy; or when he was on the helicopter bombing the jungle and asks the surfer what he thinks about all this, but not referring to the war but the waves), his coolness (everybody is ducking when a grenade explodes but Kilgore does not even seem to notice), or his music (playing Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer). In addition, despite his obsession for surfing he never even came close to the water. And think of his name: Kilgore which carries the meaning of "to kill" and "gore" (blood). To me Kilgore is not a hero, he as a caricature (or a joke for that matter).

Johannes Weinreich

Civilization wants to occupy the wilderness, yet fails to do so. Early on into the movie, Willard is aware of this incapability. Neither can the American military defeat the Vietcong that are hiding in the wilderness, nor can a single soldier assassinate Kurtz (one missionary of the 'good' failed prior to Willard's attempt to defeat 'evil'). During one scene, Willard says something like: "Charging a man with murder in this place is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500." This statement shows that he can only assassinate Kurtz because he himself functions outside of civilization. Thus, the movie does not resolve around the opposition of society and wilderness, or good contrasted by evil resolving in society's ultimate triumph as one would expect from the General's speech. Instead, it resolves around society's incapability to address the evil.
As I understood it, deconstruction is a tool that helps to critically approach a work of literature. Keeping deconstruction in mind, the reader is aware of the multiplicity of possible meanings and, therefore, also of multiplicity of interpretation. No one can claim to have found the universal truth. However, in my opinion, deconstruction takes apart and does not really worry about putting things back together. While I am somewhat able to follow the argument, I am personally not satisfied by it. I would like to find answers, not pose new questions when meaning is drawn into question.

Dono Sunardi

In exploring the theme of subjectivity in deconstruction, I review how I see the character of Colonel Kurtz. Early in the film, Kurtz is reported to be a once decorated army officer who for nobody knows why went insane. He becomes such a symbol of villain, a fixed identity we know from structuralism. I was almost expecting that this character would in all aspects embody the "badness." In other words, I want him to stay "bad" till the end, to stay the same in his "identity." But, when the movie shows an angle from his side, I learn that he becomes like he is for a reason. This does not change him as the antagonist of the film, yet it shocks me in the way that the term "villain" is not as fixed as it was before and as many Hollywood movies, including "The Matrix," tell me about "frozen identity" - my term on the superhero who will always be a superhero and the villain who shall be a villain forever no matter what. There is a human side in his becoming "horror" to many people. My "naming" to Kurtz has been, to a certain degree, hegemonized by a discourse, which for certain reasons, sometimes unconsciously, I take as granted. Deconstruction liberates me as a reader from such hegemonic situation and makes me learn how language is not a perfect and fixed tool of communication, but a necessary vehicle to see the world and ourselves. Deconstruction also revives the subjectivity to the degree that we must scrutinize whatever discourse claims to be the most objective - since there is nothing like that, but chains of subjectivity, an always postponed "truth."

Keen Hahn

According to Ryan, Apocalypse Now "argues for a forceful resolution to the Vietnam War" and "links the military argument to the conservative economic individualism that came to prominence in the US in the late 1970s and 1980s, immediately after the unsuccessful conclusion of the war" (58). This analysis is what Tyson would term a linguistic "grounding point," a place from which to begin a fruitful deconstruction of the film. Using Ryan's assessment, we can view the film in a series of binaries based on the message the text is meant to convey. Of course, good vs. evil is chief among these, followed closely by collective vs. individual, law vs. choice, and ambivalence vs. determination. Of course, all the latter terms in each opposition are ascribed to Colonel Kurtz and his actions upriver in Cambodia and are placed in the "privileged" position in the binary, whereas the former are applied to the US military bureaucracy and are the markers of marginalization, pushing those labeled with them to the periphery. However, with close analysis of the film, these oppositions easily implode themselves.