Apocalypse Now

By Crispin Sartwell

Over the last couple of weeks, uncharacteristically (since I've got five kids at home), I got out to see a couple of different movies: "Adaptation." and "Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers." These films - both of them beyond excellent - arrive at the end of our culture, but perhaps as we grope toward a beginning as well.

The things we make now usually drip with irony and self-referential asides, from our literature to our television commercials, from our restaurant menus to our blue jeans. Today's war movie is no good-guy-vs-bad-guy fable - John Wayne shooting down Nazis - or even the angst-ridden anti-hero version - "Deerhunter" or "Full Metal Jacket." Now it's "Wag the Dog," in which the first question is whether the war exists at all. The postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard wrote a book titled "The Gulf War Never Happened." Our westerns are not "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly," but "Unforgiven" in which heroism has devolved into age and fallibility, and in which the movies themselves have done the same..

In "Adaptation," Spike Jonze's amazing interpretation of Susan Orleans' book "The Orchid Thief," Nicholas Cage plays a screenwriter trying to adopt "The Orchid Thief" itself for the screen. The film was written by Charlie Kaufman, who introduces himself into the plot gratuitously as a pair of identical but opposite twin screenwriters. "Kaufman"/Kaufman is so absolutely immobilized by self-consciousness and self-loathing that he can barely move, much less write. He swears that he will not introduce conventional Hollywood elements - the traditional elements of epic story-telling - to Orleans' discursive, digressive book: no gratuitous romance, or sex, no chases, no pure villains, no nifty little resolution at the end. In the course of swearing off, he introduces all that and more.

So he ends up writing a movie about himself writing a movie about a book, and then some. The movie keeps peeling back the layers of irony until it leaves us with nothing - no elements of story - except some obscure yearning after human connection in a world crippled by its own status as fictional: our world.

For decades, filmmakers have been "breaking the third wall": they've been letting us know that they know that they are making a movie, and that we know it too. But "Adaptation" takes that self-consciousness to an extent beyond which there is really nowhere to go, presents an exquisite or suicidal self-consciousness in which the movie and the very idea of movies collapses under the weight of its own distance from itself. In some sense, it's the last movie, in such a deeply ironic relation to itself that it almost doesn't exist by the time it's over. The film collapses into the idea of film, and hence into the idea of itself.

The conventional elements of story - fixed in the Western tradition since the Homeric epics, have imploded utterly.

Really, there seems to be nowhere to go after that, no next moment or next movie. "The Lord of the Rings" is a heroic revival of the largest, purest traditions of story-telling. But I came out of the theater thinking about the nature and possibility of story itself: I will never be without the self-consciousness that finally makes a an enduring refreshment in the source of storytelling impossible.

J.R.R. Tolkien's books might have been the last great epic of the West. "The Lord of the Rings" is comparable in its scope and in the dignity of its language to Homer or the Norse sagas, both of which are important sources for it. Epic is a deeply unselfconsious, unironic genre: it requires real heroes, and a real war between good and evil. It is significant that Tolkien's trilogy emerged from World War II England, in which the idea that good people were being attacked by hordes of bloodthirsty orcs had some purchase in reality.

Peter Jackson's film - which approaches the book with extraordinary care and veneration while developing its own sumptuous visual correlate to Tolkien's prose - manages to read the story straightforwardly. There are no knowing winks at the camera, no ironic distance from the characters or the moral drama that they enact. I must admit that I managed to have an experience of total immersion, suspension, and sincerity as I sat in the theater.

In an age burdened by morbid self-consciousness, in which every event seems morally ambiguous, in which, for example, we don't know whether to go to war with Iraq and (to be honest) whether America is a bastion of freedom or an evil empire - whether we're Gondor or Mordor - the moral certainty of Tolkien and of the film are themselves heroic. But they are heroic in part for their sheer perversity in a deeply unheroic world.

For exactly that reason, the films of "The Lord of the Rings" come at a perfect moment, in which our yearning for truth, goodness, and certainty has become urgent, in which epic has become both impossible and absolutely necessary.

But "The Lord of the Rings," like "Adaptation," also signals our yearning toward the future, or shows that we are at the end of something and deeply in need: of something true, something innocent, something pure.

In that way, these opposite films try to bring us to the possibility of that purity: each in its own way is an expression of hope, or at least of our need for hope, at the end.