HOW TO DIE

            When I was a teenager my favorite film was the western, Shane. Alan Ladd plays the hero, Shane, a gunslinger, who befriends a young boy and then, after killing the bad guy, has to ride off into the sunset leaving the boy calling after him, Shane, come back Shane. Everyone knew the movie and the call of Shane echoing with such wanting across the empty plains. And this is why I yelled Shane just before slam dunking a basket ball or before kicking a field goal over the church wall, because I wanted to win and for that split second, everybody, who heard me, was on my side, no matter what team they were on.

The film, Andre Rubalov, by Tchaikovsky, sent me into a different tailspin, back down to the dark land of fairy tales and myths, the emotional landscape that pads the little cell where my soul sleeps. Like the deformed child of a conservative family, I never let the little guy outside for fear that someone will laugh at him or he will stumble and hurt himself. And sometimes I wonder if he is still in there.

            But now my favorite film is Apocalypse Now. In a way it is very timely since this is our second war that is a no win situation, where we are like lemmings repeating the same suicidal run for population control in the name of democracy. We are an imperialist nation doomed to fall just as all the rulers of the world have crumbled. We know that and the world knows that it is just a matter of time. Just as we were no match for the Viet Cong psyche in the jungle, we are not a fair match for Arabs on their home turf of blasted sand and broiling heat.

The movie Apocalypse is about our end as Jim Morrison sings in the beginning over the oncoming helicopters. It is about our death, the death of a giant nation gone astray, gone to the dark side, just waiting for someone to give him the final blow to his skull. The fact that Brando, AmericaÕs most brilliant actor, plays the rotting core of America that has to be killed is heartbreaking. It is hard to portray the slow death of a great country and in all his confusion he hit the nail on the head.

It is equally hard to make a film about how we will die when we feel like we are sitting on top of the world.  But relentlessly every scene repeats this message like a tolling bell. How will it happen? Following the madness of leaders like the surfboard cowboy played by D---- or bleeding to death in the dark while they lower sex shows down from the sky to entertain us. In the end as the boat travels farther and deeper into our minds we know how it will happen. We will die like fools, totally confused until the dark side looks like the glimmer of heaven. And we will call these fools heroes because thatÕs what they are, hopeless wasted heroes. And we will cry and then feel better because we are a bunch of fucking lemmings Ð if only we could do it all in the theater instead of real life.

This is the movie I choose to call art, when a film can deliver this much back to its society even before the society realizes it needs it, before it realizes it is bleeding to death. Already our scientist can count how many more times the sun will set on our horizon and our poets sing about a moon that has vanished from the sky.