Embrace Of The Serpent

Up The Creek Without Colours

We are at the point of cinema history where each and every great film is inevitably built on top of the legacy of other great films, and that their discursive nature rests upon the evocation of the earlier films. In most part it takes the form of homages, but in other instances they are outright thefts. The interesting thing about this film is that you can't quite tell what is being quoted, what is an homage and what is simply duplicated out of the diminishing options of the setting.

The great predecessors to this film peep through ever so often and it makes you wonder.
Here's the obligatory spoiler alert, but in many ways you might have seen this film before, just in pieces contained another films.




What's Good About It

It's not as if the world has resolved any of the complex problems of civilisation and its conflicts with nature. Nor can we say that the colonial conquest of the new world has exactly ended or that the world is better placed to resolve these conflicts and contradictions of humanity's place on this planet. All of these themes are compressed into this film, which ultimately is a journey up the river much like 'Heart of Darkness'. Instead of the Congo River, we are treated to the journey up the Amazon River by two men, across two different times, but with the same guide. It is no less disturbing than Joseph Conrad's novel.

What is intriguing is that the two men are in search of a flower, which immediately casts the two men as Gilgamesh an the guide as Utnapishtem. Even in the most exotic of settings, the story echoes back to the origins of human civilisation. The quest for the flower is the quest for immortality in 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' - this in turn is the great quest of modern civilisation itself as it reaches deep into the junglier search of esoteric knowledge. The image of the ever present water invokes within us the deepest, archetypal stories of civilisation - except it turns it on the head as a story of moral failure.

The performances are interesting because they seem stilted, yet natural. The veil of the foreign language obscures from us the nuance of the language and so we rely heavily trying to read the expressions of the actors, but the actors give up so little. It's is very engrossing and challenging to watch at the same time.

What's Bad About It

It's a shame the film is too reverential about the history of cinema itself. There are moments where you can spot the shots that were re-framed form films as diverse as 'Andrei Rubylev', 'Apocalypse Now', 'Aguirre, Wrath of God', 'Baraka and even '2001: A Space Odyssey''.  There are moments that derive their roots from the same intellectual concerns as 'Koyanisqaatsi'. There even moments that might be a riff on 'Empire Strikes Back' where Luke dos to train with Yoda in the jungles of Dagobah - not because Dagobah was a jungle planet, but because the passing of wisdom to the younger man on the quest is structurally the same.

It's very post-modern and interesting to setup these games with the audience, but you wonder if the film really needed those moments.

What's Interesting About It

Joseph Conrad really was on to something with his book because we keep coming back to the image of some person from the heart of civilisation going up the river. With the earlier iteration of 'Apocalypse Now', it was ironic because by casting it in the Vietnam War, the protagonist was bringing the American madness of civilisation with him as he went into the jungle in search of the rogue colonel Kurtz. The journey of Willard in 'Apocalypse Now' inevitably leads to a bloody and confused combat wherein Kurtz is killed like the sacrificial bull.

This film cleverly posits two possibilities through two different journeys, tied together by the same guide. In the first arrival at the destination, the younger guide destroys the flower in a bid to protect the pristine jungle and its sacred knowledge, denying civilisation. It is a moment filled with the tragic failure of the enterprise, much in line with Willard killing Kurtz. Yet in the second trip with the older guide, it is the older guide who changes his mind about the meaning of the journey up the river.

The older guide urges the young explorer to change, to transform his consciousness and see what the jungle people have seen. And so the sacred flower is consumed, revealing it self to be a consciousness expanding hallucinogen. The film reaches a different conclusion to the arc started by Joseph Conrad, and that may be the most interesting insight offered by the film.

The Transformed Man

Back in the 1960s, there was a lot of transcendentalism. This isn't just the Beatles with the Maharishi but also the emerging counterculture which involved drug taking and basically stepping out of family narrow social strictures. Indeed, the world of the 1960s is strangle alien to us, so much so that a show like 'Mad Men' can run that alienating effect out for 7 seasons - with themes important aspect being the transformation of the main character through transcendentalism. Now, that might all be hippy BS and a lot of poppycock for those of us who grew upon the emotionally spare and sentimentally austere 1980s under economic rationalism where such notions were consigned to history quite willingly and hurriedly as the world transformed itself into a globalised melting pot of corporate interests and Reaganomic Thatcherite profiteering.

Still, the man whose work comes to mind when watching this movie is Carlos Castaneda. The new worlds fecund with moments of transformation through drug-taking. The drug-taking has its origins in indigenous cultures and those cultures are deeply interested in the kind of knowledge the drug experience provides. It's interesting how 'Embrace of the Serpent' treats all of this aspect of the drug culture as a given, as well as affirming the meaning of existence. If we didn't have the signposts of other accounts, this would have seemed oddly out of place. Instead we understand it as implicit in the experience of living in the jungle. The meaning seems to fold in on itself as both narrative strands end up at the flower and the knowledge revealed is a bit like the the slit-scan sequence in '2001: A Space Odyssey'.

The question is whether modernity has transformed us at all. It appears the moment of transcendence can only be understood in the past tense, as something that happened in history. We are not moving towards it; if anything we are speeding away.

A Long Way Since Gilgamesh

In the old epic, Gilgamesh gets to the flower at the bottom of the sea but during the night a serpent comes along and steals it. There is an overlap between the sacred anaconda and the serpent that steals Gilgamesh's flower. Gilgamesh of course was transformed by his adventure to seek the flower of immortality, but not in the way he desired. In any case his quests an utter failure, just as the first quest
in this film which ends with the destruction of the cultivated flowers.

Thus, it is very interesting to see that in the second trek up the river, the explorer gets to the flower, and is then transformed. The film hints at the great distance of time from the first understanding of the world to a modern understanding of the world. We are still with great possibility, even as we speed away from the transcendent.

The older guide changes his mind about civilisation. He says that it is his job not to keep the sacred knowledge away from the civilised but to use it to transform civilisation. It's a big call and maybe a little too optimistic about civilisation. The civilisation which started with Gilgamesh's people turned a verdant forest land into the desert of northern Iraq today by chopping down the tree to bake the bricks. Is there any way to really transform civilisation when it is built on cities reaching out into the hinterlands and consuming the resources to extinction?  It's hard to share in the oblique optimism of the film.