The film ends on a downbeat note with only Rainbow (Walken) and Sunbearer (Martinez) standing.
"Where will the wind take you?"
"To the Alamo"
(the Texan war standoff)
Leaping on his horse, Sunbearer hazards,
"The old ones say, nothing lives long but the mountains and the earth."
The last image is of the parasol, marking the woman's grave, blowing away.
The wheel of Montezuma they were rolling off, the hazy sun, the bullseye target, the parasol. Round emblems of a stark, desert symbolism.
Symbols of the desert are life and death things. The scuttling lizard, the vulture that lands on the staked-out Rainbow. They speak of psyche or the wordless meaning of the cosmos.
There was a piece on Raphael in DT, and I sent this (unpublished) letter.
Alastair Sooke has this tendency I've noticed of protesting too much about detractors of Raphael. If you divide art into the physical or the psyche as an experience, Raphael can't be faulted on the former. It's the psyche that lacks depth. This is presumably something like what the Pre-Raphaelites felt in the 19th century, that Raphael was the initiator of a trend to physical perfection at the expense of psyche. Now at the end of Modernism we have the physical perfection of science. What is lacking, is the question that springs to mind
Modernism is the perfection of one thing at the expense of another, which is the meaning of the cosmos (epistemology). The words of Sunbearer are completely antipathetic to modernity, but it could simply prove that we live in a hyper-realistic illusion.
What appears to be physical perfection is illusory (Apollo) because without the psyche everything is an illusion. In other words, physical reality is far from perfection, but it is cosmically real.
Burne-Jones' gnarled boughs are tangled in an expression of Merlin's fraught brows, under the gaze of the Lady of the Lake. The physical reality is composed of large-scale similarities that are seen in branches, trunks, limbs, the strewn stars over the crescent moon.
The large-scale similarities (see Haeckel prev) enable differences to be perceived. The tangled and incestuously clinging lines (vines) of nature echo a type of cosmic fecundity.
Dr Strange (DNO3) has this cosmic erotic frisson (in the comely shape of Clea), gnarled and steaming. The human being is not alone in the cosmos because of these large-scale similarities, which is where myth starts.
Lines metamorphose one into the other in a type of cosmic debauchery that knows no boundaries. The lines themselves animate the forms.
The sun spins in the desert wind, the body reels under the sun, the wheel spins, the crescent moon flickers under the tired gaze. The spinning universe exists in invariable time because otherwise there cannot conceivably be any primordial rhythms (see spinning-top P200 HB209) and UVS.)
Invariable time is mythic time, and activates psyche. In other words, we live inside an illusion that appears physically perfect but where the psyche is inactive or dormant.
Psyche has to depend on invariable time, where all things are connected in spinning rhythms. The expressive line conveys this universal psyche. Japanese anime, for instance, is pretty good at this, and points to the opposite direction from Raphael's perfectionism.
Japanese popular prints strongly influenced Western art styles in the 19th century (Art Nouveau, Mucha) with their sinuously sexy and expressionistic verve. Large-scale similarities enable the psyche to be imbued.
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Sinuous, flowing vibrancy
If physical perfection is an illusion of the West (the ego or the head), this applies to literally everything. For example, the GPS calculations of Relative time that distort cosmic rhythms (see prev.) The perfectibility applies to a universe of brainwaves or electromagnetism, akin to the corporate Cyclan demons in the Dumarest pulp series.
From Raphael to Einstein, the illusion is perfect, the psyche ever-more dormant.