Summary:
Special Forces operative, Captain Willard, is given the task of journeying up the Mekong River during the Vietnam War to find and kill a US army officer, Colonel Kurtz, who has set up his own kingdom deep in the jungle where he is worshipped as a god by the local people. A series of episodes along the way highlight in various ways the insanities of the war before Willard locates and assassinates the enigmatic Kurtz.
Analysis:
Heavily indebted to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, it might be argued that this film wears its literary credentials rather too pretentiously. When we first meet Dennis Hopper’s photojournalist character,1 for example, he seems to attribute godlike stature to Kurtz (Marlon Brando) partly on the basis that he quotes lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; hardly the most likely piece of verse to be quoted by a US army officer who in the late 1960s/early 1970s has set himself up as a small-time, ultra-authoritarian dictator deep inside South East Asia. When we eventually meet Kurtz himself there is further use of Eliot’s verse; this time perhaps more appropriately from The Hollow Men but still rather lacking in originality.2
But it is not the range of literary allusions, from the placing of a copy of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough on Willard’s bedside table during the opening to the photojournalist scuttling from Kurtz’s presence towards the end reciting the final words from Eliot’s The Hollow Men, This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper, that makes this an important film. These somewhat forced attempts to express profound insights into the wider nature of the human experience are probably the weakest part of the whole. The most interesting aspect of this film is the way in which it offers, just four years after the fall of Saigon, a complex set of responses to the American experience of Vietnam.
In Conrad’s book the narrator, Marlow, takes the reader ever deeper into the depths of the late nineteenth-century European colonial enterprise, on a journey that operates as a metaphor for an examination of the (dark) heart of man:3 in Apocalypse Now we follow our narrator, Willard, as he is drawn with fatalistic inevitability ever further into an exploration of the American imperialist venture in Vietnam and Cambodia. Through him we experience both the historical realities of this particular war and its psychological ramifications for those individuals (and maybe a whole society) ensnared in the ongoing nightmare of that moment. Both Marlow and Willard move towards a mysterious man called Kurtz, who seems to offer the possibility of some insight into not only the particular expansionist enterprise under examination but also the psychological (even, the spiritual) state of man. Both the novella and the film move towards their culmination in the final words of Kurtz, ‘The horror, the horror’, and both abandon the reader to their own devices to decide the significance (if any) of these words.
Apocalypse Now utilises a very basic episodic narrative with no great sense of new complications or developments – we are simply and inevitably moving towards the climactic rendezvous with Kurtz. A sequence of events may occur which reveal an ever stronger sense of the madness at the heart of the American GI’s experience of Vietnam but these are merely sights along the way. A lieutenant colonel, Kilgore (Robert Duvall), who loves ‘the smell of napalm in the morning’ leads a helicopter charge scudding across the sky to the sound of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries; 4 troops at an army base riot at the sight of the tantalising glimpses of home offered by Playgirls during a surreal ‘girlie’ stage show; soldiers in a forward base surrounded by Viet Cong and abandoned by their commanders survive in a drug-induced haze; and, in between, a routine search of a sampan results in the slaughter of an innocent Vietnamese family by inexperienced, nervous US ‘kids’ abroad. There is no connection between these events other than that they occur during Willard’s journey towards Kurtz. And this sense of a disjointed, dislocated picaresque narrative is entirely fitting for a film about the madness of war and the insanity of man.
However, despite this episodic approach there is some sense of steady incremental change as the story progresses. We move from daylight and vast tracts of open water at the start of the journey towards an ever-narrowing funnel of a river, ever more night-time episodes, and ever darker and more death-filled events. Not only that but Willard and those who are unfortunate enough to find themselves accompanying him into the jungle darkness lose their innocence in a remorseless delving ever deeper into their self and away from ‘civilisation’. For Willard this culminates in a shot of him emerging at night from a swamp, half-naked and with his face blackened, on his way towards carrying out the ritual slaughter of Kurtz.
In one sense Willard might be said to kill his alter ego, in another he plays the endgame as Kurtz seems to require it to be played, but in a further narrative sense he simply operates as the traditional hero who successfully reaches the inner cave where the final test must be endured and emerges triumphant and therefore able to return to the world changed but also ritually cleansed. What this has to say about the American experience in Nam, about war in general (and about the human condition) is open to interpretation.5 If as Kurtz asserts he has seen through to the purity of action that is required in order to win such a war, then in showing this as unacceptable to the US authorities the film might be seen to be critical of the armed forces (and perhaps a democratic country) that was not prepared to go far enough. However, Willard’s comment that he can see no method in what Kurtz is engaged in positions him as the restorer of not only order but also reason (and, therefore, sanity).
In keeping with the episodic nature of the whole, the initial exposition phase effectively operates as a self-contained short film. Jim Morrison’s lyrics playing over images of a verdant jungle devastated by the explosive intrusion of human technology followed by a scene in a claustrophobic hotel room effectively brings together the external socio-political world and the interior human psychology. And these dual aspects of the film come together in the superimposed image of the jungle fires playing around Willard’s head. The war and its effects are inescapable. Willard’s response as he peers between the slats of the blind, ‘Saigon: shit’, represents at several levels what within a few years of the deployment of troops came to be the dominant American response to Vietnam. Our guide is immediately disconcertingly positioned as observing this place but yet cut off from it and unable to comprehend it. We begin with a contradiction which is also a statement: ‘This is the end’. This film is in its entirety going to be about ‘the end’: the end of civilisation, the end in terms of the death of the individual, and most of all, the end in terms of a reaching of the extremes of human experience.
The resolution phase too ‘works’ in the same way; from the moment Willard reaches Kurtz’s kingdom we find ourselves in a section from the whole that has its own sense of narrative structure with its own exposition, development, complication, climax and resolution phases. The only element holding the whole together is the presence of Willard, just as Marlow is the only link maintaining any sense of coherence within Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This is entirely appropriate: the creative impulse behind both the film and the novella is the idea that the only thing enabling any sense to be made of the world at large is the connectedness achieved through the individual consciousness (and storytelling).
To be more critical, this film is Americancentred and highly masculine6 in its outlook. However, this would be to criticise it for what it is not rather than to recognise it for what it is, to judge it in terms that are beyond its terms of reference. This is a key US film because it attempts to deal with a national disaster that was at the time very recent. That it explores this period in such a way as to convert a naïve (if not idiotic) foreign policy into a heroic if doomed effort to come to some understanding of the human condition might be a valid criticism; but the fact that it does this at precisely this point in American history demonstrates the strength of the US desire to see its efforts prevail and to envision even its failures as Hollywood, even epic, in scale.
This film is a reflection of complex contradictions found in the USA in the period, and not simply, as some commentators have suggested, a condemnation of the war. In its bold approach it embodies the emergence into the cultural arena of the confidence of a younger generation taking on the perceived failings of their parents. It attempts to confront the arrogance of US foreign policy and yet remains firmly and confidently UScentred in its offering of solutions. The sequence showing Kilgore’s attack on the Vietnamese village is entirely conventional in Hollywood terms in its use of sound and cinematography to engender an atmosphere of gung-ho excitement; and yet it also employs the powerful juxtaposition of the cut to the peace, tranquillity and innocence of the village that is about to be attacked. We are given a full-on Hollywood experience only to end in the shadows of a cave with a madman searching for truth in an insane world (‘Horror has a face and you must make a friend of horror.’ ‘To kill without judgement because it is judgement that defeats us.’). It is not just that war is pointless and inhumane (and yet horribly human), but that there is something sick at the very heart of man; and this evil cannot be escaped but only faced and accepted.
John White
Notes
1. Several photojournalists simply disappeared into the jungle in South East Asia in the period US forces were operating in the region. One of them, Sean Flynn, as the son of actors Errol Flynn and Lili Damita, had a slightly higher profile than the others. He worked in both Vietnam and Cambodia, but was captured in Cambodia by the Viet Cong or Khmer Rouge in 1970 and is believed to have been killed in 1971.
2. Kurtz reading from The Hollow Men was added during shooting and was not in the original script from Milius.
3. There are few representations of women in the film. The Playboy ‘chicks’ ‘choppered’ in and then swiftly out of the first American base visited on the Mekong are conventional sex objects and the disembodied, taped female voice playing at the death of ‘Mr Clean’ is that of the other traditional female figure of the mother.
4. The handmaidens of Odin who in Old Norse mythology rush into the confusion of battle on horseback and with swords drawn in order to carry off those selected for death; who are then taken to Valhalla as heroes.
5. See Frank P. Tomasulo, ‘The Politics of Ambivalence: Apocalypse Now as a Prowar and Antiwar Film’ in Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud (eds), From Hanoi to Hollywood: the Vietnam War in American Film, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp. 145–58.
6. See the shot of the hand caressing the missile slung on the side of a helicopter as Kilgore’s attack commences.
Further Reading:
James Clarke, Coppola, London, Virgin, 2003.
Eleanor Coppola, Notes: On the Making of ‘Apocalypse Now’, London, Faber, 1995.
Peter Cowie, The ‘Apocalypse Now’ Book, London, Faber, 2000.
Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud (eds), From Hanoi to Hollywood: the Vietnam War in American Film, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Cast and Crew:
[Country: USA. Production Company: Zoetrope Studios. Director and producer: Francis Ford Coppola. Screenwriters: John Milius and Coppola. Cinematographer: Vittorio Storaro. Music: Carmine Coppola and Coppola. Editors: Lisa Fruchtman, Gerald Greenberg and Walter Murch. Cast: Marlon Brando (Colonel Walter E. Kurtz), Martin Sheen (Captain Willard), Robert Duvall (Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore), Frederic Forrest (Jay ‘Chef’ Hicks), Sam Bottoms (Lance B. Johnson), Albert Hall (Chief Phillips), Laurence Fishburne (Tyrone ‘Clean’ Miller), Dennis Hopper (photojournalist).]
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.