Apocalypse Now Redux
With Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Albert Hall, Sam Bottoms, Laurence Fishburne, Dennis Hopper, G.D. Spradlin, Harrison Ford, Colleen Camp, Cynthia Wood, Christian Marquand, and Aurore Clement.
Still, to imply that this movie’s highly entertaining obfuscations of American and Southeast Asian history have more value than anything filmmakers could possibly tell us today is to place a pretty low premium on the truth, the world, and the present–not to mention movies and ourselves. I keep hearing that this movie is supposed to provide some definitive kind of statement about Vietnam–what it was, what it means, and so on. But considering that Vietnamese people aren’t given even a hint of a voice in the statement–an absence that goes entirely unremarked–this is monumental chutzpah.
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text,” as critic Robin Wood might say, that came out only three years earlier, it makes random slaughter look romantic, spectacular, and downright artistic–so goddamn cinematic you can tap your toe to it. It opens with a frank illustration of how beautiful a tropical jungle silently exploding into flames can look, especially when the explosion is combined with a tune by the Doors that follows the spiffy stereo effect of helicopter blades faintly whipping past. “Far out,” we’re tempted to say, helped immeasurably by the fact that the filmmakers have thoughtfully shielded us from seeing whether human flesh is being devoured by the napalm. After all, this is entertainment we’re talking about.
One of the first articles I ever published was an essay for Film Comment on Orson Welles’s first film project, whose conception, screenplay, designs, and tests occupied him during his first six months in Hollywood, before he started his preparatory work with Herman Mankiewicz on Citizen Kane. It was a contemporary adaptation of “Heart of Darkness,” with an experimental use of a subjective camera to represent the viewpoint of Marlow, the story’s somewhat detached narrator–to be played mainly offscreen by Welles, in his storytelling radio persona–as he penetrates the heart of the African jungle in his search for Kurtz, a crazed white ivory trader who’s lording it over the natives. Welles updated the story to relate it to contemporary fascism in Europe–focusing on Kurtz as a charismatic, proto-Nazi despot before Kane was even a gleam in his eye–and RKO halted the project, finding it both too expensive and too commercially risky. (Welles had already adapted the story, rather lamely, for radio in 1938 and would readapt it for that medium much more effectively in 1945. I believe that parts of both versions can be heard briefly in the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.)
This scene–along with a much earlier one, when Coppola cuts suddenly and briefly from Kilgore blasting Wagner from his armed helicopter to a quiet Vietnamese village with a flock of children filing across a schoolyard, shortly before bombers arrive–is one of the few in the film that force us to contemplate some of the worst aspects of what the war was doing to the Vietnamese. And because it is the character we most identify with who delivers the coup de grace–deliberately, efficiently, and callously, rather than confusedly, ineptly, and innocently, like the preceding slaughter by the crew–our emotional relation to him is permanently altered.
Some recent commentators have attacked Herr’s narration for its literary posturing, but his rhetoric isn’t any more overheated than the superb cinematography by Vittorio Storaro or Murch’s druggy audio effects. Those effects, like the ones in Coppola’s earlier film, The Conversation (1974), probably qualify Murch as a coauteur; what he does in the opening sequence–getting us from helicopter blades to the blades in a ceiling fan–is as ravishing as any of the lap dissolves. Literary or not, Herr’s hyperbolic prose, here and in Dispatches, may be the best writing we have about American combat in Vietnam. That he wrote all of the narration during the film’s long postproduction–in effect, trying to locate as well as articulate the film’s ethical positions only after Coppola returned from the Philippines to California with his endless footage–only throws into relief the fact that he was apparently the only creative person working on the project who had had any experience in Vietnam. Obviously he can’t undo the unredeemable pretensions of Milius and Coppola’s screenplay, but he does ask enough of the right questions to get us to contemplate our relationship to this material, though this strategy works, as I’ve already argued, only as long as Willard’s questions remain unanswered.
