The Vietnam Reader (37 page)

But movies are not life, and losing one’s film company because of shortsightedness, bad luck, and self-indulgence is not an apt metaphor for the deaths of millions of people. Over the years Coppola has been hammered for this quote again and again; it’s commonly hauled out as proof of his overall pretentiousness as well as that of
Apocalypse Now
, both of which are amply documented in Eleanor Coppola’s
Notes
and the 1991 documentary fashioned from her location footage,
Hearts of Darkness.

Beyond the metaphor of Coppola in the jungle and the massive hype both the filming and the release of the movie attracted,
Apocalypse Now
was burdened with fleshing out—dramatically fulfilling, that is—one of English literature’s finest allegories for colonial domination and the evil in men’s souls, Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness.
In Conrad’s novella, the seaman Marlow begins his tale by imagining what it must have been like for a Roman captain to take his ship up
the Thames, surrounded by darkness, forest, savages; he goes on to relate the story of his encounter with Mr. Kurtz, the chief of the Inner Station, deep in the Congo. Mr. Kurtz’s section produces four times more ivory than any other, yet something’s amiss. The company has sent Marlow to investigate another matter, but as he winds his way upriver, he becomes more and more intrigued with the figure of Kurtz as a representative of European imperialism gone mad. Rumors abound at each stop: His methods are strange, the natives worship him, he’s a wise man, he’s a devil. Marlow eventually finds Kurtz—near death—and the strange society he’s gathered around him. It seems that Kurtz at first tried to bring Western enlightenment to the natives, but soon gave in to baser impulses, setting himself up as a vengeful god. Marlow is horrified and tries to bring Kurtz back downriver—for everyone’s sake—but Kurtz dies, whispering, “The horror, the horror.” It’s Marlow’s job to report his fate to Kurtz’s intended, and he finds he cannot tell her the awful truth.

Coppola and his cowriter John Milius use Marlow’s journey upriver to illustrate both America’s involvement in Vietnam and Man’s journey into his uncivilized Self. Marlow is now Willard (Martin Sheen), a fallen CIA operative who, like Kurtz (Marlon Brando), is serving at least his second tour of duty, having found nothing at home in the States. While in
Heart of Darkness
Marlow tells his tale to a group of men, Willard delivers a spare voice-over written by Michael Herr, the author of
Dispatches,
which echoes the hard-boiled
noir
thrillers of the late forties, another genre that posits Evil at the heart of human affairs.

The film’s first words, ironically, are “This is the end,” sung by Jim Morrison as a napalm strike silently engulfs a jungle, Hueys and Loaches dipping across the screen in slow motion. A shot of Willard’s face, upside down, is superimposed on this, a Buddha’s stone face opposite him, rightside up.

We’re in Willard’s hotel room in Saigon. He sleeps with a gun under his pillow, and he’s been drinking brandy. As in
The Deer Hunter,
a ceiling fan revolves with the bap-bap-bap of rotor blades. “Saigon,” the voice-over goes. “Shit, I’m still only in Saigon. Every time I go to sleep I think I’m going to wake up back in the jungle.”

He tells us about going back to the World. “I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce. When I was here I wanted to be there, when I was there I wanted to get back to the jungle.”

We watch Willard, stumbling drunk, punch a mirror and cut his hand. Naked, he seems mad, savage, already fallen to the weird core of his Self. When a pair of Army messengers appears, he asks, “What are the charges? What did I do?” As the men dunk him under a shower, the voice-over says, “I was going to the worst place in the world and I didn’t know it yet,” and, after mentioning Kurtz: “If his story is a confession, so is mine.”

Willard is an assassin, though it seems he’s lost the heart for it, and a group of Army higher-ups want him to find the mysterious Kurtz. “His ideas, methods,” one says, “became … unsound.” They try to come up with reasons. “In this war, things get confused out there—power, ideals, the old morality and practical military necessity. There’s a conflict in every human heart. Between the rational and the irrational, between good and evil.” Willard is instructed to terminate Kurtz’s command “with extreme prejudice,” after which Willard comments in his best tough-guy voice-over, “Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.”

Willard hooks up with a Navy patrol boat going up the river. “The crew were mostly just kids, rock ’n’ rollers with one foot in the grave.” It’s a hip crew. They smoke dope and waterski to the Stones’s “Satisfaction,” swamping the Vietnamese washerwomen and fishermen on the banks.

They meet up with the 1st Cav, which has “cashed in its horses for choppers,” though Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall) still wears a cowboy hat and a bugler sends them off. As they approach a fishing village, Willard and company pass a TV crew led by Coppola himself. It’s a shot echoed by Kubrick in
Full Metal Jacket,
among others. “It’s for the television,” Coppola shouts. “Don’t look at the camera, just go by like you’re fighting.” This is followed by a massive, brilliantly staged assault on the seaside hamlet; it’s at once exhilarating and terrible, a true, pleasing spectacle for the eye even as it tacitly decries what it’s showing us (Kilgore is taking the village only so they can surf a desirable stretch of beach). After a girl sapper destroys a medevac chopper,
Kilgore mutters, “Fucking savages,” then later asks Lance (Sam Bottoms), “What do you think?” Kilgore means the surf, but Lance thinks he means the assault, or Vietnam in general. “It’s really exciting,” Lance says. Kilgore goes on to utter his famous line, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Smells like … vict’ry.” Then he adds sadly, as if it’s something the men should all ponder, “Someday this war’s gonna end.”

Willard comments acidly on everything, never forgetting—like Herr in
Dispatches
and Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in the
noir
classic
Double Indemnity—
that he’s implicated as well. “Home … we knew it didn’t exist anymore.” “Murder and insanity—there was enough to go around.” “Never get off the boat, unless you’re going all the way.” “The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam you needed wings to stay above it.”

Finally we head upriver, and Coppola stages a number of set pieces to show the strangeness—the unique madness—of the war. A USO show featuring a trio of Playboy bunnies dressed as cowboys and Indians turns into a riot. The crew of the patrol boat accidentally massacres a sampan full of innocent civilians. Night at Do Long bridge is an absurd, trippy circus (Willard: “Who’s the commanding officer here?” Crazy gunner: “Ain’t you?”). The next day, Lance writes back to a friend at home that Vietnam is “better than Disneyland.”

They cross into Cambodia and find Kurtz, attended by his legions and his yes-man, a spaced-out photojournalist (Dennis Hopper). Everywhere are heads on pikes, bodies hung from trees. Like the fawning Russian in
Heart of Darkness,
the photojournalist has fallen under Kurtz’s spell, thinks he’s a genius. He tells Willard, “You don’t judge the colonel,” although, “Sometimes he goes too far. He forgets himself.”

Willard is taken to Kurtz (the bald, ruminant Brando), who knows precisely why Willard is there. “Are my methods unsound?” he asks. Willard carefully replies, “I don’t see any method at all, sir.”

Kurtz imprisons Willard and butchers one of his two remaining crewmen. The photojournalist admits that “The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad.” He worries about how Kurtz will be remembered. “What are they going to say? He was a kind man? He
was a wise man? He had plans?” He puts the future burden of explaining exactly who Kurtz was on Willard: “Look at me, am I going to set them straight? No. You.”

Kurtz lets Willard out of his cage, brings him into the inner sanctum, where he recites Eliot’s
The Hollow Men.
“I’ve never seen a man so ripped apart,” Willard tells us. “You have no right to judge me,” Kurtz says, and in a speech that directly addresses the gap: “It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means.”

Kurtz relates the story of a VC atrocity, explaining how he became this way, lauding strength of will over morality. “It’s judgment that defeats us.” And, repeating what Willard has said earlier, “There’s nothing more I detest than the stench of lies.” With that, Kurtz lays on Willard the responsibility of telling his son what happened.

Night comes down, the torches are lit, a water buffalo prepared for ritual slaughter. Drums thunder (percussion led by Mickey Hart of the Grateful Dead), and then on top of that, the Doors’ “The End.” Willard rises wraithlike from the dark, smoking water, his face painted like Kurtz’s when he killed the crewman. As the Doors pound out the crescendo of “The End,” Coppola crosscuts between the ritual slaughter of the buffalo and Willard murdering Kurtz. “The horror,” Kurtz whispers as he dies, “the horror.” Scrawled across Kurtz’s humanitarian treatise on the natives (another element lifted from
Heart of Darkness)
is
Drop the bomb, exterminate them all.
The deed done, Willard’s face merges with that of the stone Buddha, and once more we hear Kurtz’s last words. Then fade to the sound of rain.

Apocalypse Now
is an epic in the grandiosity of its ambitions, the brilliance of its imagery, and the sheer pompousness of the statements it makes about Man and the war. This is a double-layered allegory—a beautiful cartoon, as some critics put it. Only the merest lip service is paid to realism. The symbolism is heavyhanded and constant, the characters grotesques. Everything is in capital letters—Good, Evil, Will, Morality—and the imagery that Coppola uses to bring us his psychodrama is utterly indulgent and at times marvelous. While the storyline sags under the weight of the set pieces, the overall dramatic frame of the journey or mission works well; the mapping of
Heart of Darkness
onto the war seems apt in that it gives the viewer not only a plot to follow but a lens through which we can judge, historically, the American involvement.

That said, it’s important to note that Coppola made this choice and then shot the movie to fulfill it. Implicitly he’s criticizing the American involvement with almost no attempt to interpret the complexity of the actual events or the role of the men and women who fought the war. The representation of the American military as bumbling and aimless and the view of individual soldiers as drug-addled and out of control are enormously clichéd, and it could easily be argued that characters like Kilgore and Kurtz are cheap shots. As a metaphor for the madness of the war, as well as a grim comedy indicting perceived U.S. policy,
Apocalypse Now
succeeds, but it’s certainly not a thoughtful investigation of what happened and why.

Themes we’ve seen before (and will see again) include Caputo’s assertion that moral decay is implicit in war; the internal struggle between good and evil; the gap between America at large and Vietnam, also between REMF and combat soldier; the perverse attraction or beauty of war; the role of the media; the climate of lies; Vietnam as a physical embodiment of madness; the tendency of the military (and perhaps America) to see the war as a Western; race and class relations; the inhuman treatment of the Vietnamese (especially women and children); the stilted use of American and VC atrocities; and the mapping of a fixed Hollywood genre onto the war (in this case, the noir detective thriller, where for
Coming Home
it was the romantic melodrama).

That Cannes awarded the film its
Palme d’Or
says perhaps more about French attitudes and Coppola’s talent than the movie’s coherence and incisiveness. Like
Coming Home, Apocalypse Now
is packed with prevailing contemporary U.S. attitudes toward both the war and the American soldier, and while this did not please veterans or critics, who seemed to agree it was an empty fantasy, it sold well at the box office. None of the principal performances won Oscars (Duvall was nominated for his over-the-top Kilgore), though the lush cinematography earned Vittorio Storaro an award, and the sound crew picked up another.

Twenty years later, these judgments seem keen. The movie still looks and sounds good, and Coppola’s eye serves him well. As the documentary
Hearts of Darkness
crows at the end,
Apocalypse Now
has grossed over 150 million dollars and is generally considered an excellent and important film. It’s a compelling story: An artist puts his career on the line with an audacious, nearly impossible work, survives innumerable setbacks, unkind critics, and in the end is vindicated by the public. In this at least, Coppola escaped the fate of America’s involvement in Vietnam. Still,
Apocalypse Now
continues to mesmerize viewers not because of what it says but how it says it.

This is one of the great paradoxes or challenges every artist faces when taking on Vietnam, but especially filmmakers: The audience’s addiction to the raw sensation of aestheticized violence, combined with the difficulty of (and political and cultural opposition to) relating the experience, can easily lead to a falsification of presentation—an emphasis on the spectacle of war or simplistic judgments upon it rather than its political intricacies and the emotional truths of those involved. And that appears to be what happened with
The Deer Hunter, Coming Home,
and
Apocalypse Now
, but with one interesting and important result. The failure of these three widely accepted and highly decorated films to navigate such seemingly impossible demands would inspire, almost immediately, a large number of vets themselves to speak out and try, once again, to set the record straight.

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