Apocalypse Now

[osprey_archer]

Myra and I watched Apocalypse Now, because it's on the AFI top 100 movie list, and holy shit you guys, this movie is so weird. (I feel this way about lots of the movies on this list. Myra's comment was that they're not necessarily on the list for intrinsic quality, but because they caused a sea change in the movie industry - hence the fact that the first list included Birth of a Nation, because despite its gaping flaws, it did give people a whole new vision of what a movie could accomplish.)

Anyway! Apocalypse Now. Our protagonist, Martin Sheen (he has some other name in this movie; I have forgotten it), is sent into the jungle of Vietnam to kill Colonel Kurtz, allegedly because he's gone insane, but as Sheen moves through the jungle, he notes that you could say the same for pretty much every American soldier in Vietnam. They meet, for instance, an officer who is obsessed with surfing, and sends some of his men to go surfing on a beach that is still under enemy bombardment; and when we first meet Martin Sheen himself, he's dancing around his hotel room in his underwear, and punches a mirror.

Or is it really insanity when the whole situation is in itself bizarre and reason-defying? Maybe this is a perfectly reasonable adjustment to the chaos and the lies that permeate the war. A lot of the visuals in this movie are bizarrely nightmarish, like the American army bases that rise up out of the jungle strung with Christmas lights.

The film hammers this home so blatantly that it feels almost insulting at times. But on the other hand, even though that explicit theme is blatant, I also felt like there's a whole other level of stuff going on here that maybe I'm not getting at all.



The movie intercuts Kurtz's death with the sacrifice of a cow, for instance, as if he too is a sacrifice - for the army? To wipe away the sins of the army? To call down good luck for the army? It's not clear and probably not supposed to be clear - I don't think it's a flaw that it's not clear; I think it's probably, among other things, trying to demonstrate that it's hard to draw any clear meaning from war, once you strip away the traditional dulce et decorum est justifications for it.



It might become clearer if I watched it again. But that would mean, well, watching it again - and I kind of want to, but I also really don't. The film works on a kind of nightmare logic anyway; I'm not sure it's going to become clear in an intellectual sense no matter how many times one watches it.

Comments

[spoiledcat.livejournal.com]

Its one of my favourite movies! Its such a Experience watching it

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It really is an experience. Not quite like anything else! So weird!

[sovay]

The film works on a kind of nightmare logic anyway; I'm not sure it's going to become clear in an intellectual sense no matter how many times one watches it.

I have only seen Apocalypse Now once and a couple of years ago, but it made immediate sense to me as a variation on the myth of the year-king, if that helps with the death/sacrifice.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

There's probably an interesting comparison to be made between Apocalypse Now and The Wicker Man. Two very different retellings of the year king story.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I've never seen it. How did it work as a retelling of Heart of Darkness?

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I read Heart of Darkness so long ago that I'm not sure I could meaningfully compare the two. But I found the movie haunting in a way I didn't really find the book (although "the horror, the horror" still seems melodramatic and OTT in both).

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I agree that it's supposed to feel like a nightmare/hallucination, and that the main reason is to reflect the theme that the Vietnam war made no fucking sense, drove people crazy while encouraging madness as a sort of twisted survival strategy, and felt like a nightmare/hallucination to most of the people engaged in it. So yeah, a lot of it is deliberately non-rational, because it's about a non-rational event.

I agree with Sovay that there's some kind of Year-King theme going on. Kurtz isn't just mad, he's deliberately walked into the heart of the non-rational in the sense of "primitive" ancient myth - a time when no one was rational and magic/superstition ruled. [Obligatory note: I'm not saying this was literally true of ancient times, but I think the movie is using that assumption.] So he becomes the ruler who is also the sacrifice. But for what?

I think "for what" is unclear because Coppola's saying that the war was for nothing and all the loss of life was pointless, so Kurtz is a sacrifice without a purpose. Or if there originally was a purpose, it's not working. Kurtz might have had some intention, but whatever it was, it's now lost or unknowable.

Here's some of Kurtz's quotes which I think support that reading:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Now#Colonel_Walter_E._Kurtz

"You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgement. Without judgement! Because it's judgement that defeats us."

Why even bother to kill, then?

I think Coppola is saying: "YES. GOOD QUESTION. Y'ALL SHOULD BE ASKING YOURSELVES THAT."

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It does feel like a hallucination. The scenes where he's at the army bases especially, they just feel so unreal - which of course ties back to Willard's inveighing against all the lies that the war spawns, and the fact that he comes to admire Kurtz in an odd way because at least Kurtz is honest, goddammit.

Although he seems to move away from the admiration once he actually sees Kurtz's corpse-strewn fort and Kurtz starts trying to abuse/entice him into joining him - he still sympathizes with Kurtz (I think WIllard sees it as a mercy killing, and not a sacrifice - he thinks he's doing it for Kurtz, not for the army, although of course that's also a convenient rationalization for carrying out his orders...)

Anyway. He still sympathizes with Kurtz, but I think by the end he decides that Kurtz's blunt honesty - the fact that he doesn't try to cloak his actions with mumbo-jumbo about the morality of them, like the soldier on the helicopter announcing "We are here to help" as behind him the other soldiers destroy a village - isn't redemptive, either.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oh, also: have you seen Full Metal Jacket? It makes basically the same point but I like it better as a movie.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen Full Metal Jacket. I actually haven't watched that many war movies (or westerns, for that matter, another movie genre that's all over the AI top 100 list; it's actually been quite a broadening watching experience).

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I've only seen Apocalypse Now once, but I unfortunately found it boring and mostly incomprehensible. However, I did watch the (much longer) director's cut, which in retrospect was probably a bad idea.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

It's already a super long movie with lots of lingering shots of, like, here's Martin Sheen's super blue eyes and some waves coming up on the surfing beach and here's the boat drifting down the river. I can only imagine that the director's cut is totally torturous.