The End: Apocalypse Now

This winter, I watched a charming little one-act play called The World Is Not Silent about Don, a Vietnamese-American immigrant, and Linh, the bright young Vietnamese woman who comes to their Nebraskan community to teach Vietnamese Sign Language (VSL) to Don’s aging father. Don never learned to sign or speak in Vietnamese after his parents encouraged him to assimilate; Linh is great at communicating to her students, but she has more trouble understanding her own heart. They’d met during one of Don’s rare visits to Vietnam, years before. His parents and her grandmother, hoping for a love connection, or at least friendship, left them alone in a bedroom to talk, one of them knowing almost no Vietnamese, the other knowing almost no English. When Don introduces the flashback, his tone grows more serious, almost dangerous. The light changes; we hear the rotation of a ceiling fan and a twangy guitar plays. In short, it’s all a clear and extremely funny reference to Apocalypse Now. The scene isn’t set in Vietnam as much as it’s placed in the image of Vietnam that Americans know from the movies.

For decades, Hollywood loved to talk about Vietnam, sort of. Only one film jon the subject was released during our ill-fated adventure there¹: The Green Berets, an absolutely wretched exercise in rah-rah patriotism that rather infamously ends with John Wayne holding hands with a small Vietnamese boy the US military has “saved,’” walking toward the sunset over the Pacific Ocean.²

The tide, if you’ll pardon the expression, turned soon after. Films like Coming Home and First Blood examined the war’s cost on individual American³ soldiers, while Full Metal Jacket and The Deer Hunter took a slightly larger view. These movies are generally tragic, focusing on a lost American Dream and blaming the suits and John Waynes of the US for feeding young men to a meat grinder. By 1985, Rambo: First Blood Part II was topping the box office and Paul Hardcastle had a successful one-hit wonder with “19”, a song that focused on the average age of an American soldier in Vietnam to emphasize the relative innocence of boys sent off to war. (For the record, Hardcastle was sincere, but the statistic has been disputed.)⁴

Apocalypse Now is slightly outside this timeline, thanks to Frances Ford Coppola’s choice to combine the white-boys-gone-astray narrative that quickly began to dominate Hollywood’s vision of Vietnam with an older white-boys-gone-astray narrative: Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness. Written in part due to Conrad’s horror at European (particularly Belgian) actions in West Africa,⁵ Darkness addresses what happens to both colonizer and colonized when human life is treated as cheap and disposable. The problem, of course, is when you tell that story from a Western perspective and through a white lens, the people being dehumanized can appear to be simply inhuman.

Chinua Achebe wrote a really excellent takedown of Heart of Darkness many years back, and a good half — at minimum — of what he said applies directly to Apocalypse Now, too. The jungle is the enemy, and so are the Viet Cong⁶, and they’re basically the same thing. The masses of nonwhite bodies blend into the mass of vegetation to create an inhuman, unfamiliar force that is near-impossible to understand. 

“As a creature of his time,” Edward Said said in response to Achebe’s critique, “Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them.” Coppola wasn’t much different. He saw the damage done by the war, but from a very specific lens.

Coppola argues, quite convincingly, that war makes all men monsters, but the monstrosity takes different shapes. It’s a little like the joke that all unhappy families are different; American soldiers go crazy in all sorts of different ways but the Vietnamese are (almost) all the same⁷.

This movie is blinkered and racist at times. It almost killed Martin Sheen, stole corpses, murdered a water buffalo, and produced so much film — over a million feet — that Coppola could add almost an hour of existing footage in 2001 to make Apocalypse Now Redux. It was close to being an utter disaster.

It’s also really good.⁸

Coppola’s tight focus on Martin Sheen’s Willard helps, of course, as does Sheen’s performance. Confining the story to one man’s perspective and one particularly horrid boat trip lifts the movie just slightly out of Large Metaphor for American Participation in the Vietnam War and more into Specific Man’s Struggle with Sanity. 

Everyone’s said everything there is to say about the opening, pretty much, but there’s a reason for it: it’s the perfect thesis statement. There is the beauty of nature, and there is a certain beauty in destruction, and then, nothing but ash and nothingness. The flames die out, the sound of helicopter blades turns into the whir of a ceiling fan, and the viewer is in a hotel room with Sheen’s Captain Willard as he mentally deteriorates. Saigon is alive with people, but to Willard it might as well be the surface of the moon.⁹ The war will burn everything out of you. It’ll turn you into someone else, someone more hollow, suited only to doing more of what you’ve already done. Willard is horribly detached from his own self before Harrison Ford and those other guys even send him after Kurtz.

“When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.”

Willard was broken before the film begins, and he struggles even to pass as a human in these early scenes. When he’s back in-country, he pulls back to himself, a leader, a strategist. Apocalypse Now, like Heart of Darkness before it, asks us who we are at the core of ourselves. Conrad’s protagonist Marlow manages to center himself, but Willard never quite gets there. He doesn’t lose himself as wholly as Kurtz, but it’s not clear he’ll ever find a place where he belongs again.

Apocalypse Now was the first incomplete film to be shown in competition at Cannes, in a three-hour cut. Coppola recut it for its 70 mm release in August, 1979. Then he recut again, for a slightly longer 35mm wide release with a slightly different ending. There were a few other variations in the ending credits, but of course the big change came in 2001, when Coppola and longtime editor Walter Murch released Apocalypse Now Redux. Besides the extra hour, it had new music, restored footage, and ADR from many of the original actors. Even Coppola couldn’t get out of the jungle.

Redux tells the same story and also quite a different one, less focused, slightly more expansive. The most famous/infamous addition is a long sequence set at a French rubber plantation, where a handful of European expats are still playing house like little has changed. It broadens the film’s vision a bit beyond the tight focus on American folly, underlining that Vietnam was an imperialist plaything for French and Chinese colonial powers for centuries before the United States decided to stick its foot in the water. 

I kind of like it, because it’s a nice reminder of how this stupidity goes in cycles. It’s also maybe wholly unnecessary, because this stupidity sure does go in cycles, huh?

As I write this, another generation of US soldiers are far from home, serving in a country where they don’t know the language and aren’t encouraged to learn it. They are following the orders of a visibly unhealthy man, propped up by rhetoric that seems as detached from reality as the rantings of Kurtz himself.¹⁰

The American experiment is, more or less, 250 years old today, and it’s in a particularly precarious situation (like a snail crawling on the edge of a razor blade, maybe). 

There’s no neat resolution to be found. We are the madman in the darkness; we are the lost ones, minds overwhelmed; we are the desperate supplicants. We are, perhaps, the soldier in the dark, holding the machete.

1. I grew up with the narrative that the Vietnam conflict was the US’s big mistake. That was already a pretty optimistic view of history, and the field has gotten significantly more competitive since. ↩︎
2. If you’re confused about why this is funny, please take a quick look at the globe and note where the sun sets in both Vietnam and California. ↩︎
3. Usually white Americans, almost never women. Women are innocent (white) ladies at home, or prostitutes. Notably the ending of Full Metal Jacket breaks this formula, inspired by a real sniper who held American troops down for hours, but she’s reduced to begging for a quick death at the end of the film. The U.S. had thousands of women serving in Vietnam (in addition to civilian humanitarian staffers) and millions of Vietnamese women served in the military or militias. We are not going to go into the way Vietnamese women are generally treated in American movies about Vietnam today, but let’s be clear that filmmakers have not covered themselves in glory. ↩︎
4. What’s your favorite Vietnam War PTSD song of the 80s? “19,” “Walking on a Thin Line,” or “Born in the U.S.A.?” ↩︎
5. Particularly in the horribly ironically named “Congo Free State.” ↩︎
6. Referred to in history and in this film by the dehumanizing, all-of-them-are-the-same nickname “Charlie.” This is not uncommon in war regardless of the races involved; it is, people have discovered, harder than you might think to convince humans to kill each other. That’s a story for another day. ↩︎
7. Let’s never forget that Coppola said, “My film is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.” Coppola’s family, of course, immigrated to the U.S. from the well-known Southeast Asian community of Bernalda, Italy. ↩︎
8. I think people are well within their rights to reject Apocalypse Now for its flaws, but that’s not what we’re doing today. It’s the Fourth of July, so let’s get our little flag out, shall we? ↩︎
9. Even here, you can see how the film shows That One Vietnam. It’s hot, it has palm trees, there are people speaking a language most American viewers don’t understand and some of them have guns. If you’ve watched one of these movies, you know what Vietnam is supposed to look like, and it doesn’t really matter that it was shot in the Philippines. ↩︎
10. Which Kurtz? Either will do. ↩︎