BAD FAITH OF Apocalypse Now

...While brooding on these questions he has a chance to observe the war closely...

...According to the first, leaked soon after the shooting was completed, Coppola—whose previous films had established him as an exceedingly gifted liberal director, the successor of Fred Zinnemann and the early Kazan—had been converted to a twilight-of-the-gods chauvinism, under the influence of Milius...

...Brando has been judged by most critics the weakest link in the film...

...Why, Willard asks himself, did Kurtz give it all up...

...We might at the same time pay homage to Brecht, the greatest modern prophet of those dangers...

...His most notable display of strategy comes in his order to clear a beachhead for a surfing exhibition by one of his men, as the battle enfolds and darkens the scene...

...This final confrontation with Kurtz's oriental band makes an ugly scene...

...He knew the importance of thought, in art as much as outside it, to the health and fortitude of a culture...

...We see the American secret operative, Willard, first lying in bed—amid hallucinations in which a ceiling fan turns into a helicopter's rotor blades—then standing before a mirror, thinking to himself, "Every minute I stayed out of the jungle, I knew I was getting weaker and Charlie was getting stronger...

...the trouble with America generally, Willard decides, is that it too has decided to stay on the boat in Vietnam...

...Along the way he reads secret dossiers on Kurtz, growing ever more fascinated...

...We should have forgone these, and fought terror with terror, in single-soul combat from one village to the next...

...Kurtz's tragic knowledge is to have recognized this himself: "Exterminate the brutes," reads a fugitive note he has at some point addressed to himself, which Willard discovers among his papers.* And brutes they are, as we see them in the film...

...Willard has of course already ordered the air strike that will exterminate the brutes as the closing *1 misremembered the line as identical with the version of it in Heart of Darkness...

...the line is very ordinary, and only a great actor could make it seem much good: "I was expecting someone like you," he says to Willard...

...but its emotions—the sense of power, mingled with revulsion from the victims of power—might be paralleled in the pages of Carlyle on The Nigger Question, and several celebrated tableaux from the German cinema in the decades before Hitler...

...From the first, his whole experience of the war is governed by a simple opposition between weakness and strength...

...Even before he meets Kurtz he has advanced beyond the emotional habits implied in the phrase, "staying on the boat...

...but we would have saved our souls...

...Good work, we are encouraged to say, as Willard doubtless says to himself, with all due respect to the horror of it...

...TWO TALES ABOUT the genesis of Apocalypse Now have been put out for general consumption...

...Apocalypse Now is a piece of visionary propaganda about the Vietnamese war— oppressively ugly for most of its length, with an emotional sordidness that teases and at last wears down and baffles the audience—a confidently brutal film, grating in its record of the terrible events, aimless-seeming, like the sequence of actions it describes, and like them difficult to learn from...

...but he finds that he need have had no fear, for on seeing him, and fully comprehending his deed, they shrink from his presence and give every sign of submission to their new god...

...Willard, on the other hand, is fascinated by his success...

...Kurtz went to Harvard...

...In its ideology this is a thoroughly self-consistent film— its meanest assumptions are laid bare, and their inhumanity conveyed without stint, in the screenplay...

...The depth of the bluff, together with the utter want of cogency in the response, ought to make us reflect with a renewed vigilance on the dangers of all spectacle...

...What turned so "professional" a soldier into a prodigy of rebellion...

...When we do get to see Brando, he is immensely slow, bulging, ungainly, but with an angular sculpted profile (we often see him in profile), somewhat reminiscent of Orson Welles as Kane at the end, lumbering across the frozen marble rooms of Xanadu...

...the pride of his men and their lucky fate: the personified spirit of this war...

...The tragedy of the story, if that is the word for it, is to be located in Kurtz's commitment of his destiny to an unworthy set of beneficiaries...

...His shooting of the wounded and innocent woman was ugly but honest, and "clean" as the war itself is unclean...

...one of them is surprised in the jungle by a tiger, which he thinks is a sniper—he resolves ever after to stay "on the boat...

...Yes, but a nightmare whose ill effects will reverberate in waking life...

...Yet the one such show that we see is extremely hard to credit, and forms a striking instance of the film's dissipation of its own energies—the fretting away of plausible thematic contrasts, in a chaos of unmeaning disgust for which the disgust of the war itself can be no justification...

...He does make his entrance a little too concertedly as the whimper-not-thebang mentioned elsewhere in the screenplay, and his improvisations show nothing better than an actor of genius performing hastily and under duress...

...hence, the film as we have it, a strange mixture of things but above all our first true picture of the war...

...And Brecht unquestionably would have had much to tell us about the spell of participation under which we read Heart of Darkness too...

...hurl himself against the wickedness of his fate...

...Even so we might not have won the war...

...To this Willard says nothing, but he need say nothing...

...What this really means is: "l am beyond judgment...

...Instead of the wounded woman the Americans take on board a puppy, one of many domestic animals left behind in the massacre...

...On the contrary, Coppola's intrusion is calculated to please all those hierophants of affectation for whom the will, if pretentious enough, is always equal to the deed...

...Think...

...the American soldiers are very young, more in dread of the encounter than the family is, and looking for the slip or start of betrayal that will set their machine guns firing...

...burst into declamations that gave some hint of the temperament Willard found reflected in his notebooks...

...he was himself driven mad by the tropics, like the Americans who fought there...

...During a helicopter attack in which he participates—at the end of which a Vietnamese village and the forest surrounding it are napalmed, and razed to the ground—Willard takes stock of the cavalry officer in command, who plays Wagner over the loudspeakers to "scare the shit out of them" as his helicopters descend on the village...

...theirs, the silence of weakness, of fear, of a loathsome blank horror...

...It thus helped to create the moral atmosphere in which it was possible for Coppola to describe his film as "an attempt to capture the sensuousness of this war...

...What Brecht feared was the spell of participation that the indulgence in spectacle could cast over an audience and the consequent tendency of mass art to reinforce old habits of feeling, rather than make us reconsider them...

...In fact, the words of the film are: "Drop the bomb...

...Willard notices two things...

...Even so, we know that Brando put several hours on film, and we are left wondering about the footage that remained on the cutting-room floor...

...The meaning of the line, the revelation of darkness that makes the last appeal of an all-devouring racism, is lost in the hint that Kurtz would prefer to destroy all races equally...

...So he enters Kurtz's temple compound wellprepared for the meeting with his legendary precursor...

...His opening scene sets the tone for the entire story...

...No weapons are found...

...Aside from the beauty and clarity of his madness, Kurtz's final legacy to Willard is contained in his injunction: "Don't judge me...

...NOWHERE IS the film's nihilism clearer, or truer to itself, than in the central incident of Willard's journey...

...Apocalypse Now is a work that affects to "tell us the worst," and for that reason it is well to know the worst about it...

...Coppola did not endure anything resembling the horrors of war, unless it can be verified that he had napalm raining down on him, or snipers trying to pick him off night and day, in his director's chair...

...Roused from his enforced idleness, Willard is told by two soldiers to report to his superiors...

...Apocalypse Now is the most potent testimony in recent years of the sickness of mere spectacle...

...All about the compound, scattered on the ground or hanging from the trees, are the bodies of the Vietcong whom Kurtz has killed...

...This character evidently exists as a kind of drainage system or escape valve for the high seriousness of all of Brando's 208 performance as Kurtz, but, though his presence is understandable in this light, his pothead apothegms and high jinks are out of keeping with the whole tenor of the film...

...The film, far less elusive in this respect than Conrad's story, completely identifies horror with truth, and "the horror" with the truth revealed by Vietnam...

...It has nothing in common with the spirit of the great signatures to which it alludes— Raoul Coutard's camera swinging round to catch Godard, between frantic paces to keep afloat a totally improvised adventure...

...q 213...

...Our mistake was to suppose that conscience ever came into the question...

...But most of the speeches that follow are the testament of a man who has gone to the bottom of life to learn its horror...

...But the general direction of the propaganda is plain...

...It would be surprising if many came away knowing that the war was a result of political decisions made in America, and military decisions made in Vietnam, which were neither inevitable in themselves nor rendered inevitable by the curse of the jungle...

...By the separate and seductive mediation of images...

...Second, and quite apart from their fears, the Americans he encounters are utterly unserious about war...

...He is now the guru and absolute ruler of a mingled following of Vietnamese and Cambodian primitives...

...At bottom, the film knows exactly what it is about, and the cue is given in the climactic stand-off between Willard and his inherited minions, with their different silences—his, the silence of a terrible freedom, of the blood-deed...

...If the improvisations are often ineffectual, that is the fault of a director the final verse of whose apocalypse was yet to be determined on the day of shooting, so that its contents were left to the auguries of the actor...

...His gunboat crosses the path of a civilian junk, floating unauthorized in the guerrillainfested river, and the captain orders his men, Willard's escort and accomplices, to stop the junk and board it...

...and, finally, there is a slip, and the family is massacred...

...This officer is mad, yet somehow sympathetic...

...WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE of this latest addition to the annals of imperialism, and of its reception by a stupefied public...

...Most of the film records Willard's journey up river, on a gunboat manned by Americans who know nothing of his mission...

...He believed that an exemplary intelligence could be incorporated in art, and shared with the audience...

...This they do, to search for concealed rifles or grenades, all the while nervously eyeing the family of passengers on the junk...

...Willard, after having murdered Kurtz, lurks warily in the shadows of the temple, afraid that the wrath of Kurtz's followers will avenge itself on the destroyer of their god...

...What were you expecting...

...Kurtz's opening speech is pure—rather soft and sweet—Brando, queerly incongruous under the circumstances: it is a memory of a favorite bed of flowers, in his hometown, in America...

...First, however, he is beset by a scruffy hanger-on of Kurtz's, played by Dennis Hopper—a reporter with an imagination blitzed and bombed out by too continuous a dose of drugs, war, and the lingo of the counterculture...

...How can a film so unmistakable, or in the language of fashionable criticism, so "unmediated" in its ideology, have been misinterpreted...

...They are contemptible, and fit only to be ruled...

...We are meant to see him as having had much the best of the exchange with the sentimental young soldiers...

...Kurtz reads from "The Hollow Men" (affectingly) and the books in his study, From Ritual to Romance and The Golden Bough, are lingered over by the camera (idiotically)—Kurtz's books, in the scheme of this film, would more likely be The Geneology of Morals and The Will to Power...

...More subtle counters are never proposed...

...Assassinate Kurtz, he is instructed...

...Yet in one important way Conrad's story makes its impression fairly: it earns its dark view of humanity by the power of incident and metaphor, the reiterated power of drama itself...

...The film is a nightmare, its apologists tell us...

...and at the same time, we disarmed ourselves for soul-battle with the vice of pity...

...The impression we have from the evidence, incomplete though it may be, is that Brando tried to complicate the character by adding to it a dimension of evil, and that Coppola as editor brought him back into line, by representing evil only in its moments of assurance and eloquent selfjustification...

...they have a line on him, because he has already committed a political murder, and he is now under their protection...

...First, the soldiers accompanying him on the boat are desperately afraid, but conceal their fear with drugs and a rich overlay of American habits...

...Nevertheless, Coppola has contrived to work his publicity angle on the film into the film itself, in a self-referential glimpse of the director exhorting bewildered soldiers (actors) not to stop on the beachhead but keep going at all costs, because "it's for television" (the movies...

...climbed up the army ladder, and was being groomed for Chief of Staff...

...He has gone too far...

...It is prowar...

...But in the long run he will have come away from the project with cleaner hands than either Milius or Coppola...

...Exterminate them all...

...The only point of a late report like this is to unmask a trahison—a job other critics would have served the public by performing earlier...

...But the truth is that Kurtz is fighting an altogether different war, and that is why the army has to kill him...

...The heroes of Apocalypse Now are kindred to the guerrillas whom they oppose: an American, the psychic and nominal descendant of Conrad's Kurtz, who has unburdened himself of both airsupport and compassion for friend and foe alike, and gathered about him the cadres necessary to a successful war of terror...

...until he chucked it all, enlisted in the Special Services, and went to Southeast Asia...

...Whereas Apocalypse Now relies for its force on the existence of an audience that has tired of thinking about the war...

...Saving her would only be saving our conscience, he tells them...

...was a serious student of international relations...

...It is this same combination of tactical idiocy in battle, and the idiocy of conscience afterward, that is losing the war...

...Unhampered by these, the Vietcong could range freely, and do what the logic of victory demanded...

...This little cameo reeks of show biz...

...Tale number two is cant...

...Kurtz is a desperado, who has separated himself from the war effort of half a million of his countrymen and embarked on battles of his own that have finally carried him, in pursuit of the enemy, into Cambodia...

...As Kurtz is murdered, shots of Willard's butchery are intercut, in montage, with shots of the natives outside the temple slaughtering an ox, so that there is even the suggestion that he is a sacrificial victim of the war...

...After thought, and in place of it, comes spectacle...

...In consequence, what had begun as an antiwar film became, in the course of its making, a defense of a proud colonialism, with Brando as the law-giver to the lesser breeds...

...The picture of the war conveyed in the battle scenes, however, is at once so impressive and so sickening as to have misled critics, and silenced those whom it did not mislead...

...In sum, his improvisations give us plenty of rhetorical silences, and a sense of dignity, with the curious possibility that there are reserves of humor in Kurtz...

...Dispatches is the record of a weird trip...

...209 credits flash on, a little apocalypse on which Coppola lavishes all his rhetorical cunning...

...The dominant feeling—for it is not a conviction, and if it once came under the scrutiny of our intelligence it would cease to exist—a feeling that the victims of imperialism are in some way responsible for the enormities we have committed against them, that somehow they drew us into it: this might be associated with Conrad's original no less than with the adaptation we now possess...

...and this war the screenplay heartily endorses, or—to be absolutely faithful to the terms in which it is effected—"refuses to judge...

...was, in short, a perfect success story, of the kind familiar to us from very different films...

...To break the spell of participation, Brecht favored interruptions even in the most absorbing of works, or rather especially in them: interruptions that say to the audience, Stop...

...Somewhere in the background is Nietzsche, with his attack on pity and the "slave morality" that fosters it, his lament for the lost spirit of command in the stronger races, and his embrace of nihilism, the untimely guest of the fin de siecle...

...According to the second, Coppola learned the realities of the Vietnamese war while enduring the breakdowns of his production company on location in the Phillipines...

...His war is not an extension of the army's but an alternative to it...

...It celebrates the attractiverepulsive uniqueness of Vietnam, and sings the glories of a jungle sunset framed in a helicopter's window...

...We opted out of any authentic combat by using advanced weapons...

...The men are about to take her on board and convey her to a hospital, but here Willard seizes the initiative and shoots her...

...His latest radio transmissions are played for Willard, and they sound incoherent, but not more insane than the war itself...

...Kurtz has ordered four assassinations of political leaders and apparently chosen the right targets, since the Vietcong have been completely stymied in the wake of these deaths...

...It is a perfect instance of the character of this adaptation as a whole — faithful, in an obvious and unimportant way, while shrinking from any open engagement with the politics of Kurtz's madness...

...Several are in fact killed in battle, but the rest adjust to their daily horror not a trace more imaginatively than they respond to the sex shows they watch in the evenings after, put on by Playboy bunnies...

...and the hired assassin, Willard, who is sent to "terminate" Kurtz's private war, but who before carrying out his mission comes to regard his target as a giant among men, alone equipped to fight war in the spirit of war...

...By the strange economy of its several parts, the audience's hopeful expectations, and the duplicity of what Erwin Panofsky called the "coexpressible" power of word and image, the film in effect grants us an opportunity to regard Kurtz's war as a terrible but logical extension of the army's, and, with the battle scenes fresh in mind, to condemn both...

...Brando delivers one line with perfect force, and it is the best in the film...

...Did Kurtz never rage or stamp...

...or Hitchcock climbing aboard a train, struggling manfully with an enormous string bass...

...Most of the audience will rise from the theater hating the Vietnamese war, and the Vietnamese...

...He, like Kurtz, has seen the catastrophic absurdity of the army's war, and he is drawn to the legends of a man who followed this perception to its logical end...

...These natives—unlike some of those shown earlier in the film—do not bear much thinking about...

...Throughout Apocalypse Now Kurtz's affiliation is called Special Services, never the Green Berets—to have mentioned the name might have reminded us too vividly of the thing, and made us wonder if this was an appropriate field of action for an exemplary product of Harvard, whose only fault is an overabundance of altruistic impulses...

...Do not be taken in too easily...

...But this action, like his others, was 207 unauthorized...

...Herr wrote the narrative portions of the film spoken by Willard, and his journalistic style, a sprawl of understatement richly drugged on the rock-nihilism of the 1960s, is a suitable vehicle for his sentiments...

...What accounts for his great refusal...

...Besides, Apocalypse Now has a second and more congenial source in Michael Herr's Dispatches...

...The army must terminate Kurtz because of his insubordination...

...But this first tale was quickly supplanted...

...On the lower slopes of right-wing romanticism, John Milius, author of the screenplay of Apocalypse Now and a Hollywood Nietzschean, has long made his home: before undertaking to adapt Conrad for Francis Ford Coppola, he had written several films of a similar tendency...

...It is a destruction for which the audience has been neatly set up, and about which they can feel comparatively at ease...

...But presently a woman is uncovered who is only wounded...

...The screenplay follows out a single doctrine, indeed drums it into us till the soul sickens, but the images can seem to tell a different story, especially in the helicopter-attack sequence...

...All its reservations concern the way the war was fought: our American strategy, we learn here, was paralyzed by two great burdens of a liberal state, conscience and technology...