On Film

...Chief stops the patrol boat to make a routine check of a Vietnamese junk lhat seems to be transporting "friend-lies' and vegetables As Chef boaids to inspect it and Clean covers the pass-cngeis horn the patiol boat, a voung gul makes a lunge lowaid a cannister that Chel is about to uncovei All hell bieaks loose, and Clean machine guns the Vietnamese who turn out to have been utterly innocent Coppola goes on to tug at our heart strings by revealing that the girl was trying to protect a little puppy As it pops its cute Little head out, the audience collectively sighs, "Awww," and Lance scores some sentimental points by taking it and caring for it after the patrol boat continues upnver But Coppola has one more trick up his sleeve The girl, though hornbly wounded, is still alive When Chief insists that they transport her to a field hospital, Willard reminds him that the mission comes first, pulls out his service revolver and puts the girl out of her misery Obsessed with all those special effects by John Lombardi that make the horror realistic, the director has simply surrendered intellectually to the view that there are no good guys or bad guys in war, that no one can be held responsible for anything because in extreme situations, ordinary people are capable of anything cuch a perspective nicely lets us all off the hook And having been relieved of moral responsibilty, we are free to regard war as a form of the theater of the absurd Certainly this is the sensibility that prevails in the scene where the patrol boat lands at the port of Hau Phat late at night The place looks like a left-over set from Star W ars Right out of the blackness of the jungle stands a large open-air amphitheatre with blazing spotlights, gigantic towers, and hugh phallic-shaped objects—bearing the insignia of different units—that, I suppose, represent artillery shells As Willard and his crew watch in amazement, a helicopter lands in the arena and deposits three Play-bov Bunnies, who bump and grind before the sevstarved GIs Suddenly, a soldier lunges at one ot the all-too-provocati\ e se\ obiects and pandemonium ensues \\ ithin a Hash and a burst ot feedback from the colossal speakeis that moments betoie had been blanng "Su/ic Q" toi the sti tilting Bunnies, the entertainers are whisked away by helicopter Willard, naturally, adds his observation in voice-over "Charlie didn't get too much USO, he was dug in too deep or moving too fast " Are we supposed to be impressed by Vietcong stoicism7 Disgusted by American self-indulgence9 Outraged at sexism7 Angry at the officially condoned teasing7 But perhaps the scene most representative of Coppola's sophomonc attitudes and confusion is the one that comes toward the end of the journey With his face bizarrely painted "as camouflage," Lance sets off a smoke bomb, dances around the deck of the boat yelling "purple haze" (the name of a Jimi Hendrix record), and declares that "this is better than Disneyland " Chef opens a letter and finds a newspaper clipping describing the Manson murders Willard is musing over his orders and the additional information he picked up at Do Lang "I began to wonder what they had against Kurtz ' Clean is listening to a tape-recorded "letter" from his mother Chief leisurely steers the patrol boat past a contraption resembling a Chnsto running fence that is inexplicably ignored by the entire crew—red silk beanng Chinese-like characters, stretched be-ween posts along the river bank A barrage opens up from both shores, tracer bullets zip one way and another, and when the shooting stops Clean is lying dead on the deck with his mother's voice still playing on the tape recorder in the background Meanwhile, Lance is in near hysteria because he can't find his puppy dog The scene is quintessential Coppola audience-pandering sentimentality, theatrical violence, strained-for social significance, obscure phenomena, and narration instead of drama Bv the time the patrol boat crosses into Cambodia and \\ illard meets Kurtz, Coppola has emptied his bag ot spectacular \ lsual and aural tricks But the crucial last halt hour is worse than anticlimactic—it is sheei disastei In the no\el, Mai low knew \er\ little about the man lie was seeking, except that "he had taken a high scat amongst the dewls ol the land ' Conrad uses suggestive language rather than specific details to describe the blackness of Kurtz' soul "The wilderness had found him out early and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts " Willard, on the other hand, has had the benefit of the general's explicit sermon and of those packets of intelligence reports that he read to himself and us throughout the trip Hence the film is faced with the problem of creating concrete images suggesting the mystery of the man behind all that data "We sat around scratching our heads," Coppola said in an interview, "wondering what, in fact, Kurtz could do that could live up to the expectations about him that had been built up " One solution devised by the director is to swathe Kurtz in shadows, as if he were some ghoul in a third-rate horror flick "The use of dark and light was one factor that added to the mystery of the man," he has claimed, but Brando's corpulence (in excess of 300 pounds) was probably the real reason for keeping him out of the limelight Similarly misguided is the Angkor-Wat-hke compound constructed for Kurtz' army, complete with decapitated heads lying on the ground, nude corpses hanging from trees and crucified bodies aswarm with flies (When Willard first enters the area, Herr has him utter the howler of the decade "Everything I saw told me Kurtz had gone insane " Even better is the reaction of a camp-following photojournalism played by that great movie destroyer Dennis Hopper, who gravely delivers this understatement "Sometimes he [Kurtz] goes too far, but he's the first to admit it ") No doubt Coppola wanted to fashion a lunatic landscape out of Hieronymous Bosch, but he merely created a campy castle of horrors The real comedy, though, does not begin until Willard and Kurtz start talking Conrad was able to spare the reader by vaguely referring to Kurtz' "occasional utterances of elevated sentiments " Coppola, regrettably, has taken it upon himself to attempt what the novelist avoided "You have no right to judge me," Kurtz tells Willard "It is impossible to describe to those who do not know what horror means " Then he goes on to do exactly that Apparently, Kurtz once accompanied a medical team to innoculate the children of a Vietnamese village, when they returned there some time later, they discovered that the Vietcong had amputated all the children's limbs that bore innoculation scars "The genius to do that,' he marvels to Willard "The will to do that Those men who fought with their hearts they were stronger, they had the strength to do that men who are moral and at the same time able to utilize their primordial urge to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment Because it's judgment that defeats us If I had 10 divisions of those men , our troubles would be over " Along with this extraordinary paean to the will to power, Kurtz rambles on about gardenias on the Ohio River, advises Willard to make "horror and moral terror your friends,' accuses him of being "an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect the bill," complains that "we train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't let them write 'fuck' on their airplanes because it's obscene " i is difficult to know how to respond to this combination of the ludicrous, the trivial, the irrelevant, the overwrought, the incomprehensible Willard reacts by deciding to fulfill his mission and "terminate" Kurtz, despite the fact that the colonel knows of his plans and still permits him to wander about freely "Even the jungle wanted him dead," Willard somehow magically infeis, "and that's who he really took his orders from anyway I felt he was up there waiting for me to take the pain away He just wanted to go out like a soldier " So in accompaniment to the Montagnards' ritual slaughter of a water buffalo, Willard executes Kurtz, who dies in a pool of blood while murmuring, "The horror' The horror'" Yet because of all the talkiness, the last quarter of the film fails to convey any horror at all—except the horrible literary self-consciousness of the writing For instance, while Willard is deciding to kill him, Kurtz reads aloud TS Eliot's "The Hollow Men," whose epigram is a line from Heart of Darkness?Mistah Kurtz—he dead " Coppola's images of the compound also draw heavily on Eliot—although less on "The Hollow Men" than on "The Wasteland," with its descriptions of "white bodies naked on the low ground" and "the jungle crouched, hunched m silence," as well as its footnotes to James Frazer's The Golden Bough and Jessie L Weston's -From Ritual to Romance (books found on Kurtz' mghtstand) Irving Howe has suggested that the vagueness of Conrad's language is the source of both the novel's strengths and its weaknesses "Conrad's addiction to adjectives of ultimacy strikes one as a straining for some unavailable significance For isn't Heart of Darkness a kind of parable about Conrad the writer, a marvelously colored and dramatized quest for something 'unspeakable,' which proves to be merely unspecified''" In Apocalypse Now, Coppola has tried mightily to specify the unspeakable, but he has simply revived in spectacular fashion what we have seen before—in other movies and especially on the network news coverage of the Vietnam war After a decade of horror broadcast nightly into our homes, it takes more than some ineffectual cribbing from T S Eliot to convey the true nightmare of our involvement in Vietnam As for the technological terror of the first three quarters of the film, it may as well have taken place in a science fiction movie for all the sense it makes in the context of the story Apocalypse Now is like the Star Wars of war films fazzling technique in the service of an insignificant plot Only Star Wars was supposed to be fun, Apocal te Now is supposed to be serious...

...On Screen DOOMSDAY DEFERRED BY ROBERT ASAHINA FRANCIS Coppola's Apocalypse Now, one of the most eagerly awaited films of the decade, has at last exploded on the screen—like a barrage of blank shells It dazzles the eye and ear, numbs the brain, and lacks any political, moral or intellectual impact Of course, failure on colossal scale is itself impressive So it is hardly surprising that many critics, both hostile and sympathetic, have praised the director for embodying what Pauline Kael once called "the grandeur of classic visionary folly the lunatic tradition that is quite probably integral to the nature of the movies " In some accounts Coppola emerges as a tragic hero After all, he devoted 14 months to shooting on location in the Phillipines (10 months longer than scheduled), spent more than $30 million as producer ($18 million, mostly out of his own pocket, over the original budget), and had to almost completely rewrite the screenplay commissioned from John Mihus (who is still credited as coauthor) The incoherence of the writing is chiefly responsible for the fiasco The story is based on Conrad's Heart of Darkness, wherein a young steamer captain named Marlow undertakes a hazardous journey up a jungle river to confront Kurtz, an enigmatic ivory trader who has succumbed to the lure of the wilderness and "gone native " Mihus "simply took the metaphor of the boat going upnver and the name Kurtz,' Coppola told an interviewer, so he "put in several scenes which made more use of the book " In the final script, British colonial Africa has become Vietnam, circa 1969, and Marlow has become Willard (Martin Sheen), a CIA assassin assigned to track and "terminate" Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a renegade Special Forces colonel who has led an army of deserters and Montagnards into Cambodia, where they are waging a private war against all comers But as the movie follows Willard on his mission through battle-ravaged Vietnam into darkest Cambodia, it becomes increasingly obvious that neither screenwriter understood Conrad's novel The drama of Heart of Darkness arises from Marlow's slow yet ever-stronger identification with his unknown prey, as the journey upnver forces him to face his own potential to succumb to the same forces of blackness that have already overcome Kurtz Coppola, never one to overestimate the intelligence of his audience, goes out of his way from the outset to picture Willard every bit as looney as the man he will be assigned to kill While Willard waits for his orders in his little cubicle, his frustration makes him crazier and drunker, practicing the martial arts in a space barely big enough to turn around in, he smashes a mirror and reduces his hand to a bloody pulp When soldiers arrive to escort him to Army headquarters they find him inebriated and naked, except for a bloody sheet He immediately asks, "What are the charges7"—as if he were the criminal The case against Kurtz is made by a general (G D Spradhn) "Out there among the natives, it must be a temptation to be God," he says, going on to specify the charges against the deserter Apparently just before skipping over the border into Cambodia, Kurtz had ordered the execution of four Vietnamese he believed to be double agents This, plus his actions since, the general sagely pronounces, prove that Kurtz is "obviously insane" and that his "methods are unsound" (artificial language Coppola seems to have used only because it appears in the novel) Willard somberly nods in agreement Eventually, we hit the river and enter the hour-and-a-half or so of combat footage that has justifiably been praised as spectacular by partisans and detractors of the film alike Willard is being transported to Kurtz' compound in Cambodia on a lightweight fiberglass patrol boat manned by a crew of "rock 'n' rollers with one foot in the grave" Chief (Albert Hall), who skippers the craft with a mixture of rule-book authority and grim racial insecurity, Chef (Frederic Forrest), a nervous native of New Orleans who joined the Navy because he wanted to learn to cook, Lance (Sam Bottoms), a dopey blond California beachboy with an international reputation as a championship surfer, and Clean (Larry Fishburne), a 17-year-old survivor of the South Bronx wars, whose experiences of urban combat have not prepared him at all for Vietnam Coppola piles on revealing details in brief blackout sketches that are a visual and aural correlative to Michael Herr's hyped-up descriptions of the war in Dispatches (although Willard's narration, credited to Herr, is unspeakably insipid ) In one scene, for instance, as we watch Clean jivin' to the beat of the Stones' "Satisfaction,' the director cuts to Lance water-skung behind the patrol boat, swamping in his wake groups of hapless "fnendhes" fishing along the river banks Willard and his crew then hook up with the airborne cavalry, led by Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall), which will escort them upnver past a Viet-cong stronghold Kilgore, an absolutely brilliant character (probably created by Milius) owes much of his allure to Duvall's bravura After the first helicopter attack that he leads, we see him swaggering about insanely, oblivious to enemy artillery and a crazy inspiration to his troops Utterly contemptuous of dead enemy soldiers he is momentarily impressed by the courage of a dying Vietcong who continues to struggle with his guts hanging out Yet he is immediately distracted when he learns that Lance, a fellow surfer, is in Willard's crew The next day, partly enticed by the prospect of surfing on Charlie's turf, Kilgore plans and executes a helicopter strike that is the most exciting combat scene I have ever come across The choppers strain to lift off in the predawn grey light As the sun slowly rises behind them, they begin to fly low over the white-crested ocean waves, until they descend with frightening suddenness on the tranquil village outpost The entire attack, including the leveling of the village, is so brilliantly filmed that it outrageously engages us in the thrill of destruction Unfortunately, Coppola is less interested in the moral implications of combat than in the photogenic violence it gives rise to At one point...