Ideological Representation in ‘Apocalypse Now’

This report will comment on the explicit or implicit ideological and moral basis for the film Apocalypse Now, and on how its stance is conveyed through narrative, characterisation and, or mise-en-scene.

To many Americans, the Vietnam war was an American extravaganza, staged in Vietnam. To concede that it was a civil war is to relegate America to a supporting role in someone else’s drama. But that is exactly what it was, someone else’s drama. In spite of all the billions spent by the US, the Vietnam war was essentially a Vietnamese affair. The stakes were simply much higher for them.

This film is original in its moral and ethical emphases, and its portrayal of the results of war; it contains the action demanded by cinema audiences, but also emphasises its corresponding brutality and suffering. Films such as Coppola’s Apocalypse Now are not only nonconformist in their rejection of government propaganda and approved ethical views, but also seek to question the psyche of western civilisation, the inherited belief, from the Christian era to imperialism, that European society not only controls the balance of world power, but is a model for other, inferior non-European peoples. Not only does the film constitute a critique of the Vietnam war but also bring into question the very ideological fabric of an aggressive, expansive and socially regimented post-war America.

Apocalypse Now is based upon Joseph Conrad’s novel, Heart of Darkness, in which Marlow, captain of a continental trading vessel working in the African Congo, describes his revulsion with nineteenth century imperialism, and the effects of encounter with wild Africa for the ivory-obsessed, unprohibited Westerner. Coppola’s Marlow is Captain Benjamin J. Willard, whose mission is to assassinate the renegade Col. Willard is the veteran soldier, whose special missions have almost driven him beyond the threshold of sanity.

All wars brutalise, torture, maim, and kill, that’s all a war is. All the main characters in the movie know and accept these facts. They even glory in them. Willard, for example, never flinches at any atrocity committed in his presence. He becomes guilty of one himself when he kills a wounded Vietnamese female civilian halfway down the river. Unlike Lance, who has machine-gunned her entire family in panic, Willard shoots the woman in cold blood.

The film is not concerned with detailing a realistic and historically accurate expression of the war; it delves into the surreal and mythic landscape of American culture and the darkness of war. The key aspects for the thematic concerns of Coppola’s film are; the trauma experienced through the victim hero, the futility of American values and the unrestrained force of the American military.

In Apocalypse Now, the Americans are not in Vietnam to fight but to surf. Following the rape of Casualties of war, the sadistic Clerk tells Eriksson to remain silent, what happens in the field stays in the field. War itself is a hunt, rather than a bloody necessity. In contrast to the gung-ho Americans, the Vietnamese are usually portrayed sympathetically. Simple Vietnamese villagers are always innocents, for whom the war is a calamity. Despite an obvious emphasis on the brutality of the American army in Vietnam, there is, however no clear polarisation between the two forces as good or bad; the process of war itself is seen as a force which induces the emergence of the contained savagery in human kind. In war, men and women are not human, but simply killing machines. Savagery as a consequence of war is seen in the film, where Clean shoots the passengers of an inspected boat.

The country of Vietnam does indeed look spectacular in Apocalypse Now, but as a character, Vietnam is a body without soul. Despite the elaborate mise en scène, a sense of emptiness and rootlessness lingers in these frames. Vietnamese characters in the film are treated as set-pieces, decorations to complete the “look” of war. They are shown as peasants running away from the American soldiers, or as maimed bodies strung over tree branches and artistically strewn on Captain Willard’s path. And they are almost never seen in close-ups—the way Western characters are instantly rendered as psychologized beings. In fact, Vietnamese voices are rarely even heard, and when they are, they are bodiless, a mere aural complement to images of graphic casualties. Their non-subtitled dialogues serve less as a cultural signifier but more as a shortcut to heighten the breach between the Americans and the “strange” land they are in.

The simple fact that the Vietnam conflict is fought over political ideologies suggests the meaningless of war. The youthful innocence of the soldiers in Vietnam, whose age averaged nineteen, is also a damning criticism of the American effort – seen in the death of the boy Clean in Apocalypse Now. The protagonists of this film are children, for whom the prospect of war is a game; it is only following training, and exposure to the full horror of war that its reality becomes apparent, and the conflict between army discipline and the ethic-effacing effects of bloody slaughter take place.

In addition, the only Vietnamese speaking part in the film belongs to a south Vietnamese army translator, who gets to yammer: “This man is dirty VC! He wants water! He can drink paddy water!” This in the movie that Coppola famously declared “is not about Vietnam – it is Vietnam”. This movie, then, is really about a bunch of pale guys, Coppola included, wading into their own hearts of darkness. It is certainly not about Vietnam. Audience can’t be even sure it’s a Vietnam war movie.

Near the beginning of the film, Captain Willard’s superior waxes poetic on the good and the evil within every human being, and the tragedy of Colonel Kurtz who was once a humanitarian and is now completely overcome by immorality and vainglory. This sentiment is reflected later in the French plantation scene when Madam Sarrault whispers in Captain Willard’s ears about his two selves: “one that kills and one that loves.” The film views Vietnam as a mythical land full of unknowable, exotic forces, implying that not just the war but the country itself possesses some power to cast the American soldiers into the dark side.

This fabrication of an inspired atrocity by the Viet Cong is consistent with the movie’s preoccupation with the dark primitives. With Heart of Darkness as its ideological ballast, this is inevitable. In Conrad’s novel, the boat goes upstream towards “the earliest beginnings of the world”. Along the way they encounter Africans with “faces like grotesque masks”. One man is compared to “a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs”. In Apocalypse Now, Vietnam is more or less one continuous jungle, with corpses casually dangling from trees, and arrows and spears flying out of the foliage. The arrow attack scene is lifted straight from Heart of Darkness, where a black river boat pilot is impaled by a spear. The phoniness of this is breathtaking. The NVA and Viet Cong did not win a modern war with arrows and spears. But a scene from a 1901 book has to be shoehorned into a 1979 movie because of Coppola’s fascination with savages.

As Willard’s boat travels up the Nung river, the only signs of civilisation are two US army bases and, in the new extended version, a French plantation. This has nothing to do with the Vietnam of reality. As anyone who has been there will say it, Vietnam is ,and was during the war, grossly overpopulated. Rivers and roads are lined with settlements. The US, by comparison, is more wild. Another thing a visitor to Vietnam can readily see is the ubiquity of the written language, that is, of civilisation. Signs and banners are everywhere. None of this is apparent in any of the panoramic shots of Apocalypse Now. Coppola hasn’t just withheld speech from the Vietnamese, he has also banned them from writing.

The river journey into Cambodia represents a further immersion into the primitive for the soldiers, their face paint and frequent explosions of conflict reflect their proximity to Kurtz, the epitome of moral and ethical degeneration, and distance from army discipline. The last bridge, built back up again each night, just to say the road’s open, suggests the futility of artificial ethical purpose in the vastness of Vietnam. Like Kurtz, Willard no longer adheres to conventional morality, but kills the injured boat woman rather than turn back. Willard’s rejection of the sanctity of human life is, however, due to a clinical military psyche, rather than Kurtz’s unsolicited and random killing of those that threaten him. Willard’s disciplinarian methods of survival force his admittance of the hypocrisy of the American effort. “We blew them up, then gave them a band aid.”

The tragedy of both Kurtzes is that they are trapped in the perverse logic of the ideology of imperialism. The ideology of imperialism assumes the absolute superiority of the oppressor. It is self-contradictory because it is based upon classifying the oppressed as morally inferior, but maintaining imperialism requires systematic barbarity, which morally degrades the imperialist. The historical response of successful imperialists to this has been a special kind of hypocrisy embodied in an attempt at creating distance between actor and act, perpetrator and victim. Both Kurtzes are destroyed by their moral integrity. They honestly admit their depravity to themselves. This grants them great power in facilitating imperial strategic aims but forces them to acknowledge the lie at the heart of imperialist ideology that legitimised the strategy, rendering their acts purposeless. The honesty of their conduct undermines the imperialist ideology. The honesty of their undertakings causes the managers to increasingly perceive Kurtz as a threat and identify him with the ‘savages’ they are supposed to be ‘civilising’. Kurtz challenges the hypocrisy of the ideology of imperialism precisely insofar as he helps it achieve its true aims.

This film, then, is not about the horrors of the jungle but its allures. The jungle becomes a hotbed of wild desires, where you can hobnob with savages, shoot them, get shot in turns, burn down acres of forests and get scared by tigers. It becomes, in short, the ultimate theme park. Halfway through this romp, Lance sums it all up, “This is better than Disneyland!” Anything to get away from “The horror, the horror” of home. “The horror, the horror” that is uttered by Kurtz in Heart of Darkness does not refer to the horrors of the jungle, as some believe, but the horrors of daily life anywhere. That is a much more profound point. In Conrad’s book, Kurtz leaves his English wife only to shack up with an African one. He becomes “at home” in the jungle. Fleeing one domestic arrangement, he runs right into another.

It is meaningful that Kurtz got into trouble for murdering four south Vietnamese “double agents”. Unlike the Vietnamese double agents, they are not two-faced. To be a double agent, one has to be sly, deceitful, hypocritical – mental operations these folks are apparently not capable of performing. In fact, they seem incapable of speech: none of them has a single line in the movie. The montagnards are so simple, so childlike, they can be scared away with sirens. Hard to square that with the fearless warriors supposedly undaunted by artilleries and napalm strikes. Fulfilling the white man’s fantasy, they worship Kurtz like a god, and after he is killed by Willard, they are ready to prostrate themselves before him too.

In Apocalypse Now, Willard is the product of moral-effacing indoctrination; he is an assassin, a professional killer, and is quite able to shoot the wounded Vietnamese girl, rather than endanger his mission by seeking medical aid. The mission to terminate Kurtz tests his allegiance to duty and military necessity, but it is also a testament to psychological conditioning that he is finally able to terminate Kurtz’s command. Kurtz asks Willard if he is an assassin, “Kurtz, Are you an assassin?. Willard, I’m a soldier.” Kurtz’s psychological breakdown does not arise entirely from a survival or killer instinct, unleashed by his experiences, but also from a scepticism those experiences have fostered – in the supposed validity and morality of Western ethics, and the sanctity of human life itself. His display of Vietnamese heads on sticks, and presentation of the head of chef to Willard, demonstrates this moral degeneration, “I am beyond morality, above caring.”

The degeneration of Kurtz illustrates the amorality of the American establishment, an inner beastilaity elemental to the civilised psyche, which is constantly exploited by the filmmakers in their portrayal of supposedly civilised atrocities, and in the predatory mercantile culture of American capitalism. Kurtz is not only the avatar of an innate western primitive, but also of its results following the subjection of Americans to one of the bloodiest wars in american history.

If the establishment-questioning hero of Apocalypse Now is Willard, The anti-hero of the film is certainly Kurtz, whose descent into barbarism is the product of western ideological aggression. Like the cattle, Kurtz is sacrificed by the system that bred him for no other cause than an ideological dispute. The self-effacing nature of the imperfect civilised psyche, is reflected in the ruins of ancient structures in Kurtz’s village. The film ends with The Door’s The End, suggesting a warning to the apocalyptic prospect of nuclear war for the ideologically divided civilised world.

In conclusion,  the film has one major aspect which is the madness of a war fought over the trivial conflict between ideals. The ensuing conflict is not so much a mutual defence against the other, but an intolerance of each other’s views. The main critique of the Vietnam war is not so much its ethical basis, but the manner in which it was fought, using massive indiscriminate bombardment, resulting in massive civilian casualties. The naive, polar conceptions of war, and of the political systems that fought in Vietnam are also attacked in the films. Perhaps the films’ most controversial aspect, however, lies in its condemnation of an establishment that breaks down individuality, imposing a regimented, and indoctrinated psychology on its citizens, committing all kinds of atrocities and folly in the mindless preservation of the ideal.

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