Apocalypse Now is the most brilliant exploration of modern morality committed to celluloid.
Coppola, as many artists before him, takes us to the extreme of war to explore man’s proper action. Extremity often provides moral clarity. The mundane muddies.
And yet, as darkness envelops the jungle-lined Nung River at film’s end, the average viewer doesn’t know what to make of what he’s seen. Besides his awe at the transcendent beauty and craftsmanship of what he has just witnessed—Apocalypse is so powerful that even someone of middling aesthetic sensibility is affected by it—he mostly feels unsettled, apprehensive.
What did he just watch? What does it all mean? The Letzter Mensch is not equipped to understand. This despite the fact that the defining character of the film, Colonel Kurtz, appears rather late and speaks with such didactic force. Only those poisoned by the modern ideology of egalitarian, liberal, comfortist unreality can miss the thrust of the film.
What appears upon superficial viewing to be the ultimate ‘70s film is in fact the ultimate Nietzschean film, perhaps only rivalled by 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In this essay, I will argue that Apocalypse Now is not an anti-war film in the simplistic sense that it’s simply against war or even against the Vietnam War because war is bad or crazy or immoral or imperialistic or barbaric or whatever other liberal impieties critics allege. Apocalypse Now is a film about the lie of modern morality as exemplified in the Vietnam War. It is not a critique of the war from the standpoint of modern morality, but a critique of the war as a prime exemplar of modern morality.
The End at the Beginning
A distorted thrumming over black. A jungle appears. Orange fog swirls across the forground. Notes from an electric guitar begin that—though they must be modern—somehow feel archaic, an ancient Oriental incantation. Fire, fire and helicopters. We are in Captain Willard’s mind, and the fan above him is a squadron of helicopters laying waste to the jungle. But wait—there is a helicopter outside his window.
“Saigon…Shit…I’m still only in Saigon.”
Is this the best ever opening to a film? If Art is Beauty compressed for apprehension, my God… Has there been a better portrayal of that liminal delusion between nightmare and wakefulness? Of the unsettled slumber of a waiting in purgatory awaiting an inescapable descent? Of the tormented man who drank himself into a stupor to suppress his shadow only to have it boil and froth out from within? There is Beauty in Truth, and it’s wound up so tightly, so intricately, so expertly here. Unparalleled cinematic concinnity.
Even just the feeling of it all: the mood, the atmosphere… It is really the perfect beginning to this movie. Anyway, enough masturbation.
Willard is often described as an empty vessel, a cipher, or the audience self-insert character. But then critics rarely pay attention to the films they’re paid to review, no?
These opening few minutes give us a deep sense of someone. This is our protagonist. He is a man who knows modern life in the bastion of unreality we’ve created for ourselves in the West. He had a wife, a life back home. But Vietnam showed him something different.
When I was home from my first tour, it was worse. I’d wake up, and there’d be nothing… I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a divorce. When I was here, I wanted to be there, and when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle…
We don’t know why, but the jungle called him back, even though it clearly tortures him. He is waiting for a mission.
And yet, when the mission comes, he drags his heels.
I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one.
He’s hungover, but that’s not all. He knows there’s something wrong with him. Why would he want to go back in the shit? This is the central tension of our protagonist. He is pulled between two worlds.
He knows the safe bubble Stateside is unreal, somehow. But he also knows the horror of the jungle, and that he shouldn’t want to go back. The journey of Apocalypse is the journey of Willard seeking clarity. Who is he, and what does he want? Why does he want?
If that is not a fascinating character study, I don’t know what is.
Of course, the grand scale of the film, and the fact that a foil in the form of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz appears tells us that we are not just learning about one man. We are learning about Man.
The Mission
It was one choice mission. And when it was over, I’d never want another.
…
It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz’s memory, any more than being back in Saigon was an accident. There is no way to tell his story without telling my own. And if his story is really a confession, then so is mine.
Willard’s voiceover during the helicopter is post-movie. He survives his journey up the Nung. But to whom is he telling this story? What does he decide to do? Who is he?
It all starts with General Corman (a reference to Roger Corman, who gave Coppola his big break). In the mission briefing scene, Corman goes on about the evil that lies in every man’s heart and how the “better angels of our nature” don’t always triumph. Kurtz was tempted to be a god, and instead became a lunatic. Etcetera. The camera wanders and falters, taking on the perspective of the hungover and bored Willard. Just get to the mission.
What’s so deceptive about Corman’s high-minded grandstanding for our understanding of the film is that it is easy to dismiss as trite and masturbatory, as well as, given the context of the Vietnam War, oblivious and hypocritical. And yet, what he says is true. Solzhenitsyn said:
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.
But notice the bearer of this wisdom. He is a general in a pointless war being waged by an empire pretending it is a democratic republic. He sits in a mobile home that looks as though it was transplanted from Louisiana to Vietnam while eating roast beef and exotic shrimp. The words are true, but they are soiled in the mouth of this man. They cannot be taken seriously.
Corman looks very uncomfortable during the playing of a tape recording where Kurt sounds kinda crazy talking about his dream of a snail crawling along a razor’s edge. But he watches Willard’s reactions carefully. The bugman-looking spook at the table looks totally unaffected and is eating normally (well, as normal as he can with his staring bug eyes). He can’t understand Corman’s lamentations about Kurtz’s potential. It seems that Corman feels a sense of betrayal—feels hurt, and disappointed.
In this war, things get confused…
Corman is a General of Modernity. He speaks of Kurtz’s evil, his defection and…unsound methods. And yet, this Modern Man, this slave, cannot see that it is he who conducts war in the most vicious and arbitrary manner. For if virtue entails excellence, forthrightness and courage in fulfilling a role, the lackadaisical war conducted without commitment, with barbecues and surf contests, is a most vice-ridden affectation of a war. Not the genuine article.
The General establishes the supposed moral paradigm: the kind of the hypocritical clean, safe morality of the evil multinational corporation that undertakes Environmental Sustainability Initiatives; of the empire that wastes millions of lives on a non-committal public relations project to demonstrate it is fighting Communism and fighting for Democracy the world over!1
And then the journey of the film reveals scene by scene just how the war is being fought within the ‘proper’ theatre of battle and by compliant officers with ‘sound’ methods.
Wannabe Warrior
Willard contrasts the enemy—the North Vietnamese and the VietCong—with his side of the war multiple times throughout the film. Right at the beginning, he says in voiceover that he weakened every day he stayed in Saigon, while Charlie strengthened every day he squatted in the bush. As the PlayBoy Bunny scene comes to a close, he says that Charlie doesn’t have time for R&R. He was in too deep or moving too fast. The only way for Charlie to go home was death or victory. We see throughout the film the contrast between the devout warrior enemy fighting on his home turf and the frivolous imperial showboating by a supposed democratic power.
Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore initially attracts us because he does not strive for comfort and security. He has a certain vitality, and a manly striving for conflict and adventure. We grin as he blasts “Ride of the Valkyries” through the helicopter loudspeakers and lights up Charlie.
Willard first finds him in a scene where Coppola has a cameo as a press filmographer trying to set up a shot as though there is a battle going on. Willard is very confused: the warrior sees a civilian making entertainment out of horror.
Willard watches Kilgore’s antics mostly with the same bewilderment and contempt. Kilgore manages to play war in the middle of a real one. Certainly men die on both sides, and risk is involved. He projects a vision of himself as the fatherly commander and the archetypal warrior who thirsts for glory, and who honours even his enemies who perform admirably in battle.
But his apparent fatherly concern is a ploy to ensure obedience, belied by his cavalierly putting his men in unnecessary danger to secure a hot spot to surf, his lame “cheer up son” directed at a soldier clearly traumatized, and his moderate reaction when a whole helicopter of his ‘boys’ gets blown up: “Fucking savages.”
And his faux respect for the mighty dink warrior is made apparent when he makes a big show about getting a VC some water from his canteen, and then misses the dying man’s mouth entirely as he is distracted by the prospect of meeting a famous surfer.
A serious man performing his role virtuously is certainly brave and perhaps even cavalier, but kills well and with honour to achieve a higher aim that resounds through the ages. He does not seek trifling acknowledgements bragging to a celebrity or those beneath him in rank.
Everything he does is to feed his own narcissism. He wants the glory of a heroic warrior plucked from Norse mythology, Icelandic sagas or The Iliad. He notes that, “Some day, this war is gonna end” with a rueful curl of his lip. But he is a vainglorious Modern man, totally absorbed in himself and ensuring that others accept this highly constructed and out-of-place-and-time persona he tries to project. Willard sees right through it, and begrudges him for it—especially because he intuits that Kilgore won’t suffer at all in the war for his vaingloriousness. Only his men will.
Willard says:
If that’s how Kilgore fought the war, I began to wonder what they really had against Kurtz. It wasn’t just insanity and murder. There was enough of that to go around for everyone.
This is an important question, the answer to which is the thesis of the film.
Leftoid semiotic analysts will assume Kilgore is a deconstruction of the warrior archetype altogether. Of course, he is nothing of the sort. Willard, the reluctant warrior, sees through the wannabe, and the proper role of the warrior is elaborated further in the interplay between Willard and Kurtz later. Anyway.
Author Tim O’Brien—an unfunny, second-rate Vonnegut (meaning he is a better writer than almost anyone published today)—says that the carabao getting sacrificed at the end of the movie affects him more than the assault on Charlie’s Point by Kilgore et al. This take is bad.2
Beyond the typical disproportionate liberal animal suffering whinging, he is missing the point of the scene, and indeed the point of the movie. His The Things They Carried, a very solid postmodern Vietnam War metafiction, is, in its moral dimension, about how disorienting the war is. The contradictory moral swamp leaves him questioning his values, his status as a liberal, America’s values, up from down: you name it. In short, the novel is an embodiment of being affected by the war.
Apocalypse Now is something different. Something Beyond Good and Evil, one could say. The point of the invasion scene at Charlie’s Point is not to get you all worked up about gooks getting mowed down. It does turn out to be a VC hotspot filled with diabolical kamikazes, after all. Well, and a schoolyard full of children...
The point is what I’ve explained above: to demonstrate the war LARP within the war. It’s all showmanship, and revealed as such, much like the war itself. It isn’t honest. This is a crucial argument in the thesis of the film. Based Apocalypse is more about how O’Brien’s hypocritical liberalism itself leaves him disoriented in the face of reality at its extremity.
Real war (i.e., not just glassing stone age civilizations from a distance and then bribing hearts and minds) is like the singularity to the incomplete theory of General Relativity. Modern man just can’t explain what the hell is going on in war, especially when you can’t paint the enemy as the embodiment of evil like that heckin’ Hitler guy. Is this what being spaghettified is like?
Liberalism was supposed to end history and usher in an era of everlasting, global peace. Why is the winner of the War(s) to End All Wars now a prime exporter of violence around the globe?
Kurtz, and indeed Willard, are counterpoints to foggy liberal modernity. There is some clarity at the end of the river. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Bunnies
The PlayBoy Bunny spectacle is obviously meant to reinforce Willard’s earlier observation about Kilgore’s barbecued steaks and Kumbaya around the campfire:
The more they tried to make it just like home, the more they made everybody miss it.
The Americans are trying to live in Vietnam like they’re Stateside. The Empire is claiming new territory, and it’s going to be just like home. If only they had realized that McDonald’s could do a better job than the Pentagon could ever dream of doing.
This sequence expands the message, however, rather than just repeating it. Whereas the critical eye cast on Corman and then Kilgore was obviously focusing on the elites and then the middle managers of the Modern military machine, the PlayBoy Bunny sequence focuses on the rank-and-file GIs.
We see these are not disciplined warriors in enemy lands. These are American civilians in fatigues; horny adolescents with no firm, masculine presence in their lives to teach them self-restraint. Indeed, their supposed betters, with a wink and a nod, encourage them to go ahead, indulge once in a while. You’ve earned it!
But it’s not the fault of the herd, entirely. They were raised in the bubble of Little America. The age of manhood has been pushed and pushed and pushed in the West until, now, few ever reach it. These are boys, and they’ve been set loose in the jungle with guns, booze and diesel, and now the retards in brass have set Playmate of the Year before their wandering eyes.
Vietnam during the Vietnam War doesn’t feel like a warzone most of the time, and so the men don’t have to be warriors. But warrior is not a day job you punch out of at five. It is a role, a vocation. Especially when you’re in enemy territory.3
Willard on Kurtz
In the beginning, we see Willard adrift, damaged, a soldier without action to take. He sees home and human relationships as empty, as burdens even. He is the atomized individual who can see that the moral structure around him is corrupt, but he doesn’t know what to replace it with, and the trappings of humanity remind him of this dislocation, this fraudulent persona he has to project in the company of others.
Notice how, in the mission briefing scene, Willard rejects the cigarette that is offered to him at first, but he then accepts it after learning he has to “terminate the Colonel’s command…with extreme prejudice.” Perhaps he wanted to show strength, courtesy, self-sufficiency, or any number of qualities by refusing to take that smoke. But once he’d accepted one poisoned pill, the second was a mercy.
It takes a moment for Willard to clue in that he is supposed to enthusiastically agree that the Colonel is insane, and then he finally remembers he needs to act a certain way with his current company.
Many frogs know this feeling.
He doesn’t believe the mission he is given is fit for a soldier, but what ground does he have to stand on and shout against the hypocrisy?
Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indie 500. I took the mission. What the hell else was I going to do? But I really didn’t know what I’d do when I found him.
This is the bind in which modern man finds himself. He senses that all is amiss, but he doesn’t know what to do. It is easier to tell what’s wrong than what’s right, or the ‘why’ in either case.
Throughout the journey up the Nung River, Willard goes through his classified dossier on Kurtz and ponders the man.
At first, I thought they handed me the wrong dossier. I couldn't believe they wanted this man dead.
The Colonel had a stirling career in the military and was clearly being groomed for leadership in the Pentagon. You know the top brass have picked out a new man to join their caste when he sails through the ranks with a wind behind him.
He could have been General, Willard notes, and so the decision to leave it all behind and take a demotion to join Special Forces seems baffling. But the rise-through-the-ranks, corporate rat race mentality was beneath Kurtz.
After a notable run-in with a tiger after leaving the boat to look for mangoes (symbolizing—among other things—the feminine Chaos of the Natural Order, a.k.a. reality, upon which the Americans are ill-equipped to impose order), Willard says in voiceover:
Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right. Unless you were goin' all the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fuckin' program.
Even though he doesn’t fully understand Kurtz, Willard understands one thing: this one foot on the boat, one foot on the shore approach that the US was taking to the war in Vietnam was the worst path. Either stay out, or jump in with both feet.
Kurtz had evaluated the American war effort in Vietnam in a report that became top secret due to its controversial nature. It was not what the Liberal Empire wanted to hear. How can one believe in foisting global democratic utopia upon the world and apprehend the true nature of war, Vietnam and power at the same time? To apprehend what it would take to make the utopia happen? The truth had to be suppressed, and so Kurtz awakened to reality. The gynarchic West hadn’t the balls to win a war, but he did. He could be dropped near the Cambodian border as part of Project GAMMA and strive for victory, evading the reach of the brass.
As he moves closer to Kurtz, Willard begins to understand him. As he begins to understand him, he begins to admire him.
He could have gone for General, but he went for himself instead.
“What balls,” Willard says when he reads about how Kurtz created and executed a whole operation on his own authority against the wishes of his superiors.
They were gonna nail his ass to the floorboards for that, but after the press got hold of it, they promoted him to full colonel instead. Oh man, the bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above it
Willard sees that the generals are actually opposed to conducting war in a way that would lead to success, and he also sees that they are the craven toadies of public opinion (as decided by the media).
And yet, Willard carries on with his journey upriver on the orders of one such general. His mission is to terminate the Colonel’s command with “extreme prejudice.” Is Willard still following orders, or is he heeding a different call from without, or from within?
Beyond the Bridge
The Do Lung Bridge is pure anarchy, the last outpost at the fringe of modern morality. Atomistic individuals pursuing either their own aimless trivialities (like Roach blowing up a screaming, injured VC) or mindlessly performing a vestigal function of which they can no longer even recognize the value (rebuilding the bridge).
After the experience at Do Lung Bridge, it is easy to conclude that the apparent wilderness beyond is a further descent into anarchy. But this is not so. The crew of PBR Street Gang are entering a new order.
This new order is not the American empire, or even Vietnam. It is the iron will of Kurtz imposing upon the jungle and its people, issuing arrows and spears from the bush, hanging heads from the trees. Or it is the will of Nature, the Jungle, expressed through Kurtz, who speaks Her language, who understands Her. That’s what Kurtz himself might assert.
We find out through voiceover as Willard reads through Kurtz’s dossier that Kurtz ordered the assassination of four people, including two colonels in the South Vietnamese Army—with no orders from above to do so. You can see why this would be a big no-no to the Americans, who are allied with the SVA. He is officially accused of murder by the army. Corman must have seen this as beyond the pale, and realized that he had a man basically gone AWOL, running his own war outside of the parameters of the Official War. Even worse, this renegade was running the war better than they were:
Enemy activity in his old sector dropped off to nothing. Guess he must have hit the right four people.
…
No wonder Kurtz put a weed up command’s ass. The war was being run by a bunch of four star clowns who were gonna end up giving the whole circus away
As PBR Street Gang crawls up the river in Kurtzland beyond the bridge, various assaults are unleashed on the crew. In the first, Clean is killed. A young man barely more than a teenager, he recently lost his innocence, but now loses his life. Next is Chief, the boat’s captain, who has been the steady hand for the boys on the boat throughout their journey.
Narratively, I think it was cleaner to have fewer people arrive at Kurtz’s compound in the end. Thematically, I think Kurtz’s territory is too much for Clean and Chief to handle. One too young and innocent, the other too normal and decent. The only ones who remain are Chef, whose neuroticism has pushed him over the edge, Lance, who basically had an insane acid trip that he never snapped out of, and Willard, the true warrior on a mission—whose, he still wasn’t sure.
The Convergence
As Willard progresses on his journey, he (and we, through him) begins to converge in perspective with Kurtz. His thoughts and statements echo ones later made by Kurtz.
A routine sampan check ordered by Chief goes awry leaving all the Viet on the boat dead except one girl, who is probably mortally wounded. To the horror of his boat mates, and against Chief’s orders, Willard finishes her off with his pistol.
“It was a way we had over here of living with ourselves,” says Willard.
We’d cut ‘em in half with a machine gun, and give ‘em a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw of them, the more I hated lies. Those boys were never going to look at me the same way again. But I felt I knew a few things about Kurtz that weren’t in the dossier.
And this hatred of lies, this detestation of vulgar untruth in the face of reality, is what leads to the convergence between Willard and Kurtz. Kurtz articulates his disdain for Modern morality explicitly in his letter. And he is so articulate, so clear-headed, so noble, that he gets Willard—and us—on his side.
Dear son,
I'm afraid that both you and your mother would have been worried for not hearing from me these past weeks. But my situation here has become a difficult one.
I've been officially accused of murder by the army. The alleged victims were four Vietnamese double agents. We spent months uncovering and accumulating evidence. When absolute proof was completed, we acted, we acted like soldiers.
The charges are unjustified. They are in fact, under the circumstances of this conflict, quite completely insane.
In a war, there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action, for what is often called ruthless, what may in many circumstances be the only clarity; seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it directly, quickly, aware...looking at it.
I would trust you to tell your mother what you choose about this letter. As for the charges, I'm unconcerned.
I'm beyond their timid, lying morality. And so, I'm beyond caring.
You have all my faith,
Your loving father.
[emphasis mine]
Kurtz has stepped outside Modernity. He has rejected the infirmity and comfort of the Last Man. He has stepped out of the hypocrisy and lies. He sees the American empire is but an empty corset, a structure with no figure to clasp, and so as it tightens, it pinches in on itself and is left a crumpled heap on the floor. The empire has no authority, no foundation, no substance.
The only measure by which he can set his compass is what needs to be done. He is perceptive. He saw reality. He put it in his report. No one listened. But reality is his guide, and he knows what must be done.
And he knows who he is. He is a warrior. A true warrior. Kilgore wanted to LARP as a warrior to feed his ego and so he could go home and tell tall tales. Kurtz is the true, archetypal warrior who wants to live by the sword and die by it. He knows that anything less would be inauthentic and insufficient. Indeed, intolerable!
The lies of modern morality—the effete standards that favour weakness, incompetence, cleanliness, litigiousness, procedure, utilitarian calculation, bureaucracy, comfort—do not allow one to live authentically in the jungle with an enemy crouching behind every tree Those trapped by Modernity feel as though they’re drowning or going insane in a real war against a real enemy. Jay 'Chef' Hicks just wants to go home and cook (*insert grill dad meme here*).
But Kurtz goes beyond the judgement of others, the judgement of himself within the modern paradigm and can see reality, and his own will is apparent to him. In his context, in war, he sees that horror and moral terror are his friends, not his enemies.
Willard isn’t there yet, but he knows Kurtz is more right than wrong, even as he mulls over whether or not he should kill the man.
We know the film takes his perspective at least to some extent because it is repeatedly emphasized that his methods work and he gets shit done, and the idiots who are supposedly in charge only get in his way.
Where the real brilliance of the film lies is that it doesn’t end there. Corman is right that Kurtz has fallen to the temptation of becoming a god. Only God could create values out of thin air, but Kurtz thought he could do the same. Did he realize his mistake?
The Fisher King
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
— The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot
When we finally get to see Kurtz’s compound, we are not exactly struck with the impression that the management is sane, competent or clear in its purpose, as I have been arguing throughout the essay in relation to the Colonel.
Festering corpses coated with flies litter the landscape. Heads stand high, skewered on pikes. Lieutenant Colby has a gun with a scalp hanging off of it.
Willard had trouble matching up the voice describing his dream on the recording in the mission briefing scene with the man in the dossier, but now, the connection is tight.
Everything I saw told me Kurtz had gone insane.
…
It smelled like slow death in there. Malaria. Nightmares.
Chef has his own opinion, which is perhaps closer to the truth:
This Colonel guy. Here’s whacko, man. He’s worse than crazy—he’s evil! I mean, that’s what the man’s got set up here man, is fuckin’ pagan idolatry!
Pagan idolatry indeed. But who is being worshipped? The Jungle, perhaps. Or the man himself?
Willard has not come during the height of Kurtz’s vitality. Tapping into the myth of the Fisher King (as alluded to in T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland; Coppola was reading Eliot while he was shooting) as well as the source material, Kurtz is the archetypal king who has become sick, and his kingdom has fallen sick with him. According to the myth, the sick king must die and be reborn for the land to be revitalized. There is a timeless truth stored in this myth about the need for a virtuous, vigorous elite.
And Kurtz seems to understand this. The photojournalist notes as much, indirectly:
Sometimes he goes too far. He’s the first one to admit it.
A question arises: What changed between the decisive execution of four traitors earlier and the pitiful languishing we witness?
Kurtz went into the jungle to fight America’s war his way, the right way. But what if he rejected the Empire? What if he realized fighting the Modern General’s war just to spite him was really just fighting the General’s War? Why does he still work to achieve the Empire’s ends? Why not abandon the war entirely? What does Kurtz care if Vietnam falls to the communists?
Here more speculation than analysis is required, but I think we can sketch a reasonable picture based on the man in the film and Man in reality.
There is no doubt that Kurtz was an American patriot. He served not only for himself, but for his great nation. But there is also the drive of a great man to finish what he has started. The drive of a great man who has seen what could be and how man has failed to measure up. He can get it done. And indeed, he has remarkable success at first.
But the futility of his small band eventually leads to a sober reckoning. They can not do it all. Kurtz says himself that he would need “ten divisions” of men who fought with the will of the enemy to achieve victory in Vietnam. But does the America he left behind deserve victory?
Kurtz found the way not only to perform, but become the role of the warrior. And he had the absolutely adamantine will to transform himself into the perfect embodiment of the warrior.
And yet, the lies he has left behind still reach out for him, and he reaches back. It makes him sick. Instead of focusing on his activities, he rants and raves against the hypocrisy of the system from whence he sprung:
We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplane because it’s obscene.
This is a great Tweet, Kurtz, but at the end of the day, what are you accomplishing?
Kurtz speaks of the enemies who go home lovingly to their wives and children after exerting their will through moral terror. But Kurtz himself, and his follower Lieutenant Colby, have divorced themselves from the rest of the world.
It’s true that their families live in the hypocritical world back home, and so they would not understand these men, but it does seem there is a lack of balance. The quest to live truthfully and decisively is admirable, as one can only truly perform one’s roles if one acknowledges and lives in reality. But Kurtz’s Nietzschean conception of reality only acknowledges the Will to Power, and only in the context of the war.
But man has many roles, and therefore much good to do. He must be a father, a husband, a role model, a provider, one who generates value for society, an appreciator of excellence in noble domains, etcetera.
Kurtz has a great strength of will to do what he does, but ultimately, he had to go to the jungle, which gives him his ‘orders’—because faux morality doesn’t exist there. Only the laws of Nature, and how one must interact with it, preside in the jungle. This takes great strength, but it would take even greater strength to live in a lost society but live truthfully and in accord with the telos of man. To have a wife whom you introduce to reality and live with her there, and raise your child there. Just as the empire tries to squash Kurtz for living authentically, so too would sick society. But instead of escaping society, the fully embodied man would remain and resist, even if it destroys him.4 Is this futile, Christian matyrdom? I will allow the reader to decide. But it is clear that Kurtz loses his purpose in the end, and loses something more too.
Does Willard have this realization? Can he go back home and finally live authentically without restlessly lusting for the simple and alluring role of the Company Man, the Errand Boy for Grocery Clerks? We do not know. We only know that he has resisted the role of god unmoored from society or any of its roles.
Kurtz chose to be god, for a time.
The Photojournalist illuminates the role Kurtz has taken on:
Out here, we’re all his children. He’s enlarged my mind. He’s a poet-warrior in a classic sense.
…
He can be terrible, he can be mean, and he can be right. He’s fighting a war. He said, ‘If you take my picture again, I’m gonna kill you.’ And he meant it [the photojournalist says this with satisfaction]. You don’t judge the Colonel.
Kurtz may be beyond judgement, but he certainly evaluates the man who has come to kill him for a period of days. He dispatches Chef, who would have called down hellfire about Kurtz’s compound, and leaves his head in Willard’s lap. After a few days of unpleasant captivity, Kurtz has made up his mind on Willard, and leaves him free to leave or stay, knowing he will stay.
On the river, I thought that the minute I looked at him, I'd know what to do—but it didn't happen. I was in there with him for days, not under guard, I was free, but he knew I wasn't going anywhere. He knew more about what I was going to do than I did. If the Generals back in Nha Trang could see what I saw, would they still want me to kill him? More than ever probably. And what would his people back home want if they ever learned just how far from them he'd really gone? He broke from them, and then he broke from himself. I'd never seen a man so broken up and ripped apart.
Kurtz monologues to his unshackled captive in an effort to get him to understand, for he has a mission of his own for Willard. A mission from a real warrior.
Have you ever considered that real freedoms, freedoms from the opinions of others? Even from the opinions of yourself?
…
K: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?
W: I’m a soldier.
K: You’re neither. You’re an errand boy…sent by grocery clerks…to collect a bill.
This is an interesting case where Kurtz is right and wrong, but he is wrong on purpose to guide Willard into expressing his true self. Willard really does have the soldier within him, moreso than the civilians in fatigues who ride up the river with him in PBR Street Gang.
But it is true in the sense that one cannot be a soldier for men who are not military officials, and insofar as people like Corman and Kilgore are inauthentic and hypocritical, they are not truly military leaders. They might as well be grocery clerks.
I think Kurtz sees that Willard is a soldier trapped in the role of errand boy. He sees himself in Willard, and wants to awaken his Will by opening his eyes to the reality of his situation. But he does not want to stop Willard from completing his mission, no. He wants him to do it to actualize himself and give Kurtz the warrior’s death he deserves instead of the slow rot of jungle sickness.
But he also wants something else from Willard, and the photojournalist explains it perfectly:
He’s got something in mind for you. Aren’t you curious about that?
The man is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad. He hates all this. He hates it. But the man’s uh…he reads poetry out loud, alright?…And a voice! A voice.
He likes you because you’re still alive. He’s got plans for you.
What are they gonna say when he’s gone, man? Because he dies, when it dies, man, when it dies, he dies. What are they going to say about him? What, are they going to say, he was a kind man, he was a wise man, he had plans, he had wisdom? Bullshit, man. Am I gonna be the one who sets them straight? Look at me—wrong!
What was once home, the people there, they cannot understand what Kurtz has done. They are trapped in the timid, lying morality of modernity. They have not had Kurtz's revelation.
It is impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make friend of horror. Horror, and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.
I remember when I was with Special Forces, seems a thousand centuries ago; we went into a camp to innoculate some children. We left the camp after we had innoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and was crying.
He couldn’t say.
We went back there, and they had hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms, and I remember I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do.
And I want to remember, I never want to forget it. I never want to forget.
And then I realized, like I was shot with a diamond, a diamond bullet right through my forehead and I thought, my God the genius of that, the genius, the will to do that.
Perfect. Genuine. Complete. Crystalline. Pure. And then I realized that they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men. Trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children, but they have the strength, the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles would be over here very quickly.
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.
I worry that my son might not understand what I’ve tried to be. And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything, everything I did, everything you saw, because there’s nothing I detest more than the stench of lies. And if you understand me Willard, you will do this for me.
Is cutting off children’s arms insane? Is it right? Is it excusable, justifiable or ignorable? That is not the point. The point is the will that it demonstrates, and which cannot replicated by some spiritually desiccated, liberal empire with one foot in the boat.
What does Willard think of all this?
We don’t get a final word of judgement from him. But he does say that he’s not in Corman’s army anymore. But he also says that everyone wants Willard to kill Kurtz, even the jungle. Clearly, Willard has left the West behind, but it is not obvious that he is “joining” Kurtz either. The sick king must be cleared away.
After the strokes of Willard’s machete, Kurtz whispers his famous last words:
The horror. The horror.
It is best not to over-explain these things (he says at the end of an over 8,000 word essay), so I will pose questions.
Is Kurtz whispering the name of his friend, horror? Is he looking back on what he’s become, what he’s done? Expressing regret? Expressing his disgust for what America made him become? Contemplating with despair the nature of the reality against which small, finite man is pitted? It is almost too much to bear, isn’t it?
Willard holds his head after he kills Kurtz as though he just survived a grenade blast and his ears are ringing. Has he done the right thing?
He thumbs through some typed pages and finds the scribbled words:
DROP THE BOMB
EXTERMINATE THEM ALL!
He could call in Almighty for an airstrike. Sodom and Gomorrah purged?
He leaves the temple. And as he makes his way through the crowd of savages, they put down their weapons. The king is dead. But is his killer to replace him?
Willard grabs the mindless Lance, the only other survivor of PBR StreetGang.
The duo launch the boat and begin their way down the Nung from whence they came. Kurtz’s words echo in Willard’s mind as his face lines up with this giant head statue in the jungle mists (equating Kurtz with some kind of pagan idol, the jungle god?). And we are left with the sound of crickets, and then silence.
The killing of Kurtz, this warrior-poet, this god, this madman, is an orgiastic cinematic analogy between the people sacrificing a carabao (for better fortune in the renewed future?) and the killing of the ruler of this domain, this fisher king who must pass for the renewal of the realm.
Willard is the true soldier. He’s no civilian. He is meant to be a soldier and, ultimately, he is willing to do what it takes. But he doesn’t take the bait of faux godhood Kurtz leaves for him. He doesn’t become king. And he doesn’t call in the air strike so the American empire can obliterate the living reproof of their ideology.
We know what Willard doesn’t choose, but we don’t know what he does choose. Does he return Stateside and find Kurtz’s son? Does he find some other new path forward? Where could one even go from here?
And this, dear readers, is where we find ourselves as modern men and women. Modernity has been repudiated. Reality, Nature itself repudiates it. But what can replace it? Is Nietzsche right that we must evolve beyond ourselves and carve our own values into stone?
While Apocalypse contains a deep Nietzschean critique of modern morality, its conclusion seems ultimately much more unsure. We don’t know what Willard does or should do. But the fact that he is telling the story through voiceover suggests he is sharing the story with someone. Remember:
It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz’s memory, any more than being back in Saigon was an accident. There is no way to tell his story without telling my own. And if his story is really a confession, then so is mine.
Despite talk of confession, the film does not offer up any firm moral, no Christian deliverance, no Deus Ex Machina.
Not that there is anything wrong with redemption, deliverance or even just conclusion at the end of a work of art. But for this work of art, ambiguity, an ending of contemplative unsettledness, achieves the unity of the whole. The film seems to assent to a Nietzschean critique of modern morality that goes much further than an “antiwar film,” but it does not assent to an easy prescription, Nietzschean or otherwise.
Apocalypse Now, for all its insight, leaves so much more thinking for us to do. And that is a worthy feat on its own.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
— The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot
Short coda on “intentionality” in film
It is hard for me to overstate how incredible this film is. As an adaptation, it is transcendent. The genius to take Heart of Darkness, an early Modernist literary masterpiece, and transpose it from the colonial Congo to Vietnam in a way that feels totally authentic, and then to go even further and push beyond Modernism into a postmodern, Nietzschean treatise on Man and War…it’s simply unbelievable.
It is even more unbelievable when you realize that three men were involved with the script; the production was a haphazard mess with some of the most poignant moments, especially Kurtz’s musings, being made up as they went along; the editing was a team effort (though it is not surprising that the estimable Walter Murch was involved). So many impossible threads came together to create this cohesive, resounding, triumphant masterpiece, truly one of the greatest artistic achievements of the 20th Century and of cinematic history.
Some will claim that all of this is evidence that the whole thing is a big accident and any meaning I’ve derived from watching the movie is reaching. All I can say is SHUT. The FUCK. UP!
Coppola was a man of vision, inspiration and will. His final product may not have been what he mapped out from the beginning. There may have been hours of extra footage and dumb script diversions that were shoved into later cuts. Miles of Brando’s ravings ended up on the cutting room floor. But that shows intention. The movie became more than the sum of its parts, and more than its plans (ambitious as those were). It became more than Coppola or the original screenwriter could have ever intended. The weight of timeless Truth and Beauty gave his work immeasurable mass that thrust him into a higher realm unachievable by man on his own. If you can’t find meaning there, bugman, you can’t find it anywhere.
Watch this film again and understand it for what it is. Not liberal war whinging. Nay. It is transcendent, based art that banishes the cringe of the West today. But its stunning execution allows it to be timeless. I look forward to smiling down on man as he streams Apocalypse on terraformed Mars centuries from now. He will get it. He will know.
Not to deny that America was fighting communism. Vietnam was an important proxy conflict between the American Empire and the Soviet Empire, and against communism itself. If you’re into warring empires, this conflict makes as much sense as any other. What is fake about it, and what upset the young and naive Stateside, is that an imperial global hegemon is not how Americans perceived themselves by the ‘60s and ‘70s. America was and is supposed to be the noble democratic republic that is powerful enough to protect human rights and dignity everywhere, but responsible enough to wield that power benignly. America is like that pathological liar who is kind of your friend, but you know that he lies to you about everything he does and is to project a clean cut, put-together image; meanwhile, he spends all of his time at home jerking off to scat porn and gulping down fat burner pills. Virtue requires forthrightness, clarity of purpose, and commitment, among other things.
To be fair, his point is more about conveying impact in fiction. He argues that smaller, more comprehensible evils are more effective at emotionally impacting an audience/reader than showing whole villages being levelled or whatever. This may be so, but my next paragraph still applies. Emotional impact isn’t everything. Context is important.
That is not to say that Americans were or are incompetent as soldiers. Indeed, they are and were among the best-trained killers of the modern world. It is not the skill or training, but the spirit of the Americans in Vietnam (and Afghanistan, and Iraq, etcetera) that is deficient.
I don’t want to make this a clean cut case of moral failure. There are all the elements of a Greek tragedy in Kurtz’s life. I won’t say that he was doomed, but having gone to Vietnam and seeing the insipidness of his so-called superiors, could the man Kurtz have pursued any other path? Yes, but the weight of history, society and his own nature pushed him in one direction.