by Christopher Barr
“The king who is
without blemish has a flourishing kingdom, the king who is maimed has a kingdom
diseased like himself thus the Spartans were warned by an oracle to beware of a
‘lame reign’.”
– Jessie L.
Weston, From Ritual to Romance
"Have you ever
considered any real freedoms? Freedoms from the opinion of others... even
the opinions of yourself?"
- Kurtz
Apocalypse Now, inspired by the
Joseph Conrad 1899 short novel Heart
of Darkness, opens with the sound of helicopter blades cutting through the
air. The screen fades up with an East Asian bright green jungle and a
hazy blue summer sky as helicopters pass through the foreground. The
Doors’ masterpiece epic “The End” chimes in, adding a dream-like atmosphere as
yellow flare smoke smothers the green and blue background, consuming it.
Just as Jim Morrison’s haunting voice sings the first line of the song, “This
is the End” napalm is dropped, turning the jungle ablaze, torching
everything on the ground, melting hope as the chaos of war blankets the air.
U.S. Army Captain of Special Operations Benjamin L.
Willard lies in his bed as hallucinating images of his past Vietnam tours
invade his consciousness. Thoughts of the bloody war and the mountains of
madness marinate in his mind, leaking into his unconscious while plaguing his
dreams, the Ouroboros of war, the serpent eating its own tail, the circle keeps
coming around. His cigarette sizzles in his hand beside a half empty
brandy bottle and the fleeting safety of a hand gun. He can’t escape the
end as he begins it again. The ceiling fans become helicopter blades as
Morrison melodically drifts in the air like cigarette smoke.
Willard is in Saigon,
holding himself up in a dilapidated hotel room. Thinking, drinking,
waiting for thoughts of the swallowing jungle as the four walls of boredom, of
uselessness close in on him, as he waits for a mission, he thinks of the
distance between the hyper-real atavism of the jungle and the ‘safety’
‘security’ and banality of back home in America. He feels like he’s
getting softer, losing his instinct for battle as his enemy grows stronger,
acclimating to the jungle, that place where the trees are kings.
Finally a mission
arrives….
The mission is a
top-secret assignment to follow the Nung River into the blackest, deepest
remote heart of the Cambodian jungle and terminate rogue Special Forces
Colonel Walter E. Kurtz of his command. The highly decorated Kurtz has
given himself over to the darkest side of war, the darkest side of humanity,
the darkest side of himself. Willard is ordered by his military superiors
to infiltrate the Colonel’s illegal command of Montagnard troops and execute
him for disengaging from the civility of ‘human warfare’ and into the abyss of
inhuman conduct. Clearly the moral lines are blurred here.
Kurtz has stepped
away from the symbolic economy that binds civilization from drifting into
meaninglessness. He has returned to the madness of the jungle where human
beings were once birthed out of, taking Henry David Thoreau’s argument that “all good things are wild and free” and
that the laws of man suppress rather than protect civil liberties, to a
sadistic and psychotic end. Thoreau’s argument would apply better to
Wyatt and Billy in Easy Rider or Lester Burnham in American Beauty but unfortunately these
freedom-seekers had to symbolically die to keep the machine of human progress,
financially moving forward. The
agents of control within the system must attack and eliminate all cultural
resistance that has important political implications that oppose the status
quo. The established order
must always make it clear that this form of conviction and behavior is intolerable
and must be suppressed at any cost. Kurtz, being a Special Forces, Green
Beret officer that has fought many successful battles, would be all too aware
of the consequences of political and military dissention.
The hypocrisy here
runs thicker than the Nung River and Willard knows it. Sending a
military-sanctioned assassin to kill a former military-sanctioned assassin in
the middle of a blood-dripping war was, as Willard points out, “It’s like handing out speeding tickets at
the Indy 500.” Here, ownership is implied; rules are not universal;
they are owned by the ‘ruling’ class and assigned to the people
accordingly. As mad as Kurtz has become, the military seems more
concerned with their authority to inflict their rules than the Lord of the Flies direction the Colonel was heading, and
as we see later, has long passed.
Willard joins up with
a U. S. Navy (PBR) patrol boat, commanded by Chief and crewmen Chef, Lance and
Mr. Clean. They start the
journey into darkness while trying to avoid the Viet Cong, who they call “Charlie”,
while snaking through the enemy’s backyard. The boat meets up with an
attack helicopter squadron commanded by the reckless Lieutenant Colonel Bill
Kilgore, during the aftermath of an assault on the Viet Cong, to which Kilgore and
his little army claimed victory. Willard
requires Kilgore to safely escort him and the PBR crew to the mouth of the Nung
River.
Beguilingly enough,
Kilgore is a supremely confident commanding officer that has more interest in
Lance, who is a world famous surfer on Willard’s crew than the mission
Willard’s on. Kilgore
decides to helicopter Willard, his crew and their boat up to their point of
destination, certainly not because it’s the safest point along the mouth of the
river but because there are surfer waves at the beach.
Charlie don’t surf!!!
Kilgore orders the whole infantry to load up and head out. A dozen helicopters ascend up from the jungle line in the distance, at first looking like dragonflies as the rising sun shines bright behind them. One of the most iconic moments in the history of American cinema follows. The wave of helicopters advance toward a beachfront where Charlie is hiding out, then Kilgore orders the music to be turned on loudspeakers attached to the bottom of a helicopter. The roaring triumphant sounds of Richard Wagner’s epic Ride of the Valkyries blasting for all to hear, including Charlie. This is Kilgore’s ‘shot across the bow’ warning to intimidate the enemy before they attack them in a battle, which the poised Kilgore already knows they won.
Once they reach the beach, bullets and missiles fire
away as the opera screams down on the scuttling Viet Cong. This campaign is massive in scale with
bombs dropping all over, blowing up village structures and bridges. This symphony of disaster is finally
topped off with a colossal napalm drop, annihilating the whole area past the
tree line, sending it and anyone among it, into a man-made fire pit of hell.
In spite of the
bloodshed happening all around as they land, Kilgore, along with commanding the
invasion, is maintaining his concern with getting the perfect wave for
surfing. He wants to see
Lance surf and the battle, literally at their doorstep, be damned. He wanted Charlie’s surf as well as
his life, he wanted his victory. Willard,
the passive eye, listens to Kilgore talk about the feeling napalm has over him
just after it destroys everything in its path.
“I love the smell of
napalm in the morning, you know one time we had a hill bomb, for 12
hours. When it was all over
I walked up, we didn’t find one of them, not one stinking dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell,
the whole hill, smells like… Victory.”
- Colonel Bill
Kilgore
…Someday this war is
going to end.
Willard and the crew
of the patrol boat leave Kilgore to winning his war and make their way up the
river, the river that ends with Kurtz. They
stop and Willard and Chef go into the thick of the jungle to get mangos. While in there, hiding behind leaves
the size of kitchen tables, a tiger jumps out at them. Both men rightfully run back to the
boat, with Chef yelling hysterically, “Never get out of the boat!!” The deeper they go up the river the
less linguistically symbolic everything becomes. The assignment of meaning begins
shifting from the comforts of societal ideology to a much blurrier undefinable
void. The tiger was an
encounter of the Real; that moment before meaning is carved up by
language. The Real resists
symbolization and is therefore frightening, as most things unknown are. As they move up the river they begin
to encounter a form of reality that is indifferent to symbolization, while
leaving the more definable, linguistic world behind them. Like Dante’s journey into the heart of
darkness, these men are leaving the safety of assigned meaning behind
them. This tiger signals
their escape from the language cage of symbols and meaning and into the true reality of the
world.
Similarities can be seen in Steven Spielberg’s early
masterpiece Jaws (1975), where three men leave the
comforts of rural definable civilization to hunt down and kill a shark, in the
ambiguity of the ocean where linguistic meaning has no stake. The shark has no interest in what
defines these men, it doesn’t have religion and laws, it doesn’t have fear and
preference. It is nature,
and these men have to let go of the tether binding them to land and become
nature itself to defeat the creature, while realizing that it was never about
negotiation and that it was always about survival of the fittest.
“Never get out of the
boat, absolutely god damn right, unless you were going all the way.”
- Willard
Willard looks over
Kurtz’s military file while the boat draws deeper into jungle. He tries to understand how a man so
well trained, so highly decorated, loses his mind and drops off the face of the
earth. How does a man
decide to leave it all and live in the dark jungle with a bunch of savages that
treat him like a god? Freud
would say he was returning to the phallus, he was rejecting the symbolic
authority of society and retreating back to the womb. He’d say Kurtz was a man in search of
the love of his mother’s nurturing gaze before everything became symbolic,
before everything became false ideas and confused in
language.
The patrol boat docks
at a military supply station for possible R&R, where they pick up fuel and
other supplies and then watch a couple of Playboy sirens dance on a stage for a
hundred young horny American soldiers. While
the models dance, the soldiers become restless and storm the stage to get to
the girls. This is one of
the many points in this film where the so-called order clashes with the reality of chaos. Like most levels of restraint in
civilization, this was a clear case of ‘doing what’s expected of one’
losing out to ‘doing what one truly wants’ outside of the rule book
imposed on a person in society since birth.
As they move up the
river, madness becomes more common place in the form of unbridled
freedom. A sort of freedom
that most in society would never read the fine print, the cost of actual
freedom is something that most would never wish to cash in. I would argue that the majority of
people wouldn’t be able to comprehend what they stand to lose to get actual
freedom. To do that, they
would have to be willing to lose themselves. In a religious soaked world, most
aren’t willing to give up themselves after death let alone doing it while they
are still alive. The
illusion of freedom it appears is enough for one to get through the labour of a
day.
The crew pulls up
beside a boat with Vietnamese people aboard to do a routine inspection. Chef reluctantly boards the boat under
Chief’s orders and pushes the few people on it away as he looks through vegetables
and rice bags, finding nothing. He
gets closer to the back searching the cargo when a young Vietnamese girl rushes
toward him; Mr. Clean plugs her with bullets as Lance joins in on executing the
remaining people on the boat, in a flurry of panic and the fearful unsettling
nature of the precarious environment.
The war isn’t just
getting to them, it has got to them. The
rules of right and wrong, good versus evil might as well be wearing camouflage
and blending into the natural blanket of the earth. These soldiers have arrived in madness
as the tether to civilization, and the comforts of the superstructure, wears so
thin that it has become transparent. These
men are lost, lost to the whims of chaos where order can no longer be found.
Willard saw it all as
a lie, a patch-up job to what’s truly underneath it all, insanity, madness, and
yet the very man he was assigned to assassinate was himself, ‘insane’,’mad’. The ambiguity here is as thick as the
file Willard is using to psychologically dissect Kurtz, the Freudian
‘primordial father’ he must kill.
They arrive at the
Cambodian border, ‘the asshole of the world’, the last vestige of
civilization, with a huge symbolic sign over it that reads, ‘Abandon
all hope ye who enter”. Willard and Lance leave the boat and
trek into the guts of an everlasting battle where bullets aimlessly blaze by
and circus music plays. The
carnival of madness, this circle of hell is thick with smoke and blood, yells
and screams key off the ivories to the unintentional whispers of Mozart. They climb into the trenches where
there is an artery of terrified crazed soldiers shooting into the darkness at
nothingness, where the assigned enemy becomes ambiguous and lost in
lunacy. There is no longer
leadership, there is no longer order, laws and politics become slug in the
river, and signifying order becomes a dream lost in psychedelic purple
haze.
Willard and the crew
try to hold it together as they fade into Cambodia, where the claws of the
jungle grow thicker. They
descend deeper into the inferno as they get shot at by faceless enemies that no
longer take the figure of people. The
enemy now is deep within as they sail past the decayed scraps of yesterday’s
battles, symbolically travelling back in time from the so-called height of
civilization to the back jungle of early man. This artery to the heart of darkness
grows profuse with blood, a vessel pumping toward Kurtz.
They sail up the
river with dead bodies lining the banks. They are entering the center of the
insane asylum of the world where only the mad reside. They continue to travel back in time
before the time when man became ‘civilized’. No longer are they dodging the bullets
of the Viet Cong, now tribal arrows spring from the full swaying trees and
descend upon them like bladed rain. Chief
is killed but not before he tries to take Willard with him, the man he places
blame for this tour into insanity.
They arrive at the
compound, at the temple, at the end, Willard, Chef and Lance are all that
remains of the crew. They
pass by huge Christian-like crosses and shrines with many severed human heads
on sticks, tongues hanging. A
blanket of white-powdered tribal people line the banks as the boat enters a
Lovecraftian mouth of madness. These
tribal people part their little boats as Willard and the crew sail down its
throat, as if they are being gulped in.
They land ashore
where they are met by a complete bat-crazy America photo journalist, who has
drunk the same psychotic poisonous, dogmatic margarita as the rest of ‘Kurtz’s
children’. They all
see Kurtz as this messianic figure, a poet, a philosopher as the fumbling crazy
journalist rambles on that he “should have been a pair of ragged claws
scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” There are two ways at this point we
can look at the poetry of T.S. Eliot, a clear influence of Kurtz. One, and likely more obvious, is the
misuse and misunderstanding of the poet. The misinterpretations of the literal
versus the symbolic, as well as actual understanding, as oppose to the
regurgitating type like with the journalist, where it is never made clear
whether he even knows he’s quoting Eliot or not.
Then there is a second
point on Eliot’s poetry, was the poet aware, or should he even be responsible,
for the seemingly negative use of his poetry as a dogmatic gospel to
indoctrinate blind followers. I
would certainly argue, like J.D. Salinger who came after, Eliot wrote what he felt
and left the rest to be open to interpretation, as he should have, for the
obvious reason that once it is set loss upon the world, the world will consume
it as it sees fit in spite of any alternative desire by the artist.
Willard walks toward
the temple where Kurtz is holding up. Human
heads lay all over the place with flies buzzing around all the rotten
corpses. Kurtz’s soldiers
watch Willard as he and the jumpy journalist walk toward the temple, a place
that exists in the 20th century
but feels like a time warp back to the Aztec civilization on the brink of
extinction.
Kurtz’s tribal troops
take hold of Willard and hold him down in the mud, as if cleansing him of all
his symbolic baggage. A
muddied Willard is brought into the temple to meet Kurtz, a silhouetted figure
cutting in and out of the shadows, not quite settling on light or dark. They sit and talk, man to man, soldier
to soldier, killer to killer. Willard
is then caged where the executioner has now become the prisoner, here, bad luck
was his god, bound to bamboo, dripping in mud while listening to the cries of
psychosis.
In case Willard had
doubt of his place along this circle of hell, Kurtz reminds him by dropping the
severed head of Chef on his lap, to which Willard understandably freaks the
fuck out. Drained of hope,
drained of water, drained of life, Willard edges toward the line between life
and death as Kurtz fades in and out of the light. Is he an angel there to cleanse
Willard of all his misguided societal sins or is Kurtz a demon, slowing Willard
toward the gates of hell where fire is everlasting?
Mistah Kurtz-he dead
A penny for the Old
Guy
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed
men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with
straw. Alas!
Our dried voices,
when
We whisper together
Are quiet and
meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over
broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form,
shade without color,
Paralyzed force,
gesture without motion;
Those who have
crossed
With direct eyes, to
death’s other kingdom
Remember us-if at
all-not as lost
Violent souls, but
only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
– T.S. Eliot
A pile of little
severed inoculated arms.
Willard roams free
among Kurtz’s fortress; they talk about morality, horror, fear….. Kurtz talks and Willard listens. He talks of men, not monsters, moral
men that are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without
feeling, without passion, without judgment.
“You have a right
to kill me but you don’t have a right to judge me.”
During a tribal dance
outside of the temple a sacrificial cow is brought out. They dance, joyfully around the quiet
beast while holding spears. Knowing
that Kurtz is prepared to die, Willard like a snake in the wild, like a serpent
of the sea, hides in the shadows along the fringe of the tribal gathering as
rain falls from the sky like little specks of star dust.
Kurtz laments over
planes dropping bombs and slaughtering thousands while doubts arise over whether
is it morally acceptable for said planes to use the word “fuck” painted on them
or not. At this point,
Kurtz looks back and sees the predator, the executioner, the savior as Willard
lifts his machete high in the air. Does
Willard see himself in Kurtz? Is
Kurtz a part of himself that needs to die?
In one of the finest
uses of editorial juxtaposition in film, while in the bunker, Willard swings
the machete as the tribal native’s swing their
machete’s outside in the rain, hacking into the back of the cow, splitting its
flesh wide open; while simultaneously Willard swings into the shadows as the
compliant Kurtz welcomes each blow. Blades
of light and shadow quilt the frame as Jim Morrison echoes “The End”
into the amber air.
The horror………
The horror……..
Kurtz is dead.
In silence as Willard
looks at Kurtz’s bloody corpse on the floor, the tribal people pull and tear at
the flesh of the slaughtered sacrificial cow. Kill
the God and a new God must arise because belief cannot be left to its own
devices, it must be tethered to a structure that fortifies it in the symbolic
order. Meaning requires
assignment as Willard walks out of the temple victorious while hundreds of
natives kneel before him, a man that they believed to be their new king, their
new god. Willard quite
rightfully and quite sanely rejects the position and drops his weapon, walking
out with Lance, as the natives and soldiers drop their weapons.
The film ends with
Willard completing his mission but it doesn’t leave us on a happy note. Rather, it leaves us acknowledging the
emptiness of not being fulfilled. It
leaves us with the bleak reality of our place in the grand scheme of
things. We hope for Willard’s
sake that after hitting the lowest pit of hell that up is his only recourse.
On a societal scale, Apocalypse Now is about the
failed enlightenment of the industrial age. The age of reproduction followed as
the workers become less part of the development and more part of the cog. We are the hollow men of connection
and the stuffed men of consumerism.
The rules and beliefs
that we all assume define our reality are clearly, not only put to the test,
but in some cases are seen as obsolete. These
mere representations of reality are a discourse that must ascend the shadows of
philosophy classes and into the mainstream of thought, in order for change to
occur. Like Charles Marlow
at the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
Willard looks toward the horizon and sees decay and death in the distance, but
we can only trust that the silver lining in the horizon is the ripple effect,
that was generated by Willard rejecting the kingdom of Kurtz for a more
promising future of hope.
“To
whom shall I hire myself out?
What
beast must I adore?
What
holy image is attacked?
What
hearts must I break?
What
lie must I maintain? In what blood thread?”
- Arthur Rimbaud,
A Season in Hell.
........The Horror
...................The
Horror
Fascinating.
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