Francis Ford Coppola, 1979 and 2001
“I
was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead”
Everyone gets everything he wants. I
wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like
room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never
wanted another.
What was this mission?
Your mission is to proceed up the Nung River in a Navy
patrol boat. Pick up Colonel Kurtz's path at Nu Mung Ba. When you find the Colonel, infiltrate
his team by whatever means available and terminate the Colonel's command.
Terminate the Colonel?
Terminate with
extreme prejudice. He's out there
operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any
acceptable human conduct. And he is still in the field commanding troops .
Although Apocalypse Now! is set in the Vietnam War it is based on
Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, set in the late 19th century
Congo.
In Apocalypse Now! We see on
Col. Kurtz’s desk two books, From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston and The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer.
These books inspired T S Eliot’s The Waste Land. The epigraph of that poem
comes from The Heart of Darkness “Mistah Kurtz – he
dead”.
In The Heart of Darkness (1902) a young sea captain
is sent upriver to rescue Mr Kurtz, a brilliant and idealistic manager
who is sick. Marlow finds, however,
that Kurtz is now depraved, and worshiped by the locals. Human heads decorate his gate. He has also taken a native ‘wife’.
The final words in
The Heart of Darkness are about the
death of Mr. Kurtz, asking,
Did he live his live
again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme
moment of complete knowledge? He
cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, - he cried out twice, a cry
that was no more than a breathing – “The horror! The Horror!”
When Marlow returns to
Europe he intends telling Kurtz’s ‘intended’ that Kurtz uttered her name as he
died. In the original script of Apocalypse
Now!
Willard returns to the USA
and tells Col. Kurtz’s wife and son that he lived and died a hero.
The Wasteland (1922)
reflected on the spiritual sterility of post WW1 Europe in the light of the
Holy Grail legend and classic fertility rituals, alongside Shakespeare, Dante,
The Christian Bible and Hindu Upanishads. It is experimental in form, often fragmentary and obscure, ‘a heap of broken
images’. and profoundly
pessimistic – even if he uses the word Shanti as a refrain, which
Eliot said could be translated as the peace of God which passes all
understanding.
Here are some quotes
from Eliot’s poems.
We are 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.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation/
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the
desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence/
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow.
For
Thine is the Kingdom.
And
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
How do you think these
quotes, referenced by Col.Kurtz,
might inform our understanding of the movie?
Eliot’s poem is
emphatically religious, and Willard, our protagonist and narrator, starts by telling us that
There is no way to
tell (Kurtz’s) story without telling my own. And if his story is a confessional
then so is mine.
Willard has to go on a
journey into the heart of darkness, and that is an interior journey as much as
exterior. What is his
confession about?
Apocalypse Now! is set in the Vietnam war, and even if it is not
ultimately concerned with that war it is quite possibly the most accurate film
ever made about that war.
These quotes ring true;
Shit... charging a
man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy
500.
It's a way we had
over here for living with ourselves. We cut 'em in half with a machine gun and
give 'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw them, the more I hated
lies.
We train young men to drop fire on
people, but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on
their airplanes because it's obscene!
And at the end of the
film Col. Kurtz tells Willard,
I've seen
horrors... horrors that you've seen. It's 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 a 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 inoculate some children. We left the camp
after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running
after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had
come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of
little arms. And I remember... I... I... 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 it. I never want to forget it... I never want to forget. And then I
realized... like I was shot... 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 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 had families, who had children, who were filled with
love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that.
This speech is informed
by a friend of the scriptwriter John Milius, who had served in Vietnam and experienced, first-hand, the
hacking off of the arms by Viet Cong. When the film was released in 1979 many, maybe
most, critics described Kurtz’s
final words as meaningless.
Willard says,
however,
In a war there are
many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for
ruthless action - what is often called ruthless - what may in many
circumstances be only clarity, seeing clearly what there is to be done and
doing it, directly, quickly, awake, looking at it.
This shocking moral
perspective, exemplified by the hacking off of the children’s arms as an act
of love,
as something that had to be done to save them from a worse fate – the victory
of the Americans and therefore their political system, is the diamond bullet. Critics refused to allow it to
enter their brains. How do
we react? Are there
some things so terrible that nothing, nothing at all, should deter us from
doing what is necessary to avoid them?
Especially for the sake of those we love?
Seeing clearly what
there is to be done and doing it, directly, quickly, awake, looking at it.
Maybe the critics could not look at that terrible moral possibility.
Note about the
‘French sequence’ in the Redux version. Vietnam used to be called
Indo-China by the French, who colonized it. The Vietnamese rebelled after WWII,
with Chinese support, and eventually drove the French out. The last great battle was at Dien
ben Phu in 1954, a victory masterminded by the brilliant Vietnamese General Giap, the teacher turned soldier
who died in September 2013.
Despite this defeat the
Americans fought in much the same way – and were also defeated. They feared that if Vietnam ‘fell to the
Communists’ there would be a ‘domino effect’ that turned the whole of
South-East Asia Communist.
It would have cost them much less to have made every Vietnamese man,
woman and child a dollar millionaire.
Apocalypse Now! was extraordinarily difficult films to script, shoot and edit. There were many variations of the script and edit. Some think that Francis Ford
Coppola could not find a way to make sense of the massive themes – and
footage.
