The Snail and the Straight Razor
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is commonly listed among the top ten films ever made, and rightly so. Coppola’s vision of war-torn madness and the rot that eats at the soul of men in combat contains visual after visual that shows one soldier’s journey up a stygian river into the primordial past. Many filmmakers spend a career giving a handful of memorable images or sequences; Coppola provides a lifetime worth in one of his four remarkable films in his 1970s artistic zenith. Terror and despair infect the atomic fabric of this film. Coppola, famous for saying this film “is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam,” is saying no more than is accurate. It is not about the war on the ground, as Platoon is, but rather it is a film about the effect of the conflict, not on any individual but the collective psyche of all involved. Willard, the narrator, begins his journey spiraling in the darkness of alcohol and ennui, waiting to get back in the brush, the only place he feels at home. Willard feels he has seen the black, the course of the film proves him inadequate in his assumptions. Some critics have attacked the film as pretentious, not true to the reality of Vietnam. While the film is not an accurate representation of Vietnam, Apocalypse Now establishes its lost humanity through three striking set pieces: the mango picking scene, the Do Lung bridge sequence, and the final approach to Kurtz’s compound.
In one of many great sequences, Chef and Willard leave the boat for mangoes, dwarfed by the massive flora and fauna of the jungle, bathed in an eerie blue light. Chef, one of the boat mates and a trained saucier, insists on getting off the boat to search the nearby jungle for fruit. Willard goes with them. Coppola begins his use of mood coloring in this setting, showing the move from the bright daylight of the earlier scenes into the eventual total blackness of the final engagement with Kurtz. The color palette is secondary to a recurring theme in the film, that of the impenetrable woodlands, engulfing the characters with its density and strange sounds. Willard and Chef are dwarfed by ageless, massive trees. Chef patters on about food and cook training in the navy, while the steely-eyed Willard maintains the perimeter. Willard stares into a dark hole of brush, at a glint, where the jungle waits. In Coppola’s initial assault on the crew going up the river, a large tiger jumps from the brush, causing Willard to fire wildly and for the two to run back to the boat. Willard confirms Chef’s observation, never get off the boat. But what is Coppola doing here? The jungle cat is a warning of the wild, uncontrollable nature of what awaits them up the river. The tiger belongs there, a predatory creature of instinct, free of the moral concerns of man. The jungle cat symbolizes Cerberus, the guard-dog of the underworld, come to warn those in war, no strangers to immoral actions, to go back to the relative civility of war-bound conflict. The cat’s assault goes unheeded, as the crew continues inexorably to the reckoning that awaits them with Kurtz.
Further on, building on the decent from the thin thread of civility to barbarity, the Do Lung Bridge beckons; here, there is no command, and the soldiers adorned in war paint and tribal adornments. The Do Lung Bridge is the last army outpost on the river, and the crew has been through much. As they pull up, soldiers are jumping in the water, hoping to get on the boat, away from the fighting. Willard gets off, seeking a commander. The eerie lights of the bridge contrast sharply against the utter black of the river beyond, creating some discordant noise of the eye. Willard encounters a soldier firing a heavy machine gun at a mystery enemy. When asked who is in charge, the soldier screams, “ain’t you.” The organization and structure of the Western world have broken down here.
Another soldier, with a claw necklace and war paint on, kills the enemy. He is lost in his mind, out of the world. Willard asks if he knows who is in charge; the solder replies, “yeah,” and walks away. Coppola here sets up dense layers of tribal allusions, reinforces the violence of the jungle, and uses the creeping darkness to engulf the floodlights of the bridge. Do Lung is lost. It is not lost militarily, but instead, it has become consumed by the insanity of conflict.
Willard is the white hunter, peering into the African wilds, here represented by the African American soldiers who comprise the Do Lung bridge detachment and pressing on, despite the lack of information about what is to come. Coppola’s use of race to suggest white western notions of civilization is subtle but not missed, though it leads to troublesome conclusions about identifying Black soldiers with the primal wild. Coppola also uses a wailing, psychedelic guitar riff to begin his use of howling and animal noises, mixed with soundtrack touches, to bring disorder to the very scenes themselves. Do Lung is the last outpost for Willard and the crew, and what lies beyond is the old, primordial world. What lies beyond is what Kurtz calls ‘beyond morality.’
Past the bridge, before the crew reaches Kurtz’s compound, the boat travels to the end of the world: abnormal smoke swirls, the jungle howls, and attacks occur with ancient weapons. The crew continues, lost in the choking grip of the jungle. One crew member is dead, the boat has caught fire, and Lance has lost his grip on reality. He paints his face and howls madly with the jungle. Chef is always on edge. The boat captain looks overwhelmed and frightened by his task — Willard, covered in sweat, ever more disconcerted by the river god that awaits him.
Coppola builds vignettes here. Steam and smoke churn off the river, with no sources, the river itself continues to narrow, closing its fist around the men of the boat. The otherworldly noises of the jungle grow louder and more constant. As they get closer and closer, they see burning, crashed aircraft. Downed vessels from old conflicts. The very precipice of hell. The boat continues through a river where sunlight cannot seem to penetrate. Coppola gives moment after moment of sheer madness, committed to celluloid. He brings us into this ancient land. The boat gets attacked with spears and arrows; weapons not used in conflicts for a hundred years. The trees sway with tortured bodies, slain at the whim of the dread master that awaits Willard. Any thought of the civilized world is now gone, and we the viewer have been brought into the black heart of war itself, the compound at the end of the line. This final leg is where Coppola brings the pain: there is no civility to any conflict, war is mad, and the men waging it are mad for accusing others of barbarity during it. These jungles, and the army of Kurtz occupying it, are not humans anymore but the tiger, beyond human concern.
Returning to the chief critiques of the film, that of a doddering and pretentious mess, and of failing to bear faithful witness to the Vietnam conflict, does Apocalypse Now withstand these observations? Coppola tackled a re-imagination of Heart of Darkness, itself a reasonably heavy-handed work, to explore his thoughts on Vietnam. At the time of the film’s initial release, he was given to grandiose statements about how this film is Vietnam, leading many to believe his ego had inflated beyond controllable means. It is undoubtedly a difficult film to penetrate and demands multiple viewings. Does it meander? Yes, it does have many slow scenes, but that is part of the point. Any soldier will tell you war is much boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Coppola has been accused of failing to cement his themes, but the very disorganization of the film is the theme of the film. Much has also been said of Marlon Brando, sitting in shadows, reading poetry, and philosophizing. While these scenes can try the patience of the viewer, they build the mystery of the Colonel and allow Coppola to build to the famous inoculation speech, where Kurtz speaks to the real conviction required to win a war. A better critique comes from those who say that the film does not show the Vietnam War as it occurred, and is inaccurate to the truth on the ground. These criticisms are all true and unfair. Apocalypse Now is not a war film, just as Shawshank Redemption is not a prison film; one is about the darkness at the core of the human soul, the other about the resurrection of a man. There are many excellent films about Vietnam and the war from the soldier’s viewpoint, but Apocalypse Now cannot be counted among them. Vietnam, and the conflict, is but a setting.
What does the film offer us? It provides us War itself, and a condemnation of anyone who believes in civilized conflict. It asks us to peer into the deepest part of ourselves and proposes that we will find us all capable of being Kurtz or Willard. The movie is not kind to humanity, nor should it be. It allows us to see one of the great filmmakers at the absolute peak of his visual powers, taking the viewer down a hole of despair and darkness, with scene after scene of what the emotion and mental state of warfare must look like if emotions and mental states could be visualized. Apocalypse Now stands against any critique and remains one of the few films all should see and know.