By Eric M. Blake @hardboiledfilms
“Late summer, autumn, 1968: Kurtz’s patrols in the highlands coming under frequent ambush. The camp started falling apart. November: Kurtz orders the assassination of three Vietnamese men and one woman. Two of the men were colonels in the South Vietnamese army. Enemy activity in his old sector dropped off to nothing. Guess he must have hit the right four people. …If he’d pulled over, it all would’ve been forgotten. But he kept going. And he kept winning it his way. And they called me in.”
When I first started this series, I made sure to credit my direct inspiration for it, John Nolte’s “Top 25 Left-Wing Films”. It’s a masterful, compelling series, and I highly recommend conservative movie lovers give it a look. But I also made sure to note that I pretty firmly disagree with his assessment of Apocalypse Now as a Left-Wing film.
Really, the fact that John Millius—Hollywood legend, notorious maverick, master of epic action (see Conan the Barbarian), and noted Conservative (Red Dawn, anyone?)—wrote the screenplay came as no surprise to me. For Apocalypse Now masterfully pulls the “bait-and-switch,” as do so many of the best Conservative films and TV shows.
In fact, maybe a bit too masterfully, if Nolte’s piece is any indication.
All film is subjective, as a great online critic has often said. Nonetheless, I was very surprised to see Francis Ford Coppola’s greatest non-Godfather film on a “Left-Wing Film” list. The first time I saw this masterpiece, I was left with the exact opposite impression.
Why Apocalypse Now is a Conservative Film:
Oftentimes, it’s the little things that count—the details that, when you notice them, suddenly put all the big, blatant, in-your-face stuff in a new context.
Let’s set the stage by looking at the big things. As Nolte puts it:
[C]o-writer/director Francis Ford Coppola…portrays America’s involvement there [in Vietnam], and our military men in particular, in the harshest and most disturbing ways imaginable. At best, we are forever indifferent to everything and everyone, most especially human suffering. At worst we are murderers of women and children and our government is involved in the kind of secret Black Ops the Left was sure WikiLeaks would finally reveal when just the opposite turned out to be true.
We also epitomize the term Ugly American, treating our South Vietnamese allies like children or as though they don’t exist, and there is no amount of brutality we won’t rain down on our enemies in the North. We are borderline terrorists willing to lay down intense air strikes on villages where children can scramble for cover just so we can surf. We use the dead in ways to strike fear in the hearts of the enemy and casually toss around racial slurs to describe anyone who doesn’t look like us.
So, is all that true about Apocalypse Now?
It sure looks that way.
And yet…
The “Bait-And-Switch” Method:
Those of us tragically—and understandably—conditioned to be suspicious of propaganda in Hollywood will oftentimes suffer an unfortunate side effect. Namely, we’ll see the left-looking “bait” of a film and not allow for the possibility that it might well be bait.
(For example, The Lone Ranger (a film I freely admit to enjoying, even though it’s apparently fashionable to hate on it). In that case, the bait is “White Man’s Guilt,” a la Dances With Wolves or Avatar. The switch? As a sequence involving a Cavalry officer and a Mexican standoff makes clear, the “guilt” comes about by individual choice, not racial inheritance. Further, from the beginning, John Reid’s initial Guns-Are-Not-The-Answer mindset is mocked—and only when he accepts the need for them can he become The Lone Ranger. But I digress.)
It’s especially unfortunate because this method is arguably the most effective weapon in a conservative artist’s arsenal. Imagine, for example, a film with the set-up of “noble journalists fighting to expose an evil corporate executive,” but with the payoff of the mysterious source giving the journalists the information they needed was another corporate executive, perhaps in the same company—and now that the bad guy’s taken down, the good businessman can successfully clean house and bring the company back. For bonus points, the good guy was the “cold” fellow the journalists were sure “doesn’t care about anything but company profits” or something like that.
Imagine the effect on the lefties in the audience—those at first following along with grins on their faces as their mindset is being validated—only to have the rug pulled out, jolting them into reality. And they can’t call it “contrived,” because the plot just works.
That’s the thing about our message. It’s grounded in logic. You don’t have to “force” things for it to work.
So, what “switches” are in Apocalypse Now?
The “Switch” Of Kurtz’s Rebellion:
The mission kicks off with Willard’s superiors telling him that Kurtz was once an outstanding, immensely respected officer—but for no apparent reason, “his ideas and methods became…unsound.” Now, he’s formed an army of natives who “follow every order, however ridiculous.” “He’s operating without any decent restraint—totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct.”
All vague, generic, unclear. What specific “crime” is he guilty of?
“Kurtz had ordered the execution of some Vietnamese intelligence agents—men he believed were, uh—double agents. So, he took matters into his own hands.”
What’s the explanation of all this?
“Well, you see, Willard, in this war, things get—confused out there. Power, ideals, the old morality, and practical military necessity. But out there with these natives, it must be a temptation to—be God….Sometimes, the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature.’ Every man has got a breaking point. You and I have them. Walt Kurtz has reached his—and very obviously, he has gone insane.”
Willard agrees, but as time goes on, he increasingly realizes that the higher-ups didn’t tell him the whole story. Particularly that Kurtz’s “murder” of the intelligence officers was right. They were double agents. Kurtz was simply willing to do what had to be done, though his superiors clearly weren’t.
And as Willard reads Kurtz’s critiques of how the war is being conducted, he—and we—can’t help seeing how on-point the man was, as the film’s events vindicate the words.
“No wonder Kurtz put a weed up Command’s a—. The war was being run by a bunch of four-star clowns who were gonna end up giving the whole circus away.”
“You Have No Right To Judge Me”:
When Willard finally meets Kurtz, it’s left for us to decide—along with him—whether the colonel has now crossed the line or not. Willard himself notes that, regardless of anything, those audio recordings were pretty nuts. But if Kurtz is insane, it’s not the “war climate” that made him so (as Command—and the Left—would have it).
It’s because the brass refused to fight the war to win—because LBJ and the Democrats ran the war with terribly restrictive rules of engagement that kept our boys from doing what needed to be done. As such—as Kurtz himself makes clear in that famous “Horror” speech to Willard—the enemy had a major upper hand. They weren’t tied down or shackled by “judgment”—they had the will to do whatever it took.
And as he notes in the essays and letters Willard reads in the boat, the higher-ups just didn’t take the war seriously enough—and, at this point, Willard agrees.
“In a war, there are many moments for compassion and tender action. There are many moments for ruthless action. What is often called ‘ruthless’—but may in many circumstances be only clarity: seeing clearly what there is to be done and doing it, directly, quickly, awake. Looking at it.”
Kurtz “went insane” because he never had the support he needed to fight the war well. With all the red tape and “rules” tying his hands, he had to go rogue and form his own army, and it may or may not have tragically destroyed him. Certainly, it’s broken him, and Willard ultimately concludes that Kurtz wants to be assassinated.
That’s just the way it has to be.
Kurtz Redux:
Andrew M. Price’s The Conservative Guide to Films asserts that Apocalypse Now, theatrical cut, actually is a leftist film, whereas the 2001 Redux is conservative—the contention being that the extra scenes help add more “switch” to the bait. While I disagree with the first part, the Redux does indeed include more material to support the conservative interpretation of the film. For one, we see Willard reading an essay by Kurtz, which makes clear that the colonel understood all too well that Command wasn’t taking the war seriously enough—particularly considering how the soldiers have one-year tours of duty in which they enjoy “cold beer, hot food, and rock-n-roll” as “the norm.” In short, Kurtz argues, the war is being made comfortable with the short length of tours hampering combat experience and, therefore, professionalism.
Furthermore, in the final act, the Redux shows Kurtz reading to Willard a sample of excerpts from Time and other magazines that depict the constant “new feelings” of optimism about the war—his point being that the U.S. government wanted to have it both ways—they wanted to win the war but without doing what it takes via a hard, conscious effort to win a war.
The “Switch” Of Col. Kilgore And The “Surf” Attack:
He loves the smell of napalm in the morning. He’s a bit too gung-ho and eager to blow stuff up. He has his air cavalry blast Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries in what may or may not be a reference to the Klan ride in Griffith’s notorious Birth of a Nation. And he wants the beach boys in his regiment to go out and surf while the battle’s still going on.
The man is nuts. And Willard can only observe in bitter amusement:
“If that’s how Kilgore fought the war, I began to wonder what they really had against Kurtz.”
Still, it’s not that simple. Let’s take a look at the little things.
First, Col. Kilgore’s intro has him grant a dying “Charlie” (a nickname for the enemy Viet Cong soldiers) his request for water because the man wins his respect by holding on to the bitter end—to the point of holding in his own guts with a pan. Kilgore’s a warrior who gives a nod to any man with, well, “guts”—even if he’s the enemy.
Now for the air cavalry raid—Wagner and everything. At first, it really does seem like the Kerry/Obama smear of “air raiding villages and murdering civilians.”
And yet, that soon changes. The “village” fights with the kind of weaponry expected in combat—shooting bombs into the bay where Kilgore has ordered the surfing.
There’s even a woman throwing grenades at a medevac helicopter.
Actually, dialogue in a previous scene already established that the town is a heavy “Charlie” installation. At best, the civilians are being used as human shields; at worst, they are just bombers in disguise. It would have been helpful if this point had been emphasized more, but it is there.
In the end, we can’t merely write off Kilgore as a brutal warmonger. Insane as his methods may look, the situation just isn’t that simple. War rarely is.
Kilgore Redux:
The Redux version provides a few more moments for Kilgore that underline the “switch” part of all this, making it much more blatant. Here, in the middle of the battle, a real civilian woman runs up to the Americans with her child, clearly wanting them to keep the kid safe from the carnage. Kilgore makes it a point not only to grant her request but to save her as well.
And it isn’t just that he saves them—it’s the fact that the mother makes the request in the first place. In that action, we see a shot fired against the whole “We were monsters over there, and they hated us” narrative. The woman sees the Americans as men with hearts who want to do the right thing, war or no war. And her assumptions are vindicated.
For Bonus Points:
The “sampan search” sequence seems very much like one of the “obligatory war atrocity” scenes so common in Vietnam/Iraq war films. However, keeping in mind all of Kurtz’s critiques about the handling of the war, it actually serves to underline his theory that many of the boys serving one-year tours weren’t being properly “prepared.” Certainly, the crew of Willard’s boat is so used to chilling around that they don’t seem particularly cut out for tense situations. And alas, it leads to tragedy.
Besides, Willard told them to forget the search, and they didn’t.
Finally, it’s not a small thing that Kurtz’s compound is in Cambodia. The North had supply lines running through Laos and Cambodia during the war. Alas, LBJ’s “limited war” nonsense led to forbidding our side from doing anything about it because those countries were “neutral,” you see. In other words, for those in the know, it’s more proof that Kurtz had been in the right in so many ways.
Why Apocalypse Now Is a GREAT FILM:
Where to start? By all accounts, it’s one of the greatest war movies ever made—powerful, haunting, poetic. It’s the sort of film that sticks with you forever, one way or another. I emphasize “haunting” as there’s a special mood to Apocalypse Now that, to the best of my knowledge, has never truly been duplicated. It’s the sensation of being in a dream. A realistic dream but a dream, nonetheless. Surreal, not in the blatant David Lynch sense but in the sense of how you feel when you watch it.
With this in mind, Coppola’s choice to open the film with The Doors’ song “The End” perfectly sets the stage. The gradual, mellow, gripping, weird melodies reflect the gradual, mellow, gripping, weird experience of the film itself in plot, characters, soundtrack, cinematography, mise-en-scene*, theme, everything. And the images accompanying the song blend perfectly, making it one of my all-time favorite openings of a film ever.
For those not in the know, Apocalypse Now is based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, set on the Congo River. John Millius noted that he’d written the screenplay essentially on a dare—a professor of his had firmly stated that the book was un-adaptable for the screen. Millius took that as a challenge, and the result was a masterpiece.
Martin Sheen as Capt. Willard:
The excellent website TV Tropes posits a theory that Apocalypse Now, despite the Vietnam trappings, is actually a Film Noir. Willard certainly brings that “disenchanted outsider” vibe, complete with the occasional wry wisecrack about the situation (“Charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500”). Willard’s an outsider, and he knows it, and though it haunts him that he doesn’t really have a place in the world around him, he seems to accept it.
The “case” for this detective to figure out is why Kurtz went rogue and whether he’s truly “insane” enough to validate putting him down.
To boot, Willard’s a hard drinker and smoker. At least until he’s on the case.
Anyway, before Martin Sheen was Jed Bartlett, he was Capt. Willard. And he plays the part beautifully—with no pretensions or false ego.
Robert Duvall As Col. Kilgore:
The movie may be about Willard and Kurtz. And technically, Kilgore may be a minor character, appearing only in a few scenes. But when Robert Duvall is on screen, he commands it—and, therefore, Col. Kilgore has become one of the most iconic characters in cinema history, not least of all for his napalm speech:
“Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. Y’know, one time we had a hill bombed for twelve hours—and when it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of them—not one stinking (bleep) body. But the smell—y’know, that gasoline smell—the whole hill…it smelled like…victory. Someday, this war’s gonna end.”
Kilgore has a presence, and he uses it. And there’s a nice element of comedy about him, too, with his boyish enthusiasm for surfing.
Dennis Hopper As The Photographer:
The photographer serves as a bizarre sort of Greek Chorus when Willard and the surviving members of the crew arrive at Kurtz’s stronghold. He may or may not have been the guy who sent the last photo of Kurtz that Willard received. He may or may not even have any film in that camera of his as he snaps it around. All we know is that he loves to talk, and talk, and talk, passionately evangelizing about how Kurtz has opened his mind. Nolte calls it “a poetry of black cynicism” and notes that it’s as good an explanation as any for what’s going on with Kurtz.
Marlon Brando As Col. Walter E. Kurtz:
Supposedly, Marlon Brando himself helped Coppola figure out the movie’s final ending. When he showed up on set still Don-Corleone-fat (apparently, no one had told him he needed to lose weight for the role), Coppola knew darn well he couldn’t use the script’s original action-packed finale (more on that later). But he had to come up with something that would satisfy all the build-up and fit a fat Kurtz who’s now more of an emperor-priest than a soldier.
So, he told Brando to read the “Kurtz” section of the book, and the two of them effectively improvised a more philosophical, psychological payoff. A lot of people seem to think this last act is the weakest of the film, but I don’t see how that can be. A weird-feeling film like Apocalypse Now deserves a weird-feeling ending. And that’s what we get.
Brando’s Kurtz is constantly shrouded in shadow and mystery. In his conversations with Willard, he continues to challenge Willard’s assumptions about him, the mission, and what exactly he should or shouldn’t consider “insane.”
“Are my methods unsound…?”
“…I don’t see…any ‘method’…at all, sir.”
“…I expected someone like you. What did you expect?”
Brando is often hailed as one of the greatest actors of all time. Unfortunately, he fails to live up to that about as often as he does live up to it, but Apocalypse Now is an example of the latter. Kurtz is at the end of his rope, and he knows it. He is quiet, somber, resigned to his fate, yet still challenging Willard to answer the questions he must ask himself. He wants Willard to kill him, but only after Willard acknowledges why he will kill him—after he acknowledges to himself the truth behind the events that have led to this.
Clean’s Cassette:
Laurence Fishburne—aka Morpheus of The Matrix and Perry White of Man of Steel—has one of his first big roles in this film as “Clean,” the youngest member of the boat crew transporting Willard. After the point of no return, he is the first of the team to die, perishing in a sudden firefight against an unseen enemy hidden in the jungle shores while a cassette tape he’d gotten in the mail plays on the boat’s speakers. The cassette was from his mother, talking about how things were going back home. As the other guys gather around his dead body, the battle over, “Clean’s” mother notes how eager she and the family are to see him come back home.
Despite how it may sound, it doesn’t feel heavy-handed. It’s hauntingly tragic and one of the most powerful moments in the film.
About the Redux:
In 2001, Coppola released his extended director’s cut—the Redux. He rearranged a few scenes (putting the sequence with the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” a bit later in the film, for one) and, more importantly, added a bit more. We’ve already talked about some of the additions. Here are the remaining big ones:
1. The most prominent changes begin with Col. Kilgore. In the Redux, he is given more of an actual introduction. There’s the mother and child, of course. But, most significantly, there’s a short comical subplot in which Willard, fed up by the man’s antics around surfing amid a battle, swipes Kilgore’s surfboard as if to wound his ego.
That night, it pays off—some Hueys fly over where Willard and company are resting, and Kilgore comes over the speakers to demand the board back. But not seeing the crew, that’s all he can do, and Willard shares a chuckle with the guys—a rare moment of chemistry and camaraderie among them. It’s a cute series of sequences and a nice addition if you didn’t care for the lack of warmth between Willard and the crew in the original cut.
2. Later on, we have a bit of an odd sequence at a fallen-apart, all-but-abandoned MASH facility. By chance, the Playboy girls from earlier in the film had to land there, and Willard negotiates some R-and-R for the crew. Hilarity ensues. Or, at least, it tries to.
I tend to cringe a little bit when a fellow Conservative/Christian calls something in a film “unnecessary.” Still, even speaking from an artistic standpoint, this sequence kind of is. It’s a very weird deviation. It could be a perfectly fine “breather” if the film wasn’t already long enough. As it is, it breaks the tension, but without actual justification. It isn’t even that “sexy,” being played more for awkward comedy than anything else.
3. The most significant addition to the Redux comes after “Clean’s” death. Willard and the crew stumble upon an isolated French colony where the inhabitants give “Clean” a soldier’s burial and treat the others to dinner and rest for the night.
At dinner, Willard and the plantation leaders have a fascinating conversation about the colony, which leads to a fascinating political discussion, with the Frenchmen disagreeing over the morality of the war. Finally, however, the leader notes that the French’s failures in Indochina came about because Paris appeased the “peace” protesters and “traitors—Communist traitors at home!” A young man follows up, stressing to Willard that America could win if it wanted to if it would only learn from France’s mistakes.
This can’t be considered a definitively “Conservative” scene only because of all the different arguments at the table. There’s even a Frenchman defending the Socialists, arguing with his leader that they aren’t Communists. Basically, nothing is settled except that the French can only look on in sadness at America heading down an eerily familiar path.
4. After this, Willard finds himself spending the night with Madame Sarrault, a young widow who’s taken a liking to him. She notes how drained and lost he is. There is a strong impression that she’s touched something in him, even telling him, “Your home is here.”
More than any other addition, this is what makes the Redux almost a different movie, for the simple reason that it puts a new spin on the ending. In the theatrical cut, after killing Kurtz, Willard faces an uncertain future. Here, the implication is that he just might settle down with Madame Sarrault and, at long last, find peace.
“There are two of you—don’t you see? One that kills. And one that loves….”
About the Deleted Scenes:
Usually, I don’t give these a section of their own, but, in this case, it’s appropriate as part of our examination of the Redux. (And it’s worth noting that, had I been in charge of assembling the film, I might’ve replaced the “bunnies at the medevac” sequence with some of the deleted scenes involving Kurtz’s compound).
One of the most compelling deleted scenes involves Kurtz talking to Willard while the latter is being held in a bamboo cage. Kurtz calls out Willard specifically for being afraid to “look” and then calls out Washington:
“They want to win this war. But they can’t bear to be thought of as ‘cruel.’ They want to destroy the enemy. But they hate to admit that they’re simply ‘murdering’ them. And they insist that they are ‘civilized’—they insist that they are ‘moral’—they insist that they are ‘ethical.’ And you will find, later or sooner, Captain—that those words are meaningless in this wilderness. Meaningless.”
Willard, however, rejects the idea that morality should simply be discarded in warfare. Perhaps the scene was cut because Coppola felt it “cleared up” the ambiguity a bit too much, more openly setting Willard and Kurtz at odds.
The other deleted scene has Willard talking with his predecessor, Colby—the last guy Command had sent to assassinate Kurtz, who, instead, had joined him. Colby explains that the North Vietnamese Army attacked, and he found he had to help Kurtz against the real enemy. It’s a very interesting moment—and actually helps with the ambiguity, as it builds on how Willard had found himself agreeing with Kurtz’s insights about the war.
Oddly enough, the story seems to refer to what may or may not have been John Millius’s original ending.
How It All Ends:
There have been conflicting stories about exactly how the film was originally supposed to end. Some sources say Willard was supposed to join up with Kurtz as they fend off an attack—only to have Kurtz die in battle. Others say it was supposed to be an action-packed final duel between the two of them.
Whatever it was, Millius has insisted that he’d always intended for Kurtz to die in the end, with that immortal final line of his, “The horror…the horror….” Just like in Conrad’s original book.
Ultimately, Coppola found the perfect end to this mad film—a ritualized killing, conveying how Kurtz has, as Willard himself notes, submitted himself to the laws of the jungle. It’s all over, but Willard knows full well the world isn’t exactly the better for it.
By the way, what are we to make of the scribbled-down message Willard finds on a thesis on Kurtz’s desk? “DROP THE BOMB—EXTERMINATE THEM ALL!” Is he calling for the annihilation of the North? Is it a message to Willard to go ahead with the air strike and finish off his troops? Or is it just a final expression of rage, Kurtz having crossed the line into insanity?
Who knows? Just like we don’t know for sure what Willard plans to do as he takes the boat out onto the river.
Nolte’s Theory:
John Nolte’s article posits a fascinating interpretation of the film as Willard going through Purgatory. According to this theory, Willard killed himself right after the introduction’s fade to black, and his “mission” to kill Kurtz—his symbolic dark self—is his payment for all his sins as a covert operator.
I actually get a kick out of considering this “reading.” It certainly goes a long way toward explaining the constant mood of “weirdness” throughout the film, which could be described as darkly dreamy.
Incidentally, it’s also why Nolte doesn’t care for the Redux. He finds that the added scenes cause a bit of a break from the “dream state” motif. I would argue it doesn’t have to—Madame Sarrault could be seen as an angel encouraging him toward a reward at the end of all this.
My interpretation isn’t quite as elaborate, but like Nolte’s, it sort of relies on what version you watch.
My Apocalypse Now Theory:
I’ve long entertained the idea that most of the introduction sequence takes place after the events of Willard’s mission. I say “most,” because I count Willard snapping and punching the mirror as the beginning of the “flashback” based on the fact that his hand is cut up when the guys arrive at the door to recruit him.
At any rate, pay close attention to Willard’s narration. During the intro, we hear him talking in the present tense (“I’m still in Saigon,” “I get weaker,” etc.). As we fade into the beginning with his martial arts practice (leading to the mirror punch), the narration turns to past tense—and stays that way for the rest of the film.
More importantly, there’s the footage that fades in and out amid Jim Morrison’s “The End”—the napalm strike and especially the image of the stone face, fading into sight shortly after Willard’s own.
It’s the stone face that guards the entrance to Kurtz’s fortress.
As I said, though, the Redux might throw a wrench into that if you interpret the plantation sequence as an opportunity for Willard to settle down when he’s through.
But then, maybe he just isn’t “through,” quite yet. Maybe, before he can retire with his mademoiselle, he has to emotionally recover in Saigon while he waits for the debriefing to conclude.
Either way, it’s fun to speculate.
By The Way…
Yes, that is Harrison Ford as the nerdy guy giving Willard the briefing about Kurtz in the beginning. Apparently, the moment when he drops the dossier, allowing the contents to spill out, wasn’t scripted. He actually dropped it by accident.
And that isn’t the only unscripted instance.
The moment when Kurtz throws the book at the photographer—calling out “MUTT!”—was a result of Brando’s real-life frustration with Hopper’s ranting.
And that famous “Horrors” speech of Kurtz’s was completely, 100% ad-libbed by Brando.
The photos of Kurtz come from previous war films starring Brando, which is why he’s fit in them.
The TV news guy who calls out, “Don’t look at the camera!” is Coppola’s director cameo.
The poem Kurtz reads while the photographer rants is T.S. Elliot’s “The Hollow Men,” to which Elliot attached a quote from Heart of Darkness—a quote mentioning Kurtz.
For those of you interested in the making of this film, Coppola’s wife made a famous documentary following the process: Hearts of Darkness. It’s notorious for showing just how stressful the whole experience was for poor Coppola. To put it mildly, there were a lot of roadblocks and hardships. Filmmaking is not for the faint-hearted.
*(For the non-cinephiles among you, that’s a film term from the French that literally means “look and feel.” It refers to the movie’s scenery, color palette, sound effects, and general atmosphere—all rolled into one concept.)
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