There are war movies, and then there’s Apocalypse
Now.
In the late 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola hauled
a film crew into the jungles of the Philippines
and barely emerged with his sanity intact.
And, he emerged with a film that – after
two years of work in the editing room – is
as much about one soldier’s journey into
his own mind, as it is about the American
war in Vietnam.
It’s an ambitious film that, on its face,
shouldn’t work.
And yet it does, on so many levels.
[Intro Music Plays]
Director Francis Ford Coppola was riding a
wave of success when he went off into the
jungle to make Apocalypse Now.
Over the previous seven years he’d made
three bona fide classics: The Godfather, The
Conversation, and The Godfather: Part II.
He’d proven he could tell intensely personal
stories with the scope and scale of myths.
His fascination with rituals, his daring camerawork,
and his ability to put viewers into the heads
of his characters had made him very successful.
Critically, commercially, and artistically.
As the 1970s drew to a close, the major Hollywood
studios were being gobbled up by multinational
corporations.
So executives were becoming more hesitant
to gamble on the personal, ambitious visions
of filmmakers like William Friedkin, Martin
Scorsese, and especially Francis Ford Coppola.
Nevertheless, Coppola leveraged all the clout
he had, threw in a bunch of his own money,
and headed off to the Philippines to make
his dream film.
He planned to use the Joseph Conrad novella
Heart of Darkness as the basis for a story
about the American war in Vietnam.
Conrad’s book follows its narrator Charles
Marlow up the Congo River in search of an
enigmatic ivory trader named Kurtz.
It’s the tale of Marlow’s growing obsession
with Kurtz, as well as a broader critique
of colonialism, and especially British imperialism.
In Apocalypse Now, an American Army captain
named Willard is dispatched by a shadowy group
of senior military officers (including Harrison Ford)to find a Colonel Kurtz and kill him.
Kurtz, we’re told, has gone insane.
He’s surrounded himself with an army of
Montagnard troops and fled
upriver into Cambodia.
When we first meet Willard, played by Martin
Sheen, he’s suffering some kind of post-traumatic
stress dream in a Saigon hotel.
It’s a stunning opening – dissolving from
a lush jungle ravaged by napalm, to thumping
military helicopters, to Willard’s violent
outbursts in the hotel – all scored to
“The End” by the Doors.
This reveals Willard’s damaged psyche, but
also what caused it: the horrors of war.
Then, Willard begins his journey upriver,
traveling on a Navy patrol boat manned by
a motley crew.
There’s the earnest captain known as Chief,
played by Albert Hall.
Sam Bottoms plays the California surf dude
Lance.
Chef, played by Frederic Forrest, is a saucier
from New Orleans who gets wound tighter as
the film continues.
And a baby-faced Lawrence Fishburne plays
Clean, the youngest member of the crew.
Together, these guys ferry Willard deeper
into Vietnam, encountering everything from
a USO show starring Playboy Playmates to a
surf-loving, Wagner-playing Air Cavalry officer
played with gusto by Robert Duvall.
Killgore: If I say it's safe to surf this beach, Captain... It's safe to surf this beach!!!
The sights and sounds of their voyage grow
increasingly absurd.
And the ship’s crew becomes more unbalanced,
as they all look for ways to cope with the
madness of war.
When they finally reach Kurtz’s compound,
they discover macabre temples decorated with
hanging corpses, heads on spikes, and thousands
of silent Montagnard warriors in white paint.
With them is a manic American photojournalist
played by Dennis Hopper who warns Willard
that Kurtz has plans for him.
Photojournalist: He's got something in mind for you. Aren't you curious about that?
Kurtz himself, played by Marlon Brando, remains
an enigma right to the end.
Part warrior, part philosopher, and part tormented
soul, he’s mostly kept in shadows, looming
over Willard.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don't see... any method... at all, sir.
Kurtz beheads Chef before he can call in an
airstrike, but keeps Willard alive, reading
him poetry and attempting to justify his actions
in whispered monologues.
Eventually, Willard decides to take action.
And as the Montagnards slaughter a water buffalo
in an elaborate ceremony, Willard uses the
same kind of machete to kill Kurtz.
Willard then emerges from the temple to face
the warriors, who kneel before him as he takes
Lance by the arm and pulls him back to the
boat.
THE END!
Now, the production of Apocalypse Now was
in serious trouble from the start.
Coppola was behind schedule and over budget
almost immediately.
He fired his lead actor within the first months
of filming.
And the replacement, Martin Sheen, was in
the midst of his own alcoholic breakdown
at the time.
Not to mention, he suffered a heart attack
in the middle of the shoot.
The crew, who was scrambling to keep up with
Coppola rewriting the movie as it was being
shot, returned to the hotel each night for
drug-fueled parties.
Much of the military hardware used in the
film, including the helicopters of the Air
Cavalry Unit, were on loan from the Filipino
military.
More than once, the real army needed them
back to fight their own war.
And partway through production, a typhoon
struck and wiped out nearly all of the sets
and equipment.
The stress of it all became so intense that
Coppola threatened to commit suicide more
than once and even suffered an epileptic seizure.
You know, just your average film shoot…
Except not.
It wasn’t.
Like, at all.
In the end, Coppola shot an unprecedented
one-and-a-half million feet of film, which
comes out to about 240 hours of footage.
It took a team of four editors more than two
years of work to cut the film together, tear
it apart, and reconstruct it.
War journalist Michael Herr was brought in
to co-write Willard’s terse voice over after
test audiences couldn’t understand the story.
But, after all that, the film finally debuted
at the Cannes Film Festival – a year late
– and took home the top prize, the Palme
d’Or.
Apocalypse Now is a movie that emerged out
of a really complicated production process.
And it’s not a film that’s going to be
satisfied with a single interpretation.
One way to look at films is through the lens
of genre.
And the most obvious way to think about Apocalypse
Now is as a war movie.
But what if we look a little deeper?
American scholar B. Ruby Rich makes a compelling
case that Coppola’s film actually moves
through several different genres as it unfolds.
She sees the first part of the film as a western.
Willard is our silent, stoic white man, venturing
into the wilderness because so-called civilized
superiors don’t want to get their hands
dirty.
Rich writes, “There remaining no frontier
for today’s cowboys in the USA, men like
Kilgore must turn instead to Vietnam...
The eastern bankers and railroad tycoons of
yore become here military brass, those shrimp-eating
creatures far from [the] action.”
In place of Native American warriors fighting
to protect their homeland, the American soldiers
in Coppola’s film do battle with a largely
faceless North Vietnamese army.
The military fights with machine guns and
napalm, rather than rifles and small pox,
but the game plan is the same: slaughter the
dehumanized enemy and take their land.
This first part of the film even culminates
in an actual cavalry charge, led by Robert
Duvall’s Kilgore character in his ten-gallon
hat.
It’s even complete with a real life bugle
call.
Rich identifies the second section as a traditional
war film.
And it’s during this section that Willard
fires his only gunshot of the whole movie.
The patrol crew pulls over a passing Vietnamese
sampan, a flat-bottomed wooden boat.
In a tense stand off, Chief orders Chef to
board the boat to inspect its cargo.
Chef: There's nothing on it, man!
Chief: Get on it!
Chef: Alright!!!
Chef finds no contraband, but the stress of
the encounter starts to break him.
The confrontation escalates until a Vietnamese
woman rushes toward Chef.
Before it’s clear she’s only worried about
a puppy hidden in a basket, Clean opens fire.
The high-strung Americans spray the boat with
bullets, killing most of the Vietnamese crew,
and leaving the woman barely alive.
Chief orders her to be brought aboard and
sets a course for the nearest field hospital,
when Willard fires a single shot with his
pistol, killing her.
He shows no emotion other than annoyance.
His mission is Kurtz, and everything else
is a distraction.
Rich identifies this as a central turning
point for Willard’s character:
“Fed up with a code of honor that could
massacre a boat and then feed on its remorse,
Willard remarks [in voice over] that ... in
this moment … he has begun to feel close
to the mysterious Kurtz whose fate lies in
his hands.”
In this scene, Coppola also abandons the special
effects, the darkly funny absurdist touches,
and the rock-and-roll songs that play under
much of the action.
Instead, he presents war in direct, unsentimental
terms.
As senseless, barbaric, and arbitrary.
These soldiers aren’t portrayed as heroic,
like in some war movies.
Instead, they’re weary – losing hope,
mental stability, and, in many cases, their
lives.
But that’s just one way to view the film.
Seen through a psychoanalytic lens, Apocalypse
Now is the story of one man’s journey into
the depths of his own troubled mind, a mind
ravaged by war.
In this reading, the opening of the film dissolves
the boundaries between time and space, as
seen from Willard’s damaged point of view.
As writer Maruerite Valentine puts it, “Willard’s
mind … has lost all capacity to differentiate
between the inside of his head, and the external
– the room, the hotel, Saigon.
Fantasy and reality have become one.”
The other characters Willard encounters on
his trip up the river, then, can be read as
reflections of himself.
The boat crew might represent other coping
strategies he’s tried while in the military,
while Kilgore could be a projection of his
war-loving feelings.
Even the commanding officers who send him
on the mission display the same calculated
dispassion that Willard shows through the
film.
Which means Kurtz could be a reflection of
Willard’s psyche too.
Kurtz is depicted in mostly darkness, as if
seeing him fully would be too much for Willard
to handle.
And he speaks in whispered, fragmented monologues
with unclear meanings.
In a way, he’s what Willard could – and
maybe does – become: pure ruthlessness,
entirely untroubled by morality.
This way of looking at a film is fairly common,
especially in the Slasher genre.
The prolific horror director Wes Craven once
posited,
“...I even think the characters that are
around the hero are elements of an uber personality.
And in this sense it’s like a Folk Tale
that says,
‘Okay, the part of you that’s going to
have sex when something really dangerous is
around?
That part is gonna be killed off…’”
Apocalypse Now’s ending has always divided
critics, some of whom believe the movie loses
its way in the last half hour.
But if we take this psychoanalytic reading
to its logical conclusion, the climax makes
sense.
When Willard gets to the end of his mission,
he recognizes himself in Kurtz, and he isn’t
sure he can go through with the kill.
That hesitance doesn’t make much sense in
a western, a war movie, or even a myth.
But if the story is of a man trying to root
out his worst impulses, to slay the dark,
powerful dragon in his own mind, the final
moments of the movie fit.
Because how do you destroy a piece of yourself,
however terrifying it might be?
As he’s dying, Kurtz utters his famous last
words.
Kurtz: The horror… the horror…
But maybe he’s not talking about the horrors
of Vietnam, or even his own death.
Instead, maybe he’s speaking as part of
a deeply troubled mind at war with itself,
fractured by his particular experience of
post traumatic stress.
Whether you choose to read Apocalypse Now
as an exercise in multi-genre filmmaking,
a journey into a damaged mind, or through
some other lens, one thing is clear: This
is a film that invites multiple interpretations.
It’s a bold, messy masterpiece that nearly
broke its crew, star, and director.
And it remains as relevant today as it did
the day it was released...sadly.
Next time, we’ll trade the jungle of Vietnam
for the Spanish countryside as a little girl
unlocks a fantasy world that just might help
her escape the brutal aftermath of the Spanish
Civil War in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s
Labyrinth.
Crash Course Film Criticism is produced in
association with PBS Digital Studios.
You can head over to their channel to check
out a playlist of their latest amazing shows,
like Origin of Everything, Physics Girl, and
ACS Reactions.
This episode of Crash Course was filmed in
the Doctor Cheryl C. Kinney Crash Course Studio
with the help of these [nice people] and our
amazing graphics team is Thought Cafe.
