APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX

 

The Politics of Paranoia in America Today

Jerry Lembcke is an associate professor of Sociology at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the author of The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (NYU Press 1998).

Every summer film fair deserves a good war movie. Summer 2001 has one and, no, it isn't Pearl Harbor. The remake of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, due for theater release this week, is the event of the summer for war-film buffs and those interested in the history of filmmaking. Apocalypse Now Redux, as it's titled, is also a "must see" for its insight into America's vexation with a war that ended a quarter century ago.

The basic story line of the film remains unchanged from the original 1979 version. In it, Captain Benjamin Willard is on a secret mission up the Nung River in search of Walter Kurtz, a renegade U.S. Army colonel who has been conducting his own private war from the Cambodian jungle. Willard's orders are to "terminate [Kurtz] with extreme prejudice." Along the way, Willard encounters the corruption, horror and depravity that marked the outer boundaries of the U.S. experience in Southeast Asia during the 1960s and 1970s. Willard's journey into the heart of the jungle becomes a journey into his own heart and by the time he arrives at the compound that Kurtz has fashioned out of an ancient temple, his own humanity is as twisted as that of his prey.

Apocalypse Now won Academy Awards for cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and sound artist Walter Murch and has maintained a regular presence on many "best" lists of films about the American experience in Vietnam. Part of the continuing fascination with it has to do with extraordinary effort that went into its making.

Filmed on location in the Philippine jungle, using real helicopters and fighter jets flown by real pilots, all loaners from Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos's military, the film's production is nothing if not a study in contrast with the computer-driven special effects that we see in films like Pearl Harbor. The "heroes" of Apocalypse Now's filming were the set designers and builders who constructed credible facsimiles of temple ruins and a French plantation and solved numerous engineering problems associated with moviemaking in the jungle. When Typhoon Olga hit in May 1976, Coppola insisted that production take advantage of the natural wind and rain but, inevitably, nature had its way and the technical infrastructure laid with months of work and millions of dollars, was washed away. Shooting stopped for six weeks while crew was laid off and the director sought refinancing.

The classical character of the story told by Apocalypse Now has added to its durability. Joseph Conrad's 1898 novel Heart of Darkness, about the European conquest of Africa, is widely acknowledged to have influenced John Milius and Coppola, both of whom are credited as screenwriters for the film. Conrad's story was about a journalist traveling into the Congo where he finds men whose service as agents of Belgian colonialism has cost them their own humanity. Like Heart of Darkness, the film uses Willard's journey into the heart of the jungle and center of premodern culture for an allegorical exploration of the underside of our own colonial psyche.

The enduring quality of Apocalypse Now is a testament to the classical issues it treated and its place in filmmaking history. But the importance of this film for mainstream Americans has less to do with what went into it -- few of us, after all, know or care enough about film making or 19th century classics to be drawn to the theater in August to see a 20-year-old film that is 50 minutes longer than its original -- than with the state of American political culture today. Thirty years after its making, it is clear that Apocalypse Now anticipated the paranoia that would engulf attempts to understand how and why the United States lost the war.

Soon after accepting his assignment to find and assassinate Kurtz, Willard is headed up the Mekong River toward Cambodia. As he reads the dossier on Kurtz, Willard's voice-over reveals that Kurtz was at odds with his superiors over the conduct of the war since its earliest days. Kurtz had been in Vietnam when the war was still an off-the-books endeavor run by the CIA. From what we are told, it's unclear whether Kurtz was CIA or a military man on assignment from the CIA. But the file given to Willard said Kurtz had been "groomed for a top position in the 'Corporation,'" an often-used code word for the CIA. When Kurtz returned from Vietnam in 1964, we are told, "his report to President Johnson was rejected." That was the turning point in his career. He completes airborne training, joins the Special Forces, and returns to Vietnam.

Apocalypse Now's writers had detected something in the immediate post-war culture that would become explosive by the 1990s.

What has been in the film all along and missed by scholars and critics -- but probably noticed by many other viewers -- is the intrigue surrounding the split between the CIA and the military over how the war would be fought and the paranoia of the military people about the control of their operations by the CIA, a secret civilian agency. In the film, Kurtz is said to have gone insane, presumably driven mad by the horror of war. Washington wanted him assassinated because he was carrying on a maverick operation in Cambodia, using "unsound" methods. But Willard wonders aloud "what they really had against Kurtz." "It wasn't just insanity and murder," he says, "there was enough of that to go around for everyone."

We never learn what it was that made Kurtz a target for Willard's hunter-killer mission or who the "they" was who had ordered the hit, silences that probably fueled the fantasies of those able to read the film's political message. The idea that some GIs, who the government publicly claimed to be MIA, were really defectors -- the sub-plot of several recent books, films, and newscasts -- is also introduced when Willard learns that a Captain Richard Foley had previously been dispatched to kill Kurtz. Foley did not return and the government told his family he was MIA, although they knew he had defected to Kurtz's unit. Again, the appearance of this story line in a film that went into production in the mid-1970s, at a time when charges of government lying about POWs and MIAs were first being made, points to the fact that Apocalypse Now's writers had detected something in the immediate post-war culture that would become explosive by the 1990s.

The ambiguity of Kurtz's political identity, finally, allowed him to be used as a prototype for the kind of paramilitary warrior drawn to the militia movement in the post-war years. Before Willard kills Kurtz, Kurtz tells him about the time he helped a Special Forces team to inoculate some Vietnamese children for polio. Later, some enemy soldiers came and chopped off the inoculated arms and threw them into a pile. Kurtz was struck by the political brilliance of that act. "The genius," he says. "The will to do that. Perfect. Genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. Then I could understand that they were stronger than we were. Because they could stand that." The enemy soldiers, Kurtz said, "were not monsters, but trained cadres who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children, who are filled with love, men who are moral who at the same time are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment."

Kurtz's embrace of horror as the ultimate expression of love for family and country seduced Willard into a similar mindset and, in retrospect, the scene appears to have been an eerie harbinger of the political violence manifested by the American militia movement during the 1980s and 1990s. If the film meant to suggest that Kurtz's will to kill lived on in the personage of Willard, the likeness between Kurtz and an anti-government militant like Timothy McVeigh is brought to mind. Indeed, the coldly calculating and emotionally barricaded figure described by McVeigh's biographers Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck in American Terrorist could have been mentored in moral reasoning by Kurtz -- or Willard.

With the reintroduction of film footage cut from the original most reviewers are simply asking whether the added 50 minutes make it a better movie? Measured for its aesthetic value, the answer is probably no, but for its value in helping us understand the direction that American political culture took in the 20 years since its first release, the new version brings into relief the narrative of conspiratorial sellout that America's political right wing made its own during the 1980s and 1990s.

Not all the additions work in that way, of course. The inclusion of some of the previously cut material makes it clear why it was left out in the first place. The hijacking of Colonel Kilgore's surfboard by Willard's crew, for example, is cute but redundant for the development of the characters and story lines. The scene with Willard's crew having sex with the touring Playboy bunnies is vulgar and its reinsertion in Redux is clumsy.

The longest piece that we see for the first time in the new release is the plantation sequence and its inclusion adds a political touch seldom seen in Hollywood movies. While passing upriver, Willard's team stumbles upon a French rubber plantation replete with its founding family of expatriate inhabitants, holdovers from the French period of colonialism and survivors of France's defeat by Ho Chi Minh's nationalist army in 1954. Their ghostly presence 14 years later heralds, on the one hand, that there is no future for Westerners -- French or American -- in this beautiful but hostile land while, on the other, their stubborn refusal to accept defeat and go home anticipates the American slowness to accept the same reality.

Apocalypse Now Redux is at least as much about how America is today as it was then.

Willard's crew goes ashore where it shares a resplendent dinner with the family of Philippe De Marais. After dinner, De Marais lectures the Americans on the history of Vietnamese resistance to foreign aggression and argues with a relative about the inevitability of French, and then American, defeat. Recalling the paranoia that swept French political culture after its troops were routed at Dien Bien Phu, De Marais laid the blame for the loss of Indochina to betrayal by Communists in the French government. De Marais's analysis of the Euro-American experience in Southeast Asia, supposedly written by Coppola, is a rare attempt to put the war in the historical context of the French experience which, even decades later, will prove enlightening for many who see Redux.

Watching this scene in 2001 is a time-warp experience because the now dominant, if wrong, interpretation of why we lost in Vietnam is an echo of De Marais's speech: that our troops were sold out by weak-kneed liberals in government and stabbed in the back by the political left in the streets; upon their return home, our "boys" were spat on by an effeminate counter-culture movement that continues to sap the nation's military prowess.

This more political reading of Apocalypse Now and Redux raises different questions than those on most reviewers' minds this August. If Heart of Darkness was the text for Apocalypse Now's subtext, what was the source for its conspiratorial political narrative? The flattering answer would be that Coppola and Milius had the unusual power to read what was on the mind of America and make a film that would resonate with where the country would be two decades later. The truth, however, is that they apparently bought into the same post-war mythologies that gripped and misled much of Middle America in the 1980s and 1990s. Tucked into the last pages of Peter Cowie's recent reconstruction of the film's making in the Apocalypse Now Book, are quotes from Cowie's 1999 interview of Walter Murch, the film's Oscar-winning sound technician. Murch claims that many men "now registered as missing in action from Vietnam were alive and well in Southeast Asia" at the time the film was made and that they came to the Philippines and "advised on the making of this film." They were, Murch said, "shadowy figures, Kurtz's virtual army." In the light of voluminous research debunking the reports of living MIAs, Murch's revelation that the film makers incorporated the experiences of men claiming to be MIA Vietnam veterans into the film -- to say nothing of Murch's belief that there are, still today, living MIAs in that region -- is simply stunning.

Moving downstream, historically, from 1979, the question is the degree to which Apocalypse Now is important for its interpretation of the myths of Heart of Darkness versus the creator and conveyer of its own, new, political myths. The idea that MIAs and POWs survived in Southeast Asia and that the government has always know about them and denied their existence is, of course, one of the great myths of the last quarter century. Apocalypse Now took that myth one step deeper, however, with its story that the government actually hunted and killed GIs it suspected of breaking ranks with officialdom. Apparently dismissed by the critics as screenwriter fancy in the original release, this dimension of the film's story wasn't ignored by right-leaning filmgoers with an anti-government agenda. In 1998, virtually the same story line stepped from the political underground onto America's television screens when CNN reported on Operation Tailwind, a 1970 raid into Laos by a U.S. special forces SOG team. The target: American military defectors ensconced in a secret camp from which they fought for the North Vietnamese. The report was shortly retracted and the producers fired but questions about the ultimate source of the story remain. Seeing Apocalypse Now Redux, one can't help recognizing the influence of the film on the popular culture that preconditioned the CNN reporters to think they had stumbled onto the real thing with their hunter-killer-defector story.

Apocalypse Now Redux is recommended by most reviewers for its historical importance: how the film was made, its rendering of Conrad's classic, and what it says about the Vietnam-war period. Those are good reasons to see the film. But Apocalypse Now Redux is at least as much about how America is today as it was then and it gives us a chance see the beginning of how we got this way. In a sense, Apocalypse Now (the original) created the politically reality that Redux now resonates with and that is a testimony to powerful film.

Published: Aug 07 2001