FAVORITE FILM NUMBER ONE: Apocalypse Now (1979)
Nowadays, I occasionally find myself reflecting on the short-winded, yet insidiously influential maxims I was taught as a kid; you know, the type of expressions that are supposed to build and strengthen a person's character: "Life's not fair," "No pain, no gain," "Not all glitter is gold," just to name a few. What I've discovered in the process, though, is that many of them attempt to justify unpleasant experiences. That being understood, while many unpleasant experiences (such as illness, heartbreak, and inclement weather) are naturally (and for the most part) unavoidable (and thus are in need of something to justify them as a defense mechanism of sorts), others only give the illusion that they are unavoidable. One of the greatest examples of such is war...an institution of destructive human behavior and aggression that is so often labeled an inevitable cycle of life. However, many historical figures, thinkers and artists throughout the ages have challenged that notion, and one of the greatest cinematic masterpieces that has ever represented that opposition is Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 war-flick, Apocalypse Now.
Written by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola, the film is inspired by Joseph Conrad's 1898 novella, Heart of Darkness, a story about an English tradesman sent down the African Congo River to investigate a seemingly insane ivory trader, Kurtz. Transplanting the time and setting of the story to the Vietnamese conflict during the late 1960s/early 1970s, Apocalypse Now closely parallels the respective novella. Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen of "Badlands" and "The West Wing") is a young army captain who's been given the assignment of traveling down the (fictional) Nung River in search of a murderous and allegedly insane, renegade America colonel, Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando of "On The Waterfront" and "The Godfather"), whom he is ordered to assassinate. Along the way, Willard encounters a number of strange people and abhorrent situations that illustrate not only the "horrors of war," but also the complexity of the human soul and the nature of brutality.
The primary strengths of this film rely on the visually-arresting cinematography, soundtrack, and acting. However, it's the nature of Apocalypse Now's message that gives the film its mystical allure. Although many well-written, visually-grabbing, superbly-acted war films, such as Lewis Milestone's All Quiet On The Western Front (1930) and Oliver Stone's Platoon (1986), have earned significant prestige by radically representing the gruesomeness of war, Coppola does so in a more balanced, unbiased manner, allowing the striking visuals of carnage, flames, caves, darkness, and fog to speak for the viewers. The authenticity of his story can also be closely and uncannily identified with the hellish production of the film itself (riddled with a number of "Murphy's Law" incidents, including but not limited to heart attacks, typhoons, budgetary constraints, and Marlon Brando himself). In the end, what we are left with a number of ambiguous, open-ended questions that all people can relate to: why do humans engage in war? What does it mean to go insane or become barbaric and uncivilized? What effects can battle have on a soldier?
The opening scene of the movie, in which, after fading in from black to a simple backdrop of palm trees against a plain grey sky, colored wafts of smoke appear, helicopters intermittently float by, and a sudden emergence of orangish-glowing, Napalm-induced fire consumes a forest and reduces it to ashes, is a paradigmatic representation of the psychology of war-- both in terms of what drives people to it and what effects it has on those involved. Superimposed over the initial image, our view of Willard--a faded, dissipated look on his face--as he lays in his hotel room bed, idly smoking a cigarette, lets us know that war has irreparably warped his mind and soul. Further accentuating that is the hypnotic whooshing of helicopter and ceiling fan blades (accompanied by The Doors' haunting and atmospheric musical piece, "The End"), perpetually whirling about in circles. What Coppola seems to suggest here is that war burrows its way into those who partake in it, and is a seemingly never-ending cycle of existence.
Coppola also attacks the paradoxes of war, specifically highlighting the absurdity that an army would rationally calculate and strategize their attacks and set up "rules of engagement," but then resort to aggressive and monstrous, blood-lust-driven savagery when actually immersed in the heat of battle. His famous and beautifully-edited, 10-minute long helicopter attack sequence is a quintessential example of that. The helicopters emerging from the horizon of the bright, blue early-morning sky-- accompanied by a diegetic version of Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries that accentuates the sequence's direct allusions to Norse mythology and Viking longboat attacks of the medieval past--balances our perceptions of war. The soldiers fly in with the adrenaline, testosterone-filled rush of a little boy in front of his video game set, a Hollywood cowboy or a brawny star quarterback, relishing in the heart-pumping, exhilerating joy of explosions, gunfire, and death. However, when they land and one G.I.'s leg is severed by an explosion, the gruesome reality starts sinking in. Similarly, the people that Lieutenant Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall of "The Godfather" and "Tender Mercies"), a gung-ho surfer and Wagner aficionado, orders the assault on are supposedly Viet-Cong, but whether or not the U.S. helicopter fleet acted justly or barbarically is intentionally never made clear. As Kilgore fearlessly strolls along the beach, completely unaffected by the explosions going off around him, his iconic quote "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" demonstrates, similar to Willard, just how psychologically damaged he has become by war.
The rest of the film (jam-packed with classic references of everything from Dante's Divine Comedy and Homer's Odyssey to Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Aeneas' Golden Bough), in which Willard and his crew mates make their way up the river and slowly descend into madness, further highlights the eminence of Apocalypse Now, neatly balancing direct episodes from Heart of Darkness--which stress the brutality of 19th century European imperialism--with scenes that stress the brutality of war. What we're left with is a purposely inexplicable, yet highly evocative story that transcends all times and cultures. Man, in the words of Kurtz, "crawls along the blade of a straight razor," always walking that thin line between love, hate, civility, savagery, sanity, and madness. But don't let the morose tagline "the horror...the horror" fool you. This film is a strange yet "beautiful...beautiful" work that must be seen by every person at some point in their life. "(The) End" of story!
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