HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE
A little over a decade ago in an English film magazine I made a rather foolish prediction: “Perhaps by the 90s a sufficient time gap will have elapsed to allow [American] filmmakers to approach the subject of Vietnam in a more detached, balanced, and analytical manner.” Cockeyed optimist that I was, I reasoned that some historical distance would allow certain blank spots in our knowledge and understanding of Vietnam to be filled–not doused in amber and framed in gold while remaining blank spots. I took to heart Ernest Hemingway’s famous declaration in a Paris Review interview: “If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.” I reasoned that the gaping holes in our Vietnam cover story would finally reduce that protective garment to tatters and permit some light to shine through.
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Like much of Coppola’s best work–The Conversation, the Godfather trilogy–Apocalypse Now teeters on the edge of greatness, and perhaps it wouldn’t teeter at all if greatness weren’t so palpably what it was lusting after. To my mind it functions best as a series of superbly realized set pieces bracketed by a certain amount of pretentious guff, some of which might be traced back to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, the movie’s point of departure. (“Is anything,” asked critic F.R. Leavis, “added to the oppressive mysteriousness of the Congo by such sentences as: ‘It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention–‘?”) But much of the guff, I’d wager, stems from the fact that Coppola never quite worked out what he wanted to say, a fact he often acknowledged at the time and for which there’s plenty of evidence in Hearts of Darkness. Indeed, Coppola’s continuing doubt and verbal self-laceration–at one point he calls the film “The Idiodyssey”–is a major element of the saga being celebrated here: the Passion of the Artist writ large, made to seem far more important than the mere suffering and deaths of a few hundred thousand nameless and faceless peasants (and American soldiers) across the South China Sea.
Coppola’s movie is a nice late-70s liberal statement about U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the excess it entailed–and I don’t intend “nice” or “late-70s liberal” to be condescending. For all its failings and shortcomings, Apocalypse Now was probably the best big-budget, big-statement American movie about the Vietnam war that we had in the 70s, and it’s questionable whether we’ve seen much improvement in this subgenre since. Platoon clearly is more authentic, and Full Metal Jacket at its best may conjure up more profound ideas about warfare, but neither film comes close to the total experience of spaced-out insanity and sensory overload that Coppola’s Cannes statement suggests and that his movie amply furnishes.
“What it was really like” means, of course, what it was like for Americans in Vietnam–Herr’s subject in Dispatches–not what it was like for Vietnamese. And the main poetic insight of Apocalypse Now–which borrows more than just a page or two from Herr–is that, for Americans at least, Vietnam was just like a movie. In Hearts of Darkness Coppola remarks at one point, “A film director is one of the last dictatorial posts left in a world getting more and more democratic.” Clearly Coppola is likening himself to Kurtz, and similar comments crop up frequently in the documentary–as well they should, because above all else Apocalypse Now is a movie about being a movie director. The key sequence, the one everyone remembers, is Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Duvall) of the Ninth Air Cavalry attacking a Vietcong beachhead with Wagner blaring from the helicopters and soldiers surfing ecstatically behind the boats. (The character of Kilgore, modeled mainly on George C. Scott’s General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove, offers a comic preview of Kurtz.) We don’t need Hearts of Darkness to tell us that Kilgore’s “achievement” in this attack parallels Coppola’s achievement in setting up and executing the sequence.
It’s also to the credit of Hearts of Darkness that in most of the clips from Apocalypse Now the original ‘Scope format is preserved rather than cut down to the usual video-screen ratio. Moreover, many of the participants interviewed in the film show a sophisticated awareness of the ambiguity of their enterprise. (We’re told a lot about the massive drug consumption; Frederic Forrest remarks at one point, “We felt like we really weren’t there,” and Sam Bottoms admits to using pot, LSD, speed, and alcohol between as well as during various takes. Indeed, the communal high may have been the crew and cast’s closest spiritual link to American soldiers in Vietnam, and this registers all the way through the picture.)
