Once upon a time, the great François Truffaut said, “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film.” The details of when he said this, and more importantly, under what governing context he said this, are unclear. Which explains its enduring (im)potency: bite-sized, contextless, and overconfident generality is the basis for modern-day Film Twitter (& Reddit) discourse because it encourages vocal supporters and even louder detractors to similarly provide bite-sized, contextless, and overconfident defenses and rebuttals to it. The guiding principle for those defending Truffaut’s statement, succinctly summarized by writer Tom Brook in his BBC piece that turns the declarative statement into a probing question, is that “movies will inevitably glorify combat when they portray the adventure and thrill of conflict — and the camaraderie between soldiers.” The counterargument is simple: there are just too many movies that don’t do that!
And they’re correct — especially when we look beyond the Hollywood filmmaking factory. The long-form documentaries of Claude Lanzmann on the Holocaust (most known for Shoah) and Ken Burns on almost every major American War are devoid of all the usual thrills you expect from a war film; their methodical commitment to investigating war’s rotten heart of darkness from multiple points of view is all about moral reckoning, not glorification. Similarly, if much more obliquely, arthouse films from directors like Claire Denis (Beau Travail), Lucrecia Martel (Zama), and Chantal Akerman (Almayer’s Folly) are defiantly anti-war in their emphasis on inaction and isolation. The European protagonists in these films are ghosts: colonizers who wander around a piece of colonized land almost comically, without any sense of reason or purpose. These filmmakers consistently utilize other POVs — especially of those colonized — to highlight the colonizer’s alienation not only from the land they occupy, but from their own sense of self.
The luxury of exploring internal strife and moral reckoning minus engaging combat, however, is close to impossible in a multi-million-dollar Hollywood production. (Unless you’re Terrence Malick making a comeback to filmmaking after 20 years with The Thin Red Line in 1999). They may form the film’s emotional heart, but never inform its selling point. That remains thrilling combat, obvious conflict, and American camaraderie — elements that fundamentally make it impossible for a big-budget war film with Hollywood A-listers to be an anti-war film because they inevitably glorify the spectacle of war.
And the theatrical version of Francis Ford Coppola’s endlessly mythologized Apocalypse Now is no different. It’s a film that belongs to, and most importantly, stays true to, the POV of Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen), a disillusioned U.S. Army officer addicted to the sights and sounds (in other words, cinematic spectacle) of the Vietnamese jungle at the height of America’s interventionism in Vietnam in the 1970s. He’s unconcerned with anything or anyone un-American, even though they consistently surround him — and by embodying that subjectivity as committedly and spectacularly as Coppola does, Apocalypse Now continues to be one of the truest and most self-knowing but not self-conscious war films about America’s inherent impossibility to make an anti-war film. Because, like Willard, the poisoned desire — of filmmaker and audience alike — is to be in the jungle and conquer it, the fear of dying for no moral purpose or justification be damned!
Nowhere is this better expressed than in the film’s extraordinary four-minute opening sequence that places us inside Willard’s head. We don’t see anything at first here; we only hear the increasingly violent sound of helicopter blades chopping through something or someone. Once the film’s establishing shot of a picture-perfect postcard image of a Vietnamese forest appears, however, these sounds fade away — but only for a brief second. As soon as we see what’s presumably a U.S. Army helicopter cut through the image’s foreground, the sounds come roaring back — louder and more violent than before. But then, suddenly, another non-diegetic musical track takes over, one that has come to define the tormented, psychedelic fever dream of Apocalypse Now — “The End,” performed by The Doors. Its lyrics mourn the death of everything pure and sane, but its oddly comforting soft guitar instrumentation also expresses a relaxed contentment about it. The image accompanying the soundtrack — of the lush green Vietnamese forest now lit up in rich-orange flames and covered in a fog of yellow dust — further pushes the film into the realm of celebration. The end, shown at the film’s beginning, is glorious, radiant, and operatic, then: a sight to behold and be dazzled by.
And it remains that way even when the camera pans away from this particular shot. Revealing another replica image of an unburned lush-green forest now superimposed with an extreme close-up shot of Willard’s inverted face, ready to light up his cigarette, Coppola, through the film’s first (of many) haunting double-exposure shot, suggests the beginning of another end. Willard, and hence we, the audience to his Vietnam, continue to see, sense, and smell another apocalypse after already having witnessed one. For nothing real or mundane really feels real or mundane after having lived and killed in the jungle; everything — from the whirring sounds of a hotel room’s fans to the intoxicating sight of Willard taking an extensive drag of a cigarette — elicits an unconscious, almost surreal desire on his part to relive the thrill of the jungle. It doesn’t matter if it’s as a distant spectator, comfortably seated inside a U.S. Army helicopter circling the jungle, ready to blow it up; or, as an active participant, ready to light up the brownish-green jungle, like a cigarette, into bright-orange ashes. The desire and impulse — to belong there, to destroy there — lingers.
So, the film’s narrative supplies Willard with a motive to do both. His commanding officer’s MO states: Willard is to first locate the mysterious Green Beret Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), who has been leading his personal army on illegal guerilla missions into enemy territory, and then “terminate [him] with extreme prejudice.” To do this, Willard has to travel through mazy rivers in a plastic patrol boat with four other American soldiers, unaware of his motives.
In other films, and to some extent even in “The Final Cut” of Apocalypse Now, which adds 35 minutes to the theatrical version’s runtime, the budding (or debilitating) relationship between these men constitutes its emotional heart. However, the theatrical version’s fractured narrative, and guardedly confessional tone, most faithfully adopts the unreliable, first-person narration of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, consistently emphasizing Willard’s disassociation from everyone around him. He’s, more than anything or anyone, always focused on mythologizing Kurtz by listing his extraordinary military record as we repeatedly get close-up shots of the documents he’s reading, with each Kurtz fact or quote read out loud, dissolving, one double exposure shot at a time, into Willard’s conscience. The closer he feels to him, the fewer questions he asks of him. If anything, he’s increasingly skeptical of the U.S. Army’s intention to kill him at all, comparing Kurtz’s “illegal” activities as not much different at all from what other high-ranking American officers stationed in Vietnam are also doing.
Coppola intersperses Willard’s self-serious moments of Kurtz’s myth-building with different episodes that document exactly that: America’s gloriously grotesque destruction of Vietnam. But, like the entirety of Apocalypse Now, Coppola partakes much more in celebrating the excess (creating iconography, another form of mythmaking) than undercutting it. The most infamous example of this is the “Ride of the Valkyries” sequence — best remembered for the great Robert Duvall’s Lieutenant Colonel “Bill” Kilgore pridefully saying, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” after a fleet of American choppers obliterate a heavily populated Vietnamese village — Hollywood-style. But how and why we actually get to this point in the film is comically ridiculous: Kilgore is, essentially, using this synchronized attack to impress Lance (Sam Bottoms), a young and moderately famous surfer recently drafted into war and on-board Willard’s plastic patrol boat. He wants to see him surf, and this is the only place in his vicinity that provides him the highest peak to do so — everyone else’s lives be damned! Coppola documents this entire discussion without mocking or even providing an ironic counterpoint. He documents it as Willard sees it — at first, casually, and then, in all its grandiosity — before, for the briefest of seconds, revealing the genuine horror of it all via a simple hard cut that drops us from the American flights thumping out Wagner to Vietnamese grounds standing still in pin-drop silence. It’s one of the film’s rare moments of reality, in which nothing — no voiceover, expressionist lighting, or bombastic spectacle — covers or colors the image.
But it’s over before we can sniff, let alone inhale it. We’re back in the boat with Willard, motoring down the river, encountering other American posts in Vietnam like the Playboy Bunnies arena (a frat-house-like station built for the boys to unload their stress) and the “Who’s the commanding officer here” Bridge (an unchecked, trigger-happy station also built for the boys to unload their stress) that provide similar sight and sound pleasures to the “The Ride of the Valkyries” sequence. Kurtz remains The Kurtz — even after we reach his post. There’s little attempt to demythologize him, to make him less of an enigma. If anything, the godly combination of Vittorio Storaro’s chiaroscuro lighting and Brando’s simultaneously tired and terrifying voice only make him more of a God — full of contradictory and, at times, nonsensical beliefs, sure, but still unforgettable, immortalized as mythic mystery. The desire, then, to solve, destroy, or, like Willard, even be him remains — so why wouldn’t we want to stay in the apocalyptic fog of this jungle forever?
Published as part of Francis Ford Coppola: As Big As Possible.