XX/XX/25

The End

If you haven’t already seen Apocalypse Now, you probably shouldn't be here. You should go find a copy of the theatrical release - not the director's cut - and watch it. Yeah, for those of you in this situation, that's your main assignment: forget about this fuckin' page and go watch it. Therefore, the rest of this page assumes the reader has seen the film, and thus spoilers will be made liberally.

In short, this is one of my favorite films of all time. It depicts psychidelic violence, naive cruelty, and industrialized incapacity in all its slow belligerence. Machine gun fire overlaps with rock 'n roll overlaps with screams overlaps with a chorus of boredom and novelty. And there's still more; and this movie has that too.

From just a matter of style, the film has an incredible command over sensory overload. The descent from start to finish is like a collage of everything boiling in the post-Tet Offensive American world. At least, this is the collage of every invasive species of media, weaponry, and chemical which smuggled into Vietnam in the late 1960s. In the jungles came Playboy shows, western music, helicopters and gelatin explosives. Apocalypse Now presents all these conditions in a way cinematic, while importantly preserving the urgency of this situation. In other words, for its goals, the film would matter less if it pulled punches. Thankfully it doesn't.

There's not many films this long that I feel support such a run-time (hence why I dislike the later versions), but I feel this is one that deserves it. There's enough interesting moments to make them feel like they're competing with each other for relevance, while all somehow still being memorable - and relevant. It's a movie that would not function as something that isn't a movie. I mean, you have the hotel scene, the playmate show, Lieutenant Kilgore ("Charlie don't surf!"), Do Lung Bridge (my favorite), and of course, Kurtz' compound. And there's more; there's still more!

Now I'll talk a bit about the subtext of the movie. That's another fascinating thing to consider about it. I believe one of Apocalypse Now's most profound offerings is its consideration of moral hypocrisy. The routine inspection scene is a great introduction to this idea, where a group of Vietnamese civillians are slaughtered by the main cast. The characters initiated and finalized this situation flippantly. It's only after they must own the consequences of their bad judgment that they can respect their targets as people. Judging by their reaction, I believe it is the dehumanization of the Vietnamese which allows the Americans to kill them, as killing a person at all is internalized as unacceptable within the American moral framework. Therefore, when their actions are finally known to be against people, the regret is embodied.

I believe that so much of how Kurtz is characterized is as a radical response to the systemized, violent hypocrisy of the American military. He witnessed the lie in the Americans' regret, and correspondingly the clarity of "kill[ing] without feeling, without passion... without judgment." The lie is that the American institution already made a dedication to violence as a principle of operation, yet nonetheless lacks the explicit endorsement of it which would make its violence more effective. As Willard says, "We'd cut 'em in half with a machine gun and then give 'em a Band-Aid," whatever recompense the military could give being superficial and designed to mask accountability. What this visualizes is a schism between ideological objectives: peace, freedom and security being actively contradicted by violence, suppression and international antagonism.

The institution would be better at achieving its goals, hypothetically, if it conditioned the act of killing a person not as something necessarily hot-blooded - not necessarily based on dehumanization - but as something as common as killing an animal. There are problems with this hypothesis, however. Firstly, the tradeoff within the lie is for public support and the security of the public conscience. As indicated by the horror of the cast during the inspection scene, these corpsmen - average, working-class men - are not dedicated or really prepared to kill another person. Their cultural conditioning was not designed to face a reality like that, at least not to the extent that they'd have to decompartmentalize the illusion which stablized the action.

I believe this is how Apocalypse Now addresses the impossibility of prejudice as a tool to justify war, and the implications of justifying war to begin with. To kill with judgment is to express that what one is killing is below their moral standard for humanity and what behavior they can be treated with. Where otherwise a soldier may not consider killing another person, abstracting another's personhood via judgment desensitizes the action, and may even make one feel passionate about doing so. Conversely, to retain the humanization of one's opponent while facing them is to affirm the righteousness of killing on the whole, so that it becomes a readily-available action baked into one's moral architecture.

Ultimately, The situation that Apocalypse finds is between otherwise non-violent social ideals and buraucracies who want to commit wanton violence onto anywhere of material or ideological interest. And I don't think that the cultural and moral residue of either situation is satisfactory. In the American tradition of war, the war is just as much between the unspectacular people deployed to the ground and whoever's opposite of them, as much as it is between these same people and the armies they work for. Perhaps the film's fatalistic expression is that to absolutely justify the US government for what it did in Vietnam - for what it does in any war - is to map its moral sensibilities onto everyone in America. Otherwise, the brutalities of war are functionally hypocritical of the moral standards the warring society holds itself to.

As one final note, for supplementary materials, of course you have the other big Vietnam War movies: Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. These are also iconic if you haven't seen them; and if you think Full Metal Jacket's second half is kind of a slog compared to the first, you're not alone. But additionally, the book Dispatches by Michael Herr is very tonally similar to Apocalypse Now. This is no coincidence either, as Herr actually wrote all of the narration used in the movie.