This movie, then, is really about a bunch of pale guys, Coppola included, wading into their own hearts of darkness.
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The only Vietnamese speaking part belongs to a south Vietnamese army translator, who gets to yammer: "This man is dirty VC! He wants water! He can drink paddy water!" This in a movie that Coppola famously declared "is not about Vietnam - it is Vietnam". You may have noticed that I have so far mentioned no Vietnamese characters. He's, he's a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas." Hard to imagine worse lines spoken by a first-rate actor. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, with fractions." He even manages to splice TS Eliot into his blathering: "I'm a little man. A jester in Kurtz's court, he swoons when the master declaims poetry and gushes out trippy inanities such as: "This is dialectics! It's very simple dialectics. When one of the soldiers balks, Kilgore barks: "If I say it's safe to surf this beach, captain, it's safe to surf this beach!"Īt the end of their journey, what's left of the crew run into a raving photojournalist, played by Dennis Hopper. He then orders some of his men to surf during the firefight. Attacking a village held by Charlie, he blasts Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries from the sky. He appears to symbolise the ever-optimistic, gung-ho, goofy yet deadly US military machine. At the mouth of the Nung river, they run into a kinetic Colonel Kilgore. The ending is a muck of half-baked ideas and well-done cinematography. What they are heading towards is "the worst place on earth", Kurtz's compound in the heart of the jungle, and their gory, almost picaresque encounters along the way are the meat of this movie, its only points, because nothing really happens once they get there. Instead of drifting down the Mississippi with a negro sidekick, however, Willard is now chugging up the Nung river in the company of Chief, Clean, surfer dude Lance and Chef. If anything he is a grown-up Huckleberry Finn. What the hell else was I gonna do? But I didn't know what I'd do when I found him." Willard's passive face never betrays the angst of Klaus Kinski in Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God, to cite another crazy-quest-up-the-river movie. He accepts the assignment to hunt down Kurtz with blasé resignation: "I took the mission. He doesn't want to save democracy or kill the Commies, or even get high on the adrenaline of war. He has no real aim, not even a crazy one. Willard longs for the jungle, but it is never clear what he wants to do once he gets there. Perhaps this is post-traumatic stress disorder, or maybe it's just someone trashing his dorm room after a frat party. At the start of the film, Willard gets drunk, strips himself, and punches a mirror. He appears more befuddled than shell-shocked, and his voiceover narration, written by the journalist Michael Herr, is much livelier than anything that actually comes out of his mouth. In Apocalypse Now, that agent is Captain Willard.Īs a seasoned soldier and CIA agent, with one tour of Vietnam already behind him, Willard comes over as strangely innocent and unmarked. Such absolute freedom cannot go unpunished, however, and so each man is pursued by an agent from the society he has left behind.
Surrounded by "natives", each becomes a god, beholden to no rules of civilisation. Travelling upriver, each man finds his proper domain in the jungle. In Apocalypse Now, drawn from this book, a character named Kurtz escapes civilisation and domesticity (the US army and his wife) to go wild in Cambodia. I n Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness, a character named Kurtz escapes civilisation and domesticity (England and his wife) to go wild in the Congo.
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