Apocolypse Now

Apocalypse Now is a fantastic film.

I think that when people think about war they imagine this kind of chaotic, emotional, cathartic event. In reality war is much more businesslike than most could imagine. The film really goes a long way towards showing this reality. The movie depicts a series of terribly horrific events in an incredibly bureaucratic fashion. The mission Capt. Willard receives is given to him in the same way a businessman is sent on a business trip. He is told over a “martini lunch” with all the trimmings by men in suits and ties. He is given a place to be and the people he interacts with are only told the minimum. This is how the military works and it is also why the military is flawed. Col. Kurtz shows this.

The good Colonel is the one who has gone insane, and yet he is effective. He has gone native and does things in a way that scares the central bureaucracy. This alone shows that madness in war can be a very relative thing. Robert Duvall’s character is also effective and yet he still operates in a fairly conventional manner. He is a character to say the least but he has nothing on Kurtz. Unlike Kilgore, Kurtz is no longer fighting for his country or his countrymen. He is simply fighting an enemy that he was unable to properly fight while constrained by the rules of war. He says it best when talking about how pilots are ordered to drop napalm on villages full of innocent people but are unable to write the word fuck on their airplanes because it’s considered obscene. Kurtz has chosen to be obscene, he has chosen to proverbially napalm the whole world and say fuck as much as he wants.

This movie is completely unlike O’Brian’s writing. There is little sentimentality. There is little humanity. The entire purpose of the film is to challenge the American idea of what effective warfighting is like. The mechanized American method of spending billions of dollars to maintain a sense of right and wrong is undone by Kurtz’s native idea of low intensity tribal warfare. It is disturbing to western eyes, and yet Willard’s dossier says he is incredibly effective.