Friday, July 25, 2014

Apocalypse Now psychedelia

10:08 AM | Posted by
River of Dreams
Benjamin Mercer on Apocalypse Now


 The famed first sequence of Apocalypse Now not only lays the hallucinatory groundwork for the rest of the film, but it also foregrounds the very scale of the destruction wrought during the Vietnam war: To the frayed preliminary strains of the Doors’ “The End,” helicopters swarm in slow motion over an anonymous patch of jungle, a bright-yellow plume of smoke dancing eerily in the chopper blades’ current; suddenly, an inferno, unleashed from above, engulfs the landscape, and the camera—which has heretofore been completely fixed—begins tracking to the right, effectively measuring the detonation’s impact as it moves along. A series of dissolves then positions this less as an actual event than one officer’s fevered encapsulation of the conflict he can’t seem to tear himself away from: A man appears, his face upside down, superimposed over the blaze, as he takes a slow drag on a cigarette, evidently hypnotized by the helicopter whirr of the ceiling fan above. Later in the same Saigon-hotel-room sequence, that man, special-operations officer Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen), shatters a full-length mirror with his fist, suggesting the impossibility of assimilating the war’s grand-scale horrors has led directly to this downward spiral of self-destruction.

Rightfully regarded as one of the finest films on the subject of war ever made, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now nonetheless also happens to be one of the most perennially elusive and disconcerting consensus classics of the American cinema. Discussion of the movie’s actual action has long seemed almost beside the point. There is the enduring Hollywood legend of the hellish production in the Philippines, the movie’s status as one of the money-hemorrhaging swan songs of a marvelously unruly era of domestic feature filmmaking, and the long list of homages and parodies it has inspired. Perhaps this is in part because the film itself is so difficult to pin down. It has a clear, linear narrative direction (Coppola and screenwriter John Milius, loosely adapting Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, use a simple journey’s-progress template), but an altogether more unsettled relationship to its sometimes top-heavy themes (the rottenness of the Vietnam war, the rottenness of war in general, the fragility of the human psyche, the meaning of civilization, etc.). Grasping the film as a whole is even more difficult in its 2001 (Coppola-preferred) Redux cut, a more languidly fluid affair. For one thing, women feature much more prominently: In this 50-minute-longer version, members of Willard’s crew canoodle with a pair of Playboy bunnies after their USO show, and Willard goes to bed with a French woman at the ghostly rubber plantation where she’s holding out.

A strong common thread may be found, though, throughout many of the film’s most arresting scenes, including that iconic bad-trip opener: the nauseatingly theatrical dimension of war—a key reason why this movie in particular, shot by the great Vittorio Storaro, stands to gain from an expansive theatrical presentation. Vietnam appears here as a crucible of chaos, a place occupied by a corps of distorted personalities, where only the most flamboyantly brutal gestures seem to register through the candy-colored napalm haze. Once Willard receives his orders to go upriver to kill Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando)—a decorated American officer who has gone rogue in a highly extravagant and “irregular” manner, amassing an army of followers deep in the jungle, over the Cambodian border—the nightmare commences in earnest. A patrol boat—whose motley crew also includes fired-up Clean (Laurence Fishburne), spaced-out pro surfer Lance (Sam Bottoms), tightly wound Chef (Frederic Forrest), and the older Chief (Albert Hall), stoically manning the helm—provides the means of transport.

Each scene unfolds as though it were a stop-off at some dystopic movie already in progress, but one in which real human atrocity can periodically pierce the rest of the charade. Perhaps most notable is the early rendezvous with Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore (Robert Duvall), a barrel-chested cock-of-the-walk commander who seems to relish the chaos around him, and who leads the formation of helicopters during the spectacular “Flight of the Valkyries” air strike, a barrage that’s presented, sickeningly, like a commemorative fireworks display. In voiceover (journalist Michael Herr penned the narration), Willard observes that Kilgore will always emerge from battle unscathed: “He was just one of those guys with that weird light around him. He just knew he wasn’t going to get so much as a scratch here.” From one stage to another: Soon after the Kilgore episode, Willard and his men pull over for fuel and find themselves taking in a USO show featuring a trio of Playboy bunnies (one of the women is dressed as a cowboy, another as an Indian), though the extended tease ends abruptly when a riot breaks out at the waterfront amphitheater. In Coppola’s film, there comes to seem something uniquely American about this kind of garish display.

A gradual redirecting of the thematic spotlight occurs not long after the USO scene. Much of Apocalypse Now’s haunting overall effect stems from the fact that, as the journey upriver progresses, the film’s focus seems to dilate, rather than constrict, moving further away from a Vietnam-specific commentary to a more dispersed meditation on the since-time-immemorial impulses at the dark heart of mankind. This diffusion of themes occurs organically, so that the acid take on America’s aimless conduct in Vietnam doesn’t feel abandoned so much as transmuted. But after the sampan massacre—the film’s closest-range atrocity, during which the skittish Clean opens fire on a vaguely suspect family of Vietnamese farmers—the theater of violence continues on a stage whose dimensions are more difficult to make out than the contours of the battlefield.

A kind of slow-stroboscope psychedelia takes over at the Do Lung Bridge, where faces fall in and out of the darkness as fizzling flares and seemingly undirected bursts of mortar fire sporadically illuminate the night sky—a surreal light show that serves as a prelude to Willard and Co.’s arrival at Kurtz’s compound. When Willard’s journey does finally reach its terminus, the impression of an acrid performance remains in the atmosphere. Kurtz himself turns out to be a consummate showman in his own respect, reading aloud prophetically from Eliot and brooding in the shadows, his every movement suggesting that he’s fully, if somewhat wearily, aware of each shaft of light as a potential dramatic device. (This sense is probably at least partially due to a storied on-set workaround, since the actor showed up to the set unprepared and overweight.) Referring to the severed heads littering the encampment, “poet-warrior” Kurtz’s most forthcoming disciple, an American photojournalist manically played by Dennis Hopper, admits that his idol can be a little over-the-top: “Sometimes he goes too far, you know, and he’s the first one to admit it.”

As the film drifts onward, it feels less and less likely that Kurtz has been imagined by Coppola and Milius as the embodiment of a single coherent ideological position. The tweaked-out ravings of the photographer, for one, seem to destabilize what the colonel stands for, as does one Kurtz rant about morality and judgment. The colonel is gradually boiled down to his charismatic essence—a regime of seductive phrases and loaded little gestures, all of them aimed at rejecting any authority but his own. From here, Apocalypse Now moves inexorably toward a climactic showdown, but the film’s conclusion, rather chillingly, lacks a sense of resolution. If we could follow Willard beyond that final dissolve, we would no doubt find him haunted by even more imponderably strange and horrific images of combat than at the film’s outset—and unsettled even more deeply by the specters of the larger-than-life men who were able to harness the appalling spectacle.
Saturday, July 19, 2014

Colonel Walter Kurtz talks about the tenacity of the North Vietnamese

8:42 PM | Posted by


For a century and a half the Vietnamese waged wars of liberation against the Chinese with all the physical and mental endurance they could muster, refusing to remain subservient subjects living under the auspice of Chinese rule.  The Vietnamese aspired to create a dynasty patterned after their former mandarin masters, but with a glorious history exclusive to the Vietnamese people.  They would proceed to erect their own empire, canonizing their reverent struggle of rolling back the jungle and taming its ‘primitive’ inhabitants.  There they would build their great cities and temples to house their own mandarins and seat their own emperors.

Once embarked upon this endeavor, the Vietnamese found it more foreboding and far less romantic than Chinese lore explained Sino ascension.  Neither the jungle nor its inhabitants were willing to cooperate with the making of a Vietnamese empire.  The kemois, as the Vietnamese referred to the indigenous Jarai and other montagnard tribes they encountered, resisted Vietnamese subjugation and attempts at their destruction.  Nor would the jungle—its impenetrable foliage, driving rains, searing heat, relentless insects, and deadly animal life—give up without a fight to the death either.
           
In battling the Chinese for consecutive generations, the Vietnamese not only developed a fierce warrior mentality, but also great patience and resolve.  They unleashed these things on the kemois as well as the jungle, fighting them with the same tenacity as they did the Chinese.  The Vietnamese tried to drive the kemois from their land, but they were as determined to stay as the jungle was to keep them.  Soon the Vietnamese push for empire found them fighting wars in all directions, the kind that could bring them the great victories needed in the making of a glorious history.  They continued to fight off the Chinese, pursued the destruction of the kemois in northern Vietnam, and ventured south into Champa to conquer yet even more lands.  In their struggle they learned it was not an attitude of self-reverence or exaltation of a dynasty yet to be constructed that vanquished people and fashioned empires.  The Vietnamese came to understand that they were built by men who had no fear, felt no pain, and lived without the weight of conscience or remorse weighing them down.  They learned this through hundreds of years of observing the jungle maintain its own imperium without displaying even a hint of regret or lamentation.

The Vietnamese desire for their own domain led them into hundreds of years of horrific warfare with the Chinese, Mongols, Chams, and various montagnard peoples occupying what was to eventually be greater-Vietnam.  Living in this state of perpetual warfare slowed Vietnamese aspirations of empire, bogging it down in the mud, thick foliage, and stiff resistance from the people they intended on erecting their kingdom on top of.  Their golden dream soon tarnished in the humidity of the tropical heat, making it unrecognizable even to themselves.  Generation after generation of Vietnamese fought their endless war, numbing not only their bodies but their minds, and eventually they knew not of those earlier aspirations and only that of war.  Forgotten were their dreams of kingdoms and empires, and Vietnamese emperors ruling all of Southeast Asia.  Instead of walking bronze hallways in Annam and golden corridors in Cham, with silk draped around their bodies and jewels on their fingers, the Vietnamese trudged through rivers of blood and crawled over piles of corpses, with rags on their backs and dirt underneath their fingernails.  The jungle slowly lured the Vietnamese in with false promises of wealth and power, but instead took their hopes, dreams, and dignity without them even knowing it.  In return the jungle made them hard and feral with the stamina to endure any and all pain and suffering their endless war would bring them. 
           
In the beginning it was the want of riches and glory that gave the Vietnamese the stomach to fight the endless war, but in the end their desire for these things had long left their conscious mind and the endless war became their empire.  Back then the Vietnamese pallet would have settled for nothing less than the prospect of dining on roast pheasant and a fine wine suitably served in an elegant dinner hall.  Now, some rat meat and swamp water eaten knee deep in mud and leeches would better serve their fancy.  The future that the Vietnamese once aspired and longed for has arrived, but not their empire.  Those visionary, long-suffering plans have now been replaced by their present thoughts consumed with that of mere day-to-day survival.
           
Warfare and its subsequent death, disease, and poverty have become a way of life for the Vietnamese.  There is no time to mourn the dead.  They are merely those who cannot fight anymore.  The rest must pick up their weapons and continue on in search of the pain and suffering that they have become so accustomed to.  Like the Jarai, the Vietnamese live in the jungle, carrying the same traits and armed with the same instincts as their home and creator, willing to bare any burden to protect who they are and where they come from.  The Vietnamese now have for themselves that glorious history they so very much desired, and it is one that stretches farther across the landscape of time than any empire or kingdom the world has ever known.  The history of the Vietnamese is also the history of the jungle, the two having coiled themselves around one another over the course of two thousand years.  The jungle generously shares this part of itself for a complete and unwavering obedience to its every will and desire.  At the feet of the jungle the Vietnamese kneel, imprisoned in the endless war by the forgotten aspirations of their ancestors.

 It did not seem to matter to the Vietnamese who came to make war.  Each was just another in a long line of enemies who never stopped coming.  Their foemen once wore loincloths and carried spears, making their way on foot.  Now they come in decorated uniforms, traveling from far away lands by sea and air.  The Vietnamese have been fighting wars in these jungles for over two millennia, and will continue to do so until their enemies are no more.  You can kill their women and children, but not their will.  Cut their eyes out and they will still see.  Slice their ears off and they still hear.  Sever his testicles and tear out his wife’s womb and they will still multiply.  Burn them with flame and they will not whither.  Bomb their homes and they will find shelter in the dirt.   Destroy their crops and livestock and they will subsist on vermin.  Should you cut off his right arm he will kill you with his left.  If you cut off both arms he will kill you with his cunning.  Do not be satisfied with killing all but one of them, because that one will kill all of you.  And never follow him into the jungle, for in that jungle you will surely die.
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