Apocalypse Now

16/01/2026

Film    Download PDF  

Maverick Ways

Ideology in film is a complex thing, but we might start by considering a well-known remark Francis Ford Coppola offered about making Apocalypse Now. ‘‘The way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.’’ There were only seven years between Apocalypse Now and Top Gun, but while Coppola’s film was an exploration of American excess through an ageing Colonel who goes crazy in the jungle, surrounded by sycophants and natives who credit him with a status his bloated body and confused mind cannot support, in Top Gun, a kid in his early twenties returns the US to militaristic glory as he defeats Russian MiGs. Director Tony Scott would surely insist that there was no such thing as too much money and too much equipment. The film was made with the full approval of the Pentagon and, perhaps, has done more than most in pushing what has become known as the Military Entertainment Complex. There have often been links between Hollywood and the Pentagon, and earlier films like Mr Roberts, Judgment at Nuremberg and A Bridge Too Far all relied on their help. Top Gun, however, did more than that: it helped promote militarism, and there were stories about the armed forces setting up stalls at screenings to support recruitment. Some claimed enlistments were up 500 per cent; Thomas Novelly in Military.com thought 8 per cent was closer to the actual number. Nevertheless, Top Gun helped make the military great again, and few would be inclined to claim Apocalypse Now did that. Not surprisingly, Coppola’s film wasn’t made with Pentagon approval.
There may be a very good reason for this beyond Coppola’s maverick ways, a word that much better suits a director known for funding his own projects and insistently going his own way, than the diminutive star whose character may be called Maverick in Top Gun, but is insistently a product of unquestioning jingoism. Coppola’s film, like many a seventies work, insisted on a questioning patriotism, one that mused over the quality of its democracy and its status on the world stage. Coppola’s earlier The Godfather linked capitalism with gangsterism. ‘‘My father is no different than any other powerful man, any man who’s responsible for other people, like a senator or a president,’’ Michael Corleone proposes. Coppola doesn’t present this simply as hypocrisy when Michael’s wife says that senators and presidents don’t go around killing people. It is more, she is naive. As Coppola said in a letter to Marlon Brando: what he aimed to express through the film was ‘‘...the notion that the Mafia is only a metaphor for America and capitalism, which will do anything to protect and perpetuate itself.’’ (Far Out Magazine)
In Apocalypse Now, Coppola absorbs myth and reality, but even the myth can be a function of American exceptionalism and expansionism. We may see that this is a quest narrative as Willard (Martin Sheen) searches out Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in the jungles of Vietnam, but this is also manifest destiny as national policy. Kurtz is a high-level military man who has just got a bit carried away with his task, but in principle, he did what the US wanted him to do: to save the Vietnamese from communism. If this means occupying the jungles of a country many thousands of miles away, then that is what he will have to do, and, if in trying to find him, American troops will have to destroy boats, beaches and villages, that is a small price to pay when you are the country with plenty of money to inflict the necessary damage. When in the famed ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ sequence, Coppola shows the helicopters destroying a sedate village, this is a can-do spirit with money to burn, even though it will be Vietnamese properties that will go up in flames.
An ongoing suspicion is that modern American foreign policy is predicated more on spectacle than achievement, on having something to show the American public, rather than developing, in the countries in which they insist they are bringing democracy, a proper infrastructure.  Such a claim could be argued for on the basis of how military funding and support are used in cinema. The Pentagon doesn’t usually fund or offer logistical support to films about the aftermath of various conflicts where the countries are being rebuilt, but invests in movies that show various places being destroyed: Black Hawk Down, Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper, Saving Private Ryan. These aren’t bad films, but the latter three all, according to Tanner Mirrlees, ’lionize U.S. special forces and intelligence agencies, obscuring the humanity of the Afghan and Iraqi peoples harmed by their black ops and extrajudicial killings.’’ (‘The Militarization of Movies and Television’) One might believe that Apocalypse Now isn’t much of an improvement, as it has more destruction than all the other films put together, and this is what appeals to people: construction is quite literally a laborious process; blowing things up is instantaneous. Building things rarely makes the news; destroying things often does. It is the difference between time as an elongated process and time as a contracted one. Though film occasionally uses a montage sequence or time-lapse photography to show laboriousness sped up, nothing speeds up time more than instantaneous destruction. The Twin Towers took seven years to build. They collapsed in an hour. If many insisted 9/11 was like watching a movie, then that was because, from a certain point of view, it was.
Yet at the same time, other national cinemas get away with making many films that are explosion-light and construction-rich. A wonderful work like Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala focuses on struggles against nature that include, for example, the prompt assembling of a makeshift shelter when a storm approaches. The viewer looks on, amazed at how quickly the trapper assembles something out of the environment, with the aid of a Russian officer’s equipment. After he does it, and after it protects them from the storm, we see in the officer’s notebook precisely how it was constructed. The viewer marvels at the ingenuity. It is a great instance of doing a lot with little equipment and no money.
Coppola, who helped distribute Kurosawa’s next film, Kagemusha, might not have initially wished to show how closely associated American moviemaking could be to the insanity of Vietnam, but that was a link he couldn’t quite avoid, just as he more deliberately wished to associate gangsterdom with American capitalism in The Godfather. However, what both films explore is the United States’ sense of drive, a belief that when one can do something or do nothing, always better to choose the latter option. And if this is a culture with a yen for showing destruction over construction, why would people assume that the US will likely be a force of good when they insist they want to rid a country of its troublesome leaders? The phrase regime change might not be so popular after the debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, but it hasn’t quite gone away (and is now ferociously returning), and Iran and Venezuela may wonder if their countries will be next in benefiting from too much money and too much equipment.
If Apocalypse Now has more than any other Vietnam war film transcended the boundaries of its mini-genre, one that includes the brilliant and the debased, the complex and the dumb (The Deer Hunter; Coming Home; Platoon, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Missing in Action, Hamburger Hill), it rests on its ability to convey American foreign policy at its most unhinged. Manifest Destiny meets apocalypse now, and the end is really the beginning, as evidenced in the opening scene of the film, which offers The Doors’ The End on the soundtrack to images of Napalm burning up a jungle. ‘‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we took a song called ‘The End’ and put it at the beginning of the movie” (Far Out Magazine) Coppola proposed, when coming across the Doors’ album in the editing suite, and thus footage that looked like it was going to end up in the rubbish, as Coppola didn’t quite know how to use it, became a surprising and astonishing initial sequence. It captures very well the futility of the mission and the pointlessness of the war. These images don’t convey American firepower but the country’s capacity to meet waste with catastrophe. The US is far from unique in this (and both Democrats and Republicans have shown consistent Hawkish tendencies), but when the US has military spending greater than the next nine countries, that is a lot of force, and a reflection of its general wealth, rather than simply a symptom of bloodlust. After all, looking at it from a different perspective, spending against gross domestic product, ‘‘the US comes in 21st on this list, at an average of 4% of its GDP.’’ ‘‘North Korea ranks at the top, with 23.5% of the country’s GDP coming from military expenses on average.’’ (USAFacts)
Nevertheless, no other country in the world functions as its policeman or main bully, according to where one stands and who is in power. Whether seeing the US as a force of good or evil, that forcefulness is without doubt. In Apocalypse Now, it is ambivalently presented as Willard often looks on at the various atrocities he is implicated in but has hardly instigated. His purpose is to find Kurtz and terminate with extreme prejudice, and the ostensible purpose of the various soldiers he meets on his journey is to get him closer to his destination. However, Coppola doesn’t present this as a series of tasks accomplished; more astonishment at the oblivious brutality of his own country. He shows that what matters isn’t what is achieved but what is illustrated. If the US may have failed to accomplish its aims in many of the wars it has fought since the 1960s, as countries like Iraq and Afghanistan are left in no better a place than when the US invaded them, then they have consistently illustrated that they can go into other nations and fight various or actual enemies. They might not always have shown their efficiency, but they have always portrayed their strength. Apocalypse Now, better than most, illustrates that inefficient capability.
We need only think of the film’s various set-pieces and its illustrative aspect. Willard notes in voiceover that he was meant to meet an army division thirty miles further down the river. But they were in a hurry to inflict mayhem, and there they were, destroying homes and lives. The camera crew is on hand (with Coppola playing the TV man) and tells Willard to pretend he is fighting as he passes the camera’s lens. This has been a mere spectacle for the Americans, devastation for the locals, and while someone with a loudspeaker says that the troops are there to help them, this is Altmanesque irony at work, with Coppola passing through the grim humour of M*A*S*H all the better to bring out American bad faith. This help gets repeated on a much larger scale in the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ sequence, where Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) gets to bomb the locals back into the stone age; no great achievement perhaps since he refers to them as savages anyway. Yet that doesn’t mean enormous might won’t be used to achieve it.
What is important about the scene isn’t just the quality of its destruction, as Coppola shows the United States helicopter and fighter jets at their most awesome; he also cross-cuts between the impending pounding and the village’s tranquillity. A dog barks, kids chatter, and it looks like the start of a typical school day. But the sound of helicopters alerts them to the untoward, and they prepare for a strike that will turn their village into another place of misery, as the American can-do spirit becomes a Vietnamese no-go hell. At one moment in the sequence, the Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun takes out a helicopter and Coppola shows us a reaction shot back to a couple of Americans who realise, while this is a one-sided affair, this needn’t mean they are safe. But that precarity of a life is statistically weak next to the number of Vietnamese who lose theirs. ‘‘In 1995 Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed during the Vietnam War: as many as 2,000,000 civilians.’’ Encylopedia Britannica adds, ‘‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., lists more than 58,300 names of members of the U.S. armed forces who were killed or went missing in action.’’ For every American life lost, the Vietnamese would lose thirty-five people.
For very understandable reasons, American cinema usually played up the effect on the US in films that showed troops returning having lost their friends, their minds or their limbs (Born on the 4th of July, The Deer Hunter and Coming Home all show characters in wheelchairs). But this can also give the impression that the country is mired in self-pity over self-analysis, too aware of a missing leg over a misguided foreign policy, no matter that Jon Voight in Coming Home and Tom Cruise in Born on the 4th of July do rail against their governments’ actions. Nevertheless, it can feel like they are justifying their impotent rage, rather than examining the specifics of the military machine. They can at least return to homes in the US that are in one piece, a luxury many in Vietnam were denied, as we see in the villages destroyed.
Coppola’s position on all this seems ambivalent, which could be a sign of weakness but is vital to Apocalypse Now’s strength. It isn’t an empathic account of the war, but an adrenalised one, and Gilbert Adair has it about right when he says, it ‘‘captures as no other film has done the unprecedented obscenity of the Vietnam War […] The very real sense of hopelessness that permeates the movie, the sense of things getting out of hand, of escalation, would have appeared to have derived as much from its own horrendous shooting condition…’’ (Hollywood’s Vietnam), and exemplified in Coppola’s comment at the beginning of this piece.
If the film in barest form is a semi-adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness,as Willard goes ever deeper into the jungle to find Kurtz, we might wonder how useful the set pieces are in helping to accomplish this mission. Could he not have done so without so much devastation and misery, exemplified in another massacre when a small trading boat is searched? Nothing indicates these locals are a risk to Willard and his team, but when Willard proposes the army boat captain’s purpose is to get him to his destination, and the only reason he is this far down the river is because of Willard’s assignment, the captain says, until he gets there, Willard is just along for the ride as they search the trading boat. There is nothing on it but rice, fish and vegetables, but that doesn’t stop a hot head from overreacting to a bit of movement, firing a few rounds and in the resultant mayhem, only one young woman survives, but is severely wounded. The others suggest they take her to the hospital. Willard shoots her dead.
After, in voiceover, Willard more or less justifies his actions by saying that the way many troops lived with themselves was by cutting people in half and giving them a band-aid. He is as cynical as Kilgore, but if he retains our sympathy, while Kilgore does not, it rests partly on the consideration Willard is capable of that acknowledges the Vietnamese are no less human than the Americans, and that no amount of American might is likely to rescue them from Communist tyranny. The war is supposedly being fought to liberate the North Vietnamese from Soviet oppression, but all the film shows is the US creating oppression of its own. Willard can see through the hypocrisy; Kilgore seems only to offer blind superiority. If there is a choice between some surfers getting to ride a wave, say, and a village avoiding destruction, the village will be the loser. If Willard wants to complete his journey with the minimum of casualties, Kilgore and others almost see casualties as a reward for having to be in Vietnam in the first place. The attack on the village to Wagner is like an away day to alleviate the boredom of their existence. There isn’t a lot of difference to the guys whether it is Playboy bunnies turning up on the base, or leaving it and murdering a few locals. Eros and Thanos are distractions, but while sex is hard to come by as the troops get feverishly excited and the bunnies have to be whisked off by helicopter, killing people is easy enough. Who is going to hold them responsible? As Willard says, ‘‘charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.’’
Though Apocalypse Now received no funding or help from the Pentagon, in the process of finding out whether it was possible, as Coppola tried to get use of a Chanook helicopter, he did have an exchange with Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld (Secretary of State under Gerald Ford) and others were concerned over how fictionalised the film would be, and Coppola noted: ‘‘We know that the motion picture The Green Berets received cooperation from the DOD to the extent of 94 helicopters and extensive use of army personnel and weapons.  Since The Green Berets was certainly not factual, your denial to us of even one helicopter is rather ridiculous.’’ (Spyculture) Coppola instead got his helicopters from the Philippines military, hardly a politically untainted regime under President Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos introduced martial law in 1972, and it continued until 1981. ‘’Congress was padlocked. Opposition leaders, student activists, and media personalities who opposed Marcos were arrested by the military and detained in military camps. Newspaper offices, and television and radio stations were closed down. And a nationwide curfew was imposed.’’ (The Conversation) Just as the US would seem to have one of its most liberal presidents when the film was released in 1979, with Jimmy Carter saying, “Human Rights is the soul of our foreign policy … because human rights is the soul of our sense of nationhood’’ (The Conversation), so Coppola had been supping from the most poisoned of chalices. It wasn’t helpful to the production either. ‘‘Unfortunately, they kept flying off to fight the real-life rebels, and had to be constantly repainted in US colors and insignia.’’ (Cinephilia and Beyond) When looking at the production history of Apocalypse Now, we have a film consistently critical of its own country’s foreign policy while relying on a country whose domestic strategy was oppressive.
This is, of course, no reason to reject the work, and might even be a useful way of making large-scale films that are critical of one’s own country: taking money or resources from another government, so that one can afford to criticise one’s own, might be better than taking money from the Pentagon and finding your film is toothless. The Philippines under Marcos may have been far more oppressive than the US was under Ford, and certainly under Carter, but the Marcos government wasn’t dictating terms about the film’s production as the US military was insistently trying to dictate terms to Coppola. It may be ironic that one of the greatest films about American firepower as self-immolation was made with the help of a famously venal and tyrannical regime. But to understand how ideology works in a medium as expensive as film, we can do worse than see that compromise is a complex thing indeed. To make a work so consistently scathing of US foreign policy, needed foreign help, and while some could see in such an endeavour a lack of patriotism, it might merely be the necessary requirements for a filmmaker determined to avoid the jingoistic.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Apocalypse Now

Maverick Ways

Ideology in film is a complex thing, but we might start by considering a well-known remark Francis Ford Coppola offered about making Apocalypse Now. ‘‘The way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in Vietnam. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.’’ There were only seven years between Apocalypse Now and Top Gun, but while Coppola’s film was an exploration of American excess through an ageing Colonel who goes crazy in the jungle, surrounded by sycophants and natives who credit him with a status his bloated body and confused mind cannot support, in Top Gun, a kid in his early twenties returns the US to militaristic glory as he defeats Russian MiGs. Director Tony Scott would surely insist that there was no such thing as too much money and too much equipment. The film was made with the full approval of the Pentagon and, perhaps, has done more than most in pushing what has become known as the Military Entertainment Complex. There have often been links between Hollywood and the Pentagon, and earlier films like Mr Roberts, Judgment at Nuremberg and A Bridge Too Far all relied on their help. Top Gun, however, did more than that: it helped promote militarism, and there were stories about the armed forces setting up stalls at screenings to support recruitment. Some claimed enlistments were up 500 per cent; Thomas Novelly in Military.com thought 8 per cent was closer to the actual number. Nevertheless, Top Gun helped make the military great again, and few would be inclined to claim Apocalypse Now did that. Not surprisingly, Coppola’s film wasn’t made with Pentagon approval.
There may be a very good reason for this beyond Coppola’s maverick ways, a word that much better suits a director known for funding his own projects and insistently going his own way, than the diminutive star whose character may be called Maverick in Top Gun, but is insistently a product of unquestioning jingoism. Coppola’s film, like many a seventies work, insisted on a questioning patriotism, one that mused over the quality of its democracy and its status on the world stage. Coppola’s earlier The Godfather linked capitalism with gangsterism. ‘‘My father is no different than any other powerful man, any man who’s responsible for other people, like a senator or a president,’’ Michael Corleone proposes. Coppola doesn’t present this simply as hypocrisy when Michael’s wife says that senators and presidents don’t go around killing people. It is more, she is naive. As Coppola said in a letter to Marlon Brando: what he aimed to express through the film was ‘‘...the notion that the Mafia is only a metaphor for America and capitalism, which will do anything to protect and perpetuate itself.’’ (Far Out Magazine)
In Apocalypse Now, Coppola absorbs myth and reality, but even the myth can be a function of American exceptionalism and expansionism. We may see that this is a quest narrative as Willard (Martin Sheen) searches out Kurtz (Marlon Brando) in the jungles of Vietnam, but this is also manifest destiny as national policy. Kurtz is a high-level military man who has just got a bit carried away with his task, but in principle, he did what the US wanted him to do: to save the Vietnamese from communism. If this means occupying the jungles of a country many thousands of miles away, then that is what he will have to do, and, if in trying to find him, American troops will have to destroy boats, beaches and villages, that is a small price to pay when you are the country with plenty of money to inflict the necessary damage. When in the famed ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ sequence, Coppola shows the helicopters destroying a sedate village, this is a can-do spirit with money to burn, even though it will be Vietnamese properties that will go up in flames.
An ongoing suspicion is that modern American foreign policy is predicated more on spectacle than achievement, on having something to show the American public, rather than developing, in the countries in which they insist they are bringing democracy, a proper infrastructure.  Such a claim could be argued for on the basis of how military funding and support are used in cinema. The Pentagon doesn’t usually fund or offer logistical support to films about the aftermath of various conflicts where the countries are being rebuilt, but invests in movies that show various places being destroyed: Black Hawk Down, Zero Dark Thirty, American Sniper, Saving Private Ryan. These aren’t bad films, but the latter three all, according to Tanner Mirrlees, ’lionize U.S. special forces and intelligence agencies, obscuring the humanity of the Afghan and Iraqi peoples harmed by their black ops and extrajudicial killings.’’ (‘The Militarization of Movies and Television’) One might believe that Apocalypse Now isn’t much of an improvement, as it has more destruction than all the other films put together, and this is what appeals to people: construction is quite literally a laborious process; blowing things up is instantaneous. Building things rarely makes the news; destroying things often does. It is the difference between time as an elongated process and time as a contracted one. Though film occasionally uses a montage sequence or time-lapse photography to show laboriousness sped up, nothing speeds up time more than instantaneous destruction. The Twin Towers took seven years to build. They collapsed in an hour. If many insisted 9/11 was like watching a movie, then that was because, from a certain point of view, it was.
Yet at the same time, other national cinemas get away with making many films that are explosion-light and construction-rich. A wonderful work like Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala focuses on struggles against nature that include, for example, the prompt assembling of a makeshift shelter when a storm approaches. The viewer looks on, amazed at how quickly the trapper assembles something out of the environment, with the aid of a Russian officer’s equipment. After he does it, and after it protects them from the storm, we see in the officer’s notebook precisely how it was constructed. The viewer marvels at the ingenuity. It is a great instance of doing a lot with little equipment and no money.
Coppola, who helped distribute Kurosawa’s next film, Kagemusha, might not have initially wished to show how closely associated American moviemaking could be to the insanity of Vietnam, but that was a link he couldn’t quite avoid, just as he more deliberately wished to associate gangsterdom with American capitalism in The Godfather. However, what both films explore is the United States’ sense of drive, a belief that when one can do something or do nothing, always better to choose the latter option. And if this is a culture with a yen for showing destruction over construction, why would people assume that the US will likely be a force of good when they insist they want to rid a country of its troublesome leaders? The phrase regime change might not be so popular after the debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, but it hasn’t quite gone away (and is now ferociously returning), and Iran and Venezuela may wonder if their countries will be next in benefiting from too much money and too much equipment.
If Apocalypse Now has more than any other Vietnam war film transcended the boundaries of its mini-genre, one that includes the brilliant and the debased, the complex and the dumb (The Deer Hunter; Coming Home; Platoon, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Missing in Action, Hamburger Hill), it rests on its ability to convey American foreign policy at its most unhinged. Manifest Destiny meets apocalypse now, and the end is really the beginning, as evidenced in the opening scene of the film, which offers The Doors’ The End on the soundtrack to images of Napalm burning up a jungle. ‘‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we took a song called ‘The End’ and put it at the beginning of the movie” (Far Out Magazine) Coppola proposed, when coming across the Doors’ album in the editing suite, and thus footage that looked like it was going to end up in the rubbish, as Coppola didn’t quite know how to use it, became a surprising and astonishing initial sequence. It captures very well the futility of the mission and the pointlessness of the war. These images don’t convey American firepower but the country’s capacity to meet waste with catastrophe. The US is far from unique in this (and both Democrats and Republicans have shown consistent Hawkish tendencies), but when the US has military spending greater than the next nine countries, that is a lot of force, and a reflection of its general wealth, rather than simply a symptom of bloodlust. After all, looking at it from a different perspective, spending against gross domestic product, ‘‘the US comes in 21st on this list, at an average of 4% of its GDP.’’ ‘‘North Korea ranks at the top, with 23.5% of the country’s GDP coming from military expenses on average.’’ (USAFacts)
Nevertheless, no other country in the world functions as its policeman or main bully, according to where one stands and who is in power. Whether seeing the US as a force of good or evil, that forcefulness is without doubt. In Apocalypse Now, it is ambivalently presented as Willard often looks on at the various atrocities he is implicated in but has hardly instigated. His purpose is to find Kurtz and terminate with extreme prejudice, and the ostensible purpose of the various soldiers he meets on his journey is to get him closer to his destination. However, Coppola doesn’t present this as a series of tasks accomplished; more astonishment at the oblivious brutality of his own country. He shows that what matters isn’t what is achieved but what is illustrated. If the US may have failed to accomplish its aims in many of the wars it has fought since the 1960s, as countries like Iraq and Afghanistan are left in no better a place than when the US invaded them, then they have consistently illustrated that they can go into other nations and fight various or actual enemies. They might not always have shown their efficiency, but they have always portrayed their strength. Apocalypse Now, better than most, illustrates that inefficient capability.
We need only think of the film’s various set-pieces and its illustrative aspect. Willard notes in voiceover that he was meant to meet an army division thirty miles further down the river. But they were in a hurry to inflict mayhem, and there they were, destroying homes and lives. The camera crew is on hand (with Coppola playing the TV man) and tells Willard to pretend he is fighting as he passes the camera’s lens. This has been a mere spectacle for the Americans, devastation for the locals, and while someone with a loudspeaker says that the troops are there to help them, this is Altmanesque irony at work, with Coppola passing through the grim humour of M*A*S*H all the better to bring out American bad faith. This help gets repeated on a much larger scale in the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ sequence, where Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) gets to bomb the locals back into the stone age; no great achievement perhaps since he refers to them as savages anyway. Yet that doesn’t mean enormous might won’t be used to achieve it.
What is important about the scene isn’t just the quality of its destruction, as Coppola shows the United States helicopter and fighter jets at their most awesome; he also cross-cuts between the impending pounding and the village’s tranquillity. A dog barks, kids chatter, and it looks like the start of a typical school day. But the sound of helicopters alerts them to the untoward, and they prepare for a strike that will turn their village into another place of misery, as the American can-do spirit becomes a Vietnamese no-go hell. At one moment in the sequence, the Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun takes out a helicopter and Coppola shows us a reaction shot back to a couple of Americans who realise, while this is a one-sided affair, this needn’t mean they are safe. But that precarity of a life is statistically weak next to the number of Vietnamese who lose theirs. ‘‘In 1995 Vietnam released its official estimate of the number of people killed during the Vietnam War: as many as 2,000,000 civilians.’’ Encylopedia Britannica adds, ‘‘The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., lists more than 58,300 names of members of the U.S. armed forces who were killed or went missing in action.’’ For every American life lost, the Vietnamese would lose thirty-five people.
For very understandable reasons, American cinema usually played up the effect on the US in films that showed troops returning having lost their friends, their minds or their limbs (Born on the 4th of July, The Deer Hunter and Coming Home all show characters in wheelchairs). But this can also give the impression that the country is mired in self-pity over self-analysis, too aware of a missing leg over a misguided foreign policy, no matter that Jon Voight in Coming Home and Tom Cruise in Born on the 4th of July do rail against their governments’ actions. Nevertheless, it can feel like they are justifying their impotent rage, rather than examining the specifics of the military machine. They can at least return to homes in the US that are in one piece, a luxury many in Vietnam were denied, as we see in the villages destroyed.
Coppola’s position on all this seems ambivalent, which could be a sign of weakness but is vital to Apocalypse Now’s strength. It isn’t an empathic account of the war, but an adrenalised one, and Gilbert Adair has it about right when he says, it ‘‘captures as no other film has done the unprecedented obscenity of the Vietnam War […] The very real sense of hopelessness that permeates the movie, the sense of things getting out of hand, of escalation, would have appeared to have derived as much from its own horrendous shooting condition…’’ (Hollywood’s Vietnam), and exemplified in Coppola’s comment at the beginning of this piece.
If the film in barest form is a semi-adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness,as Willard goes ever deeper into the jungle to find Kurtz, we might wonder how useful the set pieces are in helping to accomplish this mission. Could he not have done so without so much devastation and misery, exemplified in another massacre when a small trading boat is searched? Nothing indicates these locals are a risk to Willard and his team, but when Willard proposes the army boat captain’s purpose is to get him to his destination, and the only reason he is this far down the river is because of Willard’s assignment, the captain says, until he gets there, Willard is just along for the ride as they search the trading boat. There is nothing on it but rice, fish and vegetables, but that doesn’t stop a hot head from overreacting to a bit of movement, firing a few rounds and in the resultant mayhem, only one young woman survives, but is severely wounded. The others suggest they take her to the hospital. Willard shoots her dead.
After, in voiceover, Willard more or less justifies his actions by saying that the way many troops lived with themselves was by cutting people in half and giving them a band-aid. He is as cynical as Kilgore, but if he retains our sympathy, while Kilgore does not, it rests partly on the consideration Willard is capable of that acknowledges the Vietnamese are no less human than the Americans, and that no amount of American might is likely to rescue them from Communist tyranny. The war is supposedly being fought to liberate the North Vietnamese from Soviet oppression, but all the film shows is the US creating oppression of its own. Willard can see through the hypocrisy; Kilgore seems only to offer blind superiority. If there is a choice between some surfers getting to ride a wave, say, and a village avoiding destruction, the village will be the loser. If Willard wants to complete his journey with the minimum of casualties, Kilgore and others almost see casualties as a reward for having to be in Vietnam in the first place. The attack on the village to Wagner is like an away day to alleviate the boredom of their existence. There isn’t a lot of difference to the guys whether it is Playboy bunnies turning up on the base, or leaving it and murdering a few locals. Eros and Thanos are distractions, but while sex is hard to come by as the troops get feverishly excited and the bunnies have to be whisked off by helicopter, killing people is easy enough. Who is going to hold them responsible? As Willard says, ‘‘charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.’’
Though Apocalypse Now received no funding or help from the Pentagon, in the process of finding out whether it was possible, as Coppola tried to get use of a Chanook helicopter, he did have an exchange with Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld (Secretary of State under Gerald Ford) and others were concerned over how fictionalised the film would be, and Coppola noted: ‘‘We know that the motion picture The Green Berets received cooperation from the DOD to the extent of 94 helicopters and extensive use of army personnel and weapons.  Since The Green Berets was certainly not factual, your denial to us of even one helicopter is rather ridiculous.’’ (Spyculture) Coppola instead got his helicopters from the Philippines military, hardly a politically untainted regime under President Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos introduced martial law in 1972, and it continued until 1981. ‘’Congress was padlocked. Opposition leaders, student activists, and media personalities who opposed Marcos were arrested by the military and detained in military camps. Newspaper offices, and television and radio stations were closed down. And a nationwide curfew was imposed.’’ (The Conversation) Just as the US would seem to have one of its most liberal presidents when the film was released in 1979, with Jimmy Carter saying, “Human Rights is the soul of our foreign policy … because human rights is the soul of our sense of nationhood’’ (The Conversation), so Coppola had been supping from the most poisoned of chalices. It wasn’t helpful to the production either. ‘‘Unfortunately, they kept flying off to fight the real-life rebels, and had to be constantly repainted in US colors and insignia.’’ (Cinephilia and Beyond) When looking at the production history of Apocalypse Now, we have a film consistently critical of its own country’s foreign policy while relying on a country whose domestic strategy was oppressive.
This is, of course, no reason to reject the work, and might even be a useful way of making large-scale films that are critical of one’s own country: taking money or resources from another government, so that one can afford to criticise one’s own, might be better than taking money from the Pentagon and finding your film is toothless. The Philippines under Marcos may have been far more oppressive than the US was under Ford, and certainly under Carter, but the Marcos government wasn’t dictating terms about the film’s production as the US military was insistently trying to dictate terms to Coppola. It may be ironic that one of the greatest films about American firepower as self-immolation was made with the help of a famously venal and tyrannical regime. But to understand how ideology works in a medium as expensive as film, we can do worse than see that compromise is a complex thing indeed. To make a work so consistently scathing of US foreign policy, needed foreign help, and while some could see in such an endeavour a lack of patriotism, it might merely be the necessary requirements for a filmmaker determined to avoid the jingoistic.

© Tony McKibbin