Apocalypse Now: Working Papers

William L. Benzon Introduction: Shakespeare Couldn’t Do This ................................................................................... 1 Apocalypse Now — too much then? ................................................................................................. 3 Jungle Agency: Apocalypse 2 .......................................................................................................... 5

Jungle Boogie, Tiger Rage ......................................................................................................................... 5 What of it? .................................................................................................................................................. 9 Opsis ........................................................................................................................................................... 9

Apocalypse 3: Finding Yourself Lost in the Jungle ....................................................................... 11 Apocalypse 4: Sacrifice, the Great Availability ............................................................................. 13 Apocalypse 5: Précis of the Whole ................................................................................................ 17

Description ................................................................................................................................................ 17 Part 1. Getting Orders ............................................................................................................................... 17 Part 2. Cowboys at War ............................................................................................................................ 18 Part 3. Engage the Enemy ......................................................................................................................... 18 Part 4. Descent .......................................................................................................................................... 19 Part 5. Lost ................................................................................................................................................ 20 Structure .................................................................................................................................................... 20

Apocalypse 6: The Opening Montage ............................................................................................ 21 1. Vietnam in the Mind ............................................................................................................................. 21 2. Can’t Go Home ..................................................................................................................................... 26 3. Death Dance .......................................................................................................................................... 27 Toward a Neurocinematics of Violence ................................................................................................... 30

Parallelism in Apocalypse Now, a Note on Lance Logic ................................................................ 31 The Assassin and the Surfer ..................................................................................................................... 31 Lance Logic .............................................................................................................................................. 33

Apocalypse 8: Sampan Massacre ................................................................................................... 36 Apocalypse The End ....................................................................................................................... 39

Beyond the Godfather: Bring it on Home ................................................................................................. 39 Civilization and Its Discontents ................................................................................................................ 40

Apocalyptic Confusion: Home, Away, and the King’s Two Bodies ............................................. 41 Good King, Bad King ............................................................................................................................... 41 More Lance Logic ..................................................................................................................................... 42 Home on the Range .................................................................................................................................. 42 You Can’t Fight a War from Home .......................................................................................................... 43 The King is Dead, Long Live the King! ................................................................................................... 44 How’s the Movie Stand-Up? .................................................................................................................... 46

Ritual in Apocalypse Now .............................................................................................................. 48 Ritual Pattern ............................................................................................................................................ 48 Cambodian Transit .................................................................................................................................... 49 Ritual for Us ............................................................................................................................................. 50

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Introduction: Shakespeare Couldn’t Do This I don’t know just when I bought Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier. But it was several years ago. I watched the film, most likely the original first, and was blown away: Shakespeare didn’t do this, I thought. In the spectacle department there’s no contest, just as Shakespeare wins the poetry competition. Was I then thinking that Apocalypse Now was comparable to The Bard? Yep, that’s what I was thinking. [The horror! The horror!] I still think so, but won’t bother to argue it. The Bard, after all, is untouchable, mythic, beyond category. Francis Ford Coppola, on the other hand, makes wine on the side. When, for whatever reason, I finally decided to post something on the film, I decided to post doubts. And I had no firm intention to do any more than that. But, once I was in, I was in. I figured I’d do two, maybe three more posts. I had no intention of doing eleven posts, and I’d have done a twelfth if I hadn’t decided to start working on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. For the most part the posts follow my thinking about the film, though at the beginning my thinking was just ahead of my posting. The second post, Jungle Agency, in which I describe Chef’s trip into the jungle, was written as a digression on the way to accounts of the fight sequences: the helicopter beach assault, sampan massacre, Do Lung bridge, and the final killing. The third post, Finding Yourself Lost in the Jungle, was an extension of that digression. I got back on track with the fourth post, about the final sacrifices. I never did get around to a post on the Col. Kilgore surfing cavalry sequence, feeling that my comments in the précis (fifth post) were adequate to my purposes in these posts. But it certainly can support more commentary than I gave it, and that goes for sequences I covered more adequately, such as the opening montage. The more I took time to comment, the more things I saw that demanded comment. But, in the interest of getting through it all, I left most of those demands unanswered. In particular, I’ve said almost nothing about the scenes that were included in Apocalypse Now, Redux, but were not in the original film. I’d say that the turning point in my thinking came in the seventh post, where I discussed parallelism in the film. That was prompted by a post on parallelism that David Bordwell had made at his blog. It was only then that I began to focus on Lance and, in particular, on the fact that he was the boatman who made it out alive, along with Willard. Once I’d decided that there was a reason Lance made it out, the rest began to fall into place. Even at that, it wasn’t a walk in the park. I still needed outside help – which came in the form of an email message about the medieval concept of the king’s two bodies – and, to the extent that there IS a more or less coherent argument running through the posts, that argument is rather crude. I allowed myself to get over many a rough spot by referring to myth logic. I’d have preferred not doing that. I’d like to be able to consult a handbook on myth logic and simply transcribe or refit examples from it to the current case. Alas, no such handbook exists. Levi-Strauss is useful. Freud is useful. As are many others. But still, no handbook of myth logic. The only way we’ll ever create that handbook is to continue working on ‘texts’ like Apocalypse Now. And the only way to work on these texts is to have recourse to phrases such as “myth logic” to get us over the rough spots. No doubt that sounds a bit dodgy, but I don’t think it’s THAT dodgy. For one thing, we can accomplish more by deploying more sophisticated conceptual tools. While that pretty much takes us out of range of the blogosphere, it’s doable, and I’ve done such work on a number of texts.1 I fully expect others to do better. 1 See various papers on my page at Social Science Research Network: http://ssrn.com/author=604819

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* * * * * I’ve left the texts pretty much as I originally posted them. I’ve made no attempt to edit them into a tighter and more coherent whole, much less have I made any attempt at a more formal style. At this stage of the game, that’s, if not madness, something that would be counter productive. These are working papers, rickety constructions thrown over rivers and canyons so that we can get to the other side and keep on moving. Elegance and tight logic are beside the point. Ramshackle usability is the watchword. All of these posts are online at New Savanna and at The Valve. You will find links at the end of the final post in the series, Ritual in Apocalypse Now: The Valve: http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/ritual_in_apocalypse_now/ New Savanna: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/ritual-in-apocalypse-now.html

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Apocalypse Now — too much then? I’ve watched the film again, though over two sittings one day apart. It’s gorgeous, powerful, perhaps great. But I wonder how it will play in 50 years when no one will have been alive during the Vietnam War and no one will remember eagerly buying The Doors’ debut album, the one with The End as the last track on side two. That’s the music Coppola uses to frame the film. We open with Willard working on a binge while the Doors preach on the sound track. And we close as Willard terminates Kurtz’s command to that same music. It works, it really does. But I don’t think The End will survive on its own. It’s not going to become a classic. Perhaps Apocalypse Now will keep it alive. Perhaps not. The film’s Wikipedia entry provides ample material for those wishing to bank on the film’s enduring value.2 For example:

In 2002, Sight and Sound magazine polled several critics to name the best film of the last 25 years and Apocalypse Now was named number one. It was also listed as the second best war film by viewers on Channel 4's 100 Greatest War Films, and ranked number 1 on Channel 4's 50 Films To See Before You Die. In a 2004 poll of UK film fans, Blockbuster listed Kilgore's eulogy to napalm as the best movie speech. [42] The helicopter attack to Ride of the Valkyries was chosen as the most memorable film scene ever by the Empire magazine. In 2009, the London Film Critics' Circle voted Apocalypse Now the best movie of the last 30 years.

That’s impressive. Heck, the film IS impressive. But will it last? That same Wikipedia entry quotes Roget Ebert’s 1979 review3 as saying, “Apocalypse Now achieves greatness not by analyzing our ‘experience in Vietnam’, but by re-creating, in characters and images, something of that experience.” Is that enough for greatness? And from just whose experience is this something being re-created in that film? A soldier who survived ‘Nam; one who didn’t? A mother, a brother? A farmer, a lawyer, a CEO? A draft dodger, a war resister? A stoned hippie? I don’t know. Before he even gets around to saying that, however, Ebert defends the film against charges that it’s just a bunch of incidents, with no real plot, no intellectual coherence, and no ending. None of which bother me, quite. I like the film. If you haven’t, you should see it. But I worry that it’s too deeply enmeshed in a 60s acid trip sensibility to survive over the long haul. The thing is, America’s gotten involved in three-going-on-four major wars since Vietnam: Iraq 1, Iraq 2, Afghanistan (which has lasted longer than Vietnam), and we’re working on Libya. Somehow I feel that if Apocalypse Now is THAT great, then it should speak to these subsequent follies, for they’re grounded in the same need that kept us going back and going back in Vietnam, – as I argued in America’s National Psyche and the Fall of the Evil Empire.4 I’m not sure Coppola got that far, though he may well have been headed in that direction. And that may have been why he had no real ending, but staged it as a double sacrifice, of the bull by the indigenes and of Kurtz by Willard. But that double sacrifice doesn’t quite lay out over the whole film and thus reveal the war to have been an exercise in magical thinking, an attempt to exorcise our own demons.

2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Now#Critical_response 3 http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19790601/REVIEWS/41214002/1023 4 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/04/americas-national-psyche-and-fall-of.html

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Near the end, in the voice-over, Capt. Willard says, “Even the jungle wanted him dead. That’s who he took his orders from, anyway.” But the jungle is US. That’s what Coppola needed to get across. I don’t think he managed it, do I? And so we keep trying to work the same magic, trying to exorcise the same demons. And they keep coming back on us. For, as I said, they are us.

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Jungle Agency: Apocalypse 2 Not so long after I’d posted my reservations about Apocalypse Now I set about resolving them. I’ve tentatively decided that the film does in fact meet the criterion I’d set for it in that post, that the film should somehow exhibit America’s “need to fight some Other.” That’s hardly sufficient for greatness, which is the judgment that’s in play, but I’ve made it necessary, as that’s an irreducible truth about America’s post-WWII wars. But I want to set that aside for the next post, in which I’ll compare the parallel killings at the end with the killings almost smack dab in the middle, the killings of the innocent Vietnamese on the sampan. In this post I’m going to concentrate on the jungle, with a closing remark on spectacle, Aristotle’s opsis.

Jungle Boogie, Tiger Rage As I’d indicated in the earlier post, at the end Capt. Willard says in voice-over, “Even the jungle wanted him [Kurtz] dead. That’s who he took his orders from, anyway.” That’s metaphor, right? I mean, the jungle cannot literally give orders to anyone, nor can anyone receive orders from the jungle, even if it could give them. But this film is Art, and Art is often a tissue of Metaphor. In that tissue, such talk makes sense. Let’s make sense of it. If the jungle is to issue orders, then it must be an agent. How does Coppola make of the jungle an agent? What artifice does he use to that end? Look at this, the second shot in the film (the first is just a black screen):

It’s a lush jungle beach, a place you’d like to go on your vacation. Maybe you’d surf, and maybe you’d just sip piña coladas and watch others surf. Whatever. But that’s irrelevant. What’s relevant is that the second shot in this film is a lush jungle shot. The film will shortly take the lushness and the jungle out of it, but for a moment, that’s what you look at: lush jungle beach. The film grows from that. Let’s now skip over a whole pile of film: Willard’s drunk, his mission briefing, and Kilgore’s “Flight of the Valkyrie” surf and destruction mission. We’ve been through that mission and we’re on the PBR (Patrol Boat, River) going up river. It’s dawn on the next day:

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Another gorgeous shot, but this time a contrast to the previous cowboy adventureland violence and, presumably, more violence to come. The camera moves in toward the shore as we hear Chef, one of the crewmen, talking. See that blue spot to the left of center below the midline?

That’s the bucket Chef’s using to wash himself. He’s recounting a fantasy, or perhaps a dream, about meeting Raquel Welch in the jungle. The fantasy involves rubbing mango pudding on their bodies. Something something – one of Kilgore’s choppers passes overhead – & a little more something. Chef decides that he’s going to go hunting for mangoes. Willard observes: “Jus don’t go out there by yourself. You don’t wanna’ go in there alone. Not unless you really know the territory.” And accompanies Chef on his little trek. As they move through the jungle, the camera observes them:

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We have a half minute or more of such shots. The camera – that is to say, us – is off to their side, but in the thick of it. Motion parallax as manifested in apparent relative movement of layers of foliage defines our movement as we track Chef and Willard. Sometimes we can see them, sometimes not; often enough all we can see is their movement. All the while Chef is chatting about how he was raised to be a chef and how he came to enter the Navy. Jungle sounds. Then this shot:

That’s Chef at the upper left climbing over the tree root. You may be able to see Willard’s head and shoulders at the lower right corner of the shot; he’s looking to the right. If this were a clip, you’d see the motion. As it is, he’s just a modulation of the light. That shot impressed me when I first saw it, and it still does. The immense size of the tree. Trees larger than men, no big deal. But this tree is way larger, way. Chef is awkward as he climbs over that root, further emphasizing the difference in size. The murk continues in this shot, where they’re just walking from right to left below the mid-line:

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Perhaps you can make out Chef’s bucket about a third of the way across from the right and just above the bottom edge. The men are small, the jungle huge. Something something – Chef’s urinating, talking about meat, Willard straddles a fallen tree, rifle pointing skyward. Willard goes on point, Chef follows:

Something’s there. That something turns out to be a tiger. In this shot we’re behind Willard, whose head and shoulders take up much of the right half of the shot:

The tiger’s moving in from the left, though again, it’s hard to see it in a still image. Not much easier in a moving one, just elaborate fluctuations in the light on the left side of the image.

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The tiger rushes. Both men fire their guns, but Chef panics. Willard the trained assassin doesn’t. We see glimpses of action back at the boat as the crew hears the fire and assumes that the enemy has been engaged. The human enemy, that is, the Vietcong, not the tiger, much less their own fear. Willard and Chef run back to the boat and the boat shoves off. Clean – another crewman – is shooting wildly as the boat pulls away. Chef keeps repeating, “never get outa’ the boat, never get outa’ the boat,” slips in “fucking tiger, fucking tiger” while ripping his shirt off: “All I wanted to do was fucking cook.” Things quiet down and the boat continues on up river. The focus lights on Willard: “Never get outa’ the boat. Absolutely goddam right. Unless you were goin’ all the way. Kurtz got off the boat. He split from the whole fuckin’ program. How did that happen? What’d he see here that first tour?” And so he continues thinking about Kurtz as he examines the dossier, on the boat, by flashlight, in the dark.

What of it? First, a lot happened and was said in that scene that I didn’t mention. Much of it important. But movies are like that, rich with detail that passes swiftly, but also, that registers quickly in the mind as the it follows the camera and the soundtrack. Any full explication of that scene would have to account for all the detail. This isn’t a full explication. I have one main point to make, and two subsidiary ones. The main point is this: The Jungle. Chef and Willard were all but absorbed by the jungle. The dim murky unclarity of much of the scene makes my point, that Chef and Willard are all but dissolved into the jungle. WE too, we of the moving camera, we were all but absorbed. And if you think of movies as light, then it’s all fluctuations in the photosphere, as it were. There’s no difference of kind between rocks plants and humans. They’re all luminous flux on the screen. From this point to the end the film is in a constant effort to distinguish the human from the jungle, the jungle always encroaching. The jungle is thus not merely the setting for the action. It is an actor. Coppola made it one, and he did it in this scene. Logically, rationally, of course, the jungle can’t be an actor; it can only be a setting, a terrain, an environment, an ecosystem. But ecosystems are living systems. Actors. There we have it. By degrees, the jungle’s an actor. This jungle can thus indeed give orders, as it did to Kurtz. That’s the main point. One subsidiary point emerges from the end of the scene, as Willard starts thinking about Kurtz and examining his dossier. That’s a constant motif throughout the film. We see documents – letters, news clippings, photographs – and hear Willard’s thoughts about Kurtz, his mission, the war. Whatever. Roughly, we can imagine the film as a strand of double-helix DNA. One strand consists of the men in the boat on the river in the jungle action. The other is Kurtz’s story as revealed in documents and in Willard’s thoughts. The two stands fuse, of course, for the last thirty or forty minutes of the film (which runs over two hours). If we would understand Coppola’s technique, we’d have to understand how those two strands were interwoven, the effects of intercut segments from minute to minute, scene to scene. For that’s what Apocalypse Now has instead of a plot, cumulative juxtaposition and counterpoint.

Opsis The other subsidiary point is about the physical film itself, about what we see (and hear). Aristotle called it opsis, spectacle. That’s the first thing and the rock bottom thing about this film, the thing that blows me way away, how very GOOD it looks and sounds, even in the much reduced version I have at home.

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I’ve – we’ve – inherited a critical language derived from the study of meaning in literary texts. That language says little about opsis. Nor does any other language. When reduced to meaning, there’s no difference between a WOW! film and an EH? one. This is a WOW! How do we come to terms with that?

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Apocalypse 3: Finding Yourself Lost in the Jungle One of the things that hits you smack in the middle of the noggin about Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier (2006) is that Coppola didn’t know WTF he was into when he set out to make this film. Yeah, he had a cast, more or less, a budget, mostly his own money, and a John Milius script. But all that was more or less in jeopardy as soon as Coppola & Co. set up camp in the Philippines to shoot the thing. As Coppola tells it in his director’s commentary, they shot the Col. Kilgore Valkyrie Chopper Assault scene early in the process. That was in the Milius script, including the cowboy colonel, the surfing, and the Wagner. All there. They ran 100,000 feet of film through the cameras to get it, sweated blood over the napalm shots, couldn’t depend on the choppers to be on set when they were needed, and just generally found themselves in hell without the hand basket. But what footage! It was during that process that Coppola realized the script’s final scene – a battle extravaganza – wouldn’t work. That was out. And if that was out, what was in? That question plagued Coppola, presumably, until the sucker was more or less edited into watchable shape. How to end the film? Coppola says he “must have written 500 endings.” 500? That’s a good number, more or less synonymous with lots and lots. He also says, over and over – it’s a motif of his commentary – that he’s a director who likes to be “available” (his word) to whatever happens in the process. And was he ever available. Example: the opening, with the lush jungle trees at the beach and The Doors on the soundtrack. An accident. Coppola was rummaging though out-takes from the napalm scene and saw some footage he liked. Hmmm, this is pretty, maybe we put it at the beginning, with The End, yeah, that’s it, start the film with a song about the end of it all, and we got an opening. And so it was done, with the help of a brilliant montage by Walter Murch. Example: Lance the surfer-dude gunner spends much of the last quarter of the film with an arrow rig on his head. You know, the kind Steve Martin built an act on; it looks like there’s an arrow through your head. Well, Sam Bottoms came up with that bit of business on set. And it totally rocked. Example: The photo-journalist, the character played by Dennis Hopper. Hopper was hired to play some character who was in the script. The first day he showed up on set, all jazzed up, Coppola tossed another chunk of the script out the window. He created a character fit to the actor before him. Based this new character on “the Russian” from Heart of Darkness. Hopper’s dialogue: He made it up. Example: Brando, Marlon “too heavy to play the part we wrote for him” Brando. So they chatted about this and that, Brando shaved his head, read Eliot, and somehow made himself into the heart of the heart of darkness at the heart of this jungle cruise to nowhere somewhere. Example: The ending, the ‘freakin’ ending, about which more later. But here’s symmetry. It began with The Doors “The End” and it ended with it. The End.

* * * * * Sometimes you treat your initial idea as the point of arrival: When it’s all over, this is where I’ll be. Lots and lots of movies are made that way. From concept to pitch to treatment to script to shooting script to final on-the-screen film. One more or less coherent line of development. Seems logical and sensible.

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Heck, it seems necessary. Movies are expensive. Someone’s got to pay, and that someone wants to get their money back, plus interest, lots of it. They’re not going to fork over the benjamins unless they know what they’re buying. So the process more or less demands that you know what you’re going to do, step by step by step, when you set out to make a film. Furthermore, the logistics demand it. Most films are not shot in sequence. You do all the dining room scenes on the dining room set. You do all the assembly line scenes on the factory set. You do all the battlefield scenes on the battlefield somewhere in the middle of Slovenia. You do all the cave scenes deep down in the cave. And you do all dark side of the moon scenes on the dark side of the moon set. You can’t work that kind of schedule unless you know every scene ahead of time and can plan it out, ahead of time. Still, however compelling the money and logistics of movie-making are, that’s not the only way to do it. You can improvise. You can treat your initial idea, the script, as the starting point of an exploration. That’s what Coppola did. That may not be what he intended. But that’s what he did. Because, you see, he made himself available. In this case he made himself available: available to the Philippines, the beach, the typhoon, the military, Sheen’s heart attack, Brando’s Brando, the jungle jungle, not the Tarzan movie jungle, but the jungle jungle. The dark jungle, the green jungle, the blue jungle, the jungle mist, the light. And he figured out where to go by figuring out how, step by step, to keep movin’ forward. And when the motion stopped, he was there. In the words of Buckaroo Banzai, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

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Apocalypse 4: Sacrifice, the Great Availability

At this point I began to realize that this journey up the river was really a journey though time, and that I was moving into the past. At first it was going a matter of years, and then tens of years, taking me to the kind of Indochina period and to the 50s when the French were in Vietnam, and then after that it would be going into decades, and centuries and ultimately thousands of years into the prehistory of human beings. It felt that way.

– Francis Ford Coppola

That’s not a shot from a documentary, though I suppose it could be. The animal is real, not a CGI special effect, and the people are real Ifugao villagers, not actors. They’re really sacrificing that water buffalo. And afterward, Francis Ford Coppola says, the people were happy, “like Thanksgiving.” That’s how ritual works. This particular ritual was filmed by Coppola’s crew as one face of the ending of Apocalypse Now. The other face, of course, is the death of Kurtz. He doesn’t just die, of course, Willard kills him, hacks him to death with a machete. Like a water buffalo.

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The point – you can’t miss it – is that Kurtz’s death is sacrificial. Coppola says so in his commentary, and he signals it in the film itself in a shot that shows Frazer’s Golden Bough and Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. It doesn’t matter whether or not you recognize those books, much less whether or not you’ve read them. It doesn’t matter whether or not you’re saying to yourself We’re in the land of myth, symbols, and timeless universal pattern. Buffalo sacrifice = Kurtz sacrifice. It doesn’t matter because its there on the screen in the way the two actions are cut together, Willard hacking Kurtz, Ifugao hacking water buffalo, and its there on the soundtrack, which gives us a reprise of The End, the section, in fact, that was used over Willard’s martial arts dance and collapse in the opening montage. What matters is that it’s in your gut, your heart, your soul. That’s what movies are about; that’s where they go.

* * * * * All because Francis Ford Coppola, who’d made The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II, made himself available to the Philippines. He shot there, in part because it was a tropical land with scenery like that in Vietnam, and in part because the Philippine Army was willing to let him use their American military equipment. Which of, course, he needed if he was going to make a movie about an American war in Southeast Asia. The Philippines made him work for his film. It destroyed one of his sets in a typhoon. But it also made him a gift, the Ifugao people. They’re traditional villagers – Coppola says they’d been headhunters ‘till recently – whom Coppola had ‘hired’ to live on set. One of his assistants made arrangements with the head man to move the tribe into a village that Coppola had built to their specifications. The Ifugao took up residence there and there Coppola filmed them. So naturally they performed their rituals in this bespoke village. And that’s the vehicle the Philippines used to convey an ending to the desperately seeking Coppola.

One of those evenings I was home in my traditional cold sweat. My wife, Eleanor, was shooting a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, and she came home very excited, and she had spent [the day] with the ceremonies of the Ifugao people. . . . My wife had just come back with this saran-wrapped object in a bag. “You have to see this ritual. They prayed all night and then the next morning they killed a caribao. They hacked it to death with machete, and it was their tradition. . . . And since you’re the big chief they were very concerned you weren’t there and they wanted me to bring you the heart of the animal because they wanted to present it to you as a thing to honor you.”

And there it was. In the Saran Wrap. That would end the film. Willard kills Kurtz just like he’s supposed to. Intercut with the sacrifice of the water buffalo. Now, complete the syllogism:

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Water buffalo IS TO the Ifugau AS Kurtz IS TO _____

Just who is it that’s sacrificing Kurtz? Just what ritual is it? We could say that the US Army is doing the sacrifice, but that’s not what they were doing. They were killing a pain in the ass rogue officer, not making a sacrifice. Sacrifices are major public events; everyone sees; everyone participates. This act was done in deep secret. As the briefing officers told Willard at the beginning, this operation doesn’t exist. Willard had been on several don’t-exist operations. He knew the drill. But no, you say, you’re missing the point. This is a movie, symbolism. Symbolically, the US Army’s sacrificing one of it’s own. I get it, I say. God only knows the US Army engages in symbolism. But this wasn’t symbolic, not public. It was assassination, and private. In the symbolic scheme of this film, WE THE PEOPLE are the convening authorities for this sacrifice. That’s what happened when we made ourselves available to the film, and all its symbolism, by watching it.

Water buffalo IS TO the Ifugau AS Kurtz IS TO e pluribus unum

Let me conclude with a passage from another anthropology classic, Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger.

By reputation among foreign travelers this rite was a brutal suffocation of a helpless old man. An intimate study of Dinka religious ideas reveals the central theme to be the old man’s voluntary choosing of the time, manner and place of his death. The old man himself asks for the death to be prepared for him, he asks for it from his people and on their behalf. He is reverently carried to his grave, and lying in it says his last words to his grieving sons before his natural death is anticipated. By his free, deliberate decision he robs death of the uncertainty of its time and place of coming. His own willing death, ritually framed by the grave itself, is a communal victory for all his people… By confronting death and grasping it firmly he has said something to his people about the nature of life.

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Apocalypse 5: Précis of the Whole Apocalypse Now doesn’t work in the conventional story-telling way. It has little plot to speak of:

Willard gets orders to kill Kurtz; he travels up-river to Kurtz’s compound; he kills Kurtz. Things happen along the way.

That’s it. More or less. Sorta. But don’t let that fool you into thinking the movie doesn’t have a tight structure. You don’t shoot one-and-half million feet of film, 280 hours worth, edit it down to 2 and a half hours — which is a really fierce cutting ratio — and come out with formless mush. Not if you’ve got half a brain and people with mad skilz. Coppola had a full-brain head and people with mad skilz. The film has structure. Just not conventional structure. So we’re going to have to do a bit of work to figure out what the structure is. And even then we’re only going to make a good guess, because these things are not well-understood. We don’t have the concepts or vocabulary needed to do the job.

Description Still, you have to start somewhere. And we’re going to start in the most pedestrian way possible, by listing the ‘chapters’ on the DVD and commenting on them. I’m not going for anything deep here. I just want to get a crude sense of how the film lays out over time, crude, but better than I can do by simply thinking it over. Not counting the end credits, the film has been broken into 19 chapters – I’m talking about Apocalypse Now, not the Redux version, which is longer. I’ve listed them in order, using the names assigned to them, and then made a brief comment indicating what happens in the segment. I’ve also grouped them into five large-scale movements; I won’t call them acts, because that’s not what they are. I’ve done this mostly on an intuitive basis and on general principle, that there should be these larger-scale movements. That general principle may well be wrong. So I wouldn’t invest too much in these movements. But I find them convenient.

Part 1. Getting Orders Duration: 26:01 That’s it; Capt. Willard gets the order to assassinate Kurtz and meets the crew that’ll take him up-river to Kurtz’s compound in Cambodia. What kind of movie spends so much time in which very little happens? Not an action adventure flick. Waiting in Saigon: The first seven and a half minutes is a montage in which Willard wakes up from a drunk. I’ll analyze this in a later post. In his commentary Coppola says this tells us about Willard’s character, which it does. Then MPs stick him in the shower to wake him up. Intelligence Compound: We learn of Kurtz as Willard does, sitting around the lunch table with three sly and powerful men. They put roast beef and spicy shrimp on their lunch plates while listening to a recording in which Kurtz talks about snails walking along the edge of a straight razor. No one says anything explicit about killing Kurtz. Rather, Willard’s to “terminate the colonel’s command . . . with extreme prejudice.” Willard agrees that Kurtz is insane.

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Willard Meets PBR Crew: Chief Phillips appears to be career military and runs a tight boat (PBR: Patrol Boat, River). The other three crewman are conscripts – “rock and rollers with one foot in their graves.” Chef is from New Orleans and is a chef. Lance is a surfer and acid head from Southern California. Clean is a kid from the South Bronx. Willard opens Kurtz’s dossier (“. . . . I couldn’t believe they wanted this man dead . . . “) while Clean boogies to the Stones and Lance water skies.

Part 2. Cowboys at War Duration: 24:12 Depending on how you score it, this incident is borderline satire or satire proper. Colonel Kilgore struts around in a black cowboy hat and yellow bandana, looking for good waves to surf. Search and Destroy: Willard, Chief and crew come ashore while Kilgore is mopping up. They pass a TV crew filming the action. The head of the crew (a Coppola cameo) urges them to keep on going, not to watch the camera crew. Kilgore places “death cards” on dead bodies, cards telling “Charlie” who did this. Beach Party: Steaks around the campfire at night. Kilgore’s sitting on the ground, leaning back, and strumming his guitar. Willard’s voiceover: “They choppered in the T-bones and the beer and turned the LZ [landing zone?] into a beach party. The more they tried to make everything just like home, the more they made everybody miss it.” And that seems to be what this whole movement is about, imposing American tropes and meanings on Vietnam. Except for Wagner; what’s American about that? Helicopter Attack: This may be the best known scene in the movie: helicopter gunships coming on for the attack with “Ride of the Valkyrie” blaring on the loudspeakers, “scares the hell outa’ the slopes. My guys love it.” Watching the carnage below, Kilgore: “I want my wounded outa’ there to the hospital in 15 minutes. I want my men out.” Kilgore Goes Surfing: As the helicopters come in to land, Kilgore’s admiring the surf with Lance. Later, after he’s landed, to one of his own men: “You either surf, or fight. Is that clear?” And so they surf. “If I say it’s safe to surf this beach, Captain, it’s safe to surf this beach.” Then we have the big napalm run, flames across the screen. And the best-known line from the film: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”

Part 3. Engage the Enemy Duration: 30:23 For the first time in the film – perhaps the first time ever – the PBR crew engages the enemy. But not for Kurtz. We know, from earlier voiceover, that he’s killed at least six. The Tiger in the Jungle: Willard voice over: “If that’s how Kilgore fought the war, I began to wonder what they had against Kurtz. It wasn’t just insanity and murder. There was enough of that to go around for everyone.” Chef gets off the boat to hunt for mangoes; Willard accompanies him. They’re attacked by a Tiger. See this post for a discussion of this scene. Entertaining the Boys: USO show on the river, at night. Refuel with diesel fuel and Panama Red. Then it’s off to the show, bright lights, and hot chicks, Playboy bunnies no less – “Suzy Q.” The crowd gets out of hand and rushes the stage. The bunnies are loaded back into the chopper

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and it lifts off, trailing GIs from the landing skids. Voiceover: “Charlie didn’t get much USO. He was dug-in too deep, or moving too fast. His idea of RnR was cold rice and a little rat meat.” As they continue upriver they’re buzzed by their own guys in another boat, who set their canopy on fire. Kurtz Dossier: Willard reads through Kurtz’s dossier while Clean beats drumsticks on boat superstructure. “Kurtz orders the assassination of three Vietnamese men and one woman. Two of the men were colonels in the South Vietnamese army.” Afterward, enemy activities in Kurtz’s sector dropped to zero. Flashback to Willard’s original briefing. Willard: “How long’s that kid been on this boat?” Chief: “Seven months.” W: “He’s really specializing in busting my balls.” Willard tells the Chief that they’re going into Cambodia. This mission doesn’t exist. A letter from Kurtz to his son: “My situation here has become a difficult one. I have been officially accused of murder by the Army. The alleged victims were four Vietnamese double agents. . . . The charges are unjustified.” Lance puts on make-up. The crew’s on edge, tempers flare. Sampan Massacre: The boat comes upon a sampan. The Chief orders Chef to inspect the boat. Chef resists, but finally goes. Nothing. A woman moves (we learn later, to protect a puppy). Clean opens fire on the sampan. Massacre. The woman’s still (just barely) alive. Chief orders the crew to bring her aboard so they can take her for medical attention. Willard asserts the priority of his mission and shoots her. Lance takes the puppy with them. This scene ends just over half-way through the film – an hour and 20 minutes in to a film that runs two and a half hours. Dramatically, this is the half-way point. I’ll examine this scene in a later post.

Part 4. Descent Duration: 23:27 In his commentary Coppola remarks that, at this point, we loose touch with reality. From this point on we’re going back in time, ultimately thousands of years to human prehistory. [And, as a practical matter, just to get through this post, I’m going to shorten my comments. Maybe I’ll flesh them out later. Maybe.] Do Lung Bridge: The last occupied point on the river. It’s night, light, smoke. Lance is on acid. There’s a firefight going on, as there is every night. Roach launches a grenade into the night and kills a Vietnamese sniper. There’s no commander here. They pick up mail for the boat and continue on. Mr. Clean’s Death: The crew reads letters from home. Lance compares the Vietnam to Disneyland. Willard learns that, six months before, Capt. Colby had been sent to kill Kurtz. He joined him instead. Clean listens to a tape from his month. They attacked from the forest by people unseen. They return fire, wildly. Clean is killed. Lance looks for the puppy. Arrow Attack: Fog, thick white fog. Arrows come in. Lance breaks one, makes his “arrow through the head” rig. The Chief is speared through the chest. Lance prepares the body and floats it down the river. The continue on. Strange scenes of desolation along the shore. Willard tosses the dossier overboard, piece by piece.

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Part 5. Lost Duration: 43:04 Finally, the remaining three, Chef, Lance, and Willard reach Kurtz’s compound. End of journey. Kurtz Compound: The move through ranks of canoes and make shore where they’re greeted by a photo-journalist who’s attached himself to Kurtz as an acolyte. Death all over; dead bodies hanging from trees. Severed heads on the ground. They see Capt. Colby, gone Kurtz. Kurtz is revered as a demi-god. Chef returns to the boat. Interrogation: Rain. Lance and Willard go to find Kurtz. W: voiceover: “... the place was full of bodies, North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, Cambodians. If I was still alive, it was because he wanted it that way.” Willard’s taken prisoner, Lance not. He just watches, smiling. Willard’s taken to Kurtz. Kurtz: “Are you an assassin?” W: “I’m a soldier.” K: “You’re neither. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.” Chef Decapitated: Rain. Chef radios to call-in an air strike. Kurtz comes to Willard, who’s outdoors in a bird cage. Dumps Chef’s head in his lap. Next day Willard’s taken indoors to be with Kurtz. They talk. For days. Willard’s free, but he’s not going anywhere. Caribao Sacrifice: K: “. . . I worry that my son, might not understand what I’ve tried to be. And, if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything.” Willard, who’s been on the boat, goes into the water, comes out, blacked up, and kills Kurtz with a machete while the villagers sacrifice a caribou. I’ve already written a post about this double act. Ending: Kurtz emerges from the building. Starts down the steps toward the villagers, who kneel down before him. He tosses his machete away. The villagers drop their weapons in response. He finds Lance, takes him by the hand, and leads him back to the boat. They leave.

Structure That, more or less, is a summary of what’s there. As for the logic behind it all, that’s a different matter. I’ll leave that for later posts. I will note two things here and now:

1. The opening montage prefigures the end, including shots from the scene where Willard kills Kurtz. 2. There’s a contrast to be felt between the sampan massacre that ends the first half and the double killing that ends the film.

That second point quite convinces me that, while Coppola may not have known what he was doing, going forward. In hindsight, yes, he knew. He knew how to get there.

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Apocalypse 6: The Opening Montage Just what kind of two and a half hour movie does nothing in the first seven minutes? Contrast the opening of Apocalypse Now with the opening of a typical James Bond flick, or one of the Indiana Jones adventures. Those openings are jam packed with action. The opening of Apocalypse Now is jam packed with nothing.5 Images, music, thoughts. Plotwise, nothing. In his commentary on the opening scene, Coppola says that it was important to establish Capt. Willard’s character before he embarks “on this great journey.” And, yes, though nothing happens in this scene to advance or even to initiate the plot, those first seven and a half minutes do take us into Willard’s soul. Those opening minutes do more than just reveal Willard’s soul. They get your neural tissue warmed up for the movie to come. They prime it.6 What’s that mean? Just keep that notion in mind as we walk through the scene. The scene lasts for about seven minutes and 35 seconds and falls into three parts. In the first and third parts the sound track is dominated by The Doors performing The End. In the middle part we get Capt. Willard’s thoughts in voiceover. The patterns of imagery also differ among the parts.

1. Vietnam in the Mind

The film opens on a black screen. Throbbing comes up on the sound track. Jungle. Then a chopper moves across the screen. Music begins.

5 Here’s a link to a YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPA6kRuhKks 6 The Wikipedia entry on priming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29

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Flames start at the left, move right across the screen and engulf it. Jim Morrison starts singing: “This is the end, my beautiful friend . . . This is the end, my only friend the end.“

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The end? Is Morrison singing of suicide, or only of death? And the movie’s title: Apocalypse Now. The apocalypse is the end, of the world as we know it. Still. We’re over a minute into this movie and nothing’s happened. We’ve not even seen the character whose soul Coppola is baring to us in this montage. A meditative beginning. The end, NOW? But also a preparation. Later in the movie we’ll see those trees lit up by that napalm: the Valkyrie Cowboy Attack Helicopter scene. These meditative images are preparing a place in our mind for something that will happen later on. That’s what I mean by warming up the neural tissue. That’s priming. Finally, at 01:42 we see Capt. Willard. Of course, we don’t know who he is, but tacitly assume he’ll be important. For now he’s just an upside down head. Eyes closed, then open. A ceiling fan appears at right center. The jungle tree line in deep background. And then the flames, the light.

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As Morrison rolls around to “desperately in need, of some stranger’s hand, in a, desperate land” a large stone head appears through the flames at the right.

By the time this head reappears you’ll have forgotten you saw it in the opening montage. It’s the very last thing we see on screen before the end credits roll. At THAT point, maybe, it absorbs the metaphysical resonance hanging in the theater as the NEW GOD (Willard) leads the YOUNG INNOCENT (Lance) away from the ground where the OLD GOD (Kurtz) allowed his blood to be shed. But that’s the end. At this point, the beginning, it’s just a big WTF! Not only isn’t this Uncle Buck’s Hollywood war extravaganza, it’s going to have some weird mythical sh!t tossed into the mix. The ceiling fan throbs, the head turns, and we see stuff on the bed stand. Who’s that woman? What’s your best guess? The Doors fade, the ceiling fan gets louder. What kind of guy sleeps with a gun in his bed?

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2. Can’t Go Home And we’re in Willard’s room. We see the window, slats closed. We move closer, closer. Spread them to look outside.

That is to say, the camera has, and therefore WE have, assumed Willard’s point of view. We’re all peeking through the slats at Saigon – well, at a set constructed in the Philippines, early in the shoot.

We hear Willard on the voiceover: “Saigon . . . shit! . . . I’m still only in Saigon . . . [takes a swig] . . . Every time I think I’m going to wake up, back in the jungle. . . . When I was home after

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my first tour, it was worse. . . . I’d wake up and there’d be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said ‘yes’ to a divorce.” He reaches for that photo we saw on the bed stand, moves it to his lighted cigarette.

“When I was here I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. . . . I’m here a week now, waiting for a mission, getting softer. . . . Every minute I stay in this room I get weaker. And every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time, the walls have moved in, a little tighter.” The Doors are coming up on the sound track.

3. Death Dance

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We’re now roughly six minutes into the film, The Doors are back, strong and frenzied, and this central character finally does something, a martial arts dance in his underwear. Not guns blazing. But it’s physical movement, action. Later in the film we’ll see moves like these, but not from Willard. From surfer Lance the space cadet from Southern California, the only one in Willard’s party, other than Willard himself, who survives the journey up river. But what’s this?

That’s more footage from the end of the film, when Willard was blacked up and killing Kurtz with broad machete strokes. He wasn’t using martial arts moves, not like from this opening dance. But it was the martial art at its most bloody intimate. We don’t know any of that at this point, of course. It’s just another WTF! image into the mix as Morrison shouts and moans. The dance continues:

He’s doing this dance in front of the mirror. And now WE’re in the mirror, watching him watch himself:

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He smashes his hand into the mirror, guzzles some booze, and collapses.

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The Doors fade out and the screen fades to black, where the sequence, and the film itself, began.

Toward a Neurocinematics of Violence Let’s end where we began: Just what kind of two and a half hour movie does nothing in the first seven minutes? Well, obviously, this kind. But what just what kind is that? I don’t know. But it’s something we can investigate. What I’d really like to know is the state of people’s brains while watching this opening montage. Even more than that – for that knowledge is now within reach – I’d like to have the ideas necessary understand those brain states and their relation to the movie. I have no idea what it’ll take to come up with those ideas. I suppose the place to begin would be to compare audience brain states during Apocalypse Now with audience brain states during a more conventional war film, one that has more action at the beginning. Is there a significant difference? If so, does that difference track through the length of the film? That is, does Apocalypse Now elicit a different neural profile from that of more typical war movies? After all, this film with so little plot and so much surreality is end-to-end different from most war films. How does that track in the brain? But also the blood stream and the lungs, the entire brain-body ensemble. On the assumption that, yes, there is a systematic difference, it seems to me that that difference relates to some remarks Coppola had about the actor who played Willard. Martin Sheen wasn’t the actor originally cast. Harvey Kitel was. But Coppola thought the Kitel’s was too active an acting style “that really commands you to look at him in which he does all sorts of interesting things. My instinct was to have an actor, rather, who did the looking at things, rather than that demanded you look at him. In the first days [of shooting] began to wonder if I wanted a more passive kind of actor.” So what do we have? We have a war movie without a conventional plot. We have a more passive, a more contemplative, lead actor playing the central character. We have voiceovers in which that central character reveals his thoughts, especially while reviewing Kurtz’s dossier. And we open in a meditative way. Taken together, it all makes sense.

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Parallelism in Apocalypse Now, a Note on Lance Logic David Bordwell has recently done a post on parallelism in narrative, which “occurs when characters, situations, actions, or other factors are likened to or contrasted with one another”.7 To illustrate his argument he gives typically lucid analyses of two films, a recent one, Julie & Julia, and one from the 1940s, Enchantment. Each involves two relationships, separated by a generation, but which are narrated in parallel through alternating scenes. But that’s only one form of parallelism, of which there are many – as Bordwell knows. Apocalypse Now is a tissue of parallels. I want to look at three. Two obvious ones, and one less obvious. Let’s start with an obvious one, the end, the double-killing: Willard killing Kurtz, the villagers sacrificing the caribao. The other obvious parallel stalks you through the film from the foreshadowings in the opening montage through those killings: the parallel between Willard and Kurtz. We’re given this one in the voiceover as Willard is choppered to his briefing:

I was going to the worst place in the world, and I didn’t even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a main circuit cable, plugged straight into Kurtz. It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz’s memory, any more that being back in Saigon was an accident. There is no way to tell his story, without telling my own; and if his story is really a confession, then so is mine.

Pay attention to that first sentence, which implies that Willard’s voiceover comments are retrospective, from some time after the events took place. They are thus the result of some reflection. Then there’s that word: “confession.” That cannot be an accident. I rather imagine the term had real resonance for Coppola. And its religious implication certainly resonates with the sacrificial ending. Given that Willard and Kurtz are parallel character, what’s the difference between them? Yeah, Kurtz went nuts, Willard not. That’s what the story says, but, in that world – in Willard’s words “The war was being run by a bunch of four-star clowns who were going to end up giving the whole circus away” – what’s the difference between sanity and not? And what’s it mean that the sane one kills the insane one, on orders? Or rather, in the logic of myth, how does it work in the mind?

The Assassin and the Surfer Now for the less obvious: Willard and Lance, the only member of the boat crew to survive. One can’t miss the parallel killings nor Willard’s statement of kinship with Kurtz. This parallelism, on the other hand, is easy to miss. That is to say, it eludes conscious notice. Unconscious notice, on the other hand . . . Well, what is that? Here’s three frame-grabs that point up the parallel. The first is from the opening montage:

7 http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2011/06/15/julie-julia-the-house-that-talked/

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The second is much later in the film. Clean has been killed, then the Chief. Lance is the one who floated the Chief’s body down the river. Now they’re heading toward Kurtz again, with Lance in the bow of the boat:

He’s doing a martial arts dance. Not the same one as Willard did, but a martial arts dance. No one else in the film does such a thing. Clean does some moves while listening to the Rolling Stones, but they’re in an entirely different style; faster, jerkier, more angular. Finally, we have this scene in Kurtz’s compound. Willard’s in the foreground, and Lance is in the background:

One might suggest that this parallel is a mere accident, one might. And perhaps it is. In cases like this, however, my default assumption is that it is not an accident. It may not be there by conscious

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intent and deliberate plan; but it is not there by accident. The people who made this movie are too skilled to do such things inadvertently. What, then, is the significance of this parallel? It’s not simply that the parallel is being asserted between these two, but the way in which the parallel is asserted; both dance (physical grace?), and both survive (spiritual grace?). I’m not prepared to offer an explanation here and now. And, while I may hazard one in a later post, I think it important that we be prepared to recognize patterns that we cannot explain. Recognizing the patterns and describing them is our first job. Explaining them can wait.

Lance Logic However that explanation is formulated, I take it that it will track the logic of myth and ritual, whatever that is. Here’s a few more dots to be connected into that pattern: 1) Helicopter attack: Kilgore didn't get interested in Willard and his boys until he realized that one of those boys, Lance, was a champion surfer. Kilgore chose the drop point because it had good waves. And we see his guys surfing those waves. In an odd way, this episodes 'pivots' on Lance-the-surfer. 2) Sampan massacre: Only a dog survives; Lance keeps it. Willard dispatched the dog’s owner. I’ll discuss this episode in a later post. 3) Do Lung bridge: Lance is stoned on acid. At one point climbs up out of the trench, an open target (notice the dog peeking out of his vest):

Willard has to call him down. In the commentary Coppola says that, in effect, we see this episode through his eyes. 4) Attack from the fog: They hear chanting and screams coming from the shore. Chef: “Why don’t they fuckin’ attack man!” Lance just grasps some railing, leans back, and screams, as though in empathy with the hidden voices? Is there any Christian resonance in that pose?

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Then the arrows fly, Lance rigs one through his head, and the Chief is killed. 4) Sacrifice: When the villagers capture Willard, they leave Lance alone. by that time Lance was retreating into the mass of followers. That’s Lance at the left, watching Willard as he comes down the steps (the camera has assumed Willard’s point of view, which is why Lance appears to be watching us):

Willard finds him in the crowd after he kills Kurtz and takes his hand, leading him back to the boat.

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Coppola describes Lance at this point as the "young innocent." Of course, he's talking in mythological terms. As I say, I don't know how to put this together, and I may well be unable to make a coherent proposal. But I'm pretty sure it all belongs together. There IS a logic here. The other side of that logic, of course, is to figure out why the other three boatmen – the Chief, Chef, and Clean – had to die. That is, what myth-logic parallelism between them accounts for their deaths? While I could talk my way through that one right now, I'm not sure I believe the talk.

* * * * * I’ve said quite a bit about parallelism over the years, though not necessarily under that heading. Two recent posts are relevant: Being in Crisis and the Ontological Text: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/04/being-in-crisis-and-ontological-text.html Implicit Analysis in Two Texts, a Cartoon and a Romance: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/05/implicit-analysis-in-two-texts-cartoon.html

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Apocalypse 8: Sampan Massacre As I remarked in the fifth post on Apocalypse Now, this scene marks the dramatic mid-point of the film, though it ends a bit after the temporal mid-point. Whatever Willard may have done in the past – he recalls having killed six people – and whatever the PBR crew may have done, in the context of this mission, they’ve been spectators up to this point. They saw the killing around them, but didn’t actively participate. Now things change. As Coppola remarked: “From this moment on, when, really you see blood shed so directly both by the crew of the boat and by Willard in the case of the girl, once life is taken, the path is very very different.” This scene wasn’t in the original script. It had been inspired by the My Lai incident. Walter Murch suggested to Coppola that they needed a scene like that, the sensless slaughter of civilians by trigger-happy soldiers. This scene fills that ‘slot’ in the thematic fabric.

* * * * * By this point in their trip, the crew of the boat were on edge and on one another’s nerves. In this tetchy state they come upon a sampan:

The Chief decides to pull along side the sampan and search it, which is standard procedure. Willard protests, arguing that his mission takes priority. The Chief over-rides him: “Until we reach your destination Captain, you just goin’ for the ride.” He orders Chef to board and search, which Chef does not want to do. At all. But he does so, in anger, tossing things around, pointing out that there’s nothing there worth their notice. At the same time, Clean’s got his gun trained on the sampan. Take a close look at the fingers on his left hand (lower left):

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He’s nervously flexing them all the time Chef’s searching the boat. Then a woman makes a quick move and Clean opens fire, followed by Lance. Chaos. Everyone on the sampan is killed. Chef discovers that the woman had been running to protect a puppy. Chef and Lance fight over it:

Lance wins, and takes the puppy. As Lance takes the puppy, which he keeps with him for the next stretch of the trip up-river. Meanwhile the Chief notices that the woman is not, in fact, dead. He orders his crew to bring her aboard so they can take her for medical help. Willard shoots her, cold. “I told you not to stop. Now let’s go.”

The crew is stunned into silence. Lance cradles the puppy.

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Coppola comments on this scene:

Technically, by the rules of the game, if the woman in question is still alive, they’re obligated to take her to medical help. And of course Willard’s mission is to continue going on, and so, again, the moral issue is dealt with again. He kills her in cold blood rather than to bring her back, assuming she would have died anyway. But in the duel with the Chief, of course the Chief insisted on their inspecting the sampan. And so gain, blame goes back and forth. Ultimately, who has the blame. We all have the blame.

And that seems right to me. No one is specifically to blame, but all are to blame. It’s the collective situation, but no one can, on that account, claim personal innocence. As they continue up-river, Willard remarks in the voice over:

It was a way we had over here of living with ourselves. We’d cut ‘em in half with a machine gun and give ‘em a bandaid. It was a lie. And the more I saw of ‘em, the more I hated lies. Those boys were never going to look at me the same way again. But I felt like I knew one or two things about Kurtz that weren’t in the dossier.

* * * * *

As Coppola noted, there’s been conflict between the Chief and Willard. It’s Willard’s mission, but it’s Chief’s boat. Each has legitimate authority, but no obviously priority of one over the other. Yes, I suppose you could argue that Willard out-ranks the Chief, but Willard’s Army, the Chief and the boat are Navy. I don’t know how that works out. Beyond that, Willard’s mission may have been high priority, but it was also off the books. By the rules, this situation’s a mess. It’s in administrative no man’s land. And it gets worse after this point, when they pass into Cambodia, which doesn’t exist, officially. Given all this, and keeping the whole film in mind: Why’s Lance the only member of the PBR crew who survives the mission? This isn’t a moral question, it’s one about myth logic. Is it that he took the puppy? Did Clean get killed – in myth logic, not moral logic – because he lost it and opened fire for no reason? And the Chief? Because he ordered the search? Or for no (mythic) reason at all. The Chef, why’d he die? He just wanted to be home cooking up some gumbo. And Willard. Kurtz’s doppelgänger. Kurtz’s nemesis. The plot requires that he live, and that Kurtz die. What’s the difference between the two? The obvious answer to that is that Kurtz had put himself above all laws and above all other people, while Willard did not. He may have believed that “The war was being run by a bunch of four-star clowns who were going to end up giving the whole circus away”, but he stayed loyal, if not to the clowns, then to the society they represented. But not simply to that society as an abstract entity, for he also remained loyal to Lance, one of the men under his command. Do I actually believe that? Maybe yes, maybe no. I’ve not yet thought it through. Later.

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Apocalypse The End What to make of the whole movie? That’s a tough one, and I’m going to punt. I’ve thought a great deal about The Whole Thing, but to pull off a discussion I’d have to ramp up the intellectual intensity to eleven or so. And I don’t have the energy for that, not on a warm summer night edging toward July. So I’m just going to jot down some things I’ve been thinking about, some stray thoughts that needing rounding up and herding. But the herding will have to wait. Nor now, they’re strays. Some Pretty Strange Stuff Here’s a framing thought from Coppola’s commentary:

. . . this isn’t really a war film after all. This is something else. this is a journey into some kind of surreal weirdness, a journey into issues related to morality in modern time when we have the reach through our technology to amplify all of these evil instincts or negative instincts because ultimately we lie about what we’re doing. which was a central theme to Heart of Darkness.

So, though it takes place during war time and set in a war zone, it’s not really a war film. It’s “something else.” And that something else involves some “pretty same stuff,” as Coppola tells us about what happens beyond the Do Lung Bridge sequence:

If they were going to go on they were going to get into some pretty pretty strange stuff. And I, Francis, was gonna’ get into some pretty strange stuff, and I knew it. I wasn’t sure what that stuff was, but by this point the style of the movie, as happens on a project, you start the movie day one, you start shooting, and then together you discover things that you find interesting and then you say ‘Oh yeah, let’s do more of that, let’s do more of that. You know after 30 days you’ve kinda’ evolved the style.

Beyond the Godfather: Bring it on Home In thinking about Apocalypse Now it’s useful to remind ourselves that, by this time, Coppola had made the first two Godfather films, films centered in a world outside The law. If there is a morality in that world, and there is, we can’t see it by noting fidelity to the law. We have to find it in people’s relationships with one another. Apocalypse Now takes a different cut at the world, but morality’s still at issue. In the Godfather movies killing was an all but routine way of dealing with severe conflicts; it was also, of course, in contravention of the law. In Apocalypse Now killing was the core business, as it were, and it was explicitly authorized by the law. The story is about men assigned to kill other men, others defined as The Enemy.

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We could argue, as I suggested at the end of my previous post, that the difference between our two lead killers, Willard and Kurtz, is that Kurtz went out on his own, cutting himself off from the authority of the USofA and constituting his own authority. Thus he fled to Cambodia and gathered his people, his “children” as The Photojournalist called them, around. Willard stayed tethered to the authority of the American state. That authority ordered him to kill Kurtz and he did so. In this sense the movie is fundamentally conservative. The American state may be fighting an unjust and unnecessary war, and it may be fighting it incompetently (“The war was being run by a bunch of four-star clowns who were going to end up giving the whole circus away”), but Willard remains loyal to that state, and thereby, in effect, retains his sanity. Yet, is that REALLY why he killed Kurtz? And if not for that reason, what reason? Once they’d crossed into Cambodia, was Willard really operating under the color of American authority? Or was he on his own? That’s a tough one. If he really was on his own, then why didn’t he go nuts, like Kurtz? And if he wasn’t on his own, well, then what is there? A divine force? Despite all the commentary about myth and renewal . . . there’s no evidence within the film of a supernatural order. Coppola may have been giving us a myth, but he isn’t justifying the myth through supernatural reference. Maybe he killed Kurtz to revenge Chef’s death. Maybe. But that’s a dangerous motive. Maybe he did it for Lance, so he could lead Lance away from that hell-hole and back to home. That’s beginning to make sense. At one point in the commentary, near the end, Coppola referred to Lance as a “young innocent.” After he’d killed the King (Kurtz), Willard leads the innocent back to safety. In myth logic. Lance is the golden boy surfer. He never left California; but he was never there. He’s the hippie flower child who trips in the middle of the war: “Oh wow!” Nothing sticks to him. He goes with the flow. And when Kurtz directed the flow, Lance went with it. And so Willard saves him. Out of loyalty? For what?

Civilization and Its Discontents There’s the sacrifice of the water buffalo at the end. How’s that advance the plot? What plot? It doesn’t follow from anything in the Willard / Kurtz story nor is it preparatory to anything in the Willard / Kurtz story. It happens along side it. And it is necessary, Coppola believes, to a satisfactory ending. Why? To signal that the killing of Kurtz is a sacrificial act? You Think? That is, if it didn’t happen, we wouldn’t get the idea? And perhaps the villagers wouldn’t have been ready to accept Willard as their new leader if they hadn’t also sacrificed the caribao. Now that’s interesting. Perhaps, in myth logic, that is so. Perhaps. And perhaps they wouldn’t have been willing to lay down their weapons. In myth logic. We’re getting warm. Then there’s Kurtz. He’s ordered many men killed, in the military and on his own. He killed Chef. Blood on his hands. Paint on his face. And then he recites TS freakin’ Eliot. How’s THAT play against the water buffalo sacrifice? Myth logic, myth logic. That’s how.

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Apocalyptic Confusion: Home, Away, and the King’s Two Bodies When I’d made my last post I thought I was done with Apocalypse Now. I was wrong. I received a bit of listserve email about the convention of the king’s two bodies, and thinking about that – it happened quickly – allowed me to reconfigure my sense of the film’s ending. The king, of course, is Kurtz / Willard. As for the two bodies, one of them dies, ostensibly Kurtz, but the other does not. But that other body is not Willard, not exactly. That’s where we must deal in myth logic: The King is dead. Long Live the King! That’s where I start, with Coppola’s reconfiguring that bit of myth machinery. Then it’s back to lance logic and on to home and hearth, then, once more, the sacrifice. I conclude by asking whether or not the film stands up to the objections I raised in my first post in this series.

Good King, Bad King Let’s start with Dan Philpott’s account of the trope of the king’s two bodies in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philososphy:8

In his classic, The King's Two Bodies (1957), medievalist Ernst Kantorowicz describes a profound transformation in the concept of political authority over the course of the Middle Ages. The change began when the concept of the body of Christ evolved into a notion of two bodies — one, the corpus naturale, the consecrated host on the altar, the other, the corpus mysticum, the social body of the church with its attendant administrative structure. . . . Whereas the king's natural, mortal body would pass away with his death, he was also thought to have an enduring, supernatural one that could not be destroyed, even by assassination, for it represented the mystical dignity and justice of the body politic. The modern polity that emerged dominant in early modern Europe manifested the qualities of the collectivity that Kantorowicz described — a single, unified one, confined within territorial borders, possessing a single set of interests, ruled by an authority that was bundled into a single entity and held supremacy in advancing the interests of the polity.

The trope of the king’s two bodies, then, is about the fiction of an artificial person, the state, that persists beyond the life of any one head of state. As such it is indifferent to the question of whether or not a king is good or bad. It’s not about the existing ruler at all, it’s about this artificial being that persists through and from one ruler to the next. It is a doctrine of continuity. But Coppola very much IS concerned about the difference between a GOOD king and a BAD one. For in his reworking of the doctrine, Kurtz is a bad king, while Willard is a good one. But the state, of course, is continuous from one to the next. That state can only be the United States of America. Both men are commissioned officers in the American Army. They are employed by the state and they come to represent it in Apocalypse Now. Kurtz is a figure for the rogue state that got into the War in Vietnam and Willard is a figure for the pragmatic state that got out. Something like that. In this reading it is important that both men be disillusioned. But Kurtz descends from disillusion into madness and continues to fight on, creating a society about himself, his children. Willard keeps his disillusionment front and center, but does follow orders, even if those orders were issued by four-star clowns, as he called them.

8 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sovereignty/

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More Lance Logic And he brings his last man back alive. That man is Lance, the acid-head surfer. Lance is the anti-heroic foil for everything that happens in Vietnam. That he is a surfer is not at all incidental to his role in them it. On the contrary, it is central. He is the golden-haired nature boy extolled in surfer rock and all those cheesy SoCal beach movies. And he is admired by Col. Kilgore, the crazy chopper jockey who embodies a gung-ho military mentality that is as ultimately crazy as it is attractive. Kilgore works very hard at fighting the war as though it were sheer physical adventure and skill, like surfing. Hence the music (though not exactly surfer style) for the chopper attack. It’s a mentality that works hard at being oblivious to the killing. But, if the defenses should falter, as they did for Kurtz, then madness follows. And Lance is, in effect, assimilated to Kilgore’s psychological defenses. Willard’s mission, orders and all, didn’t attract Kilgore’s attention until he’d learned that there was a star surfer on his team and that there were good waves at the point where Willard needed to be. Now he had a reason to help Willard, a reason having nothing to do with orders and the chain of command. As long as he could frame – to use a current term – the attack as surfer support, the mission was an attractive one because he could undertake it without, in effect, leaving home. Because home is surfin’ USA.9 Crazy, yes? no? But as long as the defense holds . . .

Home on the Range For Kurtz, his defense, whatever it was, snapped. But he was still very much concerned about home, for that is where his son was. And he wanted Willard to be sure that his son learned the truth about him. It’s telling that Dennis Hopper’s Photojournalist character referred to Kurtz’s followers as his children, which they were, in the logic of myth. That’s symbolic, mythic, but it’s also how real small-scale societies conceptualize the relationship between ruler and subjects. Heck, it’s how Elizabeth I of England referred to her subjects when explaining why she should not marry: “... every one of you, and as many as are English, are my children and kinsfolks, of whom, so long as I am not deprived and God shall preserve me, you cannot charge me, without offense, to be destitute.” Could we venture to assert that what pushed Kurtz over the edge was the attempt to reconcile war and home? Kilgore put a raft of technology between himself and the war and so was able to maintain a home fiction of campfire bonhomie in the evening and surfing in the morning. Kurtz had to face the killing, and so could no longer believe himself at home. Instead, he snapped and tried desperately create a home around himself in Cambodia, beyond the jurisdiction of the state that took him from his home, and his son. For Willard, though, there is no home. We learn that in the opening montage:

Saigon . . . shit! . . . I’m still only in Saigon . . . [takes a swig] . . . Every time I think I’m going to wake up, back in the jungle. . . . When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. . . . I’d wake up and there’d be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said ‘yes’ to a divorce. When I was hear I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle.

And that montage is framed by a suicide anthem by The Doors, a Southern California band that’s very different from the Beach Boys. He had no wife, no son, and no fetish about surfing on golden beaches. He was thus perfect for the mission. He wasn’t going to be distracted by trying to pretend that it was something it wasn’t. And so he succeeded, though as much on his own terms as on the

9 If you google the phrase “surfin’ USA” you’ll get YouTube videos of performances of the song by the Beach Boys and others, lyrics, and so forth.

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military’s. And his success was not only in killing Kurtz, but taking Lance out of Kurtz’s compound, alive. Lance, like Kurtz, but unlike Kilgore, had finally snapped under the tension of trying to remain himself, that is, to remain home, and trying to fight a hellish war. He went over to Kurtz’s side, became one of his children. And when the old king / father was killed, he followed the new king / father. We presume that they made it out of the jungle alive, though the film doesn’t show that. For that is what the myth requires. The myth requires that we see Willard as a figure for the state, and surfer acid-head Lance as a figure for the citizenry and thus, for us, the audience. Just what America is it in which Lance is typical?

You Can’t Fight a War from Home Do I believe all that? Yes, at least in potentia. It requires more conceptual apparatus and a bit more detail in the exposition, especially about Kurtz’s thoughts as revealed in his dossier and his comments to Willard. But I think it can be made to work, and to work well. What needs conceptual work is the distinction between home and war and how the tension between the two can lead to madness. That’s about the inner structure of the self and its relation to the social group and to such abstract things as nations. That’s a lot and I’m not going to even attempt it here. But I will note three further details that are consistent with this pattern. And then, once more, I’ll take up the matter of the final sacrifice. One, in his commentary Coppola talks about how Frederic Forrest, who played Chef, was having trouble getting his part. He had dinner with him where they discussed the problem:

“I don’t know Francis, I’m just not here. I’m not here; I’m somewhere else. I’m walking down the street in Beverley Hills with my girlfriend and I’m gonna’ go in and get a Coke and a hamburger.” And I said to him, “Freddie, that’s your character. Just keep thinkin’ that; just keep thinkin’ I’m not here. I’m not really here.” And he began to do that and that led to him ultimately discovering who he was.

So, we have an actor who built his character on the tension between being physically in Vietnam and psychologically at home. And this is one of the characters who didn’t make it out alive. More myth logic. Clean is another of those characters who didn’t make it out alive. He was killed while listening to a tape his mother had sent him, from home, naturally. Clean was played by Laurence Fishburn. It was his real mother who recorded that tape. More myth logic, not to mention in-the-process improvisation. Finally, there’s a sequence that was included in Apocalypse Now, Redux, but not in the original release. After Clean’s death, Willard and the rest come upon some expatriate French living on their rubber plantation. This IS their home, and it’s become a war zone. That’s where Clean is buried, and that’s where Willard has a pipe of opium and a romantic interlude with a young woman who’d lost her husband.

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The King is Dead, Long Live the King! And so we return, once again, to the double sacrifice that ends the film, the ending that allowed Coppola to convince himself that, yes, he had a complete, a viable, film. Let us first note that Willard’s killing of Kurtz is a close killing, and intimate one. Willard doesn’t come upon some stranger in the jungle, identify him as Kurtz, and bang! kill him with a quick head shot without so much as “hello, how are ya, I’m gonna’ shoot you now.” No Willard lives with Kurtz in his compound for some undefined period of time, first as his prisoner, then as, well, his confidant. Willard comes to know this man he’s been ordered to kill, and Kurtz knows why Willard is here. Whatever this act is, it is not cold and distant, though it IS impersonal in the way that words spoken between actors in a drama are impersonal. At the same time, Lance has joined Kurtz’s ‘children.’ It’s almost as though Willard too could become part of the family. But, of course, he doesn’t. Not even Kurtz wants that. As Willard’s preparing to leave the boat and do the killing, this is what we hear on the voiceover:

They were gonna’ make me a major for this, and I wasn’t even in their fuckin’ army any more. Everybody wanted me to do it. Him most of all. I felt like he was out there, waiting for me to take the pain away. He just wanted to go out like a soldier, standing up. Not like some poor wasted rag-assed renegade. Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that’s who he really took his orders from, anyway.

And so the double-sacrifice begins First we see Kurtz backlit in a doorway and a water buffalo descend the steps in front of him:

I don’t know whether that’s the buffalo that was actually sacrificed, but, for all practical purposes, it is. That shot establishes a connection between Kurtz’s (massive) body and the buffalo. It’s as though, in this myth-logical act, the water buffalo is a stand-in for the king’s mortal body, the one that dies. We see that Kurtz / buffalo shot while Kurtz is asking Willard to tell his son the truth about his actions: “. . . I worry that my son, might not understand what I’ve tried to be. And, if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything.” The body will die, but the story, the word, survives it, assuming that Willard actually tells the tale (as he does so in the movie). We never actually see Kurtz getting hacked to death. We see Willard take broad machete swings into the dark, where we can only assume they connect with Kurtz’s flesh. We see Kurtz wheel and fall in silhouette, and we see blood on his face and neck, but only briefly.

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By contrast, the film, of course, is quite graphic about depicting the buffalo's sacrific, with a large cut through the neck and into the upper chest open to our view. As the double action moves forward we see that Lance, like the rest of Kurtz’s children, is participating in the buffalo sacrifice. Here he is playing with some young children:

And here he is anointing the buffalo that’s about to be killed:

He is no mere spectator, he’s actively participating in this killing. And that – pending the use of proper conceptual machinery – gives these events an aura of parricide. As Kurtz and the buffalo are one, to kill the buffalo is to kill Kurtz. As Kurtz’s people are his children, and lance is one of them, it follows that, in (participating in the) killing the buffalo, he is killing his father. Yet that killing isn’t personal, individual, it’s collective.

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And, in a sense, Willard’s killing of Kurtz is collective as well. Yes, he may have separated himself from the army, in his mind, but they haven’t kicked him out, otherwise they wouldn’t make him a major. But he’s also acting on our behalf – by “our” I mean the audience – he’s killing him for us, exorcising the Bad King, the Bad Father. The bad father who, nonetheless, wanted his son to understand his actions. When the killing is done Willard leafs through the typescript Kurtz had been working on. He settles on this page:

“Drop the BomB! Exterminate Them All!” THE bomb can only be the atomic bomb. And ALL? All the Vietnamese? More? His own son as well, the one he wanted to know the truth? And so Willard shows himself to the people. He drops his machete; they drop their weapons. He takes Lance by the hand and leads him back to the boat. The King is dead! Long live the King! It’s all trickery, myth-logic trickery. Continuity will be preserved, but just barely. Willard will return and become a major. Lance? Who knows? Maybe he becomes a homeless vet, and maybe he opens a gift shop on Newport Beach and raises a family.

How’s the Movie Stand-Up? When I started on this intellectual adventure I had doubts about how good Apocalypse Now is. Very good? Yes. Beyond that? At this point, frankly, I don’t much care to render a judgment. I don’t see how it would add to what I’ve said so far. On a scale of one to ten I knew that it was a least an eight. But do I now think it’s a ten, or even an eleven? When I had those doubts, I also raised some specific issues. First: “... I worry that it’s too deeply enmeshed in a 60s acid trip sensibility to survive over the long haul.” Gone. Though I’ve said nothing on this point, I do think the trippy visuals have simply been absorbed into the cinematic woodwork thrown up in the last three or four decades. You don’t need to have been a 60s child to read them. Nor does the lack of a plot mean much; it’s just another way of making a film. More substantially, and ethically, I observed:

The thing is, America’s gotten involved in three-going-on-four major wars since Vietnam: Iraq 1, Iraq 2, Afghanistan (which has lasted longer than Vietnam), and we’re working on Libya. Somehow I feel that if Apocalypse Now is THAT great, then it should speak to these subsequent follies, for they’re grounded in the same need that kept us going back and going back in Vietnam, – as I argued in America’s National Psyche and the Fall of the Evil Empire.10

10 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/04/americas-national-psyche-and-fall-of.html

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I’m not sure Coppola got that far, though he may well have been headed in that direction. And that may have been why he had no real ending, but staged it as a double sacrifice, of the bull by the indigenes and of Kurtz by Willard. But that double sacrifice doesn’t quite lay out over the whole film and thus reveal the war to have been an exercise in magical thinking, an attempt to exorcise our own demons.

I’ve all but convinced myself that Coppola has come out clean on that one. The attempt to treat the war arena as though it were one’s family/home will, I suspect, cover it when the details have been worked out.

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Ritual in Apocalypse Now Now that I’ve come to terms with the film’s ending, I’ve seen a pattern in Apocalypse Now that’s been staring me in the face the whole time. The pattern is that of a rite of passage as described by Arnold van Gennep and Emile Durkheim. The final sacrifice of the caribao is part of this pattern, but only part. The pattern, in fact, governs the whole film. First, let’s consider ritual pattern (using prose I’ve lifted from one of my essays on Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues).11 Then we can follow it through Apocalypse Now and conclude, symmetrically, with more prose lifted from that Sita essay.

Ritual Pattern The pattern I have in mind are an abstraction from structures anthropologists have found in rituals around the world. Here’s how I characterized that structure in my essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:12

In “Two Essays Concerning the Symbolic Representation of Time” Edmund Leach has described the ritual structure of Durkheim's “states of the moral person.” They are: 1) secular life, 2) separation from the secular world and transition to 3) the marginal state where the ‘moral person’ is in a world discontinuous from the ordinary world, often being regarded as being dead, and from which a return to the secular is made by a process of 4) aggregation or desacralization, often symbolized by rebirth. Arnold van Gennep talks of separation, transition, and incorporation in The Rites of Passage. The ritual sequence involves two realms of being, the secular and the sacred, and is designed to order the transition of initiates between these two realms.

As a simple example, consider the bride’s role in the now standard Christian wedding ceremony, a ceremony in which she will loose the surname she was born with and assume her husband’s surname, thereby changing her social identity. She enters the church with a veil over her face. She is thus faceless; symbolically, she has no social identity and is now separated from the secular world. Accompanied by her father, she walks to the altar where she is met by the groom; she is in a transitional state. She and the groom exchange vows and the priest pronounces them to be married. Now that she has her new social identity, and a new name, the veil can be lifted and the new woman can be incorporated into society in that new identity. This ritual is a relatively short, but anthropologists have recorded rituals that last for hours and days and even longer. Adolescent initial rites, for example, can last for months. There is an initial rite of separation where the young men, shall we say, are stripped on their ordinary identity. They may have to wear special dress and have special markings on their bodies. They may be given a different name as well. Once they have thus been separated from society, they’ll go live in some other place reserved for them and they’ll be taught things needful to be an adult man in their society. This process can easily last several months and may involve arduous physical tasks or a vision quest. During this period their friends and family may well treat them as being dead, which they are, socially. They are in transition, without an identity in their society. Once the proper things have been done another ceremony will be performed and the young men will be given new names, perhaps new body make-up, and will be incorporated into society as adults.

11 http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/07/ritual-in-sita-sings-blues-part-1.html 12 Find downloadable PDF here: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1570242

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What’s important about the ritual pattern is not how elaborate it is, or how long it takes for the full ritual to run to completion. What’s important is the pattern itself: separation, transition, and incorporation. That’s the pattern we’re going to look for in Apocalypse Now.

Cambodian Transit The ritual pattern we’re looking for isn’t presented as such in the film. To be sure, the caribao sacrifice is presented as a ritual, but, as I’ve indicated above, it’s only part of the ritual pattern. Rather, we must, in the time-honored fashion of literary and film critics, interpret events in the film as though they were ritual events. In the interpretation I am proposing the sampan massacre scene marks the separation ritual and the combination of the Willard’s assassination of Kurtz and the caribao sacrifice mark the incorporation ritual. The period in between is one of transition, or liminality as it is often called. The sampan massacre is the first time we see Willard and crew actively involved in killing. We know that Willard has killed before, at least six people, he informs us in voiceover. We don’t know about any of the others, but none of them seem like gung-ho military types, though the Chief is very much by-the-book. The killing was accidental and unnecessary, but now they’re in it. Further, this is the point in the film where Willard and the Chief come actively into conflict. There’d been tension between them before, but now tension flares into conflict. Willard has his mission and his orders, but they are secret. The Chief and his crew don’t know where they’re going or why. When the Chief stops the sampan and orders a search he was simply following standard practice. Willard orders him to continue, but he contravenes Willard. Disaster. When, again, the Chief orders Chef to bring wounded woman aboard so they could take her to medical help, he’s simply following procedure. Now Willard contravenes him by shooting the woman. The secret mission has now taken over. We’re now in no man’s land. This sequence is followed by the Do Lung bridge sequence. Once they’ve gone beyond the bridge they’re out of Vietnam and into Cambodia, where, officially, they cannot be. Lance is on acid and Willard’s mistaken for a commanding officer. Nothing makes sense in this world. As Coppola said in his commentary, “If they were going to go on they were going to get into some pretty pretty strange stuff. And I, Francis, was gonna’ get into some pretty strange stuff, and I knew it.” Three men are killed, Clean, the Chief, and Chef. Clean and the Chief were killed by faceless warriors firing guns (Clean) or tossing spears (the Chief) from the shore, while Chef was decapitated by Kurtz. We meet, however briefly, an officer, Capt. Colby, who’d been sent to kill Kurtz but who had become on of his “children.” Lance becomes immersed in his own imaginative reconstruction of the world, wearing face paint, an arrow rig on his head, and, in time, he too became one of Kurtz’s children. Willard did not become one of Kurtz’s children, but he did become his prisoner, spending time in a cage; thus signifying that he was under Kurtz’s control. Kurtz let him out of the cage and brought him into the inner sanctum of Kurtz’s compound where he became Kurtz’s confidant. Coppola thought of this section as a regression into the deep historical past. Whatever. The point is simply that this is a very different world from even that of Vietnam from Saigon up the river to the sampan massacre. This is a liminal world, and a world beyond the scope of the US military. The killing of Kurtz taken together with the caribao sacrifice then becomes an incorporation ritual. Lance participates in one; Willard in the other. When Willard appears before the villagers they bow down before him and lay down their weapons, as he’d himself done with his machete. Willard has now become incorporated into this jungle society in a new status, that of its leader, replacing Kurtz.

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Of course, he doesn’t stay there in that capacity. Rather, he takes Lance by the hand, leads him back to the boat, and they shove off, unimpeded by the villagers. Coppola has thus indulged in a little flim-flammery. The society into which Willard is newly accepted is not the one he left when he took the boat beyond the Do Lung bridge. The society from which they’d departed, we see nothing of that at the end. We can only assume that Lance and Willard go back to Saigon and . . . and live happily ever after? From the beginning of the film up through the sampan massacre events take place under the aegis of US military authority. That defines the secular world of the ritual process. Once into Cambodia that authority ceases – though Willard is still, nominally, following orders. As the Chief tells him when they depart from the Do Lung bridge, “You’re on your own.” Now Willard, and the others as well, is in a marginal world, a liminal zone. Three die, while two of them undergo a rite of incorporation, allowing to return once again to the secular world.

Ritual for Us What matters ultimately, of course, is what happens in the minds of the audience, for the characters on the screen aren’t real. That’s where the real ritual is, in us. About that we know, alas, very little. I note, however – and here I’m cribbing some more prose from that Sita essay – we could see the experience of watching Apocalypse Now as itself a ritual experience, especially if one sees it in a theatre, preferably an old-time movie palace. Here you go to a building purpose built for movie watching, and you meet other people there who have come for the same thing you did: to watch Apocalypse Now. Once you’ve entered the building you’ve separated yourself from the mundane world and begun the transition to the magical world of Movieland. First you buy your ticket (that is, make an offering to the gods); then, perhaps, you buy some popcorn and a soda, whatever. You may hang out in the lobby a bit while chatting with your friends, whatever. But, when the time comes, you enter the theatre proper, take a seat, and watch the movie. You are now in a transition zone; your mind has withdrawn its attention from the mundane world and is given over to consuming the flickering images on the screen and the sounds coming from the speakers. This goes on for 90, 100, 120 minutes or more, and then you exit the theatre and become, once again, incorporated into mundane life. If the movie was a good one, you will be in a different mood from when you went in; you will have been transformed, you’ll stand a little straighter, you walk will be a bit firmer, if only for a few hours. And so we have a ritual sequence – Saigon to sampan massacre, Cambodian transit, double-sacrifice to back on the river – within another ritual structure – home or wherever to lobby, the film in the theater proper, lobby back to home. The questions we must now ask, if not even attempt an answer, are: How is it that we, each of us in our own hearts and minds, enact the film? How do we take those sights and sounds into our selves so that, as they inhabit us, we inhabit them? And, once that has happened, what is it in us that breaks during the killing of the people on the sampan? What becomes stilled when Willard shoots the woman? And so on through a series of further questions, which you may formulate for yourself, or not. As you please. We don’t know how to answer those questions, not in any deep way. But, at least, we can analyze and describe the film that provokes them.

* * * * * For what it’s worth, I note that two scenes critical to the ritual sequence, the sampan massacre, and the final sacrifice, weren’t in the original script. They were added in the process of shooting the film. These two scenes frame the transitional phase as, respectively, the rite of separation and the rite of incorporation; as such, there could be no ritual structure without them.