Apocalypse Now

Francisco set up a projector for movies (also a wedding present; also a reason to visit). The first thing we watched was Apocalypse Now.

I disliked Apocalypse Now insofar as it was a tripped out view of Vietnam, which it was at times. (The visuals were excellent, making you feel like you were on drugs in the middle of a war.) Particularly jarring was the scene in which civilians on the beach are bombed and their village decimated, during which a commander insists that some of the men surf. All of this is set to Wagner, which that same commander prefers to play as he invades.

I liked Apocalypse Now insofar as it is richly allusive of literary tradition. Goodness, it was great. It was a creative reflection on The Heart of Darkness--instead of following Marlow up the Congo River, sent by his trading company to find another of their traders, we follow U.S. army Captain Willard up the Nung River to find a renegade Green Beret. The problems with colonialism that Conrad points to morph into problems with American intervention. But still the problem of evil is at the heart.

The film is not only a riff on The Heart of Darkness, but also on T.S. Eliot. Eliot's "Hollow Men" begins with an epigraph from Conrad: "Mistah Kurtz—he dead." Coppola's Kurtz (Marlon Brando) and his followers seem to echo Eliot's hollow men:

We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

One shot in the film scans what Kurtz has been reading--it's From Ritual to Romance and The Golden Bough, two books that Eliot relied on in the Waste Land. The original, pre-edited Waste Land's epigraph is also from The Heart of Darkness: "Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of  complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, --he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath--'The horror! the Horror!'" Brando dies uttering the same words.