Francis Ford Coppola, Apocalypse Now
Arts One
Jon Beasley-Murray
March, 2014

Combat helicopters in Operation Pershing

• Adaptation
• Imposition
• Inscription
• Destruction
• Termination

In Coppola’s film, the fantasy of an investment with Kurtz is much stronger than in Conrad’s novella, but ironically all the more impossible.
Coppola’s dream is to do away with the technology that has made this war crazy. But without that same technology, the film itself could not be made. He fears that we are in a war without end(s), only exacerbated by the media used to record it.

Adaptation: Congo to Vietnam
• A remake of Heart of Darkness
• But a very unfaithful remake…
• Congo to Vietnam
• 1890s to 1960s
• Colonialism to war
• Sailor to assassin
• Novella to film

Adaptation: Congo to Vietnam
• Difference is a virtue
• Other influences: Homer, Dante…
• What does Coppola do for Conrad?
• --updates and incarnates
• What does Conrad do for Coppola?
• --provides structure, plot
• --lends dignity, literary gravitas

Adaptation: Congo to Vietnam
• Is Conrad racist?
• Is Coppola racist?
• NB: in Coppola, racial difference internal
• Is Coppola for or against the Vietnam war?
• Is he for or against war?
• Does Coppola identify too much?

“This is the way the fucking world ends! Look at this fucking shit we’re in, man! Not with a bang, but with a whimper. And with a whimper, I'm fucking splitting, Jack.”
“This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.” (Eliot)

“My film is not a movie. My film is not about
Vietnam. It is Vietnam. It’s what it was really like. It was crazy. And the way we made it was very much like the way the Americans were in
Vietnam. We were in the jungle. There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.” (Coppola at Cannes, 1979)

Kilgore on the beach

Imposition: Planes of Vision
• mise en scène and montage
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLRmVM
VP7NQ

Imposition: Planes of Vision
• The movie as the real
• An immersive experience (also sound)
• But we see what never could be seen
• An oneiric reality
• --a nightmare made flesh
• No distance between real and representation

Imposition: Planes of Vision
• meta-filmic commentary
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4av6Ba8
8hNM

Imposition: Planes of Vision
• Theatre and set
• What’s real is what is constructed
• New self-delusion:
“Don’t look at the camera”
• A war of technology

Apocalypse Now title

“We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won't allow them to write
‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it's obscene!”

Inscription: Text as Image
• No credits
• But a film rich with text
• From graffiti to official reports
• Recording and inscription part of reality
• Words name and claim the real
• …But Willard gives up on writing as arbitrary
• --allows signifiers to float

Kurtz’s bookshelf

Inscription: Text as Image
• A modernist or postmodernist text?
• --recycles modernist classics
• --unabashedly commercial
• Despite lack of titles, the work of an auteur
• --surrounded by paratexts
• --legitimated by literary ambitions?

• The aestheticization of violence?
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz3Cc7w lfkI
• Diagesis and non-diagesis

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of ’em, not one stinkin’ dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like victory.”
“Disneyland? Fuck, man, this is better than
Disneyland!”

“Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one in itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.
Such is the aestheticizing of politics as practiced by Fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art.” (Walter Benjamin)

Destruction: and distraction
• Benjamin’s essay also about reproduction
• --loss of the “aura”
• --and its democratizing potential
• --but also as a source of danger
• Is Coppola’s film democratic/democratizing?
• What is the role of culture? (Wagner?)
• --distraction or edification?

Destruction: and distraction
• Is Coppola’s view of violence instrumental?
• …or absolute?
• Willard’s notion of a mission evaporates
• A violence that knows no end(s)
• Blurred lines: real and filmic violence
• --the real stands in for the symbolic

“Someday this war’s gonna end”
“That'd be just fine with the boys on the boat.
They weren't looking for anything more than a way home. Trouble is, I'd been back there, and I knew that it just didn't exist anymore.”

The Fall of Saigon

Termination: This is the End
• No end(s) means no beginning
• End where you mean to begin
• “Terminate with extreme prejudice”
• Terminable and interminable

Termination: This is the End
• Is it light or dark at the end of the river?
• Is Coppola’s movie more invested in fantasy?
• --a fantasy that now constitutes reality
• The Doors’ “The End”: paean to Oedipus
• --but Oedipus story about futility of remaking
• Apocalypse Now Redux: self-remaking

“I’ll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any--until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it's done already. Perhaps they have said me already.
Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story.
(That would surprise me, if it opens.) It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know. You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on.” (Samuel
Beckett, The Unnameable)

More Resources
• Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
• Michael Herr, Dispatches
• http://artsone-open.arts.ubc.ca