(into the shadow)
'On those stepping into rivers over different and different waters flow'
Heraclitus
Apocalypse Now is at heart a film about a journey into the Shadow self. The films structure reflects some of the uncountable examinations in art of this journey, from ancient stories of mythical quests to modern post war poetry and art. Apocalypse Now is a film which can be read as the personal journey of an individual into his own shadow. However any interpretation, I feel, cannot ignore the context of the time in which this film was made or based in, in the case of this film particularly as the contextual significances are fundamental to the film. This film is simultaneously one about the individuals journey into their shadow, a nations journey into shadow, a generations journey and even death within the Shadow.
Not being one who could adequately convey the experience of those who lived through or within the time of the Vietnam Conflict, nor the complexities which surround it, I will try to avoid indulging in any assumptions or analysis's which from my naive and ignorant seat in 2011 would, I feel, not only be foolish but also insulting. I will speak of this film in the only way I can, and that is to understand the story that is told and the way it relates to me, and also how I from my current situation respond to a film of which it's context is intraversably distant from my understanding. Not unsurprisingly as a twenty three year old writing almost thirty years after the Vietnam conflict, the aspect of the film which interests me the most is the personal journey into the shadow, and not that of the nation nor culture/generation who were involved.
The film strongly references and directly quotes T. S. Eliot's poem 'The Hollow Men'. The poem and the film both reference Joseph Conrad's book 'Heart of Darkness' which provided the story from which Apocalypse Now was based upon. Marlon Brando's character Kurtz takes his name directly from the character in 'Heart of Darkness' who has bought himself to a similar position as that of the Apocaylpse Now character of Kurtz has. The first line of The Hollow Men reads;
“Elliza Kurtz – he's dead”
'The Hollow men' references the Hollow men of the modern age, and many believe that weather Eliot was aware of it or not, he was expressing the condition of a post-war individual. Kurtz quotes lines from this poem, and whilst not surviving to the final released cut of the film for public consumption, Kutrz reads the entire poem out loud is a slow and contemplative manner. Similarly to the film, Eliot's poem uses and references many sources. There is something intriguing about the eclectic content of these works of art. In a modern age these works recycle and integrate older work to create a new bastard hybrid. The example of The Hollow Men is one from a time when people were coming into a new understanding of being, and western culture as Heidegger was aware was
'beginning to understand everything, even ourselves, as resources to be enhanced and used efficiently.' (Dreyfus on Heidegger, in Magee 1987, p271)
Heidegger considered that the aim of culture had changed and was geared towards efficiency. The western world had through industry arrived at two world wars which used technology in frightening new ways. Our technological understanding of being was producing some horrifying results. Men and women were being blow apart and rebuilt, physically, emotionally, physiologically. The Hollow men in reference to war takes on a horrific and tragic meaning. The Hollow men are empty of purpose, morals, meaning. They are empty like tin soldiers, technology which can be constructed and deconstructed, and thrown away.
The film's characters Willard and Kurtz are hollow men. Throughout the film we see Willard as a hollow man. He stays in a hotel room almost constantly and reflects upon his condition. He is a man without a home anymore. Willard has a family who he has returned to, however his marriage ended because of his withdrawal and his inability to leave Vietnam behind. Willards journey is clearly not over, and as this information is given to us at the beginning of the film, we know that Willard's journey to a completion of what ever internal turmoil he is going through is going to unfold throughout. His resemblance to Kurtz allows for an easy transition to Kurtz's character. Through out the film as we come to know Willard and I'm sure others like myself became attached to him, we are also getting to know Kurtz.
“There is no way to tell his story without telling my own. And if his story is really a confession, then so is mine” Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now
He is not so much a mystery to us as we might had been lead to believe he was by the military officers who give Willard the mission. By the time Willard has reached Kurtz we have witnessed an epidemic of insanity. Kurtz in contract to this although being the most extreme character of the film and the most brutal, delivers valuable insights into the human soul, namely one that has become twisted in war, and this offers Willard his salvation and his passage to finally end his journey.
The film uses the natural qualities of the location to convey the internal landscape, the symbols of which also convey the landscape of the broader social journey.
The river is the most used setting in the film and is a geological line which links the different scenes of the film together and also stands as a metaphor for the internal rivers of the psyche. The internal journey which concerns the film is well symbolized by the river. A river being water is naturally connected to the subconscious and just as the subconscious is not within our control neither is a river, upon which we can move on with out any will or even without being conscious of it. In this film Willard moves against the current producing a difficult journey into his subconscious and symbolizing the conflict of the internal. This understanding of a river and it's familiar symbols and connotations are ancient. Rivers are in a constant state of flux and their very being belongs to a large system which incorporates weather, the oceans and landscape. Heraclitus noticed that everything was in motion and subject to time. One could not step into a river twice because the river is always changing and comparatively a person cannot step into the same river twice because they are too in a constant state of change.
'On those stepping into rivers over different and different waters flow'.
For our main character Captain Willard, the river takes him deeper and deeper into an external and internal conflict without his control and changes him in such as way as to not come out the same. The way in which we have come to name rivers is of some importance here; the end of a river in the 'Mouth' and the source of the river is sometimes called the 'Heart'. This anthropomorphism relates the river further to ourselves. Any internal journey may begin symbolically with an orarphis, crossing from the outside to the inside, and at the end of an internal journey we may find ourselves at our core, or 'Heart'.
The use of a river reminds us of the epic and remembered stories of journeys such as Homers 'The Odyssey'. The allusion to Greek myth and a symbolic and internal interpretation of the film is found in the naming of the boat on which Captain Willard travels; The Erebus. Erebus is a Greek God, the son of Chaos, Erebus is shadow and married his sister Nyx the Goddess of the Night. Erebus is connected with the underworld and is interchangeable with Hades. Hades was traditionally understood as a shadow realm which was smokey consistent with the films imagery. Hades was believed by some to be only accessible by boat. Erebus and the underworld being from Greek myth moves me to speak of another figure from Greek mythology who although not directly mentioned within the film I feel bears a particular significance to Apocalypse Now; and that is the character Odysseys. Odysseys' significance can be noted within the interviews and documentation of John Millius and Frances Ford Coppola. John Millius the screenwriter of Apocalypse Now said about the story that he saw it like the Odyssey; Killgore is the cyclopes that must be tricked, the Playboy bunnies are like the Sirens. Frances Ford Coppolla's wife when filming documentation of the making of Apocalypse Now captures Coppolla relating the epic scale of the journey within the film and the journey taken by those making the film to the Odyssey. The importance of this epic story was obviously within the consciousness of those who were in the process of miking the movie. Such is the impact of widely known classics and ancient stories which have survived due to their universal and timeless reflections on the human condition.
Odysseus's character closely associated with the wound. As Robert Bly notes,
“...when the Romans translated the Odyssey they gave Odysseus the name Ulixes, which some believe to be a union of oulsd, wound, and ischea, thigh.”
The thigh wound is an ancient symbol which recurs in ancient stories. Within the context of Odysseus, he was born from Zeus thigh wound which acted like a womb, turning Zeus in effect into a male mother or a mentor. The male mother is an older man always and nurtures the initiated. As the myth goes, one day when Odysseus hunts a boar cuts Odysseus's thigh and nearly kiss him. The thigh wound is a disabling wound that slows a person down, and in this state the male thigh wound becomes a womb, a nurturing place. These stories demonstrate the nurturing side of the wound, and darkness. In The Odyssey there are moments where Odysseus's men are killed or fall prey to magic, fates which Odysseus escapes, one of these stories is the boar hunt. It is Odysseus's wounds and his wisdom in acquiring and surviving them that enables him to overcome difficult hardship where other men might fail. As the wound slows so we see Willard who's age is never revealed, leaving us to assume he is around the age of the actor playing him at the time, around his thirties. The other soldiers around Willard with a few exceptions, are young, inexperienced and wired into a culture of drugs and music. As Willard reflects;
"The crew was mostly just kids, rock and rollers with one foot in their graves"
Willard's attitude in the film is passive, he barley become involved in anything unless it's to proceed with his mission. He is calm and observant. He seems to move and exist at a different, slower speed than the younger men. Symbolically as we see in the film and the dialogue at the beginning of the film, Willard is already wounded, and like Odysseus his wounds and his journey relate to war.
Within the epic poem 'The Odyssey' Odysseus is traveling home from war, a journey which takes him ten years, the same amount of time he spent fighting the Trojan war. It seems significant to me that the journey home should take as long as the conflict. In the context of Vietnam many soldiers did not come 'home' for many years, and some of them survived but never made it 'Home'. They may had been living in their homes with their families back in America but they certainly were not in a place they belonged. They suffered from a phycological and spiritual wound which rendered many of them unable to return into society and be so completely integrated as once they had been, leaving them to live ungrounded lives in a state of existential homelessness. Willard's narration offers us some insight into his displacment;
Someday this war's gonna end. That would be just fine
with the boys on the boat. They weren't looking for
anything more than a way home. Trouble is, I've been
back there, and I knew that it just didn't exist anymore.
This excerpt of the narration illustrates the homelessness that Willard and many soldiers in Vietnam experienced. It also illustrates how conditioned Willard is, the war ending would be welcomed by the others on the boat, but this quote leads me to believe that Willard wouldn't. He needs the conflict because anywhere else is alien to him, and he doesn't belong, where as in Vietnam he's quite at home, interestingly he is at home only when actively soldiering. The impact upon soldiers is clear,
more soldiers who fought in the Vietnam conflict have committed suicide after wards than died in the conflict. Joel Osler Brende and Erwin Randolph Parson, Vietnam Veterans: The Road to Recovery (New York: Plenum Press, 1985), p 75 in Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power (Berkley Publishing Group, 1993), P145
This tragic information illustrates the magnitude that soldiers suffer after conflict, and their difficulty in belonging anywhere else. Odysseus's journey after war takes him ten years. Within Apocalypse Now we watch Willard re-enter a war in a journey which is not dissimilar to the journey that Odysseus take home. Willard's return to Vietnam allows him to take a journey through the conflict and to finish his journey through the tunnel of his shadow, and rewards him with a conclusion to his own Odyssey. By the end of the film, we have not seen Willard heal but we perhaps have seem him reach a point by which be can begin to.
The Jungle is an inherent aspect for those who make a Vietnam film. The jungle and it's basic practicalities proved problematic for the American Military. The Vietnamese were much more used to the climate and terrain and this proved to be a major advantage within the conflict. The jungle within Jungle war fare is a nerve wracking environment with not only life threatening animals and insects but the jungle offers camouflage and limited visibility. The primeval instincts of a person are I have no doubt at the forefront when one travels such a landscape. In the context of the Vietnam conflict Western countries entered overconfident into an environment which they knew little about fighting in.
It is due to the Western involvement in similar environments that the jungle in the context of Vietnam takes on a deep symbolic history for westerners. The jungle and it's inhabitant's primitiveness is a view that Westerners find difficult to shake off due to a past of colonialism which included an arrogant snobbery in Civilization and adversity to the so called primitiveness, not to mention racism. For westerners the jungle is in-separable to the Primitive and is there fore threatening to our core values and ethos. It is the unsettling truth that we all have a primitive nature and a shadow side that pushes the military in the film to terminate Kurtz's command, setting the story of the film. To be primitive is to be closer to your own nature as a human, as an animal. The primitive is almost always in my mind linked to ecstatic rituals and performances. Ecstatic means To stand outside of yourself and is also the Latin word for Mask. In the film the American soldiers adopt jungle camouflage face paint as they journey deeper into the jungle and the shadow. These masks suggest an ecstatic happening I which the characters are entering different mental space. The shift is a reaction the the primitive environment the character find themselves in and it is to prepare them for the mission, to distance themselves from the horrors of the war and actions that they may be required to commit and may already have done such as the incident where the boat crew shoot up a civilian boat accidentally.
To be in the jungle and to be in the jungle at a time of war opens up a mental space out if which it is not uncommon for people to behave outside of the usual accepted modes of behavior. This point is one which much of the film is concerned with, as it is one which Willard and Kurtz are concerned with. Kurtz is angry at the hypocrisy, lies and absurdity's of the American's conduct in the conflict. He is found near his end to be speaking into a Dictaphone on the absurdities of the American Military's conduct in the war. The very mission the film is set around is one of a hypocritical nature as Kurtz's conduct is said to be 'unsound' although he was everything the American army wanted him to be. His murders are no different than the assassination which he is the target of. Willard can see the hypocrisy as well as Kurtz can. Willard looks with the audience in bewilderment at the camera crew at Killgore's assault on the Vietnamese villiage, upon receiving his mission to assassinate Kurtz he reflects;
How many people had I already killed? There was those six that I know about for sure...Shit...charging a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding
tickets in the Indy 500.
The ecstatic behavior of those in the jungle was also heightened by the drug culture which had followed the Americans into the conflict from home. The paranoid fears of the shadow self are some might say the basis of Conflict in Vietnam, as America and other Western countries reacted against a growing communism. The jungle for Westerner's is a living entity closely linked with a shameful past, exposing through its hard and unconquerable body Western pitfalls. Heart of Darkness relates this well, the book which formed the basis of the film and was one of the bases for Elliot's poem The Hollow Men. Kurtz is a Westerner who comes to act as a God to the natives within an African Jungle at a time when Western colonialism had moved into the continent. Kurtz's position in the book parallel to the British colonization of the territory.
Apocalypse Now treats the Jungle with a consciousness and symbolically for the film, the jungle is consciousness. Willard remarks in reference to Kurtz;
“Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that's who
he really took his orders from anyway.”
The jungle's wildness is fused with the unseen and the primeval. It is not surprising that Apocalypse Now transforms this Jungle into a rich symbolic entity. The jungle in Apocalypse Now is a symbolic place which stands as the utterly wild and dangerous part of the shadow self. When one travels their own self and shadow they must take care and not become lost too deeply. The shadow of the jungle is too wild, it has no restraint, it has no boundaries, and it is very easy to become lost in the jungle. The jungle is almost too much for Willard, from the moment he begins his mission aboard the boat stepping off only leads him to those who are being consumed by the shadow and driven mad. The moments when Willard leaves the boat are way markers for America's psychology. First Willard leaves the boat near the mouth of the river, the shallowest or lightest part of the journey in the shadow and the Vietnam conflict. Willard is not in the jungle yet and the very physicality of the location is light and spacious. The deeper into the jungle and the shadow self the landscape becomes more claustrophobic, the American's influence diminishes and gives way to ancient architecture of native tribesmen, where Kurtz or by now the inner king or God of darkness can be found.
Within Western stories particularly in Fairy tales, jungles are replaced with forests. Forests always appear outside of castles. The reason for this is the suggestion that outside of the comfort and fortified sheltered and single viewed seat of the castle is a world of wild instinctual subconscious waiting to be explored. These numerous stories often depict these settings, and the characters explore or travel through forests in order to reach their goal. For westerner's the forest or jungle has always been held as a place symbolic of the consciousness of nature and thus as the subconscious of he who perceives it. This is a point of central importance in the understanding of Westerners view of the 'primitive' and why is also a mode of being which relates to the shadow self so directly. The unrestrained and unleashed desires and behavior of the instinctual and subconscious are modes of behaviors which unless in the correct and controlled setting are unacceptable to Western social standards. However westerner's and the social ethos's which have been developed and adopted by them have not ignored that each person has inside of them a nature. This nature might be understood as Carl Jung's Shadow Self or Freud's Id. The conflict arises when a persons inner personality and functions manifest into behavior and does not coincide with societies accepted modes. Therefore one might find themselves set apart from there society and culture and left 'homeless' much as Willard and Kurtz are.
When we view characters in fiction or from real life, looked upon at a distance or in hind sight, we are able to compare them to the society in which we are observing. It is this action which enables the anti-hero to exist and an anti-culture. Willard and Kurtz are anti-hero's for the viewer as they have left their culture and bravely traveled into unknown territory, putting the western philosophy of individualism and existentialism to its test.
The journey of the main character who is almost exclusively the hero, is bound to produce some darker results. Willard is a dark hero, or an anti-hero. We can see in a few moments in the film Willard's darker side rear it's head, when asking a solider for oil at the Play Bunny show he grabs the man by the collar and drags him over a bar in a sudden outburst which didn't take much to provoke at all. The second noticeable moment of darkness for Willard is also the most shocking and memorable, the civilian slaughter of the river boat.
The anti-hero within this film is set against a backdrop of American/Western heroism which sets the standards for Willard to be judged against. This age old romanticism of the hero is particularly portrayed and propagated by film, and one genre which ties in very closely with Apocalypse Now would have to be the all American and heroic Western Genre. The Western Genre touches upon incredibly relevant points which relate to the Vietnam conflict, or at least the Vietnam conflict's portrayal in film. The Western's favor traveling hero's who often are not entirely virtuous, against an immense and all powerful landscape, colonialism and a tribal war. This genre of film is a useful mechanism for understanding the portrayal of the Vietnam conflict within this film.
John Millius who wrote the original screenplay of Apocalypse Now was an avid fan of The Searchers and was fascinated by the leading 'bad guy' the native American known as 'Scar'. John Millius can be found in the DVD of 'The Searchers' discussing the film with poignant insights. Millius's influence from The Searchers is clear. In the original screenplay of Apocalypse Now the climax at the end sees Willard and Kurtz joining to have a Western style shootout with the Vietcong. Kurtz as an American who become 'savage' and leads a band of native tribesmen is, it seems, a part of Millius's fantasy from childhood where he dreamt about being Scar.
The reason I choose The Searchers specifically is the many parallels it draws between Apocalypse Now. One such point of significance is the history of a romantic heroism engineered by director John Ford. The conflict between the heroic romanticism and the reality of conflict and violence is no where in Apocalypse Now more evident than in the Character Killgore and the scenes in which we see him.
Willard join's Killgore to be escorted up the river, a larger than life cavalier man who sums up an old fashioned heroism portrayed in the American movie's, particularly the 'Western' genre of movies which were a part of the 40's and 50's. Killgore's presence is one which sums up the American optimism and arrogance of the hyper heroic stories and films which collectively produced and reflected America's over confident belief in it's own power and capability to win a jungle based war. To begin with, Killgore's name is an obvious sign of the blunt and brutal mentality of his heroic self-belief and that of his county. Killgore's division is an updated version of the American horseback cavalry using helicopters instead of horses. They still use a cavalry embelum and as their helicopters take off to battle a solider playing a trumpet sounds the traditional charge. Killgore is all American, a cavalry man who wears a black wide brimmed hat and even a yellow necktie, the same as American cavalry used to wear.
The brutality of the cavalry is reminiscent of John Ford's portrayals of the American cavalry. Within Ford's films the cavalry was a saving grace, unstoppable the cavalry would charge in and save the day, accompanied by the sound of the trumpet. Even the distant sound of the cavalry trumpet filled characters with hope and we know the day will be saved. However in a film such as John Ford's The Searchers Ford turns his own portrayal on its head as in this film the cavalry are naive, young, inexperienced and bloodthirsty. As the cavalry charge through a native American village they preemptively know that they wont be able to choose they're targets, in fact they aim to kill all there, women and children, armed or unarmed. This kind of portrayal is parallel to that of Killgore's attack on the Vietnamese village.
What's more is the issues that The Searchers delves into. The film is concerned with the dark side of Ethan Edwards and the tribalism of America's inhabitant's, both Native and Colonial. The film produces many parallels between Ethan Edwards and Scar showing the similarities and the hypocrisy of the American civilization over the Native people. Similarly in Apocalypse Now, in the scenes with Killgore the absurd and misguided conduct and hypocrisy of the American's is clear, and within the scenes when Willard is contemplating the journey he is aware of the hypocrisies and lies around him, as so is Kurtz.
Killgore is a hypercritical character. His black and white understanding of the conflict produces hypocritical behavior such as instances in his attack on a Vietnamese Village. At one moment he call's the inhabitants 'Savages' as they destroy an American helicopter which has landed to collect the wounded. It is no doubt a savage attack but the hypocrisy is present in Killgore's voice as he says the line with contempt and superiority; Hippo-critic as Killgore has his helicopters play Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' as they come galloping in; he throws playing cards with his squadron's emblem on them onto the dead bodies of the Vietnamese, even placing one calmly in one dead mans shirt pocket. Killgore's tactics are to psychologically unnerve the Vietcong, however we can see that Killgore's tactics are also glorifications of American military might. The music of Wagner creates a film like feel to the attack within the film. This adds to the film heroism which Killgore portrays. The playing cards also suggest a game and a humor in his attitude to war. This portrayal of a modern warfare can be seen in real life, as we can now see American soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts wearing headphones and listening to music as they roll through towns in tanks. This (computer)game mentality has been noted in an interesting documentary entitled 'Generation Kill'. It seems that the media and computer games inducing individuals into a kind of Hyper Reality has left a noticeable effect on young individuals going into combat. Similarly to the recent generations of people who have grown up watching violent representations of warfare dramatized and glorified on the big screen, along with computer games of war, which all have an effect of dislocating the experience of the individual, the portrayals of young men going into Vietnam to fight, the culture of rock music and drugs, has a similar effect. The Shadow side of the Modern Western culture and it's penetration into the heart of a conflict produced or rather revealed a darkness which is at the very core of Apocalypse Now.
Apocalypse Now does offer a conclusion to the journey into the Shadow. Coppola was unsatisfied with Millius's ending to the story and wrote to create a satisfactory conclusion which answered some of the questions raised by the film, to bring the characters journey to conclusion and not to leave them in a nihilistic oblivion. Willard's emptiness, his being a hollow man, allows him to reach an understanding with Kurtz. Willard's homelessness allows him to bend to the situation and to free himself from the constraints of the systems which brought him there. Although he finishes his Military Mission, his actions are not for them but for himself and Kurtz. The outcome is only coincidentally the same as that which the military wanted. Willard's journey into the Shadow has enabled him to accept himself and to proceed with a clear vision, one with less illusions than before. This story is an ancient one, to journey onwards through the shadow that falls between stable states and escape the tyranny of stagnation.
“Where there is no strife there is decay. The mixture that is not shaken decomposes”.
Heraclitus
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