by Forest Lewis

Francis Ford Coppola famously claimed that Apocalypse Now “is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.” Is this true? Does the Vietnam War seem rather dated at times? And does it have a cheesy self-indulgent end sequence?

Uh, maybe?

Don’t get me wrong, I like Apocalypse Now, generally. The surfing/strafing scene with Robert Duvall’s Kilgore soundtracked by Wagner is like nothing else in war movies. The first two hours are just so goddamned cinematic, well plotted, well acted and stunning to look at. But as the French general Pierre Bosquet said of Tennyson’s The Charge Of The Light Brigade: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre” (it’s magnificent, but it’s not war).

Actually Jean Baudrillard, French po-mo bogey-man of neo-Marxist theory, agrees with Coppola and claims in his essay on the film (found in the book Simulacra and Simulation) that Apocalypse Now actually is war; the “film is really the extension of the war through other means, the pinnacle of this failed war, and its apotheosis.”

What are we to make of this?

I bought into the whole neo-marxist program way back in college so I am obliged to, you know, get tipsy from this manner of thinking, but still, I have to ask: does the American war machine really have to rely on The Doors so much?

In any case it may be worth hashing out the basic theory as to why Apocalypse Now transcends mere artificiality.

For Baudrillard everything is already artificial: the map precedes the territory. That is, that due to Media Culture and Late Capitalist voodoo the real has been replaced by its representation, by the signs of the real. This deferral of the real has reached a vanishing point, so that the real no longer exists. What we see as “reality” is nothing more than a series of never ending producing and reproducing signs, a simulation without an original. This is basically the plot of The Matrix, but with no Keanu and no escape; it’s a dream that we cannot wake up from.

Well, at least we can watch war movies.

“Vietnam” then (the American conflict) is a tissue, a convoluted and elaborate fabric of entangled signs. There is no there, there. The image of “Nam” precedes Nam.

Baudrillard writes:

The war in Vietnam ‘in itself’ perhaps never happened, it is a dream, a baroque dream of napalm and of the tropics, a psychotropic dream that had the goal neither of a victory nor of a policy at stake, but, rather, the sacrificial, excessive deployment of a power already filming itself as it unfolded, perhaps waiting for nothing but the consecration by a superfilm which completes the mass-spectacle effect of this war.

Apocolypse Now, according to Baudrillard, is that superfilm.

Which I get, okay, but the movie is just not that super. Excessive yes, spectacular at times, but in the end, like The Revenant, just kind of dopey and self-obsessed.

Is it heretical to claim that Brando ruins it? I love the movie until he appears on screen. Certainly he’s interesting; he has a hell of a lot of semiotic power; he’s a loose baggy monster, enormous and thrumming with all of the gilded celebrity of Hollywood. But still, he breaks the spell. He’s so goddamn pretentious and so Actorly. It’s like poor Willard (Martin Sheen) has spent the entire long harrowing journey, the best part of the movie, traveling up river watching his companions die, in order to kill a poetical, washed up capital A Actor, who likes to, you know, act. Brando allegedly ad-libbed much of his lines and ends up quoting T.S. Eliot poems in what must have been an attempt at elevation, but really just gives him a lot of the true scholastic stink.

The best and most disturbing part of this end sequence is the death of a water buffalo, an actual live animal being ritually slaughtered with machete by the Montagnards, otherwise known as the Hmong. This sacrificial death had been, coincidentally, scheduled by the Hmong apart from the production, for the last day of shooting. When Coppola found that out, not yet knowing how he would finish the movie, he took it as serendipity and knew that it would be in the final sequence. This image, the ostensibly “real” eyes of the cow going dull as its neck cleaves away in slow-mo is crushing stuff. But intercut with Brando being macheted by Willard in a kind of psychotropic-nightmare, the analogy, implying Christological sacrifice, scapegoats, Macbeth, is so heavy-handed and “deep” as to retroactively deflate the rest of the movie.

But the true meaning of that analogy is clear: Brando here is no better than a fat ruminant, perpetually chewing the cud of his own greatness. He was famously a pain in the ass to work with on set and it’s as if the movie is claiming that it’s Brando, not Kurtz, who needs to be killed.

When Coppola claims that Apocalypse Now is Vietnam, he’s conflating the confusion and the heat of the American imbroglio with the confusion and heat of the film’s own tempestuous production. Film production is war/war is film production.

Millions were spent and millions were lost. A typhoon destroyed the set, Martin Sheen nearly died of a heart attack, Coppola himself suffered multiple nervous breakdowns threatening suicide, nearly all the crew were drunk at all times and Marlon Brando, king of the jungle, showed up on set, grossly overweight—and embarrassed because of it—ignorant of the script and making all manner of precious demands. In the final heat of production Brando was the last straw that rushed and flummoxed its climax and pushed the movie from being beautiful and terrifying to being sabotaged by its own grandiosity and consumed with its own termination.

It’s that circularity, that Brando is the cow and the cow is Brando, that shows up the masturbatory nature of the whole movie: it’s only ever eating its own tail. In that sense the movie is never about “Nam,” (I am not the first to argue this) but instead uses the tropes and set pieces of Nam to make a movie obsessed with itself, with the rigors and terrors of film-making, with Hollywood conceit.

This narcissism is made evident early on when Coppola and some of his film crew appear in cameo filming Sheen and co as they cross the fiery beachhead. “Don’t look at the camera!” Coppola yells. “Don’t look at the camera! Just act like you’re fighting.”

Baudrillard couldn’t have written it better.

Forest is a carpenter/writer living in Minneapolis. He writes a weekly horoscope for Revolver. Those can be found here. Follow him on Twitter @interrogativs

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