The dominant discourse about the Vietnam War (and Apocalypse Now), particularly in terms of its incorporation into the American Narrative, is that it's the Great American Trauma, unhealed like Maya Lin's black scar cut into the earth. While this is true to a certain extent -- there is no denying the fact that working-class kids of all colors were sacrificed for the defense of freedom and Western civilization -- it's also accompanied by much bleating about America's supposed loss of innocence. The ghosts of the war still loom over every foreign policy decision since; it is perhaps unfortunate that they don't haunt American politicians more persistently.
This discourse, however, is essentially egocentric: it's still all about America, and only about America. Whether Apocalypse Now wittingly or unwittingly reproduces this discourse is another thing altogether; Jean reminds us that the film is also about Francis Ford Coppola. (Nowadays the only specters allowed to haunt Americans aren't even the 58,000 dead soldiers, but the POW/M.I.A.s; even their ghosts, as it were, are unsettled.) There is little talk about Vietnamese, since the U.S. has already done its part in its clearly anti-Communist War refugee policies.
The biggest joke of all, I think, is the truism that this was a war that the United States lost; I think it should be clear that the Vietnamese people were the real losers here.
As for our obsession with the film, Frank Chin writes: "We have to be able to accept Conrad and Coppola's works as the white racist works they are and still recognize them as great white lit and film. And I think most writers from non-white peoples can and have been reading racist white lit and recognizing it as great lit."
I love the film because it's great to think about. Coppola makes a brave connection between colonialism and the Vietnam war through his use of Conrad, and even up to now that lesson on American imperialism and the war on Iraq has not been learned. Despite the film's obvious flaws, which we've discussed in previous posts, it's also a antidote to earlier rah-rah films like The Green Berets. The critical acclaim which Oliver Stone later received for Platoon should at least be recognized as part of a rewriting of that Vietnam War narrative even if it's still ethnocentric in essence; this would be rewritten again, however, in Rambo: First Blood Part 2 and Missing in Action.
(Hey, did I write that parts of Platoon was filmed on Mt. Makiling during my high school graduation in 1986? I'm kind of tickled by the fact that a very young Johnny Depp was wandering around somewhere in my hometown of Los Banos.)
There's also the fact that Apocalypse Now is simply a flat-out fantastic film, with amazing performances throughout (even if it does drag in the latter fifth). I get a chill every time I hear the whocka-whocka of the helicopter blades at the beginning; the horrific, hallucinatory glory of the first few minutes alone already marks the film as a work of genius.
It's too bad that Coppola, after making four of my Top 100 films of all time (including The Godfather, The Godfather 2, and The Conversation -- the latter being one of the three greatest films ever set in San Francisco, including Vertigo and Chan Is Missing), never made anything remotely close again. (I always used to joke that The Virgin Suicides was the best Coppola film since Apocalypse Now.)
Posted by the wily filipino at December 23, 2003 11:28 AM