At Home with War in “Apocalypse Now” (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola

Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore doesn’t flinch for enemy fire, loves the smell of napalm in the morning, and would literally kill for good surfing and a beachside barbecue. His attempts to recreate home within the theater of war render him the perfect foil to a certain upriver madman, who seems intent on making high culture serve the purposes of primitive horror. And yet Kurtz is ready to argue that it is his methods that are more sound, just because they embrace their ruthlessness more honestly, in contrast to the impotent half-measures of an imperial power that can rationalize its atrocities as collateral damage in the service of a larger humanitarian goal. Which approach should evoke more horror? Wes & Erin analyze Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film “Apocalypse Now.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Thanks to Nick Ketter for the audio editing on this episode. Transcript 0:09 Wes: Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore doesn't flinch for enemy fire, loves the smell of napalm in the morning, and would literally kill for good surfing and a beachside barbecue. His attempts to recreate home within the theater of war render him the perfect foil to a certain upriver madman who seems intent on making high culture serve the purposes of primitive horror. And yet Kurtz is ready to argue that it is his methods that are more sound just because they embrace their ruthlessness more honestly, in contrast to the impotent half measures of an imperial power that can rationalize its atrocities as collateral damage in the service of a larger humanitarian goal. Which approach should evoke more horror? Today we're discussing Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now. This is Wes Alwan. 1:01 Erin: And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. 1:22 Wes: subtextpodcast.com subscribe or. Or by searching for us within the app itself. So Erin, at the very end of this film, had the voice of Walter Weatherman in my head. I know it's weird that my conscience has adopted the voice of an Arrested Development character in that movie. We make a reference to this every other episode. 1:44 Erin: That's true. 1:45 Wes: And the moral of the story was. And that's why you shouldn't read so much poetry, there is a lot of Marlon brando. He's reading T.S. eliot, right? 1:58 Erin: Yep. 1:59 Wes: And then according to the Dennis Hopper character, who's the photojournalist, and Conrad's the Heart of Darkness is the Harlequin. He recites Rudyard Kipling's if as part of his rambling speech, and we get the sense that he's referring back to Marlon Brando's Kurtz reciting that poem as well. And this seems to be one of the things that is entrancing to people in the same way that this worked in Heart of Darkness. Right. So Kurtz was an artist, he was a journalist, he was a musician. He was a person who took the supposed humanitarian mission in the Congo seriously. And we get some of that idea here with Kurtz's reading poetry and composing manuscripts and recording himself pontificating on the war into his tape recorder. And, of course, we Also get the parallel in this movie of a supposed humanitarian component to the war. I think the two things line up very well, and that helps make this a very faithful retelling, I think, of the story, even though there's so many divergences. So, of course, the war is, you know, whereas in the Heart of Darkness, this has supposedly something to do with civilizing the natives. In this case, it's about stopping communism and it's about protecting South Vietnam from North Vietnam. It's not as direct an idea related to higher culture or something like that, or the. The imposition of certain cultural values. And so that makes the. You know, in the movie, it makes it feel a little bit disconnected. Right. Why is Kurt's reading poetry is. Did Brando just come with poetry and wanna read it? Obviously, we know people who've watched Hearts of Darkness, which is a great documentary about the making of the film and the craziness of it, and the fact that Brando hadn't read the book Heart of Darkness and didn't learn any of his lines and didn't want to do the lines and wasted lots and lots of time arguing with Coppola over the dialogue because he didn't understand it while time was ticking on his. I think he was gonna be shooting for two weeks. I forget. But for a million dollars. Yeah. To what extent is this just kind of a tacked on attempt to make things surreal? And to what extent does it actually fit with the story? I think it fits in the end. So that was the. What I was left with at the very end of the film. Something about poetry and something going back to this idea, this kind of platonic contempt for poetry and the idea that it can unleash raw, dangerous emotions on the world, on civilization, impulses that, you know, in a way, poetry, right, is meant to represent what is highest in civilization, and yet we get this paradoxical idea that this is actually dangerous to civilization. And we wrestled with this idea as well in our Heart of Darkness episode, which is, you know, whether the horror, Kurtz's horror, is a matter of the primitive kind of breaking through the thin veneer of civilization or whether it comes from civilization and how those two things are related. 5:10 Erin: Well, I guess I didn't question whether or not Brando's character sort of fits in at the end, though I suppose I should have. I guess nothing Brando does surprises me. So I also liked the different. I had a very different reading on Kurtz in this adaptation. Not very different. But first of all, I like the fact that some of his humanitarian efforts in Heart of Darkness are transposed in Apocalypse now into that sort of quixotic joining of the special forces at 38. I really liked that detail because that's the kind of thing that speaks to heroism in Vietnam. You know, it's not just a guy with big ideas who goes in and wants to rise through the ranks. This is a guy who wants to start from the bottom and work really hard and doesn't care about rising through the ranks so much as serving one's country, maybe, you know, or where, whatever the Special Forces entails, doing the hard work, the real hard job, that takes a tremendous amount of intelligence and skill, but is extremely dangerous and messy and puts you on the line in a way that, you know. So I liked that here. I don't think that we got that from the Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. I think this is a translation into, like, what Vietnam era people would admire in someone. Correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know enough about Vietnam, really, to be talking with any authority about it. So people are gonna have to take everything I say with a grain of salt. The other thing that occurs to me in what you said, I don't see poetry as being an outgrowth of Kurtz's ideals. Or rather, I don't see poetry and the way that Kurtz behaves being connected. Rather, I see those two things in tension. I think, you know, last time we talked about the two dominant senses that Conrad calls upon in the novel to describe both the jungle and Kurtz, which is like sight and sound, right? Silence of the jungle, which is sort of terrifying. And Kurtz's voice, and then also the visuals of the jungle and of Kurt's. Of Marlowe wanting to see Kurtz, that desire to see him and to hear him, those two things were kind of twinned. And I guess sound struck me as the dominant metaphor within the novel, obviously the most fitting one based on the genre. And so it seems only right that in a film, it would be sight that's kind of the dominant metaphor. So I suppose what I saw was Coppola kind of playing with that a little bit and showing the ineffectiveness of rhetoric. But also the tension between what Kurtz says he is and his highfalutin poetry recitations and the visual reality of what's actually happening in that Angkor Wat style compound those two things as being absurdly in tension rather than one being the result of poetry, which I think is what you're getting at. 7:53 Wes: So even with the title of the film Apocalypse now, the first screenwriter on this was John Milius, and an early title was the Psychedelic Soldier. And then eventually it ended up being Apocalypse now as a variation on Nirvana now, which was a slogan apparently going around in the hippie scene in California, which associated drug culture and getting high with reaching enlightenment, an enlightened state of consciousness. There's the famous scene in which we actually see. It's graffitied at the final and final scene on the temple. Around the rocks are our motto, Apocalypse Now. So Nirvana is transposed into apocalypse. And so that's one idea here about the sense in which good intentions can go wrong. We see clearly that clearly in Conrad's novel as well. There's the hypocrisy element, right? So it's we're here to civilize the natives, but really they're there to exploit. But in the figure of Kurtz, the hypocrisy actually vanishes, and that might be the problem. So he's a true believer. He's the one who actually has all the artistic talents and genuinely, initially, at least, believes in this project of civilizing people, of being a humanitarian. And then the question is why that goes wrong and whether, again, that's just a breaking through, whether he goes native or he somehow loses all sense of inhibition, is sort of touched by nature and the lack of civilizational check so that instincts simply emerge, or whether those types of cruelties he's engaged in are actually a product of civilization. So that's one fundamental question on the idea that they're the product of civilization. That's the sort of the Rousseauian point of view. So then we get to the point where we ask the same question with respect to the arts, whether there's a darker side to it. 9:55 Erin: Sure. 9:56 Wes: So Coppola, he famously said, this movie isn't just about Vietnam, it is Vietnam. 10:03 Erin: Right. 10:04 Wes: And he describes this whole process of making the movie and being in the jungle and going crazy. And in Hearts of Darkness, he kvetches a lot about, this movie's gonna be terrible. And this is so pretentious. And he sounds pretentious even when he's describing his own pretentiousness. I really didn't know that Coppola had this character. 10:23 Erin: I'm surprised by that because he seems very down to earth in the interviews that I've seen. Maybe they're later, you know, as an 10:29 Wes: older man, well, he seems almost a bit manic. So we don't have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how this is related to the arts. But it's suggestive for me, in the sense that there's something. Right, right. You know, you're supposed to. Poetry is supposed to be inspired. It's supposed to be quasi insane. And I'm treating poetry here as the representative of higher culture and the higher part of civilization. Taken too far, it can become unmoored from reality. It can be a manifestation of psychosis. So there's inspired madness versus madness. And I'm lining that up with the darker manifestations of civilization. Or a supposed humanitarian component to colonization or war. 11:10 Erin: Yeah. So that tension, I think it's certainly there in the book. But I suppose what I'm trying to get at is it's not so apparent. 11:16 Wes: Right. 11:17 Erin: It's not so in your face. And I think that what you're describing as the function of poetry for me, as I was watching this was the function of filmmaking. 11:24 Wes: Right. 11:25 Erin: I think any good movie, just like any good poem, is kind of a commentary on making a movie as it is. I suppose I should preface anything I say with this disclaimer, which I mentioned last time. I've seen large chunks of this movie before. Not all of it, as I learned. Not the most horrifying sections. I thought I had seen basically all of it. And what I had seen I didn't remember very well. But I knew what I was in for. And actually, I really didn't want to watch this movie because I knew what I was in for. So I should just say that I watched the movie twice in preparation for this. But I deliberately didn't look up any secondary information. I decided not to watch Hearts of Darkness until after we record. And the only thing I knew about this movie was that quote that you gave of Coppola's about this movie isn't about Vietnam, it is Vietnam. That was the only thing I knew going into it. So I've used that as a cipher to interpret everything about this movie. Because that was the one scrap of evidence that I had to go on. So I guess what I'll say, just to preface also, is that this movie I found unbelievably disturbing and did not enjoy at all. And I think partially because we're coming out of the pandemic. So during the last year, admittedly, my movie consumption has been escapist. You know, it's been cotton candy. I really haven't been able to handle much else. So maybe my tolerance has decreased. I'm afraid also, I'm not a big fan, as you know, Wes. I have an aversion to any kind of explicit sex or violence on screen. Not to say that I'm against freedom of artistic expression in any way. And I'm, of course, fine when it serves the plot or when it's artistic, whatever. But even then I have a distaste for it, I must admit. So I'm hypersensitive to what people get exposed to visually for a lot of reasons, partially because I'm a teacher of young men. And I also believe really strongly in an ethics of visual consumption. So I guess what this movie made me confront is the sort of meta difference between the novel as a form and the film as a form. And the boundaries that I almost felt were violated by seeing certain elements from the book which were horrifying, like the heads on the spikes around the Kurtz compound, actually seeing those visually translated into Apocalypse Now. So I suppose that's where I'm coming from. And so therefore, the tension in what Kurtz was reading aloud, the poetry, and what the photojournalist character was reciting aloud seemed very heightened to me. So that this seemed to me to be not the outgrowth of poetry as what was happening on the compound as an expression of madness, but rather the tension between the higher ideals of poetry and what was happening on the compound as expressed through the visual medium. And therefore, the hypocrisy was inherent within the film itself rather than the tension between poetry and violence, if that makes any sense. It made me think, why make this movie? Like, why do this? I don't know if that's a worthwhile question, and I know it's a stupid question. On a certain level, the movie is a masterpiece. I'm glad that it was made, but at the same time, it made me confront the idea of if this isn't a movie about a war, but if this is Vietnam and it's meant to reproduce a certain experience and it's also an anti war movie, those two things seem to me to be in tension. So we're using art, filmmaking art, as a way to express a kind of madness and using a kind of madness to get there. Like you're using the film, which is a sort of a form of exploitation, in a way to demonstrate or depict exploitation. It seemed to me to be a double bind at a certain point. 14:54 Wes: Yeah, that's very interesting. I'm reminded of. I know this is not a book that you're particularly a fan of, but Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, sure. That book is a reflection on how you would talk about war without actually glorifying it, if that's even possible. And it's Related to how you. Whether you can talk about trauma per se. And the glorification is something that kind of, you know, you take something that is inherently traumatic and it becomes tolerable as glorification. So yes, then this was an. A debate at the time. You know, some people saw this as a glorification of the war, some people saw it as a critique of the war. And of course Coppola saw it as a critique and so did Milius. The whole point of the screenplay was to point to the absurdity of the war and the surrealism of the war, which I think the movie does a very good job of. So we get the Sampan Massacre. The movie's episodic. Even though it's based on Heart of Darkness, it evokes the Odyssey in some ways. And in fact Coppola called it the Idiodyssey. He's very self critical through the whole making of the film and talking about how terrible it was going to be. And Milius was directly influenced by the Odyssey. So he thought of for instance, Kilgore as the cyclops. And in the theatrical release there's a scene where the cyclops has to be tricked. And there's a scene where Willard steals Kilgore's surfboard and takes off and then is chased by Kilgore. Sorry, that's not. I mean, in the redux release, it's not in the theatrical release. And as they go up river, things get more and more surreal or psychotic. So this is a really interesting critique of the war because it tries to get at the craziness of it instead of saying this is just cruel or it's cynically exploitative or it's hypocritical. It's not really about communism or any legitimate threat. It's about American imperialism or it simply is too costly in terms of American lives. Those critiques in a way are put to the side and favor of this critique of its surreality and that Milius original title for the screenplay, the Psychedelic Soldier. That's one of the things he really wanted to get at, which is not. Well, I don't know if it was original at the time. Of course, I think it became kind of a trope in Vietnam movies. But the, the emphasis on the use of drugs in Vietnam and the transplantation of youth culture and rock and roll. So I think Willard at one point calls his crew Rock N Rollers with One Foot in the Grave, something like that. And we get introduced to them, you know, the Clean. He's listening to the radio and Then the Rolling Stones come on and there's dancing, and of course, the surfer is water skiing behind the boat and all that stuff. I think the most brilliant part of the film comes very early with Kilgore. And it's one of the longest segments in the film. Most of these episodes last like five to 12 minutes. But Kilgore, we get almost a half hour of Kilgore. And it's brilliant because the absurdity is really highlighted, this idea that Kilgore is entirely motivated by the desire to have fun. Right. You know, his cavalry is very competent. They adore him according to Willard and obey him, and they can execute these attacks, which are very effective. But for Kilgore, it's all subjugated to the idea that he can kind of recreate home in the war theater, right? So he can surf. And his only motivation for helping take the village that Willard needs, because that's going to be his launching point for his boat, is so that he can surf. And this is where I think the question of glorification is really highlighted, because Kilgore is sort of like an ancient Greek hero. And we can revisit that. Right? Because the first forms of poetry are glorifications of war. Or maybe they aren't, you know, is the Iliad glorification of war? That's also a discussion. But, yeah, Kilgore is this larger than life manly man who doesn't flinch when bombs go off around him. Everyone ducks, but not him, you know, and he just ignores everything dangerous. And so you, at least for me, and I'm sure for a lot of men, at least, it's hard not to find that attractive in a way. So, yes, and highlighting the absurdity of it all, you may be evoking an identification with that position, a vicarious enjoyment of that position. Yeah, I think it's a good question. 19:28 Erin: I'd say again that I think I had actually the opposite reaction to that, though I can understand maybe why some of that would be glorification. I mean, certainly the elements of absurdity in the film serve the same function for me that they did in the book. So the devastation and the feeling of utter futility evoked in the book by things that we talked about last time, you know, the broken pipes, the fact that they can't get any rivets, stuff like that, that's what the effect of the absurdity in this film had on me. But I would say that, you know, the Ride of the Valkyries scene, I actually watched this with a Friend the first time, and I, like, broke down. I found it so disturbing. I didn't find it glorifying at all. So, as I said before, the surreality of that scene had the same effect of deadening that in Heart of Darkness, the futility of the infrastructure had. For me, it seemed to me that Coppola's intention wasn't necessarily glorification. I mean, it seemed to me that the intention was to induce horror in us, in the viewer, and to make us feel, to a certain extent, as though we were going through the war. Though that's obviously absurd on its face. We're not going through the war by watching a movie. But because of the reasons I mentioned before, maybe I'm set up to view the film this way, the pandemic, my natural skittishness, whatever. But I found certain elements of that attempt at horror to be. I don't want to use this word, and I don't want to say anything I'm going to regret later, because I just feel strongly about this right now. But edging on. 20:56 Wes: Immoral, perhaps, but not because it could be inadvertently glorifying. 21:02 Erin: No, no. In fact, because it could make it commonplace, I think is my problem. It could be deadening, I suppose I'm looking at this from, like, a Sontag angle, which we could talk about. I wish, actually, that I had thought of that before this, though luckily, I remember a lot. But I know a lot of Vietnam for the American public was about. For the civilian was about TV and the experience of witnessing a war in real life, or, sorry, in real time. And my understanding is that the visual footage of the jungle and the guerrilla warfare footage of the body bags coming off the planes, that this, from what I've heard from people who've lived through it, partly contributed to the diminishing of the American appetite for that war, if there ever was much of one to begin with, which there really wasn't. So it seems to me that the idea of the visual has always been an important part of the Vietnam War, more so than any other war before or since, because this was kind of the intrusion of the camera into the war zone in real time in a way that we hadn't seen before, even in Korea. So I guess it made me wonder if this war is so bad, which the film seems designed to show and which even the American civilian knows, and if its effects are so horrendous on the mind and spirit of humanity. I mean, this is a war famous for inducing PTSD in the people who've lived through it, if the purpose is to make another Vietnam. Then my question as I'm watching it is just why? On one level, I think that the film is aware of this and it provides a kind of visual rebuke throughout the film. There are instances I think of, like, you know, Coppola as himself directing a Vietnam documentary. The visuals and the futility of the visuals of the USO Playboy show, the photojournalist character. I mean, we could talk about all of these elements because I think they're saying something important about film. But I guess what I'm trying to say is just that I felt a deadening at the end of this movie. I realized as I was watching it I had never seen any part of, like, the last 20 minutes of the movie except for the shot of Brando lying on the ground saying, the horror. The horror. I had seen that clip, but I had not seen the water buffalo scene. And as soon as I saw that damn water buffalo, I almost said out loud, like, am I to be spared nothing? I knew what was gonna happen. And so you could get away with so much true horror in a novel, in a story, compared to a film. And I feel as though it's nowhere near as morally compromised because no matter how vivid and sick and shocking the thing that you're describing on paper, it's not a direct image. And so on some level, it's circumscribed by the limits of what's already within our own imaginations. Therefore, it can't possibly be as intrusive or scarring or ultimately deadening as images can be. And Sontag writes about this in terms of the pictures of the concentration camps that. And, in fact, the concentration camps were what I thought of when Kurtz tells that story of the pile of little arms. 23:48 Wes: Right. And it's there in Heart of Darkness as well. The things which sound, you know, are very evocative of that. 23:53 Erin: And frankly, I think the power and the emotional weight of that story is that it's told to us by Kurtz. We don't see that pile of little arms. I think if we did, I bet it would be so underwhelming that we would be shocked at ourselves. I don't know. I'm throwing a lot of stuff at the wall here. I know. 24:07 Wes: And I brought up the possibility that there's a darker side to the poetic that led to a discussion about the possible immorality of certain artistic representations, which is certainly in line with the traditional Platonic objection to the poetic. And I think we have at least three threads to the potential moral compromise in art. And these may all be related and there may be some overlap, but you're emphasizing the possible deadening quality. We may become inured to this sort of stuff, or it may be normalized in a sense. I remember seeing this movie as a kid, and the thing that. The one thing that stuck with me and I found so disturbing was the, you know, after the woman throws the grenade into the helicopter, and then, you know, the helicopter explodes. And then Kilgore has a very casual reaction to that. He's not worried about his men who've just been killed or the little girl that he's just put into the helicopter. Right. The baby. We see all these different conflicting things in Kilgore about this tender moment of trying to save the baby. He's completely indifferent to the fact that the helicopters just exploded and casually says, you know, be savages or something and then has his, you know, crew mow down the three Vietnamese people who are running away, including the girl who put the hand grenade into the helicopter. And when I was younger, I don't think I made the connection. I didn't realize that she was the one who had put the grenade in. And I thought this was just like, for sport, killing civilians. And this did happen. People killed for sport. My uncle was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and people in helicopters would shoot civilians for sport. This is the kind of thing that starts to happen in war. So I found that disturbing and heartbreaking. And I couldn't grasp the film's critique of that. Right. I couldn't feel that as an objection or a critique. Maybe by the time I got to the sampan scene, you know, very obviously where they are trying to create a kind of My Lai massacre situation, I maybe grasp that more now, watching it as I'm older, I'm more inured to that. And it's difficult, very difficult to watch. But, yes, there's a certain layer or boundary that you learn to erect between you and the representation. It's different. So that's one possibility. There's inurement. And then the second one is the one that I was pointing to, which is, you know. And I was relating it to Slaughterhouse 5, which is the potential for glorification. And for the potential for glorification being built into the representation of horror being built into critique because it depends on your particular moral comportment. If you're watching people who are justifying killing other people by calling them savages, you can accept the critique of that. Or, you know, maybe you go along with it. To a certain extent, or maybe it's both. Right. Or if you're looking at a manly man like Kilgore, he's formidable. He's got that, as I said, ancient Greek warrior quality. What's the intention? There is the sort of sociopathy and the unethical component of what's going on. And then excellence. Excellence in the sense of just someone who's tall and has an erect posture and has barking orders and is fearless, absolutely fearless, and operates with total confidence and inspires loyalty in his troops. So you cannot help but be attracted to that. And this is part of the goal of the filmmaker or the artist. And it leads us into the third thread, which is, you know, you have to create something that's entertaining and that's alluring to people and that's. There are. There are charms associated with the arts. So the third possibility, and this is one that I think Plato is worried about, is just that the impulse to entertain dominates over everything else, so that you are sort of impelled to identify whether you like it or not. So even, you know, when you're watching tragic figures on stage for Plato, you don't learn the lesson. You know, if there's some lesson in tragedy, you just sort of. You. You identify with the tragic figure and you want to imitate them, and your soul kind of gets comported to that, to having those same types of emotions, to being irrationally passionate and prone to strong emotions. Aristotle's Poetics is a critique of that. Its whole idea of catharsis tries to take that idea and say, actually, we can identify with those feelings without simply wanting to imitate them. They can affect us in more complicated ways. So that's. I think we've gotten at that kind of ongoing debate about the effects of artistic representation. And I think it is important, the film, you know, as you pointed out, you can treat the film as a meditation on the role of the artist. 29:02 Erin: Yeah. 29:03 Wes: You had mentioned the sort of highlighting of the heroism of Kurtz and the fact that he joined the special forces at 38. 29:10 Erin: Yeah. 29:11 Wes: And Willard relates that, you know, the way the movie begins is someone you know. You also mentioned ptsd, someone who clearly has ptsd. And part of it is he can't function in the home environment. In this film, there's a lot about home and whether you can return home and Kilgore's attempt to make the theater like home and all this stuff. So. So Willard can't be at home without being lost. And, you know, it begins with his punching the mirror and by the way, that's all real. That was all just. They got Martin Sheen really drunk and let him. 29:42 Erin: I did know that. And the heart attack and the fact that Laurence fishburne was only 14. 29:47 Wes: Right. 29:47 Erin: And I know a couple things, but. 29:49 Wes: So, yeah, so he. It begins with this whole idea that he needs to get back to the jungle. He needs somehow to get back to violence. There's that addiction to that. And this, of course, this looms over. Right. The question. We've just been talking about whether we could be traumatized or lured into that position as well. And so in this sense, he identifies with Kurtz. Right. There's a doubling between. In the same way that there is in the novel. There's a doubling. Just as there's a doubling between Kurtz and Marlowe, there's a doubling between Kurtz and Willard. Willard is fascinated with Kurtz as a kind of alter ego. So it starts with. As in the novel, starts with his kind of nobler ideals, perhaps, or maybe that's a component. But it kind of ends with the fact that he's stuck in the jungle and can. And really, that's why he is willing to. You know, he has the stellar career that he gives up and knocks himself down to Special Forces, where he can only rise to the level of colonel. You know, he could have been in general. Just because he needs to get back to war and back to the jungle. 30:46 Erin: Yeah. I like to the fact that. And partially this is because of a time constraint, I'm sure. But I like the fact that we get almost a complete picture of Kurt pretty much right away. Right. In the novel. It's more of, like, the slow drip of information. And we get it in the form of those three. Oh, first of all, I just want to say that opening hotel scene, that is like primo Martin Sheen. He is so attractive. 31:10 Wes: Oh, really? 31:10 Erin: Even though he's having the middle of his psychotic episode, like, with the stubble. 31:16 Wes: Plato would not feel good about this response. You've been seduced by, but. 31:22 Erin: I know, I know, but just in that first. The first part. And then when we see Harrison Ford and I'm like, oh, Harrison. Anyway, some very attractive men in the very beginning of this. 31:31 Wes: That's how they get you. 31:32 Erin: I know. It just reeled me in. And then I was like, for me, 31:35 Wes: it's Kilgore that does it for me. But, yeah, I get it. 31:39 Erin: No, I found him to be nasty. I mean, I love Robert Duvall, but, oh, there's something. 31:43 Wes: We have different tastes than men. 31:44 Erin: Sick about him. And then when he goes to meet the generals and they tell him about Kurtz and his sort of history, there's that audio transmission. So you actually get his voice right up front. And actually I was watching this with Greg, and Greg mentioned that he felt as though there was something similar in the timbre of Martin Sheen's voice and the voiceover and Kurtz's voice and the audio transmission, which is true. They both have, you know, Brando and Martin Sheen both have that kind of high pitched sound to their voice. So, you know, there's the obvious, like, visual parallel when they both are covered in the camouflage mud at the end, but even the audio, the auditory parallel. But anyway, so we get this. We get the audio transmission where he says that whole thing about a snail crawling on the edge of a straight razor and surviving. And it's a little bit. 32:33 Wes: That's gotta be a Brando improvisation. 32:34 Erin: Yeah. But then we get that general's really bizarre speech, which kind of took me out of it because it was a little bit too. He says this whole thing about, you know, things get confused out there. 32:46 Wes: It's very on the nose. 32:47 Erin: Yeah, exactly. 32:48 Wes: Yeah. 32:49 Erin: The struggle between good and evil. What Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. 32:53 Wes: Sometimes the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. 32:56 Erin: You know, that's something that is frequently quoted in college by professors, you know, when I was taking, whatever, American history classes or whatever. And it just seemed to me to be so out of place. I don't know what you thought of that, that little speech he gives and whether you bought it. 33:10 Wes: Yeah, we get a lot up front. You know, the voice in the novel, it's a point of suspense. Right. Because Marlowe is simply imagining. It's a little weird because it's kind of a, you know, Marlowe telling the story has already heard the voice, and so he imbues the voice with this special quality that we don't know. And so when he's retelling the story, he's retelling it as himself, sort of being lured by the voice and wanting to hear it. It's a very weird thing because how could he know anything about the voice? So here we're just giving it right up front, which I don't think is a bad idea, actually, because I don't think as a point of suspense. That doesn't really work for me in the novel. 33:50 Erin: Yeah, it got tiresome in the novel. I think we both agree. 33:53 Wes: Yeah, there's more suspense in hearing a creepy guy talking about a snail slithering along the razor and say, oh, I want to meet this guy. 34:00 Erin: I think that might be Brando. What? 34:03 Wes: And then they get to the unsound methods straight out of the novel and then terminate with extreme prejudice. Which actually comes from a New York Times article about the assassination of two South Vietnamese special agents. But, yeah, that immediately injected itself into the popular culture after that. But, yeah, it is a weird. The scene is not. It doesn't not work for me because there's a strangeness to it all. So the fact that Corman does this very on the nose speech about Kurt's. You know, it wasn't. I don't think it was as jarring to me. It shoves the theme, some thematic stuff, right in your face. It's true. I think the opening of the film is very enchanting. Right. And very visual. Then we get 12, 13 minutes of this, which is a lot, I think, for an audience to tolerate, you know, because in a way, it's the least aesthetically pleasing part of the film. And there's a lot of that exposition. And that's true. 35:00 Erin: Yeah. 35:00 Wes: You know, just shove it all in our face. 35:03 Erin: It really made me think of no country for Old Men. For some reason, that Tommy Lee Jones character's like, long meditations on what's happening, but also staying completely out of the action of the film, you know, And I guess often that's at that point, that's a tension in war films, like in Saving Private Ryan, too, right? The guys who, like, decide that they have to go in, stay very clean in their white offices, and meanwhile everybody on the ground is covered in dirt. 35:29 Wes: Yeah, that's a good point. 35:31 Erin: I even think that that element of his quoting Lincoln is an important part of the demonstration of the distance, the mental and physical distance. As they're sitting in clean Saigon. It would have been even more heightened if they were in Washington. But the ability to have philosophical conversations about what's happened and even to order these types of executions versus actually having to carry them out works for me. 35:54 Wes: Yeah, we get introduced to this idea of unsound methods, and that becomes an important kind of kernel for Willard's ruminations throughout the film. Because when we get to Kilgore, Kilgore is kind of a pre Kurtz in a way, or he's kind of a foil or point of comparison for Kurtz and. And Willard directly, you know, this is. 36:16 Erin: Yeah. He says, if Kilgore acts like this, what must they have against Kurtz? 36:19 Wes: Right, right. You know, there's plenty of madness and murder to Go around for everyone and charging him, Kurtz, with murder is like ticketing people at the Indy 500 and all that stuff. It's an interesting question, I think, in the novel and the film, what makes Kurtz's methods unsound? How are they different from the other methods that we see in the movie? What are the other methods? Right. It's not just that Kurtz's methods involve atrocities because, you know, the film's critique of the atrocities of the. Of the war machine. So we ultimately, we need something else to explain what that means. I'm not sure that I think, you know, a lot of people think Coppola doesn't really have any. Have a firm sense of, you know, what. He's. He's just throwing a lot of things at the wall. But I think there are some, actually, some very interesting things ultimately to say about this idea of unsound methods and the difference between Kurtz and Kilgore and Kurtz's form of violence and other forms of violence that we see in the film. 37:19 Erin: Well, one of the ideas is presented actually by the general. It now occurs to me when he talks about the natives and the temptation they present to be a God to them. So that seems to be Kurtz's main issue, is that he's a God. So I don't know, maybe it's a matter of degrees. Like, you know, Kilg is just a heroic warrior who has the support of the gods, and Kurtz himself has gone a step too far and made himself a God. That seems to me to be part of it. But it's just a very bizarre thing for the general to say, the temptation to be a God. He implies that that's a common temptation and that Kurtz has crossed the line by actually fully giving in to that temptation. So that seems to me to be set up as the problem, the big problem. 38:01 Wes: Yeah, this seems to be a kind of absolute power corrupts absolutely type of argument, which I think is one of several options. Just in the way, you know, in the book we have several options for explaining Kurtz. 38:13 Erin: But, no, I think it also shows a way in which Kurtz has. He's gone too far by penetrating something in the consciousness of the people. So you can have Kilgore murdering civilians willy nilly. I mean, not willy nilly. I mean, you know. You know what I mean? But that scene with a grenade, you can have that, but he does it aerially. So there's a godlike element to that. But there's also a kind of like, he's fulfilling his mission, whatever that may be. As an American soldier. Right. 38:41 Wes: Yep. 38:42 Erin: Kurtz has infiltrated among the people and infected their minds in a way. You know, he's become part of the culture in a way that goes too far. 38:50 Wes: Well, look, this is. You know, you can recite poetry. You're. There's nothing you can't do. Yeah, I think this is part of it. I think it helps just to look at a little bit of what Kurtz has, his own justification for his methods. Right. I like it when these things are kind of just done explicitly in films and books. So Kurtz says he tells the story of the men who cut off the arms of the vaccinated villagers. And then he says, at first, I wept like some grandmother. But then he says, you know, he had something like a diamond bullet through the forehead. And then he saw the genius of that, the will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we because they could stand, that these were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love, but they had the strength, the strength to do that. If I had 10 divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment. Without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us. Just to step back to your point about Kurtz kind of being able to become a God to the villagers in the book, that's associated with his artistic nature. Right. He can give these speeches, these amazing speeches. They do a little bit of that with the Hopper photojournalist character in the film, where, you know, he's like, man, you don't. You don't talk to Kurtz. You listen to him. This guy recites poetry out loud. Only Hopper could pull this off, I think. 40:33 Erin: But he's awesome in this. Yeah. 40:34 Wes: He's just legitimately insane enough to make all of that, like, convincing and funny. 40:39 Erin: I was just thinking, if they did a remake, Owen Wilson would be the only person who could play that character. 40:44 Wes: Yeah. 40:45 Erin: Not that they should ever remake this anyway. Sorry, continue. Yeah. 40:48 Wes: So Kurt's. It's not actually a bad argument. You know, he's. He's arguing for operating like an. Like an animal would operate, and engaging in killing. That isn't moralized. Right. It isn't. You don't call people savages or demonize them, and you don't say, hey, we're here on a humanitarian mission, and therefore there's going to be collateral damage. And this is necessary. The difference between Kurtz's clear eyed, sociopathic ruthlessness. So just call it ruthlessness. You know, Kurtz is advocating ruthlessness. And that is what seems insane. That is what seems like an unsound method. Not because it might not achieve results, but because it doesn't. You know, if you look at the other forms of violence in the film, you get like the panic killing and the sampan scene, you know, the family on the riverboat and. Or the kind of just psychotic. There's no commanding officer stuff going on the Do Lung Bridge, which is a pointless bridge anyway. And it's just to fulfill some bureaucratic imperative to say that a road is open, you know, so the bridge gets blown up every. Every night and then rebuilt the next day. Or the kinds of killing that's going on with Kilgore. Kilgore is a very interesting case, right, because he has an objective, which is. And this is something else Willard comments on, right? The guys just want to go home, but they can't because the home doesn't exist anymore. And I think part of that is this idea of there's the concept of social transformation, right? Youth culture is transforming the United States. And even the reaction to the Vietnam War, ironically, is transforming the United States in a way that means that the soldiers can't ever really go home. They can't go home to what they do to a society that's more anchored to tradition. So this is kind of a things fall apart element going on here. And then they can't go home because trauma will alter them in a way that they are kind of become creatures built to operate in the warlike environment. So they can't go home in that sense. But Kilgore, he sees, he's trying to treat the violence as a means to homemaking, so to speak. So Kilgore, like, they have a beach barbecue that night. And then Willard makes a comment. The more he tried to make it like home, the more everyone just missed home. And he can subjugate the objective. First of all, like, the cavalry just seems to be running wild looking for shit, something like that, as Willard puts it, and not having much of any real objective, but just kind of to wander around looking for things to kill. And then they're tasked with helping him get up river. So the motivating factor for Kilgore is I'm going to take Charlie point just so I can get some surfing in. So everything is subjugated to these things that you associate with being an American who has lots of time on their hands for leisure activities. Right. Recreating the American lifestyle in the theater of war and even making war serve that purpose. So there's a lot of different types of violence, I think, here. None of them, though. I think in any of these things, people would say, are these the insane ones, or is Kurtz the. You know, are these the forms of violence that are insane, or is it Kurtz's form? I mean, there's just the insanity and pointlessness of being in Vietnam in the first place. And the way the military bureaucracy operates, though. But Kurtz asks us to give up our hypocrisy and give up our alibis, give up the moralization of violence, give up the justification of it, and just see it for what it is. And that's what I think they see as the unsound method and the insanity, not because it might not produce results, but because it's psychologically too costly. 44:32 Erin: So once they leave Kilgore and then we get the episode on the boat, it seems to me like there's a sort of transposing. I mean, the boat becomes a kind of a safe haven and kind of a home in a way. There's this idea that Willard returns to over and over again, which is, don't get off the boat. 44:48 Wes: Exactly. 44:49 Erin: We have the. 44:50 Wes: Unless you go all the way. 44:51 Erin: Right, right. 44:52 Wes: Saying, going native. Yeah. 44:54 Erin: The lesson learned of never getting off the boat, we get with finding a different kind of native, which is a tiger. Right. In the jungle. Chef, the saucier, who, like, goes insane when the tiger jumps out at them and is like, I don't want this. I just wanted to cook. Man, that's great. Which is really awesome. But, yeah, the idea of creating the home on that boat so that you can, you know, the boat becomes a kind of a similar venue for homemaking as the helicopters do, even though they do obviously make the beach into a party, and there's a homemaking that goes on there. What strikes me about the napalm and the aerial shootings and everything is the sense of distance between the vessels in which these people are entombed in certain instances, especially in the case where the helicopter blows up and the surrounding landscape, where there's a real. There's a physical and a kind of a mental distance, and the same thing with the boat. So the idea of getting off the boat, I think, is also related to the idea of Kurtz as having Gone native and having penetrated into the society, that seems to be the wrong thing. To actually see these people as being like, more human in a way, more and less human at the same time is what Kurtz does wrong. Whereas if you just keep your distance and see them as targets and stay with your buddies and try to create a home as much as possible, whether that be on the boat or in the helicopter with aerial raids or with your little troop that you can go surfing with, then that's okay. Which is a strange and necessary idea. 46:28 Wes: Right. Because from the standpoint of home, the capacity for rationalization is greater. Right. So if you can kill, like the motto on Kilgore's helicopter is death from above. Right. Delivering death from above can be noble and glorious, and it's not up close and personal. Willard's reflections start with, you know, how many people have I killed the six that I know about? So he's done six up close and personal. And then there's others, who knows? Because you're part of a battle. Who knows. So you immediately get that distinction between those two types of killing. And to embrace Kurtz's point of view is to embrace amputating arms or doing very, very cruel, cutting off heads, all the heads, very up close and personal types of killing where you don't get to create these alibis for yourself. You have to face the full consequences to yourself of the behavior that you've. You've engaged in. Not. Not that there's not a lot of up close and personal killing in Vietnam. And that's part of what's so traumatic, by the way. This is what war trauma is all about more than anything. Memories of the kinds of violence that they've engaged in, especially that up close and personal violence. But, yeah, that's a very good point that you're making, I think, from the standpoint of a kind of artificial home bubble, it's easier to do this kind of distance killing. And that's the sound method. I think ultimately that's what they, you know, they don't think this consciously, but I think this is what really people think of as the. The sound approach. It's not crazy because you can always say, no, I'm not a monster. It's just collateral damage. It's just, you know. 48:01 Erin: Yeah, it's just a drone. 48:02 Wes: If you do it deliberately and face to face, then you can't use that excuse anymore. 48:08 Erin: Yeah. Again, I return to the idea of a camera. You know, camera is like a mediating factor between you and the subject that you're you know, you're not looking directly at it, you're looking through viewfinder. Just realize that the Sontag essay that I'm thinking of is called In Plato's Cave. Yeah, but she talks about that a camera is like fundamentally anti interventionist. 48:29 Wes: Right. 48:29 Erin: Because you can't shoot a picture of somebody and like help them at the same time and do or do anything with them. 48:34 Wes: By the way, let me just interject. There's that great scene on the beach, right, where Coppola is playing the TV guy and saying, just run past the camera, this is for tv. Just don't look at the camera. And Willard pauses for a long time, looking straight at him. Don't look at the camera. Keep going like you're fighting. 48:51 Erin: Well, that was the most important moment of the whole movie for me. The other thing I was thinking too, to return to this idea of the home thing is that you even have inter. Home Hatfields and McCoy's kind of warfare too, because you have the boats coming by, lighting each other on fire. 49:06 Wes: Right. 49:06 Erin: And then they have to replace the frickin top of the thing with the branches. The stupidity of that is really incredible. 49:12 Wes: Different layers of obvious insanity. Right. So who's insane again, is the question. Right. 49:16 Erin: And the same thing with the, you know, the purple haze, the smoke bomb which attracts the attention of the local tribes and ultimately results in Mr. Clean getting murdered. Sweet baby. With his mom's recording being played, which is. 49:28 Wes: Sorry, I felt very guilty watching the whole thing knowing that you were watching it, why I asked you to watch this. 49:36 Erin: Oh, oh. And you knew that I wouldn't be able to handle that. Yeah, I'm, I'm like, I'm literally crying right now. Just saying that I am. My eyes are watering. But that smokescreen, just really, really fitting to me, that use of smoke throughout, like especially around Brando's compound. And of course it's like, seems to me to be rhyming with the fog, which is in the novel and in the book, whatever we could say about that as a visual pun on the fog of war or the insularity of the fog, that it traps the people on the boat within themselves or with each other rather, and away from what's going on around them. But then that the purple haze, which is a literal smokescreen, actually draws attention to them. That's kind of a strange doubling and 50:20 Wes: which connects us to the drug culture as well, right? 50:22 Erin: Of course, of course, yeah. But that idea that by they're not covering themselves up, it's like they're standing out Instead, by infiltrating to a certain point. 50:30 Wes: Yeah. It's a form of escapism that attracts attention. So, you know, maybe we can connect escapism to home, what we've called homemaking. Treat them as the same sort of thing. Right. It's. They're trying to have fun on the boat and forget about where they are. And the fog is something insulating and something trancing. It's purple haze, you know, reminiscent of being high, you know, in a fog. 50:55 Erin: Insulating, That's a word I was trying to get to. 50:57 Wes: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you, you, you try to escape from reality. You do it at home, you. But it's even more poignant and, and urgent to do that in a, in an environment that's traumatizing and yet it backfires. You know, it stands in contrast to Kurtz's urge to be clear minded, to do this with total clarity. Part of what they need home, they need insulation, because that, again, is the alibi for violence that makes it tolerable. This is what makes it a sound method. This is why the irony that I love is that it sounds. It gets clean guilt. But it's psychologically sound that insulation unsound in reality, sounds psychologically. So. Which do we prefer? It's actually not. There's not a clear answer to that question. 51:45 Erin: Well, it's the same idea of the dehumanization of, especially Asians in these times of war, like in World War II with the Japanese, and the tactics that people use to dehumanize the enemy as a means of psychological distancing is both sound and unsound. Right. Like you have to dehumanize them if you're going to expect people to kill in that way. But it's also disgusting and not sound by its very nature. It sounds like we're almost totally upriver here and we're gonna get to the Brando compound, which probably looks a lot like what I imagine his house in Polynesia looked like. But before we get there, I just wanted to turn around for a second and backtrack to the Playboy show. I do want to talk about that. 52:25 Wes: Yeah. So this is. I just want to make a preliminary comment. This is part of that odyssey, like effect. 52:31 Erin: Ah, yeah, sure. 52:33 Wes: I mean, Milius thought of this as the siren scene. And it's not perfect. It's very, very loosely associative what he's doing. But what you do see is you see these series of episodes in which certain appetites are, you know, and these are related with home as well, or What Freud might call ego instincts and self preservation, or the desire to take care of oneself. But, you know, it's food. Right. With the mangoes, chef just wants to cook. 52:56 Erin: Yep. 52:57 Wes: There's the sexual desire involved in this moment. So there are other moments like that as well. But. Yeah. So the Playboy Bunnies. 53:03 Erin: Yeah. It reminded me of. You know, I just recently saw Cool Hand Luke, you know, which is remarkably similar to this in certain ways. But, you know, the car wash scene that after George Kennedy's character is recounting the scene to the men over and over again in their bunks and describing it to them in this kind of titillating way. And Luke, Paul Newman's character gets mad at him and is like, what are you trying to do? Like, what's the purpose of this? That's what I was thinking the whole time during this whole thing. It's like, if pornography, I guess, is, you know, if the purpose is to titillate and it has some sort of utilitarian and even like, sort of mechanistic function, then what happens when you just. When even the mechanistic function of this kind of. It's not a pornographic show, but you know what I mean? This purposely titillating show is also thwarted. Like, why bother? Like, why not get Bob Hope to tell a few jokes? Why does it have to be a Playboy show just to rile these people up to the point where they're trying to jump on the helicopter, you know. 53:59 Wes: Yeah. Well, it's another failure of the transplantation of home. Right. Of, you know, it's a place without women. And of course, it's. Yeah. What's the point? In Redux, they run into the bunnies later and there's like a makeout scene. I'm glad that was cut out. 54:12 Erin: Oh, yeah. 54:13 Wes: It doesn't make any sense, but, you know. Yeah. Because this is supposed to be. Ultimately highlight the pointlessness of this. It's not something they can actually have, and it's just inducing of. 54:26 Erin: Well, it's another element of this idea of the limits of the visual, the difficulty of film as a medium to express all this stuff. This scene and the scene of Coppola directing the faux documentary really stood out to me because, like, pornography or. And with the naked pinups too, whatever they're trying to express with that reference to something pornographic. Like for Coppola to say that this film isn't about Vietnam, it is Vietnam. Like, you know, pornography isn't about sex, it is sexual. 54:53 Wes: Right. 54:53 Erin: So in a way, like what Coppola is doing with Apocalypse now, it just occurred to me, is, like, kind of pornographic in a way. And again, it just made me think that. Is the movie itself artistic? Of course, yes. But it did make me think about a war film and the parallels between a war film and pornography, especially one which claims to reproduce the horrors. So is this artistic? Is it not pornographic? I think that pornography and artistry are two very different things. But is there an element of the pornographic in this? I think so. Because if part of that artistry of Coppola is, if the purpose of that is to be kind of pornographic about the horrors of war, to show how it's devastating, to show the deleterious effects of seeing something terrible which is used as a trope again and again. Like, what did Kurt see that made him this way? Willard asked that something terrible. Seeing something terrible can warp you and deaden you. And to show this via a medium that warps you and deadens you as a viewer, to me, is more than just irony. 55:51 Wes: We're back again to the danger of the poetic or the mimetic right and to the something conflictual inherent in representation. And we focused on the violence, but now we get to the sexual component of this. So the things we were focused on were inurement or glorification or titillation. Entertainment via violence. But now we have to think about sexuality. And. And notably, there's a much, much higher tolerance for violence in films than there is for actual sex, right? So to be truly pornographic, it would have to be very, very explicit. And it's always an interesting question of why we are so much more tolerant of very, very explicit violence. But we say, let's put the explicit sex in a different category and keep it out of the films. You know, I think the heyday of, like, anything explicit in films is probably in the 80s, when there always had to be a topless scene. And now I don't think, for the most part, you even see that, because what is the point, really? There is no point. I think it was done because it could be done, because it was, in a way, a statement of a sort, but it actually doesn't serve any function. And the reason it doesn't, I think it is very different from violence because in sexuality, representation and action, words and action are actually much closer to each other, right? So people are involuntarily titillated or repulsed or both by explicit sexual scenes in a way that is very psychologically invasive. And you've made an argument that this, to some extent, is true of representations of violence as well. I Think it's less true. And I think that's why violence is more tolerated. 57:29 Erin: I agree. 57:29 Wes: It's less true, I think because our sexual activated sexual fantasies are actually arousing physiologically in ways that are much more powerful. A big part of the enjoyment of movies and other arts is vicarious enjoyment of violence. I think that's, you know, in a Kurtzian vein. I, I would say we should face that fact. Like, people go to see an action movie, they want to enjoy violence. And the way they usually enjoy that is through the moralization of the violence. There are good guys and they're bad guys. So this is another reason, I think we're more tolerant of violence and in film because we, we have better defenses that we can deploy to contain the fantasy and the impulses. And we say, yep, these are bad guys and they deserve to die. And therefore, I'm not just getting off on violence. I'm, you know, I just want to see justice done, something like that. There's some filmmakers who, like Quentin Tarantino, you can see the difference because he's obviously sadistic. He's just like, I want to get off in violence. I'm not going to put the moralizing stuff in my film. 58:30 Erin: Right, right. 58:31 Wes: And so it's disturbing when that doesn't happen. It's a good kind of comparison. So, yeah, I think these are good questions that are, that are, you know, again, intimately related to what's going on in the film itself because we're talking about trauma. Anything that's like explicit pornographic sexual representations are actually potentially traumatic because they can invade us more effectively and because we don't have as effective defenses. And this goes back to the alibis, right, the homemaking alibis and rationalizations for war with sex. It's much, much harder to do that. We're much more in that Kurtzian position of just having to face up to it. It sounds like you agree about the potential for sex to be more traumatic. 59:16 Erin: I do, I do. And also because there's a flattening, like killing something. Violence already is a. Is a flattening. It shuts down life literally. There is a reality that is within sex that can't possibly be portrayed on film. And so film flattens that and makes it into something that is a purely physical act and therefore kind of cheapens it. Whereas in many forms of violence, it is just purely a physical act. There isn't something that people might call holy right about violence. It's the opposite. Whereas filming sex or seeing something like that through a camera, it makes it violent when it's not violent. It's supposed to be the opposite of violence, but the depiction of it, because you're just getting the image and you're not actually experiencing it and getting the things, insects that go beyond the actual physical act. I think it makes it repulsive, which violence is already repulsive, so who cares? Right. 1:00:18 Wes: Yeah. That would be what corresponds to the defense. Right. For violence would be the containing factor for sex is some sense of intimacy. Or you mentioned that you could. There could be a religious component or a holy component as well, or. 1:00:33 Erin: Or just a spiritual. 1:00:34 Wes: Yeah, spiritual joining. Yeah. So. And so that provides a way to reinterpret or to give a symbolic component to sex that makes it more than mere rape or mere violence and mere intrusion. And it draws on the human capacity for language and mutual recognition and all those things. And so it's. And how do you do that in a film, even if it were a romantic comedy? Right. What are you going to. In Notting Hill, which we watched recently, do you go from the tender romantic scenes to suddenly cut to an explicit sexual pornography? Those two, they don't work. There are deep, deep reasons why you can't ever do that. Because the representation of sex, you can moralize violence in a way that's completely successful. You know, the bad guys look like bad guys visually on the screen, but you can't. There's something about intimacy that's ineffable and so hard to represent that it can't sort of neutralize the extremely stimulating nature of the representation of sex. But you're reminding me with something when you mention something holy. If there can be something holy in violence. Right. It is with sacrifice. And that's the thing that Coppola tries to use. And of course, it's not there in the novel, and it's hard to make sense of it. Coppola was looking for an ending to the film, and this is one of the things that was really bothering him in the original script, Kurtz and Willard joined forces to fight the Viet Cong for a while. There's this huge final battle, which would be idiotic, of course. And Coppola, throughout the filming process, was just completely rewriting the. And then he had a very uncooperative Marlon Brando in the end who didn't want to read any of his lines and basically had to have him improvise for days and days and days just to cut together what little he got of that, which I think was effective. But, you know, I wonder how. Well, the concept of sacrifice in the End. That's his way out with an ending. Right. The identification of this kind of animal sacrifice on the part of the indigenous people, the natives in the film, with Willard killing Kurtz as a form of sacrifice. I thought a lot about this, but I think it's very hard to make sense of it. I mean, in a way, it's. Why try to make sense of it? You know, Coppola is just. He's, you know, he's reaching, but. Yeah, I don't know what you thought about that, if you thought there was something there. 1:02:59 Erin: I do. I also think it's beyond sense. The film doesn't really end for me. I don't find the ending very good, in a way. 1:03:08 Wes: Yes. I watched this with someone who's like, yeah, bad ending. 1:03:13 Erin: You know, at the beginning, we get the superimposed images of the helicopters with the ceiling fan. That works really well, I think. At the end, we get three superimposed. Well, we get one image and two images superimposed. So I really love. In the Cambodian Angkor Wat style complex, I really love the stone, that first shot of that large, monumental sort of column that, as you look at it, the two faces on either side seem to come into focus. You could see the faces and the doubling, the. You know, then impose, you know, Western culture onto this. But you think of Janus. I thought of Janus. And I thought, of course, of the twinning of Brando and Martin Sheen's faces at the end. Those last shots are the what? The image of the boat and the riverbank superimposed with the image of that. Of one of those faces, one of those monumental faces, and then the image of Martin Sheen's face. Okay, so what are we left with? Well, Martin Sheen, what is the good guy who doesn't get taken in? And he leaves, but there's some remnant of this still within him. Is that what we're supposed to get from this? I think a far more effective ending and a very interesting ending would be if when he came out after killing Kurtz and was on the steps and everyone bowed to him, the movie just ended. Because then we wouldn't know whether or not he takes the. You know, Instead he pulls Lance, the surfer who's totally bought into everything and is in some kind of trance that Colby guy is in. You know, he pulls him out and he gets to be the good guy who has made the sacrifice. If we had just been left with the image of them bowing to him on the stairs and didn't know what he did with that, then the quote, unquote sacrifice could be read not as a sacrifice, but as an overthrow. And I think the ending would be far more ambiguous. And the murder of Kurtz, where you call it whatever, you know, the killing of Kurtz would be very interesting. And I don't know if you agree with that, but that's where I would end the film. In my infinite wisdom. If I could play God like Kurt's, that's where I would end the film. And then the sacrifice would be the sacrifice to the new God or the overthrow of the old God, whatever the case may be. 1:05:21 Wes: One of the questions here is the fate of Willard. 1:05:25 Erin: I suppose he has to tell the tale at the end, but the whole thing could be. 1:05:28 Wes: That's. 1:05:29 Erin: Yeah, that's him telling the story from the compound. 1:05:31 Wes: True. While bald and squeezing water all over his head. 1:05:36 Erin: Yeah. I wrote, like, the second time I watched it, when I took just a few notes. I really didn't take much notes at all on this. I just wrote Brando's Phases of the Moon. 1:05:47 Wes: Well, one of the reasons why they shot him in shadows was because he had gotten so fat. Kurtz was supposed to be gaunt. 1:05:53 Erin: Oh, it works better with him as a fat man. He's living off the largesse of. 1:05:57 Wes: And what Coppola tried to do is he said, okay, we're just going to go the other way on this, and you're going to be this hedonist who's like a woman on either side and fat. You know, like Caesar and History of the World part one or something. You know, just popping grapes. 1:06:09 Erin: Yeah. Now there's a reference I can get behind. 1:06:13 Wes: And Brando would have none of that. He didn't want to be represented that way. So. So they, you know, Coppola did the best he could and came up with this compromise. All right, you're too fat. We're going to shoot half your head at the same time. You know, half your head at a time and watch the gibbous wax and wane. 1:06:34 Erin: Yeah. Or the gibbon wax. 1:06:38 Wes: Yeah. Right. So I'm not so dissatisfied with Willard leaving. Ultimately, there's no good answer to this because there's no real answer to Willard's dilemma, which is to be traumatized and need to be in the jungle, and yet it's not a great place to be. So having him become the new Kurtz, you know, is a problem in its own right. You know, when he walks down the steps and people are bowing or kneeling down to him, and then he throws his weapon down, and then people throw their weapons down. That's kind of the corniest part, right? And it's kind of lame. Insertion of an anti war message or something. Makes no sense, but. Or maybe it's not, you know, maybe. Maybe it's just meant to show the. The desire to. Which has something to do with worship. And of course, brings us back to the effect of art on the audience and the inducement of the audience to imitation, emotional and psychological imitation and the moral effects of that. For me, the big question is whether we can make sense of treating Kurtz's killing as a sacrifice. Can that really mean anything in the context of this movie? Can we connect it thematically back to anything else at that has happened? 1:07:49 Erin: For it to be a true sacrifice, the conditions have to be there, right? So what are the conditions of sacrifice? A higher order, a higher ideal? I mean, I think it's clear that there is none. That's part of the problem of this war. 1:08:01 Wes: And then we have to think about Christian sacrifice versus ancient Greek or primitive sacrifice. And what was it for the Greeks? It's a way of. You give some to the gods, right? It's a way of worshiping and honoring the gods. And I think it reflects an anxiety about what it means to kill because it's clear that when you sustain yourself by killing animals, you're much more. And you do it for yourself and you're much more directly involved in it. There's a stronger identification with the prey as another conscious being. This is where our human self consciousness gets us in trouble and where we have to kind of find a way out. Right? If you're a Kurtzian lion, you kill without any of that. You kill with complete coldness. And empathy is not a factor in the mind. Consciousness of the other consciousness is not even a potential factor. But once that's been introduced, then we need again, we need alibis and rationalizations and a way to make the killing more than just killing. But this actually runs in the opposite direction of the typical moralized alibi, the killing bad guys or we're killing savages or whatever. This goes in the other direction and says we are killing something sacred and we are in a way honoring. It's not just honoring the gods. There's a connection between the God and the beast, I think. And we are honoring the thing that we are killing. And one of the anxieties there is about depriving ourselves of the sources of life itself. It's the anxiety that life doesn't return, right? You know, winter, fall and winter, everything goes away. Does it come back? Is there a Spring. And in part, you worship and sacrifice to the God in order to ensure that there's another spring. So to kill the animals, to evoke the anxiety that that's it, there's no more animals, there's no more life. And to turn that into a ritualized way of honoring the God is to appease God or nature and to preserving life, you know, in a more general sense, even in the context of specific killing. So those are my speculations, something like that. So I still don't know exactly how to connect that to. There's something there about another way of killing. The various ways of killing in the film, panic and moralization, or just simply mindless or cold and various other ways. This is a new way of conceiving, of killing. And it corresponds, by the way, to what we mentioned with intimacy and sex. It's a attempt at containment, to supply to violence what we get with sex when it's connected to some kind of intimacy. So maybe it's more intimate violence. Maybe there's something to be said for the return to the primitive in this sense, to a position in which violence can actually mean something, especially when it's necessary. Right. If you have to kill animals to survive. 1:10:51 Erin: Right. 1:10:52 Wes: What Willard says about Kurtz is he doesn't want to go out as just like a washed up. He wants to go out like a real soldier. And so Kurtz, you know, basically arranges for Willard to kill him. That's why the boat. You know, when Dennis Hopper character says it's all approved, you know, pull in, pull in. Kurtz is setting this all in motion. He's kind of his little. He's a Prospero, in a way, on his island. And he controls, you know, from that point forward, he has a great deal of control over the way the narrative unfolds. 1:11:23 Erin: What he's saying as he's about to be sacrificed to is pretty interesting. Or the document on his desk, which is called. I wrote down the title. The Role of Democratic Force in the Underdeveloped World. 1:11:34 Wes: Okay. I tried so hard to figure out what that title was, and I couldn't. 1:11:38 Erin: And then he writes on it, Drop the Bomb. Exterminate them all. 1:11:43 Wes: So in the novel, it's what? 1:11:44 Erin: It's Exterminate the Brutes. 1:11:46 Wes: Exterminate the Brutes. And then the title of the report is something about civilizing the savages or something. 1:11:52 Erin: Yeah. So to what extent is Kurtz's vision a sacrificial vision? I don't know. 1:11:57 Wes: Well, in the novel, you know, Kurtz's high minded ideals have been compromised in some way. And like we go in two directions. He's been right, his impulses have gotten the better of him, or he's kind of the civilization has carried itself out to its logical extreme in a way in him. So those are the two ways I think you can go. But in this case, again, it's a little harder to make sense of because what we get is that Kurt's joined the Special Forces because he just needed to get back to the jungle. We don't get as much about him having any high minded ideals and so there's not as much of a setup that would make sense of that in this We've never heard before about Kurtz being interested in spreading democracy, so to speak. 1:12:41 Erin: Right, right. 1:12:42 Wes: Even though that's part of the official justification for the war. 1:12:45 Erin: Great. Yeah. Well, I think that's a good place to end. 1:12:48 Wes: All right, thank you, thank you. And if you like us, a rating or review would help a lot. You can also find [email protected] [email protected] Sometimes we'll continue talking about the topic for that week. Sometimes we'll discuss what else we've been reading, writing, and thinking about. When the time comes, we'll be responding to listener emails, and sometimes we'll talk a little bit about ourselves. Subscribing will also get you the occasional full bonus show and several prequel episodes that I did with various guests. Send your feedback and episode requests to lettersubtextpodcast.com you'll also find us on Facebook at Subtext Podcast and on Twitter at Enjoy Subtext. And once again, thank you for listening.