I can’t believe that’s 2006 and we are still talking about  Apocalypse Now. Not that I’m complaining.  No, I’m delighted to be given the chance again thanks to Paramount’s release on August 15th of  Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier. 

A few reviewers have already complained that the set, which combines  AN ’79 with  AN ’01, A.K.A.,  Apocalypse Redux, along with some deleted scenes,  isn‘t complete,  because it lacks the documentary  Hearts of Darkness. I can understand the hunger to have every cinematic component of the  AN story available in one place, but A)  Hearts of Darkness is not really affiliated with the film, it is an independently made doc owned by others and therefore not easily added to the mix; B) it is easily available to anyone who really wants it, and I am not going to give even a  bit of a hint how to get it; and C) if you are going to put something on a disc that makes for a “complete dossier,” why not include the 5-plus hour work print that everyone seems to have except me, including the operator of the video rental place down the street who only lends it to his friends?

 

So, yes, it would be nice to have  Hearts of Darkness consolidated with  AN, in some kind of package that maybe also includes the work print, but all that will have to wait for another publication of the disc, say, maybe four years from now, when the film is released again on HD DVD (the other companies are doing Blu-Ray). And I am delighted to finally be able to see, finally, after all these years, footage of Colby (Scott Glenn) killing the Photojournalist (Dennis Hopper).

 

Instead, for now we have a two-disc set with extras that include maybe 20 minutes of previous un-included footage from the work print, plus a commentary from Coppola himself. It is an excellent commentary, despite the fact that he refers to the actor as J.D. Spradlin instead of  G.D. Spradlin … and who cares if he calls  Hearts of Darkness his wife’s film instead of Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper’s (after all, she did shoot 75 per cent of the footage in  Hearts). No, the man talks about  AN with the enthusiasm and committment as if he were still working on it, and though some of the anecdotes may be a tad well worn to the point that neither he nor anyone else can probably remember if they are really true, it is still a joy to hear a major director discuss a major film with such intimacy and knowledgeability, despite the fact that you have to insert disc two to get parts two of each of the two versions (which must have something to do with the way the yak tracks work).

 

 

Other reviews have gone into such detail about the extras, such as Preston Jones in his excellent coverage at  DVDTalk that there is no need for me to duplicate or add to that material here. Rather, I’d like to discuss curious aspects of the film that struck me for the first time while watching it on three times in preparation for this review.

 

 

For example, while watching  AN I began to wonder, What does the film believe about the Vietnam war? Is the film for it, or against it? Is it anti-communist? Is it liberal, or conservative? Is the film anti-war, or just anti-bad wars that can’t be won, or can’t be won by western interlopers? What are we suppose to think about Kurtz and Willard? What are we suppose to think about the end? Just what is it that Kurtz is mad (both angry and insane) about?

Willard is suppose to be our eyes and ears. Through him, we absorb the Vietnam experience. All that is strange about it is newly strange to him, and thus to us (although he  has been there for some time, so Vietnam’s psychedelic nature shouldn’t come as a total surprise). But Willard is also a competent if not superior soldier, enough to earn the respect of Kurtz, and he has killed men, close enough to feel their last breaths, as he tells us in the narration. He is not us. He is a good soldier but tortured by what he has seen and done, not unlike the way Kurtz has been twisted by his frustration. He is determined. The breaking point comes with the intermission heralding sampan sequence. The mission is all to Willard, and he kills the dying woman to get back on track, showing a ruthlessness that cows the PBR crew. He is not us, but we are a part of him.

 

Kurtz, on the other hand, is  for war. He wants to fight it, but properly, and to win. He is a soldier to his essence. Kurtz is the equivalnet of, or a rogue version of, someone like John Paul Vann, an essentially conservative figure of whom liberal journalists of the time were enamored, perhaps without fully understanding. As with Kurtz, it’s a little difficult to figure out just what it was that Vann was so mad about concerning the conduct of the war beyond its ineptness and bureaucratic slowness. He saw battles fought poorly, and seemed to be fixated on a policy of the generals concerning village conversion. But as far as a global perspective on the conflict, I can only find one quote, which is that “If it were not for the fact that Vietnam is but a pawn in the larger East-West confrontation, and that our presence here is essential to deny the resources of this area to Communist China, then it would be damned hard to justify our support of the existing government.” Kurtz, too, has something of that larger perspective, with an added dollop of Vietnam’s role as part of a cultural – anthropological cycle of death and rebirth, based on the writings of Frazer (which, as far as I have been able to research, no one has bothered to try and research in connection wtih  AN; well, it is a thick book). Kurtz’s modern equivalents probably would be men such as Scott Ritter, the UNSCOM guy, and Robert Baer, whose vision infuses  Syriana.

Milius, however, apparently specifically based Kurtz on a Colonel named Robert Rheault, of the Fifth Special Forces Group. In 1969, Reault ordered the execution of a South Vietnamese guide whom he though was a double agent. His judgment appeared tio be correct, but he was brought up on charges (later dropped), and word spread that the military was conducting “foreign policy” on its own. It was from (if I remember correctly) a  Newsweek article about Rheault that Milius got the inspiration for Kurtz and the phrase “termination with extreme prejudice.” Rheault’s rogue activities appealed to Milius’s anarco-conservative leanings, which are out of Baudelaire’s portrait of the soldier in  The Painter of Modern Life more than Any Rand. Soldiers are the only truly noble people. This, you might say, is the Milius viewpoint. On their own, soldiers have a code and an honor and could probably triumph in any contest were it not for politicians and officers. In Milius’s version of the script, Willard joins Kurtz in a final apocalyptic battle with the North Vietnamese. And Kurtz’s submergence into primitivism is something seen in other Milius films. Like the Soviet era soldiers who liked to tell anecdotes drawn from Russian culture (see James Brolin’s joke in  Traffic), Milius likes to use cautionary examples from Hitler’s army, partly for shock effect, but partly because German was, until then, a society that honored military culture, until it was subverted by the madness of the leaders. The Milius vision of Kurtz remains fairly consistent throughout the whole history of  AN, even during the weeks and weeks of expensive improvs with Brando. In the deleted scene, Colby gives Willard his imprimatur to kill Kurtz, but when he does, Willard replaces him in the eyes of Kurtz’s followers, “as a god.”

 

What does the film believe? The movie seems less concerned with policy than with a personal journey. Yes, war is hell. No matter what or why or where, war is hell. Stay out of it, stay away from it, for war can only kill you or harm you so bad that it unudermines your faith in the meaning of the society you are fighting for. The Vietnam war could have been won, theoretically,  but the Kurtz view is that it was fought badly. The movie might also be saying that the war could have been won if the soldiers were more like Kilgore and not fucked up on drugs and ambiguiety. But more important, war provides an intractable invitation for a personal journey, down the river of one’s identity. Let’s not forget what was happening in the real world during the time in which the film is set (which is, according to internal evidence, about 1970). The US was engaged in peace talks in France, Kissinger was bombing Laos, Lon Nol kicked everyone out of Cambodia, and four students were killed at Kent State. None of this is mentioned, nor is it relevant to  AN. Coppola is famous for saying that AN is not a film about Vietnam it is Vietnam.

 

 

Is  AN an anti-war movie? Perhaps in a general sense, but it is not necessarily an anti-Vietnam war movie. I would argue that  AN is instead, a Francis Ford Coppola movie. As in  The Godfather, as indeed in most Coppola movies, from  Dementia 13 all the way up to  Jack and  The Rainmaker,   AN is about a man who thought he was one thing,and turned out to be someone different. Michael Corleone thought that he didn’t have a trace of his father’s wicked blood in him, until the night he saved his father’s life in the hospital, and realized that, while all around him were shaking, he was still and composed, made for this sort of thing. Willard thought he was a regular soldier, a Special Ops kind of guy, but he wasn’t, he was another Kurtz. “They were going to make me a major for this, and I wasn’t even in their fucking army anymore.”

 

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