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Politics:

 

Where the principal theme of Heart of Darkness appears to be that of imperialism, the

fundamental theme of Apocalypse Now must be war, or more precisely, the Vietnam War.Besides the background, the key difference between the two is the protagonist's assignment.

In Heart of Darkness, Marlow does not have a mission, per-se. He merely goes to the Congo

on his own accord (having dreamt of it in his youth) with the notion of working at an ivory

trading-post. In Apocalypse Now, however, Willard is sent on a mission to execute Colonel

Kurtz. This carries with it an intrinsic political weight the US Army is practically out to slay

its own men, and thus the lunacy of the Vietnam War is there for us to see. As the film goes

on it becomes evident that this is not as unblemished as it seems because, while Kurtz is

working outside the army's command and is ruthlessly slaying people (though he asserts there

to be a virtuous cause behind it), the same also holds true for the US Army itself. Coppola

plays very dubiously with this, with the effect that at times we seem as far as to empathise

with the soldiers, and at others we suspect them. This effect is best illustrated in the renownedhelicopter attack scene, in which Captain Kilgore assaults innocent Vietnamese citizens with

the intention of clearing a beach to surf on.

It is apparent that we are seeing this from a strictly American viewpoint until the music

abruptly stops and we cut to the Vietnamese citizens. As they see the helicopters approaching

in the horizon, we are made to empathise with them. The rest of the scene is based on the

continuous fluctuation of perception amongst the Vietnamese and the Americans for its

authority. As Marsha Kinder notes: "Significantly it's from this [the helicopter's] perspective

that we see the first wounded American, a black man screaming in agony, and the destruction

of the rescue helicopter by a grenade thrown by a young Vietnamese woman, with whom we

were just sympathising. By now our sympathies are split, and we are forced to see that for an

American in Vietnam there was no way of escaping the moral quicksand." (p. 19, Kinder)

While the perception does consistently flicker, the story of the sequence is indisputably told

from an American perspective, since the only characters on screen are American, and the

Vietnamese are just shown as victims but not in a three-dimensional way (as the research will

try to establish in further detail later). This is fundamentally challenging as it can be said that

we are encouraged to empathise with the Americans to the degree that we justify their mass-

killing of the Vietnamese. This holds true to a certain extent. But the intent is not that we as

spectators come out of the sequence in approval of the butchery of innocent citizens on , but

in fact, it is to make us uneasy with having empathised with the soldiers at all. As Coppola

says: "The most important thing I wanted to do in the making of Apocalypse Now was tocreate a film experience that would give its audience a sense of the horror, the madness, the

sensuousness and the moral dilemma of the Vietnam war." (Kinder, p. 13) How better to

make us feel this way than by placing us in the place of the American soldiers, and instigating

us to echo the insanity required to do what they did?

 

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The very fact that we are made to empathise with Willard and Kurtz at all is in blatant

contrast to the portrayal of the Vietnamese. It can be said that the Vietnamese are portrayed

as one-dimensional. Yet, it is more precise to say that they exist zero-dimensionally since

whenever they are seen on the screen, they appear to not have any personality, and all we see

is a natural reaction of fear, followed by defence. This can be thought to be a problematic

facet of the film's depiction of conflict, as it fails to show the war in an entirely unbiasedfashion. But it is only troubling if the audience was expecting a documentary on the Vietnam

War. As soon as we see the illustrious opening sequence, which "dissolves all boundaries

between inner and outer experience, between past, present and future," (p. 14, Kinder) it is

evident that this is not the case or the intent. What Coppola did intend, however, was a

psychologically accurate depiction of what went on in the mind of an American in Vietnam,

and Willard, being midway between a soldier and a secret agent, was impeccably placed for 

this. To be consistent in this assessment, it would be futile and incorrect to display the

Vietnamese in a reflective or three-dimensional way, as this would undercut the very theme

of the film that is; we are no longer exclusively looking at this from an American standpoint.

To portray the war entirely from both perspectives would be a task too mammoth even for 

Apocalypse Now.