INT. COMMAND COPTER - DAY. Looking down on the burning helicopter.
PILOT. They blew the shit out of it.
KILGORE. Fucking savages.
CO-PILOT. Holy Christ...I'm gonna get that dink bitch. Get over there, Johnny. Get the right skid right up her ass.
LUCAS. Your mission is to proceed up the Nuyng River in a Navy patrol boat. Pick up Colonel Kurtz's path at Nu Mung Ba, follow it and learn what you can along the way. When you find the Colonel, infiltrate his team by whatever means available and terminate the Colonel's command.
WILLARD. Terminate the Colonel?
CORMAN. He's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And he still in the field commanding troops.
JERRY [CIA]. Terminate. With extreme prejudice.
LUCAS. You understand, Captain, that this mission does not exist, nor will it ever exist...
CORMAN: Walter Kurtz was one of the most outstanding officers this country's ever produced. He was brilliant. He was outstanding in every way. And he was a good man, too. A humanitarian man. A man of wit and humor. He joined the Special Forces, and after that, his ideas, methods, became...unsound. Unsound...Well, you see, Willard, in this war, things get confused out there. Power, ideals, the old morality, and practical military necessity. But out there with these natives, it must be a temptation to be God. Because there's a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph. Sometimes, the dark side overcomes what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature.
WILLARD.
I was going to the worst place in the world and I didn't
even know it yet. Weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked
through the war like a main circuit cable plugged straight into Kurtz. It was
no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz's memory
any more than being back in Saigon was an accident. There is no way to tell his
story without telling my own. And if his story really is a confession, then so
is mine.
In an instant, THEY ALL OPEN FIRE. One of the Vietnamese
men is blown apart into the water, and the others are gunned
down in their tracks.
All of them continue to fire their rifles and guns wildly,
yelling obscenities. Willard has his .45 out but does not
shoot.
CLEAN
Motherfuckers!
CHEF
(weeping)
Let's kill them all!
LANCE
Fucking cocksucker motherfuckers!
Finally the Chief calls out to them.
CHIEF
Hold it! Hold it!
They all stop firing, but Chef, Lance, and Clean are
mumbling hysterically.
CHEF
Let's kill all the assholes!
CHIEF
Chef, hold it! Hold it!
CHEF
(hysterically)
...why not?
CHIEF
Clean?
CLEAN
I'm good.
CHIEF
You okay, Lance?
LANCE
Shit! Fuck!
CHIEF
Chef?
Chef has moved to the yellow can that the Vietnamese girl
was sitting on. He opens the lid and checks what she had
hidden.
CHEF
Look what she was hiding. She
what she was running for?
He reaches inside of the can, and pulls out a PUPPY. They
all react.
CHEF
A fucking puppy! A puppy.
WILLARD. It was a way we had over here of living with ourselves. We'd cut them in half with a machine gun, and give them a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw of them, the more I hated liars. Those boys were never gonna look at me the same way again, but I felt like I knew one or two things about Kurtz, that weren't in the dossier.
I was laughing with Stuart when Kilgore's men talked about surfing—I mean, it is funny. But clearly no one was laughing after the sampan scene; I could hear someone crying (Nell I soon discovered). Some of you wouldn't look at me when I asked for your reaction to the movie so far. It's okay: you didn't come to school today expecting what you saw. I haven't seen Apocalypse Now since I last showed it in this class two years ago (and I've seen it and Apocalypse Now Redux both in the movie theater and probably a dozen times on television and in class); yet today, it was like watching it anew. And it was disquieting. Horrifying. Horrifyingly sad. I never thought of it as a sad movie before today. As Asiya and Alice both talked said, we like the PBR crew—I like the PBR crew: Chief, the tough professional commander of the boat who looks out for his men, particularly Clean, and rightly distrusts Willard; Clean—"Mister Clean"—seventeen years old, all elbows and long legs, who really is just a kid; Lance the surfer who is all wide-eyed at the world around him; and Chef, who chose the Navy because he heard the food was better, and who vows "to never get off the boat."
They're our boys—not professional killers like Willard (and Kilgore), but just guys who'd rather be home surfing or cooking or hanging with their buddies. And then they become killers, cold- blooded murderers. Something was going to happen—Nell talked about the rising tension in the scene—but not this. Not this madness. And yet it's a beautifully filmed movie, a gorgeously filmed movie: particularly what we
saw today: has anyone ever seen as unappetizing a meal as the roast beef
and shrimp that Corman serves Willard? The choreography of the
helicopter attack on the village? The surreal nature of the opening
napalming of the jungle? The surreal nature of all of it, really: the
surfing? Col. Kilgore?
The opening: Willard remembering what happened, much as Marlow does, relating his tale—but to whom? "Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another." Coppola refuses to give into our desire for order and transparency. The narrative flies by so quickly that we are left wondering what to think. Kurtz is the bad guy, right? Willard the good guy? The attack on the village courageous and just? Corman's assessment of Kurtz is correct? Stop a minute and think about what's being said and what's being shown.
1. Reflection on the film so far? What moment, image, scene, jumped at you in particular—and why?
2. So far, where does the film overlap thematically with Conrad? How so?
3. Who are/is the good guy(s) here? Is there, are there, any? Who is/are the bad guy(s)? And why for both answers.
See you all tomorrow.
1. The scene of Willard going crazy in his room was the most powerful to me so far. Even before I knew what Apocalypse Now was going to be about, I got the feeling that the movie was going to capture the exact feeling that Conrad described in Heart of Darkness. Whether or not one perceives Conrad's choice to make men go crazy in the jungle as racist, I think it is generally agreed that Conrad does a great job of invoking the feelings of craziness and confusion that occur when you are isolated or when you go through something traumatic. This movie also does a good job of creating that feeling in the hotel room scene. That scene is what a mental breakdown feels like. Willard is fighting, crying, and uncontrollable all at once. I cannot describe the 'vibe' for lack of a better word, but it is the exact same one that Heart of Darkness generated.
ReplyDelete2. The film overlaps with Conrad heavily in the sense that it is about the pleasantries of everyday life being stripped away revealing true human nature. Willard and Kurtz are both being traumatized and seeing things that no one would ever want to see. This exposure is drivign them crazy and making them question everything around them. Also, in both stories, the 'civilized' people think their actions are for the greater good, even though that idea is questionable. Colonialists think they are helping Africans, and Americans think they are fighting communism. Both arguments are flawed, especially because of the methods that these 'civilized' people employ in order to accomplish their goals.
3. I have not seen any good guys yet. The Americans are arguably fighting this entire battle for the wrong reasons. Even if they believe that what they are fighting for is right, they are still going about it in a vicious way. They have lost all sense of humanity. Even if there is no right and wrong anymore, one would hope that a person would lean towards not killing people, yet these men have been driven to their limits. I do not necessarily blame some of the Americans for their actions. many of them are young and following orders. They do not know what to do in this situation. However, I cannot argue that any of them are good guys. I don't think there are any bad guys either. That point has been reiterated by Willard. He can't tell what's right and wrong anymore. All the motivations for these soldier's actions have been buried under layers of lies and false justifications. All the people on either side of this war are doing whatever they can to survive.
I really like the film so far. It's funny, sad, provocative, and visually stunning. The characters are fleshed out. Many of the issues brought up about the military still seem relevant today- inefficiency, lack of accountability, psychological stress/PTSD. One scene that jumped out at me was when Kilgore, outraged at the treatment of a wounded Viet Cong soldier, grabs a canteen from Willard to give the soldier a drink. But just as he stoops down and starts giving him a drink, another soldier rushes up to Kilgore and tells him that Lance Johnson is here. Kilgore stands up abruptly, splashing water over the chest of the flailing V.C., who is still parched. In this scene, Kilgore's character is laid wide open: he has a good heart, but seems to own up to nothing. In this capacity, he seems like a representation of the American conscious and American imperialism. He is concerned with his troops and with his conquests, but even more so on his pastimes, his culture: he surfs, drinks coffee, and has barbeques in a war zone. He seems as if he is disconnected with the battle, but he still remains acutely aware of what he is doing.
ReplyDeleteApocalypse Now overlaps with Conrad's theme of breaking down the distinctions between good and evil. In the last scene we saw, just as Chef begins to open a yellow barrel on board a boat, the young woman aboard suddenly runs towards him. Provoked, Clean, as well as the other soldiers begin shooting at the civilians in the boat, thinking that they might be trying to pull a fast one on them. They find out that the woman was running to save her puppy from Chef- not to attack Chef or to hide a gun or grenade. The slaughter that took place seems to be both justified and unjust at the same time- if the woman really was armed, Chef, if not all of them, could've been killed, but all the same, the civilians had done nothing wrong. Their actions were neither good nor evil, yet seemed to possess the heart of both at the same time, especially when they adopt the orphaned puppy. The same applies to many of the actions in Heart of Darkness. Near the beginning, Marlow gives a single cracker to a starving African. The act in itself is good, but at the same time so pitifully insufficient that I felt indignant that Marlow did not do more.
Just as I have said that actions seem both good and bad, characters do as well. I believe that it would be a mistake to categorize any character as one or the other, they all possess too much depth to be that way. Kilgore seems both sadistic and benevolent. The US army massacres civilians and bulldozes homes, but the Viet Cong blew up a medical helicopter and recruits many of the same civilians to fight or to house them, throwing them in the crossfire. Willard did kill an injured woman, but what good could they have done if they did try to get help? This movie shows us that it's hard to distinguish good and evil in such a complicated world. Willard said that “The muck piles up so fast here that you need wings to stay above it,” as if saying that the only way to come out on top was to be an angel, or not be there at all.
I really like your point about Kilgore being sort of a representation of America. The USA has a tendency towards good intentions and violent behavior - it's a lot harder to really help than it is to pretend you're helping people, then to ignore them and go have barbecue.
Delete1. The scene that jumped out as me was the scene above, the one with the boat and the puppy. I cried because it was so shocking, so despicable, that these men, our “good guys” could do something so atrocious and inhumane. The brutal way they treated the Vietnamese, the tension in the power structure between Chief and Chef, the juxtaposition between the tranquil river and the explosive, violent way the PBR crew acted, was painful to watch. There was so much fear. And fear makes us do terrible things, makes us go insane. The gunshots, the death, all happened so quickly, and then they realize that it was all for naught. An adorable puppy, the image of innocence, of purity, of goodness, was the cause of this. It was such a powerful scene.
ReplyDelete2. I think that this movie really is Heart of Darkness. Yes, it is in a different place at a different time, but at its core it is Conrad. Greed, fear, hate, prejudice, the absurdity of war, the despicable nature of man--all these themes run through the movie. Willard and Marlow see men stripped of their humanity, of any semblance of goodness or kindness, turned into selfish monsters. They both very nearly go mad. Kurtz is still Kurtz, the same legendary and horrific man. And the Vietnamese are portrayed in a very similar fashion to Marlow's depiction of the Africans, as somehow subhuman--less important than the Europeans/Americans. Both works are about the corruption of humanity, and that theme runs clearly through both.
3. I don't think that there are any "good guys"--the PBR crew have proven themselves to be very much bad. The only innocent group I can think of are the Vietnamese, the victims of all this horrible violence. However, we are not rooting for them; they are "other", so removed from the heroic, adventurous aspects of the movie that it would be difficult to call them the "good guys". They are simply victims (I know that they are fighting against the Americans in the war, which I guess would make them the bad guys, but the people we have seen so far are civilians, not soldiers). This movie is about the darkness within all of us--there are no good guys, just varying shades of badness.
1. I don't really know whether or not I like it yet. I like the honesty I guess, but it seems like every scene is extremely uncomfortable to watch and there doesn't seem to be an end to the madness. It seems like a lot of them like the situations they're in and almost don't want the war to end. They enjoy the smells and they're having fun surfing and bringing justice where it's due. One of the scenes that stuck with me the most was the one where the guys are in the helicopter shooting at the village and the main guy who's in charge drinks his coffee in the midst of everything going on. His indifference was more disturbing to me than anything else in the movie we've seen so far. And he does this again and again throughout the time we see him. Like when they're about to go surfing and things are just exploding in the background and everyone else is flinching and running for cover, yet he remains collected and unbothered as he's terrorizing innocent people.
ReplyDelete2. In both stories the motive behind "civilizing" the natives is justified in the same way. They see themselves terrorizing these people as making the world a better place and doing what's supposed to be done. They're both very nonchalant about what they're doing, but it is obviously played up a lot more in Apocalypse Now. Another things I noticed was the effect Kurtz had on both of the protagonists. He's changing their lives immensely by driving them mad with this obsession over who he really was and what motivated him to do what he did. They both glorify him in the same way and are trying to get to the root of his brilliance.
3. I think it could be argued that everyone is a good guy in this movie. The Americans are only trying to make the world a better place and they're just doing what makes sense. It could also be argued that the Americans are the bad guys because they should know better and should be able to recognize the Vietnamese as people instead of terrorizing them and destroying their homes. I personally don't really see any bad guys or any good guys. Obviously I hate what the Americans are doing to these people, but I'm having trouble deciphering whether their actions are a reflection of their character or the orders they've been given and the information they've been fed.
1. Like you mentioned, I was speechless at the end of class today. This was due mostly to the scene involving the civilians aboard the boat, but my sense of horror had been building throughout the whole film. I suppose the scene that jumped out at me the most - though it certainly wasn’t the most upsetting - was the playboy bunny show. How bizarre. Like the soldiers’ surfing obsession, this playboy show is just placed haphazardly in the middle of a violent series of events. But, like most scenes, this too ends with chaos, as the soldiers storm the stage and barrel towards the bunnies. It’s almost as though they had lost the ability to separate war from leisure, and they feel that they can treat these women in the same unrestrained and violent manner in which they’ve been treating the vietnamese civilians.
ReplyDelete2. Both Conrad and the film explore the issue of whether evil is innate or whether it’s created by one’s surroundings and experiences. Marlow certainly seems to think that the evil he sees in Kurtz is a product of his experiences in the jungle, but, like Moey says, I think that this evil is ever-present in humans. It might be expressed differently depending on the circumstances, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t always exist. I think that this film tends to support my interpretation by introducing us to the characters aboard the navy boat. These boys are developed in a way that no supporting character was in Heart of Darkness, making us feel more connected to them and sympathetic towards them. Yet, even these boys prove themselves capable of atrocious acts, such as the unnecessary murder of the defenseless civilians aboard the trading boat. I think that Coppola does this with the intention of showing that Kurtz is not unique by any means. Any of us have the capacity to perpetrate atrocities. I don’t think that this is meant to vindicate Kurtz as much as it is meant to make us examine our own capacity for evil.
3. No, I wouldn’t say that there are any good guys so far, at least by my normal definition. So far, I haven’t seen any character demonstrate compassion or even restraint. I loved Mister Clean initially, but then he executed a family of civilians. On one hand, I understand that he was afraid and not thinking clearly, but if he had paused and given the woman the benefit of the doubt for 5 seconds, many lives could have been saved. Kurtz is obviously a bad guy, at least from what we’ve seen so far in the movie. But then again, Kurtz isn’t really so different from any of the other captains in the movie. They are all murdering and shooting and bombing. The main difference is that Kurtz is operating outside the command of the army. It’s the fact that he’s a lone wolf - not the fact that he’s killing innocent people - that makes him a target for termination.
1. While I was taken aback at the sheer amount of suffering, I do think that the movie makes interesting commentary on American imperialism and the nature of modern warfare. The scene that jumped out at me the most was the show scene. It was really disconcerting to see the disregard the soldiers have for not only social customs, but the women themselves. They are so caught up in desire and violence that they behave literally like animals, swarming the stage and fighting with anyone who tried to hold them back. Furthermore, I think the scene was especially unsettling because of how modern the surroundings look; with the lights and bleachers and performers it is unequivocally modern. I feel like it was easy to write of Heart of Darkness because of how removed the characters are from modern times; kings still rule Europe when Conrad publishes the novel. It is easy to claim that I, as a modern man, am somehow different from the men of the late 17th century just as the Europeans tried to say they were different from the primordial men of Africa. It hits closer to home when I see myself in the protagonists and their surroundings. Thus, I think it was brilliant to try and make the play modern instead of simply placing it in the Congo.
ReplyDelete2. Both the Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now are about uncovering what it truly means to be human. And, for now, I still believe they claim that humans are inherently evil. Civilization represses our natural desires but when we have the freedom to "play god," our true nature comes out. There is no choice; everyone changes whether you're Willard, the boys in the boat, or Kurtz.
3. I think it could be argued that Willard is a "good guy." While he does seem to have emotional damage, I don't think he does anything that is arguably that dishonorable. He merely does the minimum, whatever is the least amount of damage he can do to survive in a harsh environment. And I don't think it's an accident either; his introspective nature has let him realize the change his fellow soldiers, and himself have gone through, and I think this reflection has let him at least see and mitigate the changes to his true evil nature.
1. The scene that stood out to me was all the talk of surfing as a whole but more specifically when Kilgore basically made soldiers surf. When one of the soldiers voiced their concerns about surfing in the middle of all the fighting, Kilgore said, “you can either surf, or you can fight”. I overlooked this at first but now that I think about it, there's something unsettling about the scene. Kilgore is not only acting inappropriately for the situation (the situation being the war) but it also seems like he's a bit off. I may be reading into this too much but in that moment, I felt like Kilgore was a bit twisted in that he did anything to make Vietnam feel like home even if that meant surfing in the middle of a battle ground. That being said, I feel like the movie as a whole is also unsettling. Seeing the horrific damage the Americans caused on the Vietnamese and the pain that Chef was obviously experiencing was a lot to take in. Though not the easiest movie to watch, I like it and I feel like it paints a complicated and double-sided picture.
ReplyDelete2. There are so many similarities between Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness but the most obvious is how the men in both works get out of control when in their respective “jungles” (Vietnam & Africa). In Heart of Darkness most if not all of the people who go to Africa go crazy with their power and end up committing heinous and unnecessary acts on the Africans. Similarly, the soldiers in Apocalypse Now are never stingy with their rifles. They just shoot and don't think and most of the people they kill are civilians which I suspect they are aware of.
3. At first I thought the crew of men on the boat were the “good guys” but after seeing them murder the people on the boat, I don’t know what to think. However that doesn't necessarily make them total “bad guys” because the war did put them through unimaginable things. At first glance I think there a lot of “bad guys” like Kilgore although he might've been mentally affected as well. But I do think the three men that gave Willard the orders to kill Kurtz are some kind of representation for the real evil. I don't think they go through what the ground soldiers go through yet they give out sketchy orders and claim to disapprove of the inhumane killings committed by Kurtz when they know that's what's going on all over Vietnam, and they don't have to see it on a daily basis.
1. It’s definitely a brutal film - much more so than movies I tend to watch - so it is pretty shocking. Aside from that, I think I am enjoying it, but mostly because it is well made and I believe it’s important to recognize how brutal war is (compared to the victorious romanticizations that tend to be more popular), and horrified because of what happens. I was actually speechless after the boat searching scene, even though I already knew what was going to happen because we had discussed the scene in my lit class last year; it was bare-bone fear and violence. No reason, no moral twist that makes it all okay, and no repentance on the part of Willard. Willard sees what little kindness people manage as “lies,” and they certainly aren’t enough to repair damage done, but taking the woman to get medical attention is undeniably better than just shooting her then and there. A second scene that really hit me was the helicopter attack, ending with the napalm - those people were virtually defenseless. None of them appeared to be ready for combat, and even those who had guns were so completely out-matched that it wasn’t anything other than a massacre. Apocalypse Now is unrepentantly brutal, and that makes it both fascinating and horrific - I’m interested to see how it ends.
ReplyDelete2. Both works discuss humanity’s “darkness,” but do so with different characters and settings. Willard is more violent than Marlow, so that changes the narration quite a bit. Whereas Marlow is dumbly disturbed by the violence he sees in Africa, Willard is actively participating. In a way I would argue it drives the point home even more because even our main character - the individual we’re supposed to empathize with the most - is vicious and absurd; he functions by his own set of moral codes, as evidenced by his harsh judgement of literally everyone around him and his indifferent attitude towards anyone’s survival. Honestly I hate him, but I think I’d hate him even more if he wasn’t the main character - he is our protagonist for a purpose, and that purpose is to gain our attention and engage our sympathies. Doing this with such a violent person emphasizes that even violent people are still people, and as such all people are capable of violence if we choose to be. Both Conrad’s book and this movie discuss the horrors inherent in human nature - Conrad discusses it through colonialism and slavery, and Apocalypse Now exemplifies it through war. While Conrad seems to be saying that darkness is inevitable and inherent in everyone, we haven’t seen the end of the film yet, so I am unwilling to judge how the movie views this claim. I’d argue that there’s great significance in the fact that Conrad, the film, and we as the audience consider brutality horrific in the first place - if we REALLY considered this behavior to be natural, wouldn’t we be less disturbed than we are?
3. I really want to say that our people on the boat (minus Willard because of his murder of the woman) are good people, but it’s difficult to say (because of THEIR murder of the OTHER two people on the boat). They are certainly endearing, but they are hurting people - but they’ve been told that they SHOULD hurt people, but they have free will, but they used that free will to gun down defenseless passers by - and the circle goes round and round. I thought Willard was a decent person until he shot the woman mostly because it was calculated and conscious, while the explosive firing only moments before was done out of fear and confusion. It’s a very messy situation, and it’s easy to get tangled up with the idea of “good people who do bad things,” which is an incredibly thorny topic. In terms of “bad guys,” I’d say Kilgore and arguably Willard fit the bill. Kilgore is strange and arbitrarily violent - he orders action based on his own whims, including things as nonsensical and benign as surfing, and others more vicious and vengeful like his order to “get the right skid” after she blows up the helicopter. The idea of “good” and “bad” is nearly absurd to try to apply in a war setting, because nearly invariably everyone there will have committed some sort of atrocity - does the context excuse it? Is it alright to behave this way during war time? When do you cross the line? What has Kurtz done that crossed the line, when everyone else’s actions are so incomprehensibly awful? All in all, IF anyone was good, it’s our characters on the boat, and IF anyone is bad, they are people like Kilgore and Willard (we haven’t gotten to see Kurtz yet), but I’d need to consider the topic further before I’m willing to define good and evil, especially in the context of war.
ReplyDelete1. I like the film in the way I like the book, “Heart of Darkness”, because of its somewhat beautiful ways of portraying atrocity. It’s just an incredibly well made movie, but at the same time, what it’s showing me, the horror and brutality these boys, our boys, are capable of…it just feels kind of like a violation of me to know them. Violation of what, I’m not sure, but I just get the feeling that I can’t judge these people and their actions because the rules are different in war, and I know that cannot be the justification for everything they do, but still, war is war, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t simply put myself in their shoes and say I’d do something different. For example, one moment that really stuck out to me in this respect was when that young man, who loved rock and role just as much as the next American teen, opened fire on the little boat. The woman he shoots is dying but not dead yet, and they want to save her; they don’t think of themselves as killers, after all. Willard shooting her, that somehow seemed like a whole different level of brutality, inhumanity, to the other men on the boat, even though they had just murdered two other innocent people less than a minute prior. They have a sense of right and wrong, however skewed it may be from my own perception, and what Willard did was wrong to them. It’s not as though these men, these soldiers, these murderers, have no feelings, no conscience; it’s simply that what is understood to be the legitimate and acceptable killing human beings is something that I cannot rationalize, I who has never witnessed death or experienced war. This is what man is capable of, and though it may be horrible by my standards, I don’t think that it makes these men bad people.
ReplyDelete2. I think this movie clearly mirrors “Heart of Darkness” in its exploration of the acceptability of the murder and dehumanization of people different than ourselves. This is a story about a man who loses himself the way our other Kurtz lost himself. He witnessed horrors, and it changed him. I think that what this film makes even more clear, however, is that this Kurtz was different before he went into “the darkness”. This is not simply human nature. Murder may be something we are all capable of, but it’s not as though we’re predisposed to it. We have to be put in a place where murder is okay, and the one place where that holds true in the modern age is war, plain and simple. We turn a blind eye on the individual lives lost, the murderers born in war, just as people once did during colonization.
3. I know that what I’m about to say will sound like a cheat, but I really don’t see there as being a straight forward idea of “good” and “evil”, and with that in mind, I don’t think there are any good guys or bad guys, but what there is are innocents. This movie starts off and forms a bond between me and the boys on the boat. It makes me like them, relate to them, but it also shows me babies injured by the explosions set off by these men and their constituents, their partners in crime. This movie lays it out so that we have our good guys, the American soldiers just trying to go home, and then we have our bad guy, the American soldier who has made his home the darkness, and then we have the good guys and the bad guys doing the same thing, murdering. I believe this to be an argument against the simplicity of actions being the sole representation of the true nature of a man. As we know, everyone is capable of murder when placed in a war, in fact, everyone is encouraged to do it, so where is the line drawn? It can’t be at the killing of innocent people, because we’ve seen that done, so where is it? I think that’s the question this movie brings up through, but I don’t have an answer to it yet.
1. The single scene that most stuck out to me was the USO show. The whole movie up to this point has had violence, or at least fear of violence. These scenes are remarkable, but to some degree they become the norm as you watch it in the same way the characters become accustomed to the atrocities. When they get to this stage in the middle of nowhere with the playmate of the year dancing there, it's surreal. This scene brings out the absurdity of the management.
ReplyDelete2. It brings out a morally questionable practice with questionable leadership. The Vietnam War was started by the French, who wanted to protect their colonial interests. There is a sense of absurdity in the management in both. Resources aren't delegated properly, and there is a hypocrisy to the reasoning. The general sends Willard out to assassinate Kurtz without making it an official mission in the same way that Kurtz assassinated four double agents without an official go-ahead. As justification, he says that Kurtz has reached his breaking point and has gone insane, right after we see Willard acting quite insane himself. This, and the justification for the whole war, ties back to Marlow's mocking colonialists for their belief in a higher cause that colonialism is a part of.
3. This is Willard's story. He seems to be condemning everyone involved. The Americans are depicted as brash, violent, and unconcerned with the actual issues of the Vietnamese people. Willard explicitly states that Kilgore is insane in the same way that the General describes Kurtz. However, we still see the Viet Cong do terrible things. He says in the beginning that after this mission he would never want another one. This is a story of Marlow's disillusionment with war. As such, he starts to see the bad side of all participants.
The scene with the Vietnamese natives on the bus with the puppy was by far the most impactful scene. Frederic Forest played the scene as Chef perfectly, highlighting the hypocrisy of Chief Phillips. The scene was so hectic. Everyone was yelling and you couldn't really understand anything anyone was saying.Then all of a sudden Clean begins mindlessly shooting, and Chef finds no reason to believe the people were of any threat. The innocent puppy really drove home the point. This scene is where I really started to view Cheif differently. I started to view him as a part of the military system, no different than Kilgore. Even with this, the most important part of the scene was when the Captain shit the women in the head at the end. He didn't want to stop at the ship in the first place because it would distract from the mission, and he shot the woman for the same reason. This scene helped show how focused and obsessed he became with Kurtz/his mission.
ReplyDeleteThe river represents essentially the same thing as it does with Conrad. It is only a means to an end, and in the end, Kurtz is all that matters. Also, though it is less in the movie, there is a hint of corruption in the Military, similar to the company in The Heart Of Darkness. The way thy ensure that Kurt's story is completely covered and kept secret parallels Marlow's mission in Conrad's story.
I don't want this to seem like a cop out, but I think the point of both the book and this movie so far is that there are no good guys. In Conrad's story, "The Horrors" of human nature make us all inherently bad at our core. The movie has tried multiple times to make I seem like everyone is bad in some way as well. Initially Kilgore is painted as the bad guy as he mercilessly slaughters the natives while the natives are painted as victims, but then one of the women of the village (not even a soldier) blows up one of the helicopters. Chief and Clean seem innocent soldiers at first, until they kill the people on the boat for no apparent reason. Chef so far is the only "good guy" to me.