Even in the early days of Apocalypse Now, the anti- and pro-war viewpoints were deadlocked. The plot was based on Joseph Conrad’s short story “Heart of Darkness” (1902) about a trip deep into Africa for a mad ivory picker. Typical story of dangerous exotic “militarized” John Milius, who himself was eager to go to Vietnam, but did not get there because of asthma.
Milius’ script was based on a voice-over written by Michael Herr, a well-known war correspondent who covered the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine. It was his text that became an important distraction from the literary source and added to the project’s internal controversy. According to Coppola, the voice-over musings of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), who has gone to hell on a mission to eliminate the mad Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), serve as a “voice of truth” that tears the veil off the Vietnam War spectacle that the authorities and television have staged.
Coppola edited the script, filmed and produced Apocalypse, spent personal money on it and wrote the music. According to the offended edits Milius, the director “could not tolerate any creative authority around him and wanted to single-handedly save humanity, while being a dictator like Mussolini”.
Filming took place in the Philippines, and like a yeast, Coppola’s growing ambitions stretched them from a few months to a year and a half. During this time, the crew members lived in the conditions of the sect of Colonel Kurtz: they jumped over fires under acid, slept with local women, languished from the heat and insects. No wonder Coppola said at a 1979 Cannes press conference that his movie “is not about Vietnam, it is Vietnam.” To a lesser extent, this is true of the movie’s content.
While for the crew, Apocalypse Now was a Vietnam simulation that allowed for the ultimate experience, for the less privileged participants, the project turned out to be an almost natural war. The main sponsor of Apocalypse Now was Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, whom Coppola turned to after the Pentagon refused.
But almost nowhere mentioned that Coppola paid for the installation of machine guns on Philippine helicopters, which the Marcos government now and then took away and bombed them leftist guerrilla protesters. The director hardly realized that filming an anti-war picture with a soundtrack by 1960s American counterculture symbol Jim Morrison was helping the war against leftist rebels in Asian countries.
The Apocalypse Now team itself, like an army, laid siege to the Philippines for over a year. Local extras were paid only half of what was paid to Americans and Europeans, and one Filipino worker even died on set. The gross indifference to Filipinos rhymed with the movie’s portrayal of the Vietnamese. Coppola made them voiceless savages, indistinguishable from the landscape through which a group of Americans sail into the heart of darkness.
For all the drama of the conflict, revealing to the characters the horror of war, a truly courageous anti-war gesture would have been another – to recognize that, despite all the billions spent by the U.S., the Vietnam War was a Vietnamese affair. Coppola clearly wasn’t lying when he said Apocalypse Now was a movie “not about Vietnam.”
Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who worked with Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci, shot the war not as a hideous bloodbath, but as a destructive beauty. The viewer sees Vietnam through the eyes of an American colonizer who is both delighted and frightened by the carnival riot of colors, helicopter blades and napalm scorching villages. The landscapes of Apocalypse Now are a paradise in hellfire and pink smoke, a riot of color that conveys the confusion of an American in a distant land.
Storaro went even further: according to him, when artificial colors take over natural colors, the main conflict of cinema unfolds. Some critics raved about the rhymes between the film and Storaro’s color philosophy, while others were outraged by the poeticization of war, turning napalm into a painterly device.
It was Vittorio Storaro who came up with the famous image of Captain Kurtz. According to Coppola’s plan, Marlon Brando had to play lost gaunt traveler, but the actor managed to get very fat to the beginning of filming. Coppola refused to turn the character into a fat glutton and demanded to shoot him in his original role.
Another visual find (but no longer Storaro, but Coppola himself) not only added mythologism, but also distinguished “Apocalypse” from other war and anti-war films. Panoramic scenes were a common technique of such movies: in “Paths of Glory” (1957) or in “The Longest Day” (1962) they created the illusion of a hovering gaze that turned the battlefield into a spectator attraction.
“Apocalypse” moves away from panoramic vision and instead relies on phantasmagoria, a technique of proto-cinematography (read, film mythology) developed in the late 18th century. A phantasmagoria is a device with a lantern behind painted shutters that projects ghostly images onto surrounding objects. Phantasmagoria came to cinema thanks to Georges Méliès and the German Expressionists, on whose style Coppola drew heavily. Technically, it was embodied in the in-frame montage and play with colors (Storaro’s trick), which made “Apocalypse” more a myth of power than an epic battle.
War as a spectacle
The paradox is that, as one of the most brilliant war spectacles, Coppola’s film dazzlingly criticizes the war spectacle. Captain Willard, descending from the sky to the music of Wagner, stands bewildered before the television reporters who are trying to get him to fight without the camera noticing (Coppola himself starred as the yelling reporter). Over the course of the movie, Willard begins to see how the perception of war as entertainment makes people participate in the machinations of power.
This monstrous confusion of reality and its image, the substitution of one for the other, drives all the characters in the movie crazy – Willard, his team, the photojournalist played by Dennis Hopper, and, of course, Colonel Kurtz, who, dying, repeats a single word – horror. It seems to be the most accurate assessment of the war’s transformation into a spectacle capable of mesmerizing even the most free and inquisitive minds. Coppola has made a terrifying epochal movie that stands somewhere between Griffith’s hopes for militantly beautiful movie technology and the simulated video game “Virtual Iraq.”
