Canter Bridge

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Although Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is normally cited as the premier literary inspiration for this landmark Francis Ford Coppola film, the voyage up the river is Homeric in its pacing, its cast of characters, and its staging. It is brilliant filming that takes one quickly past his expectation of seeing a ‘war movie’ and into the psychedelic mind of Coppola. Astonishingly, this film was released just four years after the last American troops left Vietnam, when the wounds were more than open. They were still bleeding.

Apocalypse Now is a psychodrama as much as it is anything else. The men on the boat that winds its way toward Horror are as much battling to maintain their own sanity as they are fighting anything recognizable as Charlie, an organized opposition.

It is the Americans who come off looking most insane, so the relief that comes from seeing Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard get back in the boat and head towards civilization is almost purely tribal. He’s like us; ergo, he needs to go home.

But Horror is before him as well as left behind in Apocalypse Now, the weird paradise that is hell and must be undone for larger reasons than the ‘unsound practices’ alleged by those who commissioned Captain Willard’s Odyssey.

I waited many years to see this film. It was simply never the moment.

Now, fresh from a much-postponed first viewing, I consider it a fixed reference point for American cinematography and for America’s long coming to terms with a war that in the end made no sense, even to those sectors of political leadership that had the most invested in it.

The insights into wartime reality that here and there come under the camera’s view are a bonus, but they are not this film’s focus. It is instead a psychodrama that might possibly have staged its Homeric tale on almost any historical stage that was raw enough to bring insanity close to the surface. ‘The War’, as many of us refer non-adjectivally to the Vietnam conflict, serves that purpose well. But this Homeric tale might have been scened elsewhere.

It it still arguable that America’s involvement there made sense. Apocalypse Now—like Heart of Darkness—is not about that. It’s about what’s in a man’s heart when civilization’s thin veneer momentarily rubs away. That, says Coppola with good lineage ancient and modern, is just one thing. Horror.