This section, which might be called the “Prelude to Kurtz,” is made up of three smaller scenes:
1. The Dennis Hopper character walks Willard into the compound, where he sees Colby, the original assassin. Hopper was initially cast to play Colby, but given his condition, Coppola quickly figured out that he would not be convincing as a soldier. The part of Colby went instead to Scott Glenn, who in the released version of Apocalypse Now doesn’t even have a line. Deleted scenes in The Complete Dossier reveal that at one stage his role was quite a bit larger, including a scene where Colby kills the photojournalist and is in turn killed by Willard. As it is, he is more of an apparition than a character, but he does linger in the mind quite effectively.
There’s some great Dennis Hopper here, where he tries to explain in his semi-coherent way why, despite the evidence to the contrary all around them, Kurtz is not crazy.
The heads. You’re looking at the heads. I, uh…sometimes he goes too far. You know, he’s the first one to admit it!
This is where Apocalypse Now enters its final act, the confrontation with Kurtz. If you wanted to divide it into three acts, I guess that the first act would go from the beginning to after the aerial attack; the second act would be the journey upriver; and the third act would be from here to the end.
Initially, the mood is somber and ominous. We see lots of fires and skulls, then Willard destroys his dossier as the boat winds its way through tall trees and cliffs, reminding one of the passage from Heart of Darkness (the book) quoted in Hearts of Darkness (the movie):
Hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico.
In fact, from this point on, Apocalypse Now follows Heart of Darkness much more than it does the original screenplay. After the boat reaches what appears to be the end of the road (river) and drifts through a coterie of spooky, white-painted natives, a figure straight out of Conrad pops up out of the crowd:
I saw a white man under a hat like a cartwheel beckoning persistently with his whole arm…(he) began to shout, urging us to land. “We have been attacked,” screamed the manager. “I know — I know. It’s all right,” yelled back the other, as cheerful as you please. “Come along. It’s all right. I am glad.” (more…)
One purpose that the French Plantation scene, had it not been cut, would have served would have been to put some space between the deaths of Clean and Chief. As it is they come one right after the other, fulfilling the Hollywood cliche that nonwhites must die first.
I hate to dwell on the subject, which I already discussed in Chapter 12, but the racial subtext here is not buried very deep. No one who is familiar with common American racial slurs can miss the irony in the fact that Chief is killed by a spear, and even he seems aware of it. From the way he croaks out “A spear!” just before he keels over, it’s almost as if the irony is killing him more than the weapon.
And of course Chief’s last action before succumbing is to try to strangle Willard, and you could argue that this is less personal than symbolic. In this schema Chief represents every person of color who’s ever been sold up or down the river, and Willard is every white man who’s ever sacrificed others for reasons that are unclear at best and nefarious at worst. Viewing it through this lens, it’s hard not to root a little for Chief to finish the job — and he probably would have, were he not losing blood so fast. (more…)
Somewhere in here goes the French Plantation scene, which was excised from the original movie but restored in the Redux version. On the whole, I’d say it was a good cut; the scene is slow-moving, talk-heavy, and kills all the story’s forward motion. But it does have some historical interest and is worth a viewing or two.
In this version of the story, the boat finds refuge from the fog with a family of holdovers from Vietnam’s past as a French colony. Most of the scene is taken up by a formal French dinner where Willard gets into a long political discussion with the head of the family, de Marais, played by Christian Marquand. His gist can be summed up in a couple of sentences:
When you ask me why we want to stay here, Captain…we want to stay here because it’s ours. It belongs to us. It keeps our family together. I mean, we fight for that. While you Americans…you are fighting for the biggest nothing in history.
Apocalypse Now is not exactly loaded with sentimentality, and one of the rare moments of overt — you might even say cheap — sentiment comes when Clean is killed by a tracer round fired from the jungle. At the moment of his demise he is listening to an audio letter sent by his mother, whose voice can be heard waxing optimistic about future grandchildren as her son’s corpse lies sprawled on the deck. (Kudos, by the way, to Hattie James, who I’m told is Larry Fishburne’s actual mother. She does an amazing job of sounding just like somebody’s mom would on a tape like this — stilted cadence, self-conscious laughter, and all.)
Some might call this instant (or at least rapid) karma, since it was Clean’s itchy trigger finger that set off the sampan massacre. Others might just say, eh, sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes the bar eats you. What you think probably says something about how you view the workings of this universe we live in. I prefer to leave it up in the air, which definitely says something about me. (more…)
Fresh from the nightmare of the sampan, the boys on the boat find themselves in a different kind of nightmare at Do Lung Bridge. This time it’s dark and has a psychedelic quality; we are invited to view the proceedings through the eyes of Lance, who has indulged in that last hit of acid he was saving for a special occasion.
Not everyone would consider passing through a remote army outpost that is a favorite and frequent North Vietnamese target a special occasion, but Lance and his ilk are a breed apart. They like to take hallucinogens under what most people would consider the worst possible circumstances. The idea, I guess, is that if you are going to endure a harrowing, life-threatening ordeal, you might as well make it seem as much like a dream as possible. It should be less frightening that way, in theory at least. (more…)
