Apocalypse Now

The following review, brought to us by Amazon Instant's military and war category, contains spoilers.

War has never been a huge factor in my life.  It has, of course, always served as a backdrop of sorts - the 9/11 attacks occurred only a few short years after I gained self-awareness, and the United States has been entangled in one overseas conflict after another in these last fourteen years.  However, it has always been a distant reality, never something I have ever needed to directly confront.  It has only ever served as news reports and discussions in classrooms.  No members of my immediate family who I identify closely with have served in the armed forces during my formative years, and I personally do not ever wish to see active combat, much less enlist for any reason whatsoever.  War, to me, is a nebulous thing, and one I hope to God I never have to confront.

Media, however, has played a major role in my life.  For years I replaced friendships in school with endless readings, both for schoolwork and pleasure.  My teenage years were heavily occupied with reading about stories I knew of and was completely unfamiliar with on various online sources.  More recently, much of my time is occupied with video games and movies, hence the reason for this blog's existence.  I am simply not a good people person, and directly facing the world unnerves me, so I turn to the cinema and world of fiction instead.

As such, my perception of war is shaped largely by what I encounter in various movies, books, and games.  For just one pertinent example, my opinion on boot camps was practically nonexistent until I saw Full Metal Jacket a few years back.  The depiction of R. Lee Ermey's gunnery sergeant as a relentless psychological abuser of a man clearly unsuited to military life, to the point of murder and suicide, cemented my distaste for the whole basic training process far more than any description from a soldier who experienced the same could.  Perhaps this speaks to something deeply wrong with me.  Personally, I think it does, and I should like to note, just for the comfort of people who I know frequent this blog, that I am aware of the issue and working to get more real world exposure to counter it.  But this receptiveness to movies has shaped who I am, and there is nothing I can do to change those past experiences.

Of all the military fiction I have consumed, the Metal Gear series of video games has influenced my perception on war and conflict more than any other single work or body of work.  I only hopped on the bandwagon this last February, but the past six months of playing and analyzing have proven some of the most enriching and rewarding experiences I have had with a story in quite some time.  For a series I started into because a meme I saw made me laugh, it has proven surprisingly impactive, especially on my views of how war should be.

Allow me to elaborate.  Much of the series centers around attempts to control the entire world to bring it into line with one's ideals, and the inevitable failure of these attempts.  A world controlled by iron-fisted power and military might can only slip away or shatter under the steel grip. In the end, it is the understanding ways of Solid Snake that save the world.  Unlike those before and around him, he fights not to eliminate an enemy and shape the world to his standards, but to remove a threat and allow the world to develop as each person living in it sees fit.  More importantly, while he will fight and do what is right to save the world and finish his mission, he endeavors to understand his enemies, and provide them the closure and understanding they did not receive in life.

There is a kind of purity to Snake's actions, a lack of judgement on the way his enemies operate.  Obviously they must be taken down, removed from the world so that they will not endanger it further, but their thoughts and feelings on how it should be matter just as much as anyone else's.  Their life stories deserve to be heard.  The failure to understand this principle, both in the series' primary villain as a concept, and by Snake as an active thought, drives much of the story's action and drama, and when the two of them reconcile in the final chronological game and at long last understand the need for that purity of judgement, it's incredibly beautiful.

I feel the need to mention all of this because in the final twenty minutes of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, I noticed some parallels to this idea.  Colonel Kurtz is portrayed as a man who fought for his country and did his homeland proud by enacting the worst of brutalities on those he was tasked to fight.  He rose as a man perfect in every way for a commanding position in an amoral, power drunk army that enjoyed the slaughter of innocents for a strategic position and a place to surf, reveled in the opportunity to rape the rare non-combatant women who came across their sights.  Another man in his position might have simply taken it and joined with the rabble, content to spend the rest of his days in a cozy general's armchair.

But Kurtz, for better or worse, was no ordinary man.  He could not stand the terrible deeds he had to perform in the name of victory, and had to find a way to understand it all, or else go completely mad.  While it is debatable whether or not he succeeded in avoiding madness, his speeches clearly show he found a way to make it through.  Upon seeing the arms of children he and his men inoculated hacked off by Vietnamese sticking to their principles, he found both the horrors of war and the way to navigate them.  It takes, again, a purity of judgement.  A conviction to do what you believe must be done, and ONLY what must be done.

It shapes Kurtz into the kind of man who won't even raise a finger against a fly as it buzzes all about his face and will take legions of the enemy under his wing as a divine figurehead - and will chop a man's head off and deposit it at the feet of his comrade if that man poses even the slightest threat to his beliefs and way of life, all without a hint of anger or regret.  Purity.  The enemy is who you judge them to be, and only they are worthy of the monstrosity war makes a man into.

Maybe Kurtz was right in his way of thinking.  Maybe it was just a philosophy he developed in order to survive.  With his limited screen-time and air of mystery, there's no way to know for sure.  But it is easy to say that his methods and philosophies had no place in the Vietnam War.  Being driven into madness and giving up one's ideals for the sake of victory, even if victory proved impossible, was the norm.  And so it is that Kurtz had to die.  Thankfully at the hand of a man who came to understand his mindset and brought him down in a manner he would have approved of, ritualistically and with the cold brutality of a monster; but he had to die regardless, and with his death the world lost any potential insight it could gain from his alternative take on the horrors, madness, and reality of war.

It's a horrible, horrible outlook to take on the world, but I can't help but feel there's an element of truth to both perspectives.  Understanding one's enemies, as in the Metal Gear model, serves to humanize them and offers deeper insight into why war shouldn't be waged, for the sake of the human condition.  But cutting through the hatred and bloodlust to operate as a distant, high-minded killing machine may very well be the only way to preserve one's principles during a war one has no way out of.  Attempting to stop the horror of battle and sympathizing with the enemy is all well and good, but if brass tacks come to brass tacks, taming the monster and unleashing it at will on those you feel deserve it is quite possibly the only way to stay sane.

Maybe that's what war's about.  Maybe I'm completely off-base and have misread the film in the worst manner possible.  I need more time to digest, but I have a feeling Colonel Kurtz's methods and ideologies will play some major part in the way I view war from now on.

Apocalypse Now has deeply impacted me as a viewer, but I am not quite certain how to process it just yet.  I have a wedding to attend tomorrow (I'm writing this review on a Thursday night), so I'll have to clear my thoughts of anything to do with the darkness of the human condition and the horrors of war for the sake of being able to function properly.  However, this means I will not be able to condense my impressions of the movie into a more coherent form before Saturday rolls around.  Since this blog exists primarily to keep me on a schedule, I'd rather not miss my day long deadline because I'm trying to figure out if my thoughts on the movie make sense or not.

As such, the above serves as a look into the parts of my reaction that I feel best reflect my overall impression of the film and potentially add a new take to the discourse.  It is, of course, an incredible film (one you should all see wherever and whenever possible), and while I found myself fading in parts, the ending more than makes up for any fears I had of not liking the movie and having to write even a word of negative criticism.  Anything I have to say about the overall story, characters, filming style, or cultural impact would be moot by this point, given its status as one of the most critically acclaimed and deeply analyzed films of all time.  Giving you my raw, immediate thoughts, however incoherent and potentially off the mark, feels like the right thing to do.

After all, this is the sort of film that encourages deep thinking about its overall plots and themes.  Colonel Kurtz's appearance in the final half hour put me in mind of my analysis of the Metal Gear series and the way media has impacted my perception of the world around me, and so those are the thoughts I have chosen to share with you, as I feel they are not likely to have come up much in discussion of the film.  With any amount of luck, it's coherent and accurate enough to serve as a thought-provoking and engaging read.  If not... oh well, I suppose.

If you'll excuse me, I'm going to go find something to do that's not so fucking BLEAK for the rest of the night.  I'll add some assorted thoughts and try to keep this from being "Gilbert Raves About Why The World Is Terrible When Really He Don't Know Nothin': The Article" in the morning.  Good night, and thanks for reading.

(Assorted thoughts:

- Marlon Brando may have been one hell of a bastard to work with at this point in his career, but damn if he doesn't deserve his recognition as one of the greats.

- Reading the story about making this movie's like reading through a fucking comedy of errors, except people are actually nearly dying and attempting suicide.

- That scene with the dog, man.  Almost broke my water bottle in two clenching it so tight, and it's made out of rubber, so that oughta tell you something.

- Robert Duvall: Second best part of the movie.  Agreed?  Agreed.)