Film Review: Apocalypse Now, Redux

On the metaphysics of an anti-Buddha, plus, thoughts on self-domestication

“It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams....”

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

The Story

Enter a disturbed-looking Captain Willard, who is picked to “terminate” the command of a Colonel Kurtz. Kurtz, we are told, was one of the army's best. An officer groomed to take high command, a generalship even, he pushed aside the promise of his exceptional trajectory to join Special Forces, presumably to move closer to the action of the ongoing Vietnam War. At the time of Willard’s briefing, Kurtz has reportedly gone rogue, and his methods of waging war have been declared “unsound”. Kurtz has joined the Montagnards in the jungles of Vietnam and fights the War on his own terms, all the while worshipped as a god by his followers.

Willard is no common soldier either. On previous missions he’s done the military’s dirty work, the stuff that gets redacted ten times over, and it clearly haunts him. But when a fellow soldier late in the film asks him “Do you like it like that, Captain, when it’s hot, hairy?” Willard replies: “Never get a chance to find out what the fuck you are in some factory in Ohio.” We learn there’s a part of him that relishes the fight, the rush of coming out alive after. 

It’s ironic being told of the insanity of a formerly brilliant soldier and then being introduced to Lieutenant Kilgore. Kilgore (the “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” guy) is the American contribution to the age-old battlefield symbol of a calm gentleman commander. He’s not exactly a gentleman. Kilgore is bravado and willpower trussed by near-infinite resources, but with the short attention span of someone who knows they’re the center of attention and must cater to others’ impressions of them. It works, though, and has the effect of making his subordinates feel safe—even Willard has to comment that Kilgore has an aura about him. “You just knew he wasn’t gonna get so much as a scratch here”. After a string of jokes at Willard’s expense, Kilgore only decides to help Capt. Willard once he hears of the fantastic surfing opportunity near the entrance to the Nung River, which Willard needs to enter to reach Colonel Kurtz. So no, it can’t just be insanity that the higher-ups want to kill Kurtz for. 

As the story proceeds, we learn more about Kurtz through reports a sweating Willard reads on his commandeered riverboat. Kurtz claims that the generals running the show have become “dilettantes in war”, and so personally decides to do everything it takes to actually win, which he says could be done with “a fourth of the present force…and with better men”. He realizes that to win the Vietnam War he has to play with the same stakes as his opponents. The Vietnamese communists have “two ways home, victory or death”. Not so the Americans, who surf, eat hotdogs, and watch Playboy shows. 

A picture of Kurtz emerges that Willard, to his surprise, begins to intimately understand. It’s an image of a heartfelt soldier disillusioned with unresolute leadership, someone more at home in the jungle than in an office, like Willard himself. Then a twist adds to the budding sympathy: Willard learns he’s not the first assassin his commanders sent—the previous assassins have joined Kurtz’s cause. 

There’s an infamous section of the movie in which the boat party stops at a French plantation. It’s inhabited by a proud, gunslinging family who are trying to keep their colonized land amid the conflict between the Americans and the Vietnamese. Willard meets a French widow who identifies him with her deceased husband, a man who died trying to protect their claimed land. She recognizes in Willard’s face a look she first saw in her husband, a sort of existential weariness with the war. The French widow tells Williard, over a bowl of opium, that there are two people in everyone: “one that kills and one that loves.” She says that the sign of a Lost Soldier (Le Soldats Perdu) is that, after so much killing, they forget whether they are an animal or a god. With urgent gentleness, she reminds Willard that he is both. 

When the riverboat arrives at its destination, a temple with hacked body parts strewn about, Willard meets an American journalist who raves about Kurtz, calling him “a warrior-poet in the classic sense”. After all the buildup, meeting Kurtz is expectedly a charged moment for Willard, and although he’s unnerved by what he sees, maybe Kurtz is too. It’s almost like they recognize each other. There are moments of chilling eye contact between the two in their scenes together, like a pair of predators glimpsing into each other’s barren souls, another internal void reflected back at them for the first time. 

In the last hour of the redux version, we’re shown a scene in which Kurtz is surrounded by children in the daylight, reading aloud a Newsweek article on the war. The children are comfortable with him, despite their grisly surroundings. The scene’s effect is unsettling, but I don’t think without reason. Willard doesn’t recognize any method to Kurtz’s madness, but something has to explain Kurtz’s allure. 

With all the scenes showing their odd kinship, why doesn’t Willard join Kurtz in the end? How could he resist where others failed?

It’s because he was warned by the widow! I think the dialogue with the widow offers a clue to resolve Kurtz’s seeming contradiction between gentleness and savagery, and it might be a reason Coppola decides to include the plantation section in the Final Cut. The daylight scene is how we learn Kurtz’s animal-self has a god’s justifications, and his god-self has an animal's quickness to violence. “He forgets himself when he’s with his people, he forgets himself…”, the photojournalist tries to explain.  Kurtz is the ultimate Lost Soldier.

The Review

It’s worth acknowledging the low-hanging fruit of this film before we climb further, and that’s whether the events all take place in the mind of Willard (like Marlow, the main character in Heart of Darkness). If so, like in our dreams, it means all the characters must be aspects of Willard’s psyche. Then the confrontation with Kurtz is an encounter with his own shadow, the morally unreflective, possibly evil part of himself that feels a sense of nobility in performing savage acts. The journey into the jungle is a journey into himself, where Willard finds a man utterly possessed by Nature, a man in which he finds himself reflected. Where he finds, deep down, pure urges to dominate and love. 

And it was all a dream, we would write in our middle school essays. It’s an easy way to gesture at seriousness without commitment. But there’s so much more to this story. 

Nature has a boundary-less meaning in Apocalypse Now—it’s the jungle outside the characters and also the savagery inside them. Besides this implicitly dual outside-inside aspect, the journalist describes the jungle as a place for “dialectics”, where everything is seen in terms of opposites: good vs evil, friend or foe. There are two ways of orienting yourself; it is impossible to be indifferent. This is how Kurtz sees the world, and perhaps what makes him crazier than Kilgore. This viewpoint limits his range of behavior—after all, a normal human should be capable of more than just killing and reading poetry.

In a kind of reverse Enlightenment, Kurtz has split himself. Even the world is pained by the division, as if Kurtz is an anti-Buddha. Like the Buddha, Kurtz has left his family and material possessions behind (and despite it, has a notably hale figure). And instead of viewing the world as fundamentally illusory, made of Maya, he believes the exact opposite. Everything is real. Everything in the jungle insists upon its realness, which you ignore at your own risk. Instead of being a witness to overarching cosmic unity, Kurtz only perceives differences. There exist only enemies and loved ones. Everything has become clear to him, and the clarity is horrible.

The danger with Kurtz is that his animal and god selves have fully differentiated, making Kurtz an (un)natural Cartesian dualist. He’s a god (pure mind) part of the time and an animal (pure body) the other parts, spouting speech potent enough to convert assassins to followers, while being capable of killing more brutally than a tiger ever could. Meanwhile, the rest of us are a bit of both god and animal, mind and body, all the time. It’s what makes us human. (So you could say Kurtz is a bit of a mind-body problem.)

Kurtz no longer saw himself as human, and there lies his insanity. We’re told by Willard’s recruiters that Kurtz used to be gentle and witty. When we meet him, however, it’s apparent that Kurtz, the man, had gone long before the events in the film. Actions he’d taken since he took leave of his morals were done on their own in the same way that rain happens on its own, or any aspect of Nature really, in the full Daoist sense. 

It’s a mistake to think Kurtz stopped being a military man after his transformation. The injunction not to judge, not to make moral pronouncements during an act that brings about some desired result, blurs the line between militarily practical decisions and gratuitously cruel ones. Says Kurtz, “You need men who are moral…and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment, without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.” 

And isn’t this sense of amoral resolve what militaries the world over inculcate into their soldiers? What does the military pride itself on more than resolve? It’s ultimately what all parties in the Vietnam War attempt to display—the French plantation owners fighting to keep “their” land, the Vietnamese Buddhists’ self-immolation, the American imperialist assurance. Resolve is putting ends over means, a commitment to outcomes that makes anything permissible in the process of achieving them. Resolve is typically a state we enter to disable wavering, once we’ve made a bet on our beliefs and so can’t afford to think anymore, to judge anymore. 

***

On Self-Domestication

“I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance.”

from Heart of Darkness

Another idea the film proposes, as the source material does, is that charity is a fragile human construct nested within natural danger, and our social life is a thin layer of order away from spilling into chaos. This understanding is supposed to be a horror everyone in society prefers not to think about. So much so that even in the midst of war, Kilgore tries to keep his rosy reality together by plying his men with distractions, unsuccessfully trying to make them forget where they are. Instead, Kurtz stares into the face of horror with no relief from gazing into it. He would say, perhaps with Willard, that those who have forgotten about the violence, or threat of violence, needed to preserve safety are imbecilic know-nothings. 

The passage I quoted above expresses a sentiment common of soldiers who return home from battle. How can we who’ve never fought in battle understand it? If the past was filled with conflict, might conflict be something so embedded in human nature that we can never escape it?

I think there’s a special viewpoint granted by living in one of the least violent eras of all time. I have this strange thought that today we’re more human than our ancestors rather than less. As Pascal put it,

“Those whom we call ancient were really new in all things, and properly constituted the infancy of mankind; and as we have joined to their knowledge the experience of the centuries which have followed them, it is in ourselves that we should find this antiquity that we revere in others.” 

So whatever primality constitutes the Heart of Darkness, though I’m initially inclined to believe that it’s really old—instead, it’s rather young. We, the people standing in a liberal democracy, are the old ones. So maybe, just maybe, our revulsion to violence today can be taken as an indicator of social maturity.

It’s an undeniable fact that we have tended to be less violent over time, and even more so recently. Self-domestication is a tempting theory of human evolution that proposes to explain this¹. The reasoning goes that we domesticated wild animals to make them live with us, and, theoretically, domesticated ourselves for a similar reason, to live closely with other humans. The most violent individuals stopped being desirable mates, and over time societal levels of aggression decreased. Violence of the kind we see in nature, “all-oblivious enmity”, largely disappeared for those within our group, emerging only for outsiders who threaten us. 

This might be what creates the sort of person Kurtz wants, “someone who is moral” within their group but who can kill without judgment someone who threatens the group’s safety. What could happen is that the Heart of Darkness gets projected onto the tribe level; while each member can plausibly call themselves a peace-lover—it’s the tribe over there that’s the issue. Or, if your tribe is playing offense, you claim your intrinsic collective superiority grants you the right to take ownership of your rival tribe. It’s then an easy leap from this, our ancestral state, to modern-day imperialism, which we can understand as the large-scale continuation of the tribal raids of our distant past, a state-level bureaucratic expression of the Heart of Darkness.

Well, this sort of thing…hasn’t totally disappeared. Nations very much treat the world as a jungle; the international community still doesn’t really compose itself according to democratic principles, no matter institutions like the UN. Countries still seem to abide by the laws of the jungle, and those of us in the US happen to live under the protection of the biggest silverback in history. I guess nations have more growing up to do than people. (This makes sense; individuals have been around, evolutionarily speaking, much longer than states have.)

What do we do with the question of progress and maturity? Nassim Taleb once said to “never talk about ‘progress’ in terms of longevity, safety, or comfort before comparing zoo animals to those in the wilderness.” It's a familiar picture: the vigilance of an animal in captivity turned into bored docility, natural instincts dulling for lack of use. So it’s a fair question: have we perhaps overly self-domesticated ourselves?

Today Western societies have mastered Nature to such an extent that most of us are successfully shielded from it. We’re more nidicolous than ever. And forgetfulness of what real violence is may actually be doing some of its own. We’re certainly less prepared for actual conflict than several years ago. I don’t remember who said this, but I do think (and Apocalypse Now reminds us) that a society that forgets the price of safety also forgets the effort required to keep it.

In the same way a barn animal imagines itself safe in its barn, while fields and forests filled with foes exist beyond it, we imagine ourselves similarly insulated from Nature, despite harrowing outdoors no more than a few miles away at any time. Surely it’s children who should be protected from grim realities, whose contribution to the world’s dwindling resource of innocence makes them valuable as well as vulnerable? In what ways have people grown up and benefited from “the experiences of the centuries” following our ancestors?

If we have grown up, it may be through a recognition—on an individual basis, if not national—that grim realities are, in part, dependent on our reactions to events. That the goodness or badness of circumstances isn’t entirely external to us, or out of control. We can choose to respond to unknowns—and bad knowns—with unhesitating violence or with curiosity, to try and uncover more knowledge before acting. If we first see reality as beautiful, or even potentially so, before we see it as dangerous, we’re able to learn more from it. We can, after all, define barbarism as the urge to destroy beautiful things without hesitation.

The broadest views of courage and heroism often involve coming into contact with reality and overcoming it. This is where the real nobility of resolve comes from: gritting your teeth to persist through some hardship, to make your grasp extend beyond your reach. Even in a (thankfully) less violent world, there are plenty of avenues left to exercise this. Everyone at one point or another meets reality and faces a choice between avoiding it or leaning in, whether to deal with what resists by resisting back or by retreating. 

We eventually have to leave the safety of the boat behind, and step on dangerous riverbanks in search of knowledge. We want to find things out about the future without waiting to travel there, to see where the river will flow without being swept up in it ourselves. The banks may contain tigers, even other humans, but we should meet them with a lightness of heart; we should meet them as the grown-up humans we are. There is yet room in Nature for grace. 

1. There have also been some pretty compelling counter-arguments, mainly arguing that decreases in aggression are better explained by increased self-control rather than violence being bred out of the gene pool. See: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00134/full