No Method – Apocalypse Now and a Study of the Failures of Moral Philosophy in the Case of War

by Bryn Gatehouse.

“His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines”
(Conrad, 1899)

Ending of Apocolypse Now, 1979, United Artists.

“In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river”
(Eliot, 1925)

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) , as an informative article by Rhys Jones on this website from August reveals , was chaos to produce. However here my aims are different. I plan to parenthesise the production aspects of the film, along with other cinematic elements of the film in order to attempt to reach a basis, or a port if one will, for understanding the spirit of the story. As Willard does, I will make my journey to the dead heart of meaning. When reaching the beach of understanding, the film will either open itself up and reveal its sublime naked self to me, or the winds of failure will push me back home along the Acharon to ignorance. Whilst the basis of the spirit of the Heart of Darkness lingers in the background of the first half of the film, an unwanted presence immanent to the state of war, the second half of the film, notably the interactions between Willard, the audience, and Kurtz are where what we perceive as the figure of darkness to rear its head. Thus the focus of this shall be on the second half of the film, with only brief reflections on the madness of part one. Kurtz is our focus here, messiah or sophist, and we must reflect Willard’s journey of obsession and come to our own conclusions about what Kurtz is, what man is, what war is, and whether that overgrown, ghost-filled temple is really deserving of the spatial presence of a ‘heart of darkness’.

Shot from Final Cut Trailer of Apocalypse Now, 2019, United Artists.

The first aspect of meaning that we find in our journey along this tumid river attaches itself to war de jure, and to man de facto. What I speak of here is how man acts in war, and how that may reveal to us how man acts in nature. Putting to one side any attempt to define, actualise, or corner a ‘human nature’ in essence, the Nung instead turns our eyes to man in nature as he is now. Following the construction of Rousseau, man in nature here is not natural, but is man as we know it placed in a vacuum of authority. It is no coincidence that the film starts with fire, before slowly integrating an image of our hero Willard, a man of no army and thus no authority. Even during receiving his orders Willard is no US Army soldier, he is simply a physical manifestation of will, as the other characters are by virtue of characterhood. But here, this collapse into will becomes more apparent than in most films, as we slowly open our eyes to a lack of command and a lack of leadership. The War is not duty, it is interest that seeps into the war beneath the boat, and that is let out in clouds of purple haze. Willard is not on a mission, but a pilgrimage to see the Christ figure that has intrigued him so much.

This lack of command and competing wills inevitably leads to conflict. This does not just account for the war itself, but the actions taken within the film, one less of a state of nature than a state of war (whether those are synonyms you can decide for yourself). And if one knows anything, law does not affect will, nor desire, and thus the crimes of war are introduced and then immediately pushed aside into the gutter. For how is there to be a law in war? Are these not contradictory terms? If we are to justify the force of violence against another, how can we then say that we’ll follow certain rules whilst doing so? We want to eat the food, but the abattoir is bound. How will that affect us, mouths overloaded and bits of meat falling down onto our laps, quickly to be brushed off with disgusted hands, not realising simply touching this has dirtied them? The state of nature has no code from above, no divine commandment, one does not even go forth and conquer. There are only competing wills and the madness that results from them. Every act in this film brings madness to the table, and originates in will. Think the capture of the beachhead, the playboy scene, or even the mission itself. There is madness within will, and war is the place to bring this out, where men become animals, albeit social ones.

Shot from Final Cut Trailer of Apocalypse Now, 2019, United Artists.

The moral picture presented here practically reflects that of the deuteragonist, or perhaps really the protagonist of the film when rejecting the Aristotelian arc format that film tends to follow. Of course here we talk about Kurtz, the man in the shadows, and the man who occupies Willard’s mind and who shines through his eyes. Kurtz haunts the previous events either done or witnessed by Willard, from the interactions with Roach at the Do Long Bridge or the man holding himself together with a plate, from the piles of bodies left to rot and curl at the side of our Acheron, us taking the form of Charon, to the water buffalo left split, bloodied, and ruined in the final moments of the film. In a word, Kurtz is war, not quite personified but certainly corporeal. He is the soldier, the leader, the killer and God. As we have already noted, there is no law to war, nor to nature. Kurtz is this lawlessness, this madness, this lack of method, and his monologues are the single most important gate to the naked meaning of Apocalypse Now.

For Kurtz, horror, the culmination of clashing wills in a populated environment like Vietnam, has a face. Its face is profoundly human, perhaps with eyes and a nose, and it acts and smells just like you. It aligns itself with moral terror as if two inseparable twins, and resides most notably in war. Kurtz began the war as a decorated soldier and a moral man, working on hearts and minds with vaccination schemes, and more than anything else following orders. Quickly climbing the ranks, he begins his nosedive into cynicism after witnessing the revenge against an inoculated village by the NVA, which involves the cutting off of every inoculated child’s arm. This single memory seems to be the basis for Kurtz’ moral theory of war, one which is built upon will and requires no sense of law or order, a theory which seems to better reflect what war is as opposed to how war seems in a courtroom in Geneva.

“A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God… the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that.”

Shot from Final Cut Trailer of Apocalypse Now, 2019, United Artists.

Using war as the oar to push our boat downriver, we see what Kurtz believes is necessary for victory. Amoral individuals, or men detached from morality, able to truly act according only to their will. This provides some structure for the actions we see in the film, some explanation for why these soldiers are acting the way they are. That explanation being that they want to. Clean killing a number of civilian merchants? He wanted to. Willard killing an injured non-combatant? He wanted to. Beyond any justification, or any judgement, comes the simple explanatory phrase that they acted in accordance with their will. Unlike anyone else in the film, Kurtz understands how this works. He has made the horror that follows him a friend, publicly displaying corpses including those of children around his compound as an example of the force of will. Somewhere around the heart of Apocalypse Now is the idea that good men do not win wars, instead the stronger do. And more often than not, the strong and the mad are difficult to tell apart.

As the film is based on the novella ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Conrad, I want to dedicate a small section of this piece to the idea of a ‘heart’ of darkness, and whether by the end of the film we are actually enlightened on the matter. One of the greatest influences on the film, and on Kurtz, is Eliot’s poem the Hollow Men. With the subject being that which is hollow, perhaps a cruel trick is being played on us? With consideration, this is almost certainly the case. Again, Kurtz seems to understand this. He has his lack of method, his friendship with chaos, his will, but to what end is this made? He no longer seems to care about victory, rather massacring numbers of Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians. He does not win a battle in the film, he does not even fight one. At the bottom of our descent another hole lies deeper still, and there is no light at the bottom. Instead war is empty, and all this willing and chaos serve no real purpose. Take for example the war in Vietnam. We have just watched a number of American wills in this war, great wills, unbreakable desires to engage in this chaos, and yet within the decade the Americans have lost. There is only violence for no real purpose. Instead we see a practical death drive, be it your own or that of others, an unending will to see and cause suffering, violence, chaos and entropy, no more. There is no real purpose for which any character acts, and they pay no attention to any order that tries to create one. There is nothing but hollow men, hoping only for the whimper of death, either others or their own. War here is senseless, but continual. There is no avoiding such horrors, and there is no purpose once we stop.

Within the film the notion of father-son relationships is explored frequently, from the issuing of orders to Willard, to the friendship between Cap and Clean. One may then note the fact that death always lies somewhere around these relationships, with Willard no longer following orders, going as far as renouncing his own army, the death of both Cap and Clean, and the killing of Kurtz by his spiritual son Willard. As soon as Willard meets Kurtz, Kurtz understands that Willard is the errand boy sent to kill him. Not only that, but he immediately accepts his fate, asking only that Willard meet Kurtz’ family back in the USA after killing him. The final action of the film, the killing of the buffalo and the killing of Kurtz, is an act of patricide by man against nature, as the film circles back to the napalm strike of the jungle in the first scene. Patricide drives history, and yet war shows that nothing changes. Willard kills the father, and at the same time finally becomes him. Every action he has made has followed Kurtz’ philosophy, and he now embodies war, along with the aftermath of it. So out he trudges, with his bloodied machete and intense stare. Kurtz, rather than truly dying, finds a body to live on and haunt. Willard does not need to stay in order to carry on Kurtz’ project, he simply returns to the war a changed man, a man who carries the will to do anything in the name of chaos. The cutting off of the head does not kill the beast, and war, violence, and pain will remain. Patricide is necessary and yet useless.

Shot from Final Cut Trailer of Apocalypse Now, 2019, United Artists.

Apocalypse Now depicts a journey of meaning in which no meaning is found. We do not know why violence, madness, and war occur, but it does. We know only how to engage in it, and how to will for it. Kurtz lives on as an inholy spirit, and we can be certain that Willard, having seen the eyes of death, now carries him into conflict once more. The film can only reflect on how deeply meaningless this act of war is, whilst simultaneously capitulating to the fact that it will happen again.

“It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
(Mccarthy, 1985).

by Bryn Gatehouse, January 2023.

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