I revisited Apocalypse Now for the first time since college yesterday. My local cinema had a screening of the slightly unnecessary Redux and it still stands up as the defining movie about the American experience in Vietnam and as an anticolonial work but one that hit me differently the second time in a few ways that I wanted to put down.

Kurtz and Trump

The Kurtz / Trump similarity struck me hard with this watch. Kurtz’s rambling, looping speeches mirror Trump. They monologue. They have constant grandiose, narcissistic monologues that reek of paranoia and justify themselves. They radically simplify the world, presenting a picture in primary colors with themselves painted as necessary heroes.

There is a genre of young man that finds Kilgore exceedingly cool, as they do Kurtz or Jessup from A Few Good Men. The movies meet them halfway but that leaves half from the young man’s desire to be important.

Examine Willard’s shooting of the injured Viet woman on the boat. It exhibits a recurring subtheme of the movie, the valorization of those willing to perform cynical calculus during war, a subtheme that contradicts as it coexists with the dominant one of the horrors of war and a necessary subtheme for the lynchpin of Kurtz’s seduction of Willard.

Sometimes it is the man who makes his own importance (and we are talking about men here) and sometimes it is the system who makes the man. When the greatness comes from the system, it allows the man to stay mediocre, a natural temptation for those who lack the discipline for more, much as grifters like Jordan Peterson provides the feeling of self-improvement with no more effort than listening to a podcast. It is thus natural that these movies revolve around the military, a system meant to give importance to the mediocre.

Anticolonialism in Apocalypse Now

My favorite moment in the movie is the spear that kills the Chief. That spear comes straight from Heart of Darkness in a scene that matches the book beat for beat. Apocalypse Now is very clear about being a contemporary remake of Heart of Darkness and as the spear travels from the Belgian Congo of the 1890s into Vietnam in the 1960s, it makes clear the movement of empire over the years. The American imagination contains not only the white supremacy integral to the West but also the belief that the USA is the modern evolution of hidebound Europe, that the USA is idealistic and egalitarian in contrast with the inequality foundational to modern Europe. This spear draws a line from the imperialism of the Scramble for Africa straight through America in Vietnam all the way into the heart of the Chief.

For all of that though, Apocalypse Now remains the story of the colonizer and not the colonized. As with Heart of Darkness and The Man Who Would Be King before it, it treats the idea that a white man would be able to deify himself before a mass of adoring subalterns as a given that needs no explanation just as it refuses to let the subaltern speak.

Apocalypse Now is also more concerned with the lies than the war. Accurately, the movie recognizes the insult of wanting to bring a woman shot by Americans to an American medic, the modern incarnation of the lie of upliftment, but finds the insult more distasteful than the injury and so finds a new shade for the original insult.

It repeats and iterates on the core idea, that war breaks everyone, throughout the movie and so the movie becomes progressively more unhinged the further it goes upriver. It is only the colonizer that gets a voice to express that breaking in this movie. Possibly though, this is the best choice for a movie that is indelibly the output of the colonizer.

We see here the common cause between the colonized and the backbone of the colonizer. American soldiers paid a high price in Vietnam and continue to pay that price today. The British colonists had a shocking suicide rate in India and the standard of living dropped sharply in Britain for the first century of colonialism. The process of colonization must also include the exploitation of the homeland.