Apocalypse Now (1970), Essay Example

Francis Ford Coppola’s movie Apocalypse Now(1979)created a riveting screen image from the military conflict of the Vietnam War. It was supposed to be the first major studio movie to address the Vietnam War. This movie exposes the madness of war itself, and offers an explicit critique of the Vietnam War, which did encompass elective battles fought for dubious gain, the slaking of rapacious sexual appetites, and futile campaigns to destroy bridges and other military objectives. Simultaneously, the original cut of the movie makes no attempt to establish political, postcolonial context of the war. This movie treats Vietnam War as a myth, depersonalizing its critique of American imperialism by rendering the war in grotesquely broad strokes that preempt the audience’s emotional identification with the main characters.

In the process, American society was treated to a movie that represented not so much Vietnam-era America as America’s idealized view of itself post-Vietnam, that is, from the enlightened perspective of a historical retrospection that could deny contradictions (Tomasulo 147). While 1979 audiences may have read antiwar sentiment into the movie – the title is a twist on the slogan “Peace Now!” (148) – their own memories of the conflict probably informed that interpretation. Divorced from its post-Vietnam context, the movie is politically ambiguous, as it engrosses violence by depicting helicopters and napalm strikes in beautiful representation.

This movie ends with the actual ritual slaughter of a water buffalo crosscut with footage of Willard butchering Kurtz, suggesting sacrificial purification to serve the greater good. The bizarre resolution Coppola stumbled upon left audiences confused and failed to provoke a consistent emotional response that might have coalesced into a “culturalreassessment of the Vietnam War and American soldiers’ role in it” (Bates). This movie placed ambivalence and ambiguity at the center of the Vietnam narrative and, in so doing, approximated an essential truth of America’sVietnam misadventure, which remains a heavily disputed tangle of myth and memory.

Works Cited

Bates, Milton J. The Wars We Took to Vietnam: Cultural Conflict and Storytelling. Berkley: University of California Press, 1996. Print.

Tomasulo,Frank P. “The Politics of American Ambivalence: Apocalypse Now as Prowar and Antiwar Film”. In Dittmar, Linda, and Gene Michaud, eds. From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990. Print.