Tribes

If the tagline of World War II was the air raid siren, that mournful howl, then the equivalent in the Vietnam War was the pulse of helicopter rotors. Their futile spinning tells you everything you need to know about that war: American technological superiority, the magical ability to poof in and out of the jungle at will while raining death from above, and finally of course retreat, defeat, and evacuation.

It’s no surprise then that Francis Ford Coppola goes with the twirling rotors in the first shot of Apocalypse Now, to the sound of The Doors, the tree line erupting in a gorgeous napalm fire.

We all know what napalm smells like in the morning, right?

Coppola was one of the new wave that swept through Hollywood in the 70s, the easy riders and raging bulls who overturned the old studio system. He was besties with George Lucas, a filmmaker who will go on to romanticize war in his own way.

Apocalypse Now famously adapts Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and in this version Marlow is a troubled Army officer, young and reckless Martin Sheen all hopped up on reds and PTSD. To contrast this character with Sheen’s later star turn as President Bartlet in The West Wing is still rewarding: it’s like a flow chart of the Baby Boom generation.

The story is okay, but the mise en scene is so good it’s ridiculous. The river, the rain forest, the wonderful bit – adapted from Conrad – of the boat futilely firing into the bush as though the jungle itself is the enemy.

Everybody loves the napalm in the morning, but the scene I can’t take my eyes off is when Lance water skis from the back of the swift boat to the Stones’ “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

In the end, the Coppola movie collapses as comprehensively as the Saigon regime did. But it’s still a work of genius. The Horror, Colonel Kurtz says, the Horror. I didn’t really get the line in Conrad, and I still don’t get it in Coppola.

The fact is Apocalypse Now makes not the slightest attempt to find meaning in the jungle. In one scene regrettably squeezed back into the Redux cut, a Frenchman holds forth about the naiveté of America’s militaristic troublemaking, contrasting it with the more sophisticated style of the French, demonstrating how the Europeans were able to make it through the 20th century without significant bloodshed. But it’s processed history, and not particularly useful.

It doesn’t take, anyway. What we remember of this magnificent picture is the moral squalor, the butchered water bull, the etuffé and the tiger, and the phantasmagorical chaos of the Do Lung Bridge.