Imagine being an American
soldier sent to Vietnam to fight the militarized Marxist Communists there. The Vietnam
War provides many examples of such a plight. Now consider how much worse it
would be to be sent into a seemingly constantly rainy, hot and humid jungle deep
in Cambodia to assassinate an American colonel because he is a renegade Special
Forces military officer who has gone insane. Just in case this is not dire
enough, simply add in that he has the local village protecting their god with
weapons. Surely safer secret military missions exist than to assassinate an
insane former special-ops man with a small army of devotees. This is the central
plot of the 1979 film, Apocalypse
Now, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who had directed The Godfather earlier that
decade. Behind the plot of Apocalypse Now is a dichotomy wherein human
nature itself is bifurcated into a dichotomy of good and bad. This is
interesting because some of the characters may fall in between, suggesting that
human nature has a gray zone in which most of us live.
Robert Duvall and Marlon Brando
are in both films. All of the characters played by both actors in those films have
both laudable and sordid qualities. In The Godfather, Dulvall’s Tom
Hagen delivers the Godfather’s threats to innocent people on pain of death and
yet evinces steadfast loyalty to the crime family that had adopted him when he
was a boy. In Apocalypse Now, the actor’s Lt. Col. Kilgore loves the
smell of toxic napalm gas in the morning and is loyal to the United States and
brave rather than cowardly. Similarly, in The Godfather, Brando’s Don
Vito Corleone gives orders to his henchmen to murder people and yet he strives
for peace between the families in the wake of the murder by one of those
families of his son, Sonny. In Apocalypse Now, Brando’s Col. Kurtz
tortures and brainwashes people, including Capt. Willard, whom the U.S. Army
has sent to assassinate the insane Kurtz, and yet Kurtz politely asks Willard
to urge Kurtz’s son back in the U.S. not to judge Kurtz too harshly. Kurtz is
as sensitive as he is insane and cruel; he even has a copy of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough,
which traces historical shifts from cruel customs to moral and religious
values. Interestingly, when Willard hacks Kurtz to death with a machete, the
villagers are shown hacking a cow to death as a religious sacrifice; editing shows
a back and forth between the two killings, and the villages then drop their
guns and kneel to Willard, treating him as if he were a god for having killed another
god, Kurtz.
The relationship between ethics
and theology in the Abrahamic religions that is analyzed in Kierkegaard’s short
text, Fear
and Trembling, comes to mind in the interlaced camera shots of Willard murdering
Kurtz and the villagers sacrificing a bull. To Kierkegaard, Abraham is guilty
of being unethical in attempting to murder Isaac even though Abraham is faithful
to Yahweh’s divine command to sacrifice Isaac, with a knife! The ethical
verdict against attempted murder and the approbation of Abraham’s religious
faithfulness to a divine command at great personal cost to Abraham are both valid.
The co-extant validity of two different, albeit related, domains of human experience
point back to the complexity of human nature itself. And yet, in the film, the
depiction of humanity’s higher nature and brute cruelty, as well as its susceptibility
to mental illness, in the Col. Kurtz character is set within a larger
dichotomous framework in which people are either good or bad, and no one
is in between. The complexity of Kurtz’s character itself suggests that the
film’s dichotomous paradigm of human nature may be artificial, perhaps even
imposed by the structure of the human mind along the lines of Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason.
During what can be characterized
in terms of Joseph Campbell’s notion of a
hero’s journey, Willard (the film’s protagonist) is hosted for dinner and
an overnight stay by a French family in Cambodia. The daughter, who treats
Willard to opium and sex in her bed as if both activities were routine, tells
him, “There are two of you. You kill and you love. You are a god and an animal.”
We are indeed a species in the animal kingdom, but it is doubtful that we
constitute gods, although generals on a battlefield may come close. In the
film, Gettysburg (1993),
Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who holds the line against charging
confederate soldiers by flanking them while having to resort to bayonets, says,
“Generals can do anything. There’s nothing so much like a god on earth as a
General on a battlefield.” That film is based on Michael Shaara’s book, The
Killer Angels,” the title of which comes from Chamberlain’s recollection of
his father’s reaction to a speech that Joshua made as a student in which he quoted
from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “What a piece of work is man.” Joshua’s
father, as later recollected by Joshua, had remarked at the time, “Well, boy,
if [man is] an angel, he’s sure a murderin’ angel.” In the film, Pvt. Buster
Kirain replies to Col. Chamberlain of man, “Well, if he’s an angel, alright then.
But he damn well must be a killer angel.” This line went on to become iconic.
If we are angels, then surly we are killer angels. This line fits the overall
paradigm of Apocolypse Now.
A line by the photo
journalist, played by Dennis Hopper, to Willard also contributes to the dichotomous
paradigm. “There is only love and hate. You either love a person or hate a
person.” Even so, the fact that the demented photographer idolizes Kurtz as “a
genius” and a “poet-warrior” even though Kurtz has threatened to kill the
photographer if he takes another picture of Kurtz suggests that something in interpersonal
relations exists between love and hate, or maybe both can exist together,
besides like and dislike as gray areas. Similarly, Col. Kurtz tells Willard, “horror
and ethical atrocities are your friends; if not, they are your enemies.” There
is apparently no in between. Interestingly, the film ends with Willard’s voice-over,
“the horror, the horror” in a tone of astonishment at the sheer extent of it
that he has witnessed in human nature. Behind the gloss of assassination lies
sordid murder, of which he is guilty. Even Willard is difficult to assess in
terms of good and bad.
We mere mortals are quick to judge one another as either “good” or “bad.” The distinction between ethics and religion confounds such an easy categorization of people under the blanket labels of “good” and “bad.” Apocalypse Now presents the dichotomy as artificial—even perhaps insane—ironically because Kurtz, and even perhaps Willard, are presented as having both laudable and not so praiseworthy qualities. Even in Kurtz’s insanity, are there not credible nuggets of insight of which he is capable? Willard does not dismiss Kurtz’s philosophizing outright; at least Kurtz can reason through his philosophical claims. The philosophizing of the photojournalist is so insane that no line of reasoning whatsoever can be detected. People are not always so bad that a person must vacate to Aruba to collect oneself before getting married (such a marriage may not be wise), and yet people are not so exclusively good that a prudent person would let down one’s guard. In assessing other people, a wise person takes into consideration the distortive mental impact of the dichotomous mental paradigm of the human mind that may go back to the brain’s dichotomous left-brain/right-brain physical structure.
