It was an excellent find, though I think Coppola was being too modest. Seems like he had the idea in mind to give over all possible credit for the film to Milius, which was nice of him, but not at all true. Coppola at the least put several touches in there that changed the whole course of the film.

Both for sure. There's some interest, I think, in comparing the two versions.

Apocalypse Now Commentary
Part I: The Art of Violence



Interviewer: Why the need for so much gruesome, graphic violence? Why not let us imagine a little of it--
Tarantino: Because it's so much fun, Jan!


As a reformed grade-school bully, I am opposed to real world violence, along with the many varieties of threats and challenges and posturings which accompany and engender it. In my adult life, whenever I've been confronted with the possibility of a fight breaking out, I've chosen--perhaps not always the best de-escalation solution in the moment--but an approach which at least resulted in fists left unflown and weapons undrawn.



We humans are only another variety of violent ape, kin to gorillas and chimpanzees. What we have over apes and chimps is a much higher level of imagination and creativity, thanks to having brains with more and deeper and more intricate wrinkles.

This evolutionary development has given us storytellers and visual artists and musicians and developers of sports and games, all of whom often help us to process and sublimate our inherent violence, and to work through it without ever having to throw a fist or draw a weapon.

Not every piece of art need have violence in it, but some of our best artists have used it extensively in their works. My point here is: artistic violence is perfectly fine; the great majority of us know the difference between real and make-believe, and we can enjoy the hell out of as much make-believe violence as we can stand without having to feel the least bit guilty about it.

Apocalypse Now was originally conceived as an old-fashioned, straightforward war movie, and thus the violence in it--like the violence in humanity--is inherently baked in.

John Milius wrote the screenplay for the movie. Looking at his resume, which includes Conan the Barbarian, Dillinger, Dirty Harry, Dirty Harry: Magnum Force, Red Dawn, Clear and Present Danger, 22 television episodes of Rome, a Medal of Honor video game, and the Homefront video game, we can see violence as a common theme in his storytelling. Certainly, he's made a number of successful and well-loved projects wherein violence has been essential to advancing the story.

Milius was a contemporary and close colleague of Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. He was their conservative--I won't say mascot because they all had a tremendous amount of respect for his filmmaking--but he was the conservative in the group. Years later, Milius would befriend the Coen brothers, who based the Vietnam-obsessed character of Walter in the Big Lebowski upon Milius.



After Milius wrote Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola became interested in producing it. Coppola had taken his Godfather money and formed American Zoetrope, an independent production company designed to provide young and talented filmmakers like Lucas, Spielberg and Milius the money and the means to film their visions, outside of the stultified big studio environs.

George Lucas was originally slated to direct Apocalypse Now, with production starting around 1976, but the young director begged off to instead make a high-budget children's space adventure.

Eventually, Coppola gave the directing job to himself. It wasn't his style of movie--acts of violence in his films were invariably saddled with tragic consequences, plus he had been ambivalent at best about the USA's imperialist excesses in Vietnam--but the movie had something he was looking for, and that was the potential to become a big blockbuster war movie, like the Guns of Navarone or The Dirty Dozen or John Wayne's The Green Berets.

From the start, Coppola planned to spend his Godfather money lavishly to make Apocalypse Now big and loud and horrifying and beautiful, with the highest quality, most earth-shaking sound mix, and the most expensive cameras and the biggest sets and a huge cast. Then, after raking in the proceeds, Coppola planned to use them to fund smaller, more personal projects to be made by and with his contemporaries.

To get the asses in seats, Coppola calculated that he'd have to play the movie straight: nothing weird, nothing political, just massive, gung-ho blockbuster war porn, filmed exactly the way Milius had written it.



In the movie, Special Ops Captain Benjamin Willard, played by Martin Sheen, is sent on a top secret mission to assassinate a Special Forces Colonel named Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, who has gone rogue way up in Cambodia, where Americans weren't supposed to tread--per several Vietnam-era agreements--but where we went anyways, only secretly; only Kurtz was not being secret about his activities, which involved openly torturing and slaughtering suspected North Vietnamese and Viet Cong agents and sympathizers, along with assembling and training a cult-like force of Cambodian, Vietnamese and Montagnard tribal fighters, who worshiped Colonel Kurtz as a god--spreading terror and dismay amongst his enemies.

To reach Kurtz, Willard must hitch a ride on a Navy river patrol boat and then sail up the Nung River through South Vietnam and up into Cambodia. But to get to the river, he first requires the assistance of Colonel Kilgore and his Air Cavalry.



My assumption about the character of Kilgore had long been that Milius admired him, and portrayed him as heroic--if a bit over-the-top, while Coppola--who does a nice meta cameo in the above clip--turned Kilgore into a parody of the gung-ho American war pig, subtly, with the aid of Robert Duvall's superlative portrayal, and without changing much if any of Milius' stellar dialog.

However, in the interview I posted upthread, Milius said that--rather than admiring Kilgore--he considered him to be akin to Polyphemus, the Cyclops from the Odyssey. Polyphemus was a dimwitted one-eyed, man-eating giant who stood in the way of Odysseus's epic journey, and in this spot Milius had Willard in the role of Odysseus.

Coppola, meanwhile, filmed two small scenes highlighting Kilgore's humanity: one in which the Colonel offers his own canteen to a wounded enemy fighter, and one where he makes sure that a wounded Vietnamese baby is airlifted out of the combat zone. Milius may have written those scenes, but Coppola and Duvall made them stand out.

So my initial conceit of casting Milius as the jingoistic war hawk and Coppola as the anti-war peacenik turned out to be more complicated than I'd envisioned. Now I think I might be a little closer to the truth if I employed the Ying Yang symbol to their contributions, and credit at least a little of both elements to either side.



This post is getting long, so I will conclude it with the most famous scene in the movie. The helicopter Flight of the Valkyries scene.

This scene plays fairly early in the movie, when Coppola was still trying to play it straight and make a big booming war spectacle and stay true to Milius's screenplay.

The Valkyries scene plays out almost precisely how Milius wrote it--word for word--beat for beat, with the exception of two little vignettes (as Coppola called them), meaning two little mini-scenes where the director added his own stylistic flourishes for us to meditate on. See if you can guess which two they might be.




Up Next: Psychedelia and the Dark Heart of Imperialism

No guesses?

Eh, I probably shouldn't be giving out homework in any case. I'll spoil the answers tonight...maybe.

Didn’t realize we had HW, I’ll try to get it to it today.

Can I get an extension?

I don’t know the young child left behind that gets dragged to wherever the school kids are going. Maybe the surf board heavy vs light discussion or the sitting in your helmet? I thought the idea of the Colonel drinking from a coffee cup was a nice touch. Man a lot going on in that scene.

A few maybes:

The guy riding with his hand on the rocket pod.

The children in the school courtyard.

At the very end, the guy being pulled out of the huey. (usually they were pushed out, but this was much more cinematic.)

You have until midnight 12 January.


You're right about the schoolkids lining up.

Without bogging down the scene, it's a quick way to show that the enemy is not a monolithic villain. There are always kids involved when we invade a country, whether we were invited in or not.

I like that we don't see any kids get hurt. That would have been heavy-handed. Instead, the idea of innocent bystanders sticks around in the back of my mind while I enjoy the cinematic carnage.

I find the kids lining up as a surprising omission that I thought would’ve been part of the original script.

The Valkyries scene plays out almost precisely how Milius wrote it--word for word--beat for beat, with the exception of two little vignettes (as Coppola called them), meaning two little mini-scenes where the director added his own stylistic flourishes for us to meditate on. See if you can guess which two they might be.

prayer scene?

somewhat tangentially; have you read Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes? 2010 novel, unforgettable combat images. Equal to the best of Sebastian Barry and James Jones ( I am thinking Long Long Way, and Thin Red Line).

I guess Coppolas cameo and the scene where the soldier repeatedly shouts "I don't want to go!".

Was the Coppola cameo in the clip? I must of missed it.

The guy shouting I don’t want to go was a good one but also to me something you would think they’d include in the original screenplay.

Coppola cameo appears prior to Valkyries scene...though the prayer scene might also be mis-placed in my memory.

Ah yeah the Coppola cameo was when they first met the 1/9th; mixed that up.

Missed that one scene was identified already; I stand by my other guess.

Confirmed that the Coppola cameo is from an earlier scene. That was a Milius scene. They'd hired actors to portray the TV crew, but a huge typhoon hit the Philippines (and wrecked the set) and the actors couldn't make it, so Coppola and his crew stood in for them.


A little more about the writer, John Milius:

Before he went to USC Film School, Milius was a surf bum for several years around Camp Pendleton near San Diego, thus the surfing scenes in Apocalypse Now

A lot of his fellow surfers were marines and ex-marines from the camp who had been to Vietnam, and other surfer friends were drafted into the war, being unmarried, not in school, and having no rich parents to find them exemptions.

Milius had volunteered for the war, but he was rejected due to having asthma. He garnered stories from the war from his surf buddies, and those turned into the Apocalypse Now screenplay.

One of Milius's main themes is that Vietnam was a "California war," in that the USA took its late-60's West Coast culture with it to the war: the rock n roll, the drugs, the surfing and waterskiing, the cookouts with steak and beer, the Playboy bunny USO shows, and the massive overwhelming firepower and technology. One of his points is that all this importation of the culture just made the soldiers want to be back home all the more.

In any case, Milius's focus in the movie is always on the American soldier: what is he thinking, how is he experiencing and processing this chaos and madness?

Coppola, on the other hand, likes to check in with the Vietnamese from time to time. What do they think about us? How did they beat us given the massive differences in technology and firepower?



As an example, here's another scene by Milius with a quick Coppola vignette at 2:33.

Also, I'll spoil the second Coppola vignette in the Valkyries scene tonight. It's a bit of a troll, and I would be surprised if anyone got it, other than by process of elimination.

Tease

When the Americans swoop over the village around 5:19 they encounter a gun emplacement with a WWII-era .50 caliber, and 25 seconds later they blow away the crew that's manning it.

Around 6:24 the Americans spot the villagers trying to extricate the .50 cal in the back of an old Citroën automobile rolling across a wooden bridge. Kilgore announces "Clear the area, I'm coming down myself" and his chopper blows away the car with a missile. Kilgore says, "These people never give up." and sips from his coffee mug as flaming pieces of the car and its former occupants drop off the bridge.

That's Coppola's second added vignette. He's showing the old gun and the Citroën car as the sum total of the technology the villagers can array against us, vs our attack choppers, our mounted automatic weapons, our missiles, artillery and bombers, and our high-quality sound system blasting Wagner operas.

Coppola also mentioned that the set department had built him a nice bridge, so he felt somewhat obligated to blow something up on it.

The big reveal generated much less discussion than us guessing what it was. I guess I’m not surprised.

I think we covered Part I pretty well. I'm happy with it.

Apocalypse Now Commentary
Part II: The Dark Heart of Imperialism

Yes, they go on telling everything, these chatterers! They tell how I levy incredibly burdensome taxes upon the natives—taxes which are a pure theft; taxes which they must satisfy by gathering rubber under hard and constantly harder conditions, and by raising and furnishing food supplies gratis—and it all comes out that, when they fall short of their tasks through hunger, sickness, despair, and ceaseless and exhausting labor without rest, and forsake their homes and flee to the woods to escape punishment, my black soldiers, drawn from unfriendly tribes, and instigated and directed by my Belgians, hunt them down and butcher them and burn their villages—reserving some of the girls.

They tell it all: how I am wiping a nation of friendless creatures out of existence by every form of murder, for my private pocket’s sake, and how every shilling I get costs a rape, a mutilation or a life. But they never say, although they know it, that I have labored in the cause of religion at the same time and all the time, and have sent missionaries there (of a “convenient stripe,” as they phrase it), to teach them the error of their ways and bring them to Him who is all mercy and love, and who is the sleepless guardian and friend of all who suffer.

King Leopold's Soliloquy
-Mark Twain: 1905


Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, recounts the fictional journey of an English sailor and adventurer, Charles Marlowe, as he captains a Belgian ivory trading steamboat far up the Congo river through a land groaning under the kleptocratic colonial control of King Leopold II of Belgium.

The length of Heart of Darkness is somewhere between a long short story and a novella, yet it took me much longer than my usual time to finish it. Part of it was the density, descriptiveness and ornateness of Conrad's prose.

“I thought his memory was like the other memories of the dead that accumulate in every man’s life—a vague impress on the brain of shadows that had fallen on it in their swift and final passage; but before the high and ponderous door, between the tall houses of a street as still and decorous as a well-kept alley in a cemetery, I had a vision of him on the stretcher, opening his mouth voraciously, as if to devour all the earth with all its mankind. He lived then before me; he lived as much as he had ever lived—a shadow insatiable of splendid appearances, of frightful realities; a shadow darker than the shadow of the night, and draped nobly in the folds of a gorgeous eloquence.

The vision seemed to enter the house with me—the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart—the heart of a conquering darkness."

Good stuff--in moderation--but the whole damn story is like this, all the way through. I believe it was Stephen King who advised that long, flowery passages are fine if you can do them well, but a good writer also mixes in a few short Hemingway sentence stubs for variety, to keep people from nodding off. I agree.

The other thing that slowed me down was our protagonist's copious use of the n-word. Marlowe drops it every other page or so. It's true that he's a British imperialist from the Victorian era, and given that lineup one should expect racial slurs in the mix, but I nevertheless I found it to be exceptionally grating, so I had to stop and think about it.

Our heroes in Apocalypse Now toss around racial slurs left and right, their denigrations being aimed at their Southeast Asian counterparts.

Shouldn't these soldier's slurs bother me as much as Marlowe's n-bombs? I guess. But soldiers have always casted dehumanizing epithets at their enemies, going probably all the way back to when we could first articulate different sounds to warn our tribe of the presence of foreigners.

Soldier's slurs are an age-old mechanism designed to make the enemy seem less than human, in order to tamp down the traumatic stress that afflicts non-psychopaths whenever they're called upon to kill and maim their fellow human beings.

Does that notion excuse the hate speech? I don't know. It explains it. The offensive side of the mechanism strikes when it lowers the threshold for violence in otherwise normal people, violence against those subjected to their slurs, as shown here by Clean, played by 16-year-old Laurence Fishburne (The Cotton Club, Boyz n the Hood, Event Horizon, The Matrix, etc. etc.)



If you've read part I of this commentary you won't be surprised to know that this scene wasn't part of John Milius' original screenplay, but an addition by Francis Ford Coppola. It's likely the source of Milius' early complaint that Coppola was trying to turn his war movie into an anti-war movie.

It's easily the most heavy-handed "message" scene in the movie. I think it's fine. To me, it's a vital piece of the alchemy of opposing viewpoints that makes Apocalypse Now such a great film.

It's also an eye-opening moment for us to watch Willard, our protagonist, execute an injured girl in cold blood, rather than deter or delay his mission with helping her.

Again, it seems a bit heavy-handed, but here Coppola is reminding us that Willard is an assassin. At the beginning of the film we were told; here we're being shown. The latter method is always more powerful.

Willard's ultimate target is Colonel Kurtz, played sublimely by a three-hundred-and-something pound Marlon Brando. Kurtz has "gone native" far up the river in Cambodia, and has gathered a tribe of natives and other hangers-on who worship him as a sort of demigod.



Back in Heart of Darkness, Marlowe the businessman/adventurer is commissioned to make contact with and resupply Mr. Kurtz, the top ivory gathering agent for Marlowe's company. Kurtz has "gone native" way up the Congo river, gathering about him a tribe of natives and other hangers-on who worship him as sort of demigod.

Mark Twain's snippet up top has the Congolese being worked to death gathering rubber for the imperialists. Twain himself had a rather complicated history with the n-word; complicated enough that it's beyond the scope of this essay. I count myself a fan of his, so I'll be covering Twain at some point in the future.

The least I can say about Mark Twain is that he often stood for the oppressed and the downtrodden. Marlowe in Heart of Darkness, on the other hand, stands for the oppressors and the downtreaders. Marlowe's crew fends off a single arrow and spear attack on his trip up the river, but for the most part, the natives are not his enemies. They're his servants.

Rather than rubber, Marlowe's company works the Congolese to death gathering ivory. From what I can tell from the story, there was still enough fossil ivory on the ground back then from predeceased elephants, so they did not have to kill live elephants for their tusks. The only ones who died for ivory were the natives.

As a quick aside: right around Marlowe's time, rubber trees were being exported to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and the French were setting up new rubber plantations where...they would work untold numbers of Southeast Asian natives to death gathering rubber.



All this is to say that Marlowe's n-bombs sound worse in my head than any slurs from the other parties above.

While it's true that the soldier is responsible carrying out the oppression on the ground level, and a well-to-do son of slave owners like Mr. Twain can sound a bit hollow standing up for people he calls "friendless creatures," in the end it's always imperialist entrepreneurs like Marlowe and Mr. Kurtz who nourish and perpetuate the cycle of oppression through the generations.

It's also possible that the above might be an earnest pile of freshman dormroom Marxist claptrap from me, and that the real reason why I don't like Marlowe is that I picture him looking and sounding like Grady from the Shining.



Maybe it's a little of both.

It usually is.

Next: The Psychedelic Soldier

Can a colonizer carry out the business of colonization without also viewing the colonized as less human than himself?
The slurs in Heart of Darkness were more jarring for me as well, but is this simply because the American soldiers in Vietnam are closer to us in time and more relatable? Genuinely not sure myself.
A couple quotes from Heart of Darkness that stuck in my head across the intervening years:

Twain was the well-to-do son of slave owners?

I think we're more likely to give soldiers a pass for calling their enemies bad names, as they're thrown into in a death struggle against them.

I think that first quote is from Marlowe's speculations about a Roman commander travelling up the Thames back when the British natives painted themselves up and threw spears. I'm going to have something to say about that passage in part III.

Your second quote is the most succinct summary possible for Heart of Darkness.

His dad was a judge, I believe. He died, though, when Twain was fairly young, so the well-to-do part was put on hold until Twain became well off on his own merits later in life, before he lost his fortune getting scammed on bad investments.

Twain's parents owned a slave. Which, you know--even though it was just one--still makes you a slave owner.

When you say it makes him sound hollow, do you mean he's insincere?