Pretentious twaddle

Rating: 1/10 (26 June 2008)

During the Vietnam era, you were either a "square" or "hip" -- with "hip" meaning pro-communist, anti-capitalist, pro-sexual-revolution, anti-mainstream American values. Hollywood directors generally chose to be "hip." The significance of this fact should become apparent in due course.
Now, a little boring history for those who can stomach it: U.S. troops were present in large numbers in South Vietnam from roughly 1962 to 1972. U.S. troops came home in '72, having successfully strengthened the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) so that it could defend South Vietnam from invasion by the North Vietnamese communists and from subversion by the South Vietnamese communist Viet Cong.
The ARVN did, in fact, successfully defend South Vietnam for almost three years. Then, a Democrat-controlled Congress cut off funding to the South Vietnamese in the wake of Republican President Nixon's resignation over the Watergate scandal. The North Vietnamese invaded, and South Vietnam fell.
Soon thereafter, the Communist Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and tortured and murdered some two million innocent men, women and children. This is the true tragedy of the Vietnam war -- something that no Hollywood director to my knowledge has touched ("The Killing Fields" is not accompanied by a political explanation of the Cambodian Holocaust.)
Four years after the fall of South Vietnam, and seven years after U.S. troops left the country, Francis Ford Coppola made "Apocalypse Now." He was one of a slew of Hollywood directors who sought to capitalize on the deep well of anti-war sentiment in the United States. Well, let's examine such anti-war sentiment for a minute. Being anti-war is fine, but those who are against war are called upon to offer alternatives that work -- and they never do. Instead, they hold up the UN as some sort of ideal -- a UN made up mostly of undemocratic countries with no respect for human rights.
In the end, the Vietnam War was but one of a series of proxy wars between the communist Soviet Union (at times allied with communist China) and the capitalist West. The Korean War was the first major battle in this rivalry, where both sides sought to extend their influence while bleeding and demoralizing the other side. These proxy wars were a substitute for all-out nuclear war. Terrible things were done by both sides in this conflict, but I believe that the U.S. cause was a noble one. And it largely succeeded, in that the Soviet Union collapsed and freedom and prosperity expanded into Eastern Europe.
But the conduct of the Vietnam War by U.S. politicians was terrible at best. U.S. soldiers never lost a battle in Vietnam. But politicians in Washington would not allow them to keep the territory they had won. They refused to follow Barry Goldwater's advice, which was to "Win, or get the hell out!" They failed to mine Haiphong Harbor in North Vietnam to keep Soviet and communist Chinese supplies out of that country. They refused to invade Laos and Cambodia in order to close down the weapons supply line that ran along the Ho Chi Minh trail, ending only thirty miles from Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital.
In the meantime, Vietnam was the first televised war, and the U.S. media were largely left-wing (as they are today) and anti-war. During the Tet Offensive (a major defeat for the communists, and a major victory for the Americans), Walter Cronkite declared that America had "failed" in Vietnam. This was just one of many distortions by the media. The American public stopped supporting the war. And some celebrities -- like Jane Fonda -- actually rooted for victory by the communists.
What, then, do we see in "Apocalypse Now"? Nothing more than all the one-sidedly anti-American, anti-Vietnam-war stereotypes of the day: playing Wagner (subtle; I don't suppose that could be a suggestion that the Americans were the equivalent of Nazis?); showing a giggling soldier-moron in a helicopter randomly machine gunning innocent Vietnamese peasants (subtle; I don't suppose that could be a suggestion that the Americans were the equivalent of Nazis?); and so on and so forth.
Of course, Coppola wasn't satisfied addressing such "substantive" issues. His movie had to be a "grand vision" -- not unlike his "The Godfather." So he threw everything except the kitchen sink into this movie: the pretentious linkage he tried to make between his magnum opus and Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" -- "Wow, man! That's heavy! Copolla is our Conrad!"; the psychedelic/surreal affectations (a first!); the "ironic" and "clever" juxtapositions (a battle mixed up with surfing); the "revelation" of "Ugly American" insensitivity; and so on.
Well, Copolla was preaching to the choir with this movie, and in this he was a great success. But there is no significance to this movie otherwise. If you really want to see enlightening scenes from Vietnam, rent the multi-disc documentary on the war (I forget the title; there are several.) One very moving scene shows U.S. soldiers singing "Silent Night" on the flare-lit battle-field on Christmas eve. Watching a documentary on the war might actually teach you something about that war -- a first! Otherwise, you're going to have to settle for Hollywood's version from the likes of Oliver Stone and Coppola.
The true subject of Coppola's movie, in my opinion, is Coppola's giant ego. The main secondary subject is the dumbing down of an American public that would uncritically eat up his "vision"; the exact same thing is true of Oliver Stone's various movies. Hollywood thinks that "Epatez les bourgeois!" is the last word in creativity, even when its arrows fall far short of the target.
That is the reason why most "serious" Hollywood movies, in my opinion, are overblown failures. And Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" surely stands at the very front of the line of those failures.