There is no justice and no justification in any war

Rating: 10/10 (7 November 2006)

A long awaited version of this cult film. Even Francis Ford Coppola has been submitted to cuts in one of his most important films. They say it was commercial. They know it was not entirely. One main scene was cut off : the French plantation scene that reveals how the Americans had played a double game during the war in Indochina between the Viet Minh and the French : they had helped the Viet Minh and hence had produced the French defeat. Poor loser's explanation, for sure, and yet not entirely false. Think of the Americans helping Saddam Hussein against Iran, or the Djihad in Afghanistan against the Soviets. We know the results. Double agents are always those who lose in the end. But this full and final cut of the film, though it does not change the meaning of the film, does change the depth of this meaning. We get down into horror little by little as we go up the river. Of the five men on the boat the first to die is the black soldier, and then the second to die is the black sergeant. The blacks have been eliminated first : quite a symbolical truth. The third victim will be the white soldier from New Orleans who speaks French. It is also very symbolical today, though maybe less in those days, though it was symbolical of what happened to the French in Indochina : they were defeated. The only two survivors are the two white pure Americans. But what is shown under a new depth is the meaning of this horror. We could have thought Kurtz used the basic and daily horror of those historically-retarded jungle people to impose savagery and total carnal violence. But what appears now is that it is not the savagery of these people that produced their war but it is the war imposed from outside that produced the savagery, or liberated this savagery from its box. In other words a war that comes from outside, and I have the propension to think all wars always come from outside, even the most patriotic and justified defensive war, such a war liberates the deepest layers of the survival instinct in man, not even the animal instinct of survival. These men who commit gratuitously-embellished violence do not plainly aim at surviving which would simply imply killing their adversaries, enemies or challengers.They survive in a completely different way : they have the feeling to be alive because they make the other die in atrocious suffering and in the most barbaric way. It is not so much the dying of the enemy that gives them this feeling of being alive, but the torture, the suffering, the horror in which this death is performed. In other words it is no longer only the survival instinct that is at stake but it is also the pleasure instinct. In other words they transform the cold necessary killing of an enemy into a hot pleasurable sexual event that replaces real sexuality. Killing in such a horrible way becomes a pleasurable intercourse and the victim is seen as fulfilling its destiny, just like the buffalo that is killed at the end of the film. A man who enters such a war is supposed to accept his dying in such a sacrificial way because that is his ultimate function. But then where is the war ? We have regressed to the emergence of humanity from animality, of man from the animal he was before : this dire moment when human beings felt that killing animals had a religious dimension, when human beings felt that killing their enemies had a religious dimension, that is to say in both cases a pleasurable power dimension. That led humanity to inventing religions, religions that originally always justified the killing of enemies and that provided the believers with the conviction that they had special powers enabling them with unfailing and totally justified capabilities, powers. But what will remain after this thrilling sensation of absolute power provided to soldiers by those sophisticated new technologies that kill with a microscopic precision ? The horror, nothing but the horror, the haunting and gnawing question : Why did I do this ? Why did I feel pleasure when doing it ? Why does it feel so easy to go beyond limits that should never be trespassed, such as into torturing activities ? And for us the film brings up one question : Is there a Kurtz in each one of us ? Is there an Eichman in each one of us ? Is there an Auschwitz in each one of our memories ? Coppola seems to tell us that war is a Pandora's Box that we better not open. Coppola is in phase with Clive Barker who tells you war, and maybe life, is a secret cube that you must not open because beyond it there is nothing but suffering and the pleasure of inflicting as well as receiving that suffering. The old film was a masterpiece, this new director's cut, or redux is a biblical masterpiece : think of Abraham who is going to sacrifice his own son with the full assent of everyone around him, or at least no protest from them, including the son himself, and God replacing the son with a ram at the very last minute to symbolize that humanity has to move away from any type of human sacrifice, even in war. Human life is sacred and no human being has the right to take one single human life away. That's where Kurtz is wrong : everyone has the right to judge him, to call him a murderer, but no one has the right to perform justice and to kill him to do so, except in a completely perverted version of rightfulness.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne