Movie Review: Apocalypse Now (1979)

Francis Ford Coppola’s failed translation of Joseph Conrad

By Rolf Dumke

I found Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) wonderful. But I think that his celebrated Apocalypse Now (1979) contains too much slaughter. And, according to a recent article in The Guardian, Coppola agrees so far as to say, “Apocalypse Now has stirring scenes of helicopters attacking innocent people. That’s not anti-war.”
    The main scene emphasized by film reviewers – the helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village by drugged Green Berets with loudspeakers blaring Wagnerian music – is camp, but disgusting. It is also stupid and gratuitous to show the required “horror, the horror” of the war in this way.
    Why Joseph Conrad’s novella The Heart of Darkness (1899), about the upper Congo’s brutal exploitation by King Leopold of Belgium and his henchmen, is Coppola’s model and metaphor for the war in Vietnam is a puzzle.

Coppola’s daughter, Sophia, directed a delightful film, Lost in Translation (2003). It’s about finely nuanced interpersonal relations experienced by guests for a week in a Tokyo high-rise hotel. I too have been “stranded” for weeks in a Tokyo high-rise hotel (and in the Beijing Hilton) and encountered curiously displaced persons.

In contrast to Francis Ford Coppola’s puzzling “translation” of Conrad into our own times, a modern masterpiece in such translation can be found in V.S. Naipaul’s novel, A Bend in the River, which came out the same year as Coppola’s Apocalypse. Naipaul’s work is a story of a former Central African colony’s initial attempt at modernity and its subsequent collapse into tribal mayhem and violence, which has unfortunately happened several times in Africa since 1979.
    In Naipaul’s novel, the story is experienced and told by an outsider, a trader with an Indian background who knows both the modern Europeans and the tribes and has engaged in a comfortable and profitable modus vivendi with both. But he is distracted from the encroaching danger by a love affair, loses all, and barely manages to escape down the river.
    Naipaul presents an African town and country in precarious balance between modernizing trends and tribal responses, which include post-colonial revenge on their former “masters.” The outsider who tells the story is the litmus test of this society. He is not really close to either group, but he knows them well and is usually wary of the numerous dangerous changes around him and is able to interpret finely nuanced social signals but has come to ignore them.
    Naipaul’s novel is the great Conrad story of our times. Coppola’s film isn’t.

Copyright © 2019 by Rolf Dumke