Hearts of Darkness/Apocalypse Now Redux

By The Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

The short story is, we're glad we went to see it, but both it and the documentary were disappointing.

I was very interested to see the documentary--put together partly out of footage and tape recordings made by Coppola's wife Eleanor during the marathon film shoot in the Phillippines--because I wanted to know more about how they made the decisions they made about how to adapt Heart of Darkness (upon which the film is loosely based). Well, from many standpoints, Hearts of Darkness: The Making Of... is disappointing, primarily because of what it doesn't tell you, but also partly because of what it does.

The documentary covers the many calamities that befell during the shooting, several of which are now legendary: Martin Sheen's near-fatal heart attack, Brando arriving having put on 100 pounds but not having read Heart of Darkness, the typhoon that washed out most of the sets. There's some revealing stuff about the amount of drug use that went into these performances: the actor who played Lance claims he was high on something most of the time he was being shot, while there's a very disturbing sequence showing how they actually shot the opening scene in Willard's hotel room in Saigon, during which we learn that a) Sheen was really, truly drunk off his ass; b) he really does cut his hand when he breaks the mirror, and that's real blood; c) during those scenes where you can see Willard screaming but you can't hear anything but the soundtrack, what he's doing is cursing out Coppola for putting him through this. But in most cases, the documentary doesn't go far enough.

For instance, I was very interested to discvoer that Willard (Martin Sheen's character) had been originally played by Harvey Keitel, but that Keitel was replaced after the first week of shooting. I would love to have known more about what happened there, but we're never told why Coppola decided to take such a drastic step or shown any of the original footage shot with Keitel. Meanwhile, the information that the film was originally supposed to be directed by George Lucas is so horrifying that perhaps it's best they don't bother explaining why that decision was changed. (Just try to imagine this movie with a score by John Williams. Try.) We learn that the original film was supposed to end with a massive battle scene involving a huge air strike and Willard and Kurtz fighting side by side, but that Coppola decided to scrap that ending halfway through the production process and for a long time was just making the film up as he went along, improvising dialogue and situations with the actors. The scene where they massacre the peasants on the boat, for instance, was actually suggested by the actors, who said they all wanted their characters to go through a "My Lai type massacre." Then there was the fact that they were filming the thing in the Phillippines during a civil war, using helicopters provided by the Marcos government, which took off several times to go quash rebels. The documentary is concerned with how this impacted the production process; the ethics of cozying up to a dictator and using the same hardware that's being used to put down a rebellion by killing actual people are left unexplored.

"Ethics left unexplored" could basically sum this whole thing up. For instance, the way the documentary represents Heart of Darkness for the viewers at home makes it clear that Coppola's reading of it was unencumbered by any of the questions about Conrad's representation of Africa and Africans that tend to come up nowadays; for him this is just a psychological portrait of one man's descent into the savagery that lurks within all of us, and the idea of using an Asian landscape and an Asian cast to represent that savagery doesn't strike anyone involved in either the film or the documentary as problematic. Nor is anyone making the documentary at all interested in finding out what it was like for the Filipinos who flew the helicopters and dressed up as the Vietnamese peasants to be play-acting this brutal and bloody war while there was a real war going on in their own country. Also hinted at and left unexamined is the treatment of the indigenous tribe they brought in to play Kurtz's native worshippers. While they were shooting at the ruined temple (which the documentary reveals was built by about 600 Filipino laborers; the producer who describes this points out that 600 Filipinos cost about as much per hour as one Teamster, but doesn't seem to be too concerned about whether this wage structure is exploitative at all) the tribe of extras brought in a caribou and had a ceremony during which they ritually slaughtered it, which Eleanor Coppola filmed. That ceremony was clearly the inspiration for the final scene of Apocalypse Now, in which Willard's assassination of Kurtz is intercut with the ritual slaughter of a water buffalo. What was it like for these people to perform that ritual once based on their own calendar and their own motivations--and during which, based on the documentary, they are all wearing their everyday clothes--and then have to do a mock-up of it again for the cameras, after putting on "ritual" paint and "native" garb which they don't normally wear for this occasion so that it would look more primitive? We don't know; nobody asked.

This attitude seems to have carried over into the film itself--and worse, it has not been revised since the 1979 release. Apocalypse Now Redux does not include any credits at all (the original film had no opening credits; this one doesn't even have closing credits) so the theater distributes a program which includes the credits both for the original film and the re-released version. None of the people who played the Vietnamese/Montagnard characters are listed in the credits, despite the appearance of credit lines for characters like "soldier with suitcase." There is a credit line for the indigenous tribe as a whole, but no individual names. The explanation is in one sense very simple: none of the Vietnamese or Montagnard characters speak (at least not in English). However, this reminds me of Achebe's criticism of Conrad's representation of Africans in Heart of Darkness, in which one of Achebe's major points is the fact that Conrad almost never allows any of the African characters to speak. For Achebe, denying Africans the use of intelligible language is a diabolically effective way of reducing them to subhuman status; the novel may be sympathetic to them as the mute and suffering victims of European brutality but it refuses to allow us to recognize them as individualized human beings. Apocalypse Now treats its Vietnamese and Cambodian characters the same way: they get shot, they cry, they scream, they run, they silently worship Kurtz, but they never say anything that the viewer can understand. They appear most often either as soon-to-be dead bodies or already-dead bodies (the documentary reveals, for instance, that some of the Filipino extras got stuck "playing the severed heads" in Kurtz's compound--roles that required them to be buried up to the neck in mud for several hours a day).

Well, in spite or indeed perhaps because of its flaws we both find the film compelling anyhow, so we went to Apocalyspe Now Redux, and took the good with the bad. The good is: the film itself is much more impressive on a big screen, and the print has been rejiggered so that the color is much brighter and the picture is much sharper. I had assumed that the muddiness of the video version I've been showing was intentional, but it apparently was not, and in the newly released version you can really get the full effect of all that color and light. The sound is also much better, and so forth. So for the experience of seeing the film in mint condition on the big screen it's worth it. The problem is the inclusion of material that was cut from the original version--all of which, in my humble opinion, makes the movie worse.

Aside from a few incidental things, the major additions to "Redux" are:

* An extra few minutes of the scene with Kilgore (Robert Duvall), in which Willard steals Kilgore's surfboard and flees with it. Kilgore later sends hueys out with a recording of him blaring, "Give me back the board, Lance. It was a good board, and I like it." It's funny, but it's out of character for Willard, who in the original film doesn't seem to have a sense of humor.

* A scene in which Willard goes into an army post where all is chaos and disarray because the C.O. has been killed and there is no new one, at which the U.S.O. helicopter carrying the Playboy bunnies has inexplicably landed and been stranded because they're out of fuel. Willard trades the Bunnies' manager 2 drums of diesel fuel for the opportunity for him and his crew to boink the bunnies. What follows is a bizarre scene in which Chef and Lance get busy with Miss May and the Playmate of the Year, respectively. The bunnies essentially monologue about how lonely it is to be a bunny and how nobody understands them as people, while the guys ignore everything they're saying and treat them like dolls (Chef poses Miss May in order to recreate the centerfold he has spent all this time lusting over, Lance finds the playmate of the year's makeup kit and starts painting her face with it while she's talking to him). Meanwhile, Clean pounds on the windows demanding to be allowed to have his turn. What Willard is doing with Miss December we never find out. The Chief is back at the boat, thus ensuring that we never see any of the black men having sex with the white bunnies. I felt that, despite making a half-assed attempt to comment on the objectification of the bunnies, this scene basically objectified them anyway, and was probably included for the sake of getting some T&A into an otherwise almost totally womanless movie; and in any case, as Liza pointed out, it is also totally out of character for Willard, who normally refuses permission for any activity that will slow down the progress of his mission.

* A scene after they pass the Do Long Bridge, and after Clean has been killed, where they come across a French plantation that is still holding out against all comers. The French folks give Clean a decent military burial, during which the Chief is sentimentalized in a way I found unbearably cheesy, and then have them all up to the plantation for dinner with fine wine and china. The dinner party is essentially an excuse to go over the history of the French colonization of Vietnam, but it's too full of exposition and blustering and whatnot. Then, it gets worse, because the hot blonde French chick who has been staring at Willard all night, and who as it turns out lost her French soldier husband in the defense of the plantation, takes him up to her room where they smoke opium and have sex. During all this she spouts a lot of pseudophilosophical crap about how her husband used to say, "I don't know whether I'm an animal or a god," and she used to tell him, "you are both," while also telling him, "There are two of you, one who kills, and one who loves." This scene also includes full frontal female nudity, giving Coppola a perfect record: every woman in the film who has a speaking part also eventually takes all of her clothes off on camera.

* During Willard's captivity at Kurtz's compound, there's an added scene after he gets Chef's head tossed in his lap. Willard wakes up in a big metal dumpster like thing, and Kurtz comes by and reads him some stuff from Time magazine about the war, then tells him, "You'll be free, under guard, don't try to escape, you'll be shot," and gets up to go. Willard tries to walk out of the box, but collapses; then we see him being carried into Kurtz's lair to be nursed back to health. I think this scene makes Kurtz look too lucid; Liza thought it made him look pretty crazy.

That's basically it. With the possible exception of that scene with Kurtz--which I think also ruins the tone of their presentation of him, because it's the only scene where you see a full body shot of him in broad daylight, and thus it disperses the mystique generated by keeping his body in the shadows and only lighting the head and the hands--all the rest of this stuff is crap, and I'm glad it wasn't in the original movie. I'm going to go out and buy a copy of the originally released version cause that's the one I want to keep showing. If only I could get a copy of the new one, and cut out all the new stuff, and have the bright shiny remastered negative without the large-breasted naked chicks. Ah well.