Splinters

Jungle Fever

Peter Cowie's imaginatively-titled "The Apocalypse Now Book" does exactly what it says on the tin - a fairly exhaustive overview, endorsed by Coppola, of the entire "making of" saga and the fallout of the film's launch and reception, complete with loads of on-set shoots. It's a story that's already been brought to life in Eleanor Coppola's documentary "Hearts Of Darkness" (criminally out of print) but, as with any epic production, Cowie's book provides another valuable perspective. The sheer volume of disasters that Coppola faced - Martin Sheen having a heart attack, the Philippine army disappearing with the rented Hueys to hunt "rebel forces", the vast sets constructed in the jungle being destroyed by typhoons, not to mention going hugely overbudget and spending months rather weeks on location in the Philippines - is now all the stuff of legend, but reading Cowie's book brings home just what a logistical nightmare it was and why Coppola himself, the epitomy of bravado and unflappable calm, nearly lost his mind whilst out there.

The reason I read Cowie's book was because last Christmas I took a trip to the cinema to see something suitably festive. "Apocalypse Now Redux" was a double treat not only because of the near-extra hour of restored footage, but also because it was the first time I'd seen the film on the big screen. It's hard to express quite how powerful a film it is - I had a palpable sense on emerging from the cinema that I'd seen something that transcended the usual boundaries of cinema, regardless of the fact that it was made over 20 years ago. In terms of capturing the sheer madness and futility of war, combined with its specific portrayal of America within the Vietnam conflict, there's little to touch it. Virtually every other American-made Vietnam film - e.g. Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Casualties Of War, even The Deer Hunter - takes a particular literal narrative and runs with it, remaining within the confines of the Vietnam experience. All of these are commendable films, but Apocalyse Now manages to reach beyond and use Vietnam as a metaphor for all armed conflict, where it hints at eternal truths - perhaps unsurprising given its homage to Conrad's Heart Of Darkness.

There's an analogy to be drawn here between two famous accounts of Vietnam, Michael Herr's Dispatches and Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Herr's book, written as a war correspondent, takes an almost mythical view of his time spent in country, with a collage of incidents and events which Herr later admitted were sometimes embellished or even made up. This is not to detract from the importance or power of Herr's book - it's lauded as one of the best Nam accounts. Rather, it's the same problem that to represent reality, straightforward narrative tends to lose more than it keeps. Tim O'Brien's book is a collection of very personal vignettes of life as a soldier, an essential book to read alongside Dispatches as a microview account from within the war rather than Herr's journalistically styled macroview. By the same token, every other Vietnam film seems to fit within Apocalypse Now's overview - there has been little attempt to fundamentally challenge it. (I did a search on Google looking for reviews that think Apocalypse Now is truly awful - I couldn't find anything. Let me know if you know different).

It's no coincidence that Herr provided the narration for Apocalypse Now which helped give the film shape. There's something about both Dispatches and Apocalypse that captures the perverse glamour of high-tech war, the misplaced sense of invulnerability and absolute power it conveyed upon the American army. The Ride Of The Valkryies sequence in Apocalypse demonstrates the aesthetics of the surgical strike - separate the spectacle from the death and destruction it causes and it becomes an incredible vision, echoed by Kilgore's now-classic comment "I love the smell of napalm in the morning". Of course, for the audience, such a separation is impossible so the sight of the Air Cav attacking is simultaneously awe-inspiring and appalling. This ambiguity has continued ever since Vietnam, as is happening in Afghanistan at the moment, but, unlike Apocalypse or Dispatches, the consequences of the actions are rarely shown anymore.