It only struck me tonight, watching Apocalypse Now with friends, that it might be the first war movie ever, by an American anyway, in which there are no heroes at all. It’s groundbreaking in that respect and surely reflects the mindset of many in the wake of the Viet Nam war. That window of clarity has probably closed entirely where film is concerned, where that message could be conveyed in the mass market. It’s not like we can’t create the characters now. A monster like Kurtz, for example, could be portrayed though probably not as an American unless he was presented as the embodiment of evil soon defeated by forces of light.

That’s the message of the film though, isn’t it? If Kurtz is evil, then the same evil exists in all of us. If Kurtz is crazy, and he is, then we are all crazy. If he has lost any semblance of a moral center, then certainly we all have.

I grew up on war movies and they all romanticized our wars as the struggle between light and darkness. There were always heroes, and sometimes they were deeply flawed men to be fair, but there was always an opportunity (always taken) for a redemptive act. Evil is defeated. Good always prevails, even if at the ultimate sacrifice of the life of the hero/anti-hero. There was always that Judaeo-Christian undertone just beneath the surface. We win because we are good. Bad people always fail. That’s the role, I suppose, that we needed Hollywood to play in our lives. It was what we demanded, no matter how patently dishonest it was. It was what we demanded of art. There should be no moral ambiguity and we could go home feeling good, as if this was art imitating life. This was our collective truth, etc.

What was it Willard said? “Oh man the shit piled up so fast in Viet Nam you needed wings to stay above it.”

Same for Hollywood. It’s taken me 40 years to sort out Apocalypse Now. It was a bigger film than I was a thinker. It’s taken nearly that long for me to suss out the steaming heap of moral relativism and the degree to which dehumanization plays out to Western thought and privilege.

The film was most true to the book in this stream of thought. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness played out in all his novels. It’s not that there weren’t good people. There were a small few, but there were never heroes, were there? How did Hollywood, as a vehicle for art, stray so far from literature in honestly characterizing the full range of humanity? How did it fall so easily into the rutted path of a visual narcotic? I think it speaks to our collective desire for anesthesia, even if it’s moral anesthesia. If there is a pain or discomfort, we will turn immediately to something to numb it. Then in the absence of pain, we will invent an ailment so we can numb that. The removal of discomfort subsumes real pleasure. Not that we have to invent the barrage of cognitive dissonance from the illusions that don’t quite veil the onslaught of bullshit.

It’s incredibly jarring that in Apocalypse Now, every person that holds onto any vestige of innocence as they move up the river into the darkness is destroyed. You see bits and pieces of that in earlier Hollywood films. An innocent victim and such, but then there is always revenge. The perpetrator is shot, stabbed, hung, burned or blown up. End of story. The victors/forces of good return home, perhaps sad, but… victorious. Coppola, true to the artistic vision of Conrad, had none of that. The only survivors were those who divested themselves, or had already divested themselves, of any shred of what conventional movie-goers would define as humanity. The savages live. This is the very first movie I ever saw that flipped the story-table and put the entire human race on the same moral (or immoral as the case may be) level.

It’s taken me 40 years to figure out why I left the movie in 1979 not feeling so good. It was absolutely exhilarating visually. There were a thousand pull-quotes that we all pulled out like parlor tricks and everyone knew the references. The acting was superb. The direction and cinematography were brilliant. Everything was amazing. But did I feel good when I left the theater or after any single time I’ve viewed it since?

No. I’ve always been forced to consider the film in the same way that I’ve accepted so much of my favorite literature (including Conrad): Art isn’t always about feeling good. Sometimes it’s about feeling bad. Sometimes it’s supposed to mirror things about yourself and your world that you don’t feel so great about.

I’ve always loved Apocalypse Now, and after all this time having found the one small missing piece, I hold it in higher regard. It’s a fucking astonishingly honest film, on top of being visually beautiful. It also occurs to me that the feelings it left me with that first time are the same feelings I have sought in so many film since. It’s the relief of witnessing honesty. It helped me to ‘leave the boat’ as Chef might have explained it, and just confront what was out there, no matter what the outcome.