Reflections on Apocalypse Now
Margot Norris explains in “Modernism and Vietnam: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now” that “Apocalypse Now's many surrealistic scenes and moments forcefully convey the war's incomprehensibility. But by themselves they do not produce an insight or recognition of Vietnam's significance for the American public, or a calculus for its damage to America's moral life”. This truly did seem to be the case in this film in that this was my first time watching Apocalypse Now, and yet it gave me a different understanding of the war in Vietnam. Many of the scenes were extraordinarily surreal and some were so vulgar that they were almost incomprehensible. An example of this is what Norris refers to as the film’s “puppy-sampan scene”. This was a scene that stood out in my mind as being just one of the war’s common cruelties. Norris explains this scene as the PBR boat’s routine inspection of a “peaceful sampan” (key word: peaceful) that turns into a massacre of men, a woman, and almost a puppy. The ironic part about this scene is that it did in fact look like a peaceful, harmless sampan and ended up being just that, while they were all brutally shot and killed. The woman was shot while attempting to save the puppy from the men, which Norris illustrates as signifying “the heart-searing images of slain infants at My Lai”. I think it is interesting that Norris compared the puppy to the countless infants’ lives lost in the war because when I saw how the puppy was rescued and taken care of, I thought that it was not a fair depiction. It would have made more sense to me to have had shown the puppy shot and killed during the whole ordeal and then depicting the sorrowful aftermath. After all, that was the only thing left in the aftermath of Vietnam – sorrow. There was nothing hopeful or exciting (such feelings that a puppy brings) about this war. Having lived through and experiencing a war first hand, the one thing that was going through my mind during that entire scene that brought tears to my eyes was thinking – how would you feel if foreign people came into your country, on your land, and sailed through your waters and thought themselves to have the audacity and the power to tell you how to live? To stop you dead in your tracks as you are going about your everyday lives and get on your boat and tear the entire thing apart while “searching” you. Who and what gives them the right to do that on your land? There is nothing that makes me more irate than this mentality – ethnocentrism at it’s best.
-Hasti Fashandi