Why I Hate Apocalypse Now

On liberal racism and delusion

A picture of Trịnh Thị Ngọ, AKA Hanoi Hannah, a very cool North Vietnamese radio host who used to tell American soldiers to give up.

I re-watched Apocalypse Now (1979), Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, a few months ago and it’s lingered with me in the worst possible way. Apocalypse Now, for those unfamiliar, is a film about an American soldier in Vietnam who sails upriver to retrieve a colonel being revered as a god. It substitutes Heart of Darkness’s Congo setting for a Southeast Asian one, and in both stories, the soldier leaves “civilization” to enter a primevil darkness that’s supposedly a mirror of man’s worst instincts. Southeast Asian characters barely speak throughout Apocalypse Now, like African ones throughout Heart of Darkness, and both the film and novel are considered to be among the finest works of their genre ever made.

I hate Apocalypse Now and I hate Heart of Darkness, too. I think both works are nauseatingly racist, irritatingly self-important, and myopic in the way only western art can be. I find it deeply unsettling that westerners can murder millions of people and then use that as a backdrop to examine “the soul” of their nations and, per the comedian Frankie Boyle, I have less patience now for art about how “America will go to your country and kill all your people... then come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad” than I ever have in my life. These books and movies reflect a liberal delusion that’s sustained genocides from Namibia to Palestine, and I want that delusion to die so a new world can be born in its place.

I’m not the only person who feels this way. In 1977, Nigerian novelist and critic Chinua Achebe wrote a scathing pan of Heart of Darkness in The Massachusetts Review called “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’” In his essay, Achebe writes that Conrad treats “Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity,” that’s a “foil... to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray — a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate.” He argues that “the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa.” Conrad’s empathy, much like contemporary western liberals’, is little more than patronization in disguise. Apocalypse Now shows this in a more contemporary form.

One of the most telling scenes in Apocalypse Now involves a transition from one state to another. The protagonist, Willard, has to sail through an enemy checkpoint called the “Do Lung Bridge” and cross from Vietnam to Cambodia to retrieve Colonel Kurtz. Coppola presents the Do Lung Bridge as a Southeast Asian Hadrian’s Wall, the last outpost of “civilization” before a primordial wilderness and people. The film gets viscerally and upsettingly racist after this crossing.

Once Willard sails into Cambodia, Southeast Asian people stop being people altogether. They start wearing skulls, tiger pelts, and worshipping white men as gods. They become one with the land itself, melting into it as seamlessly as animals into the bush, while Coppola reserves language and philosophical debate for the white protagonist and antagonist. They become props for Willard’s psychological breakdown and reformation, elements of the supposed “primitivism” in his “civilized” heart. At the end, they hack a real water buffalo to death on screen. I left the theater sick after watching it.

Throughout Apocalypse Now, I kept thinking “these were real people, with a real communist philosophy who were killed in the most horrific ways imaginable for resisting western imperialism,” and feeling more and more ill as it progressed. I thought about how brave they must have been to take on an empire as powerful as the United States, the brutal conditions they weathered in their guerilla war, the losses they suffered to protect their homeland, and got enraged that they have to deal with western filmmakers depicting them as mute savages in the wake of all that.

I hated, and still hate, Francis Ford Coppola for Apocalypse Now, and every other western artist who does this kind of work: The Things They Carried author Tim O’Brien, Redeployment author Phil Klay, American Sniper director Clint Eastwood, and every American news writer who describes what’s happening in Gaza as “The Israel-Hamas War” instead of the Palestinian genocide. I’d like for their perspective to be scrubbed from literature for the next century and to only hear from resistance fighters instead of the colonial forces that genocide makes “introspective” and “sad.”

Achebe closes his essay on Heart of Darkness by writing that “Conrad saw and condemned the evil of imperial exploitation but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened its iron tooth.” 48 years later, we still have this problem. Liberals who’re capable of recognizing that Israel’s murder of children is evil leapt to believe that Hamas committed since disproved “mass rapes” during its 2023 Al-Aqsa Flood attack because they’re programmed to see Arab men as beasts who can’t wait to get their hands on white women. Even now, Palestinians are only treated as worthy as long as they’re perfect victims. I have a horrible suspicion that in 20 years, an Israeli filmmaker will make a god-awful film about an IDF soldier with a conscience who suffers a breakdown from committing genocide that’ll be hailed a “nuanced” masterpiece. One of the many reasons I want Palestine to win is so this cycle stops repeating.

Tāmaki (Auckland) Events

• The Capitol Cinema Film Club is playing Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962) based on Kafka’s novel of the same name on Wednesday, May 28 at 8pm at The Capitol Cinema in Mt. Eden. I like Orson Welles movies and I’m looking forward to this one.

Recommended Reading

• I liked this essay by Marxist writer Sarah Miller on how she tried to use ayahuasca to stay climate-induced suicidal thoughts.

• I liked this essay by Roro, PhD on being a passenger princess and how that can be strange when you’re either gay or Indian like the driver.