Apocalypse again

Spectator, The, Nov 24, 2001 by d'Ancona, Matthew

What draws Willard to Kurtz - even as he is preparing to kill him - is the feverish clarity of the Colonel's vision. He has grasped the full horror of warfare and `what is necessary' so completely, in fact, that he has lost his sanity. The film's fulcrum is the speech in which Kurtz recalls the transfiguring moment when a particularly unspeakable atrocity perpetrated by the Vietcong in a village opened his eyes:

I remember I, I, I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do, and I want to remember it, I never want to forget it. I never want to forget, and then I realised like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond, a diamond bullet through my forehead and I thought, My God, the genius of that. The genius, the will to do that.... And then I realised that they were stronger than we, because they could stand it.

At the dark heart of Brando's rambling, part-improvised monologue is the dark heart of the whole film and the question it poses about war. Kurtz, for all his obvious insanity, is not presented by Coppola simply as the beast into which he has degenerated, but as something much more ambiguous. The Colonel is also the truthteller, to the extent that he faces the reality of battle unflinchingly and insists on repeating what he sees. How far, he asks Willard, is the West really willing to go to achieve its objectives? And are 'they', the nameless enemy, stronger than we are?

The questions are real - and ultimately unanswerable - precisely because the West is not fundamentalist in its core beliefs. For the al-Qa'eda or Hamas or Hezbollah terrorist today, as for the communist Vietcong in the 1960s, such dilemmas simply do not arise. Men who are willing to turn a passenger plane into a guided missile in order to destroy a skyscraper full of civilians are willing to do anything. How does a civilised society respond to such a threat? The fictional Kurtz demands that we, like 'them', forswear what he calls 'judgment', by which he means not only compassion, but doubt, scepticism and reason. To defend Western values, he declares, you must suspend them when you confront the enemy. In a monologue cut even from this new, extended version of the film, he goes on to say that `extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice'.

These are the ravings of a madman. But it is the contemplation of such questions which has pushed Kurtz over the edge, and Coppola - who himself lost it spectacularly during the film's shooting - has every intention of forcing the viewer to confront them too. How does the West stop its very civilisation, the distaste for 'horror' which defines its culture, becoming its greatest vulnerability? When does necessary moral restraint become mere decadence? Apocalypse Now is about our society's squeamishness at the deeds which are committed in its name. It foresaw the sanitisation by television of the Gulf War; it echoed unwittingly the fastidiousness of the British state in its response to a quarter century of IRA atrocities (11 September has finally made internment an acceptable option once more for the political class in this country, in a way that Warrington, Enniskillen and the City bombs never did).