Monday night I watched Francis Ford Coppola´s classic "Apocalypse Now" in the "Final Cut" version. I won´t attempt a full analysis of this "best film ever made", but one thing struck me when watching it. The film is obviously very critical of the Vietnam War. The crook Colonel Kurtz is a renegade who "went too far" and therefore has to be dispatched - something the main character Willard rather explicitly regards as hypocritical. Kurtz is simply the product of the insane war itself. One of the "good" guys - the officer who loves the smell of napalm in the morning - is just as crazy as Kurtz (although with different symptoms).
But...
In the end, "Apocalypse Now" actually becomes "problematic" (to use Woke terminology). The Montagnards or tribals who follow Kurtz worship him as a god, apparently voluntarily. The American soldiers who join these renegade forces "go native". So does Kurtz, living in a Khmer temple and presiding over pagan sacrifices. So in the end, it´s not really the American war that drives the colonel insane. It´s the jungle, the colored peoples and the pagan rituals. No White man can withstand the evil influence of the colonized environment.
Logically, this means that civilized Whites should leave the Third World because it will inevitably corrupt them. The same theme is also visible in the plantation sub-plot, where an incredulous Willard asks the French settlers why they don´t just return home to France. The old planter who believes that an understanding can be reached with the natives is depicted as senile, while the stalwart colonialist who argues with Willard is obviously "out of touch", spewing absurd conspiracy theories as he babbles on.
Note also that Kurtz hides in Cambodia and that his temple compound is littered with skulls and dead bodies. Could this be a hidden reference to the Cambodian genocide? Maybe it´s a co-incidence, since the film was in production for years before finally released in 1979. Still, the parallels are hard to miss, especially since the worst Khmer Rouge soldiers were tribals.
Maybe our White asses should avoid the heart of colored darkness, but don´t tell me that´s a "progressive" critique of colonialism...
No comments:
Post a Comment