Politics:

Where the principal theme of Heart of Darkness appears to be that of imperialism, the
fundamental theme of Apocalypse Now must be war, or more precisely, the Vietnam War.
Besides the background, the key difference between the two is the protagonist's assignment.
In Heart of Darkness, Marlow does not have a mission, per-se. He merely goes to the Congo
on his own accord (having dreamt of it in his youth) with the notion of working at an ivory
trading-post. In Apocalypse Now, however, Willard is sent on a mission to execute Colonel
Kurtz. This carries with it an intrinsic political weight the US Army is practically out to slay
its own men, and thus the lunacy of the Vietnam War is there for us to see. As the film goes
on it becomes evident that this is not as unblemished as it seems because, while Kurtz is
working outside the army's command and is ruthlessly slaying people (though he asserts there
to be a virtuous cause behind it), the same also holds true for the US Army itself. Coppola
plays very dubiously with this, with the effect that at times we seem as far as to empathise
with the soldiers, and at others we suspect them. This effect is best illustrated in the renowned
helicopter attack scene, in which Captain Kilgore assaults innocent Vietnamese citizens with
the intention of clearing a beach to surf on.

It is apparent that we are seeing this from a strictly American viewpoint until the music
abruptly stops and we cut to the Vietnamese citizens. As they see the helicopters approaching
in the horizon, we are made to empathise with them. The rest of the scene is based on the
continuous fluctuation of perception amongst the Vietnamese and the Americans for its
authority. As Marsha Kinder notes: "Significantly it's from this [the helicopter's] perspective
that we see the first wounded American, a black man screaming in agony, and the destruction
of the rescue helicopter by a grenade thrown by a young Vietnamese woman, with whom we
were just sympathising. By now our sympathies are split, and we are forced to see that for an
American in Vietnam there was no way of escaping the moral quicksand." (p. 19, Kinder)
While the perception does consistently flicker, the story of the sequence is indisputably told
from an American perspective, since the only characters on screen are American, and the
Vietnamese are just shown as victims but not in a three-dimensional way (as the research will
try to establish in further detail later). This is fundamentally challenging as it can be said that
we are encouraged to empathise with the Americans to the degree that we justify their mass-
killing of the Vietnamese. This holds true to a certain extent. But the intent is not that we as
spectators come out of the sequence in approval of the butchery of innocent citizens on , but
in fact, it is to make us uneasy with having empathised with the soldiers at all. As Coppola
says: "The most important thing I wanted to do in the making of Apocalypse Now was to
create a film experience that would give its audience a sense of the horror, the madness, the
sensuousness and the moral dilemma of the Vietnam war." (Kinder, p. 13) How better to
make us feel this way than by placing us in the place of the American soldiers, and instigating
us to echo the insanity required to do what they did?
The very fact that we are made to empathise with Willard and Kurtz at all is in blatant
contrast to the portrayal of the Vietnamese. It can be said that the Vietnamese are portrayed
as one-dimensional. Yet, it is more precise to say that they exist zero-dimensionally since
whenever they are seen on the screen, they appear to not have any personality, and all we see
is a natural reaction of fear, followed by defence. This can be thought to be a problematic
facet of the film's depiction of conflict, as it fails to show the war in an entirely unbiased
fashion. But it is only troubling if the audience was expecting a documentary on the Vietnam
War. As soon as we see the illustrious opening sequence, which "dissolves all boundaries
between inner and outer experience, between past, present and future," (p. 14, Kinder) it is
evident that this is not the case or the intent. What Coppola did intend, however, was a
psychologically accurate depiction of what went on in the mind of an American in Vietnam,
and Willard, being midway between a soldier and a secret agent, was impeccably placed for
this. To be consistent in this assessment, it would be futile and incorrect to display the
Vietnamese in a reflective or three-dimensional way, as this would undercut the very theme
of the film that is; we are no longer exclusively looking at this from an American standpoint.
To portray the war entirely from both perspectives would be a task too mammoth even for
Apocalypse Now.