by Louis Williams

Created on: November 11, 2009   Last Updated: November 12, 2009

Up The Lazy River: Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux

This tale is suspended between two colonels: Kilgore (Robert Duvall) at the river's mouth and Kurtz (Marlon Brando) up in Cambodia, where the river curves out of sight into the jungle, both of them - or is it just one? - vastly insane. In between you have Captain Willard's (Martin Sheen) trip up the river to meet, and murder, Kurtz, on the way providing the viewer with a tour of Dysfunctional Playboy bunnies dancing oblivious to the destruction around them, French planters determined to stay on land no longer worth staying ondelusion as ripe on the air as an orchid past its prime. The warthe American war in Vietnam has been going on for half a dozen years now and things are clearly coming apart, the army and navy are coming apart as institutions, individuals in them are coming apart as functioning humans and the captain's journey to put a stop to Kurtz is a pointless gesture. Kurtz, a highly decorated professional, someone who might have become Chief of Staff, has in effect abandoned the army and become a law unto himself, but he isn't the problem. He may, indeed, in removing himself from Vietnam entirely, have made a separate peace of sorts; the real problem is what Joseph Conrad, the author of the original story, Heart of Darkness, called the great demoralization of the land, the problem of there being no one and no thing in working order. Colonel Kurtz, he the downriver brass accuse of unsound methods, may have seen clearly, honestly, and early, that the war was going to the bad and, far up the river, removed himself from it. Not, truly, that he's any purer than the rest.

On the other hand, Colonel Kilgore, the helicopter commander at the river's mouth, is having the time of his life. Some of his troopers are surfers, and he has them skimming to shore while his unit makes its attack on the beach-side village; people die all around him and he is as at his ease as though he were in a sports bar with a beer; he is responsible, that morning (this in a diversionary attack so that Captain Willard and his crew and boat can be air lifted over the sand bar blocking the river's mouth), for fifty, possibly a hundred deaths, and can say, while the smoke slowly clears and the screams dwindle into death, that he loves the smell of napalm in the morning. But, then, his methods are apparently sound. We never hear, at least, that the generals back in Saigon ever have him up on charges. There will be no court martial for

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