Subject: Re: What are people reading?
From: Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Date: Fri Feb 04 2000 - 11:42:04 EST
At 8:38 AM -0500 on 2/4/2000, you wrote:
> One the two most compelling aspects of the film for me happened in the
> first 10 minutes. One commanding officer is walking across the beachhead,
> walking across enemy fire. Soldiers are prone all around him, taking
> heavy fire from the woods. The man is invulnerable. For some reason I
> was caught by this, that a man's optimism, or ego could repel bullets. I
> looked into it and it turns out there are many stories of people doing
> that exact thing in a fire fight. It's as if their will is greater than
> physics, or at least statistics. Incredible snipet of a scene.
That was later in the movie -- the character was played by Robert
Duvall. It's got the (in-)famous line, when he is asked why the
troops must conquer the beach, that they need to snag it because that
way, Duvall can surf. When he's questioned about the wisdom of it,
he barks, "CHARLIE DON'T SURF!" (Charlie, of course, being slang for
the Vietnamese opposition.)
> The other thing that rendered exactly the problem of the war and why
> we had so much trouble there was the helicopter scene. I never really
> understood so much of the war as when I viewed that one scene. A huey has
> landed and is evacing several south vietnamese. A woman with what looks
> like a baby in her arms runs up to the huey and it turns out she has a
> bomb, blows the huey on the pad. Pretty difficult war when you can't
> recognize friend or foe.
That's one of the details Apocalypse Now captures that is not always
present in American movies about the Vietnam war. There is an
absolute air of paranoia the soldiers must develop in order to
survive -- which is why there's such a surreal feeling when Martin
Sheen gets into Kurtz country and runs into Dennis Hopper, who plays
a kind of visionary/lunatic photojournalist who has gone completely
nuts as a Kurtz follower.
Or, as Brando says, "The horror! The horror!"
--tim
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