Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now continues Francis Ford Coppola’s career-length meditation on his artistic journey from sanity to insanity or, in cinematic terms, from objectivity to subjectivity. His films are among the best of the ‘70s American New Wave by those directors and director/screenwriters who were exposed to classic studio-produced films in their creative formative years, followed by the revelation of the ‘60s French New Wave that introduced (or reintroduced to American audiences). They containedthe notion of subjective, personal point of view filmmaking that is as much, if not more, an art form as a commercial artifact. Coppola’s initial inspiration reaches all the way back to Charlie Chaplin’s spatial mise en scene, which showed the real-time physical skills of the film icon within the limitations imposed by the immobility of the camera. That film began as a hand-crank 19th-century curio and developed into a techno-poetic 20th-century innovation demonstrates the advancement of film as an evolving personal art form affected by technological progress. The other equally powerful influence on Coppola was D. W. Griffith’s body of work that proved “big” films could be legitimate conveyers of personal expressiveness. His 1915 Birth of a Nation expressed an attitude toward cinema and toward life, if, for personal filmmakers, there is indeed a difference.
Through his first seven films, highlighted (but not limited to) the two ‘70s Godfatherepics, Coppola explored the theme of artistic isolation, how it is a necessary environment for creative thinking, while too much of it (or too much thinking) leads inevitably, in Coppola’s view, to insanity. Think of Michael Corleone, who goes from a young man enlisting in the armed forces, marrying his sweetheart, and living a happy, law-abiding life to a middle-aged homicidal maniac, at peace only in the self-imposed isolated world he has created, alone with his thoughts, as we see in the last scene of Godfather II. Michael’s elimination of everyone he cares about and who cares about him following the death of his brother and father, starts a self-guided journey into aloneness and madness, each leading to the other. When The Godfather (Brando) passes the crown to his only surviving son, he sets him on a journey la folie.
After graduating from UCLA’s film school in the early ‘60s, Coppola, who had suffered from polio as a child, at once a debilitating disease and one that isolated him, as if a message from the future, necessitating long periods of time in isolation, began his professional career in film. Like so many of the progenitors of the “New American Wave” by working for Roger Corman’s roving band of independent filmmakers. They learned their craft hands-on - not by studying films but by making them. Coppola sought to emulate Corman’s concept of creating a studio separate and independent from the old studio system. While employed by Corman’s troupe, Coppola wrote a variety of outside scripts, mostly for Hollywood “B” pictures, and some erotica, to pay the bills.
His breakthrough came when he was hired to write the screenplay for Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1970 smash hit Patton (he shares co-writer credit with Edmund H. North), which won him an Oscar. The theme of the film, as Coppola wrote it, would become the central one that drove all his future works: his belief that the journey tonecessary isolation leads to both greatness and madness. In Coppola’s script for Patton, the legendary general’s personality disintegrates under the weight of responsibility and power, corrupted (driven to madness) by the abuse of both.
Coppola’s emergence into Hollywood’s elite gave him the opportunity to direct and co-write the Godfather films. It’s interesting to note that between the two epic crime family films, Coppola made The Conversation, a “small” film about a loner, a professional observer (corporate spy) whose high standards lead him to insanity, visualized by his compulsive deterioration of his environment, (mise en scene), as he literary rips up the world that has given him his identity. Cinematically, The Conversation serves as a powerful metaphor for Coppola’s great fear of success,that it may lead him from sanity to madness.
Coppola’s 1979 Apocalypse Now, completed five years after the first two Godfather films, is a nightmare scenario in the time of the Vietnam War based in part on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, with a measure of plot device borrowed from David Lean’s 1957 Bridge on the River Kwai. In many ways, Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard is an updated version of Kwai’s Commander Shears(William Holden), a military soldier who has seen action and survived, havingmiraculously escaped the madness of a Japanese Concentration Camp only to be sent back to it (to the heart of darkness?) against the natural flow of his, and civilization’s life. Willard, too, has seen the face of battle and survived, and is now ordered to return to the war’s heart of darkness, going up the river and against civilizations’ natural flow, to confront the utter lunacy of the rebellious Colonel Kurtz, played by Coppola favorite Marlon Brando.
Coppola takes us along on the journey up the fictitious Cambodian Nung River against the flow of the tide, each stop along the way increasing the level of insanity – the murder of innocent civilians, a man eaten by a tiger, the sudden arrival of Playboy bunnies – an ill-fated Blakean expedition from ordered innocence to chaotic experience. At its illogical end lies the personification of madness in the guise of Kurtz (driven crazy by his unchecked leadership and the primitive worship of the natives who see in him the deliverance of their own personal Jesus). Captain Willard completes his journey by replacing Kurtz – the last stop on his road from powerlessness to power, from sanity to madness. Willard’s becoming Kurtz reflects Coppola’s own insecurities that his cinematic journey will ultimately result in his own madness. Exhibit A: 2024’s Megalopolis.
In real life, after Apocalypse, Coppola left the commercial comfort of Hollywood to continue his own cinematic journey in San Francisco (another capital of cultural madness), at the time the land of hippie millionaires via the temporary shift of the locus of rock and roll from Los Angeles to the land of the Beats, the Beggars, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Grateful Dead. There, with fellow film school alumnus George Lucas’ help, Coppola created Zoetrope, his vision of a modern-day studio based on the old Hollywood system. The result was a disaster that brought about one of his many financial catastrophes. He was saved from ruin, he said, by the profits from the vineyards he’d bought to help fund his films (not the other way around, as everyone assumed, that his films were made to finance his wine business). Exhibit B.
-Marc Eliot
Resident Film Curator
Marc’s Take: Before the Film
Marc’s Take: After the Film