Friday, August 17, 2001
Apocalypse Now Revisited
t isn’t a picture of real war
or the real people there, but a peerless evocation of the war
as filtered through technology, the mass media, and the ruins
of dead mythologies. In Coppola’s ‘Nam, what’s inescapable isn’t
the VC so much as the TV, old movies, show business, and the buzzing
feedback of rock’n’roll. Apocalypse Now isn’t about how
we invaded Vietnam so much as how the war invaded our psyches,
how it permeated pop culture and came to be the sight-and-soundtrack
to a new, bad American dream. In that idyll of apocalypse, defeat
takes on a perfect, preordained inevitability—when you’ve got
nothing left to lose, on some level the war really does become
Disneyland with live ammunition, at least until your ticket’s
punched—and it develops its own downward-spiral momentum and
exhilaration.
—Howard Hampton, "Jungle Boogie,"
Film Comment (May/June 2001)
