The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Francis Ford Coppola · a film · 1979 · written by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola, with narration by Michael Herr, after Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness · the theatrical cut
Mode
War film turned journey upriver; epic, hallucination and rite in one, told in one man’s voice
Mythos
The descent to the place of the dead; the king of the grove killed by the man who comes to replace him
Phase
One voyage up one river, from a hotel room in Saigon to a stone compound where the river ends, the crew lost on the way
Presentation
Feature film in colour, released in a 70 mm form without end credits and a 35 mm form with them; Vittorio Storaro’s photography, Walter Murch’s sound, Willard’s voice-over throughout
Register
From a Playmates’ show near farce to a killing played as liturgy; vivid and ironic for two thirds, solemn and slow at the end
Scale
One boat, one river, and a war held through American eyes
Governing Proposition
A captain waiting in a Saigon hotel room is sent up a river to kill an American colonel who has gone beyond his command and set himself up as a god among the people of the interior. Station by station the war’s staging falls away, the surf, the Wagner, the lit stage, until no one is in command and only a rite is left. The wager of the film is that a modern war can be shown as a show a country puts on for itself, and that one journey up one river can carry it back, from the television crew to the sacrifice, to the oldest show of all.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a treeline. Helicopters cross it, and the trees erupt in napalm in silent slow motion, under the Doors’ “The End”. Over the fire comes a face, upside down: Captain Benjamin L. Willard, played by Martin Sheen, lying in a hotel room in Saigon. The rotor of a helicopter dissolves into the ceiling fan above him, and the war is heard in the room before anything in the room is seen. Then his voice: “Saigon. Shit. I’m still only in Saigon.” He is waiting for a mission, and the waiting has become a war of its own.
Alone and drunk, he dances before the mirror, and the mirror breaks. Military policemen come for him, and he is taken to a lunch. General Corman, played by G. D. Spradlin, Colonel Lucas, played by Harrison Ford, and a civilian brief him over the meal on Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, an officer who has gone beyond the army’s control and set himself up in the interior as a god among the people there. They play him Kurtz’s voice on tape. The order is to go up the river, find him and end his command, and the civilian gives the phrase for it: to “terminate with extreme prejudice”. It is an order that is not on the record, given at a table laid for lunch.
Coppola produced and directed the film, an Omni Zoetrope production distributed by United Artists, from a screenplay by John Milius and himself; the narration was written by Michael Herr, whose Dispatches (1977) the film also draws on. The frame of the action is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899): a man sent upriver to find an agent who has gone beyond his employers’ control. Vittorio Storaro photographed it, Dean Tavoularis designed it, and Richard Marks, Walter Murch, Gerald B. Greenberg and Lisa Fruchtman cut it, with Murch credited as well for the sound. It was shown in competition at Cannes in May 1979 as a work in progress, shared the Palme d’Or with Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum, and opened in the United States on 15 August 1979, four years after the fall of Saigon. Coppola was forty.
Movement II
“I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one.” The boat is a patrol boat with a crew of four: Chief Phillips, played by Albert Hall; Chef, played by Frederic Forrest; Lance, played by Sam Bottoms; and Clean, played by Laurence Fishburne, credited as Larry Fishburne, who was eighteen when the film came out. Willard opens Kurtz’s dossier and begins to read, and he will go on reading across the voyage, so that the man is put together out of documents as the river carries the boat nearer him. From here the film moves one way. It never cuts back to a place the boat has left, and almost every scene keeps Willard in it.
The first station is the air cavalry of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, after a battle. Kilgore deals cards onto the dead. A television crew is filming, and its director, played by Coppola himself, tells the soldiers not to look at the camera. There is a mass at Kilgore’s position, and a night on the beach. The boat must pass a village, and Kilgore will take the village because the waves there are good. At dawn the helicopters come in low over the sea with Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” played from their loudspeakers, and the film cuts from them to the schoolyard below.
The village falls, and men surf under fire. Napalm is called in on the treeline, and Kilgore stands on the beach with the trees still burning and says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” He ends wistful, regretting that one day the war will be over. Duvall makes him a whole man in a few scenes, and the scenes make the film’s case without stating it: the war is a show, staged, filmed and scored for its own makers, and the show kills. The first great performance of the voyage is over, and it had an audience at every point.
Movement III
Chef and Willard go ashore for mangoes. The jungle is silent and green, and then a tiger bursts out of it, and the two men run for the boat. “Never get out of the boat.” Chef means it as a rule for himself, and the rest of the voyage tests it and breaks it. It is a scene of seconds, and the jungle in it has no audience and no music.
At the supply base at Hau Phat a stage is lit, and Playmates are flown in to perform for the soldiers. The crowd rushes the stage, and the helicopter lifts the women away. It is the last of the shows the film has been gathering, after the television crew, the Wagner and the surf, and the nearest to farce. After it, nothing on the river is staged for an audience.
On the river the crew stop a sampan to search it. There is a puppy aboard, a sudden movement, and a burst of fire from the boat that cuts down the people on the sampan. A woman is still alive, and the crew would carry her to help. Willard shoots her, and the mission goes on. He has been sent to kill a man for killing outside the rules, and on the way he does the same thing to someone helpless. Willard’s voice has already said what the scene shows: the bookkeeping that charges one man with murder in this war is hypocrisy, and he is now inside it.
Movement IV
The bridge at Do Lung is lit at night, under shelling. Flares hang over it, tracer crosses it, and wreckage lies everywhere. Willard looks for the commanding officer and there is none. A grenadier fires into the dark by ear. It is the first stage in the film with no one directing it, and the boat goes on past it into country where no one is watching at all.
The deaths come in order. Clean is killed by fire from the bank while a tape from his mother plays on the boat, her voice going on over his body. Then arrows come from the shore, and Chief is killed by a spear. The weapons have grown older with every mile, from helicopters to rifles to arrows, and the film has travelled backward from the modern to the archaic. The crew of four is two.
The boat reaches the compound. There are faces in the reeds, and on the stone steps bodies and severed heads. A photojournalist, played by Dennis Hopper, comes down to meet them, an American who talks without stopping, in a patter that circles and repeats. Lance drifts away among Kurtz’s people. Chef waits by the boat’s radio. Willard goes up the steps and is taken.
Movement V
Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando, is kept in the dark, his head emerging from black into a little light and going back into it. Willard is held in a cage for days. Chef is killed, and his head is shown to Willard. Kurtz talks: “You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.” He tells of the inoculated arms, and the story comes to a claim, that the war will be won by men without restraint and that the army which made him can neither be such men nor admit what he saw. On his table lie Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. He reads aloud from Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”, whose epigraph is Conrad’s line announcing Kurtz’s death, and the film closes the circle of its source. He asks that his son be told about him.
At night, in the rain, Willard rises out of the black water and goes up to Kurtz. The killing is cut together with the slaughter of a water buffalo by the people of the compound until the two are one rite: the king of the grove killed by the man who has come to replace him. Kurtz, dying, speaks his last words: “The horror… the horror.” Willard comes out, and the people of the compound bow to him.
They lay down their weapons before him, offering him the place, and he drops his own and walks through them. He takes Lance by the hand and leads him to the boat. The radio calls; Willard’s face is laid over the stone head of the temple; Kurtz’s words are heard again in a whisper, and they are the last words heard. The film received eight Academy Award nominations and won two, for Storaro’s photography and for the sound; Best Picture went to Kramer vs. Kramer. The maker returned to the material in 2001 and in 2019, and the Vietnam films that followed, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket among them, worked in its shadow. What they could not take was the shape: one river, every station older than the last, and a man at its end who is what the war becomes when no one is watching.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and on the cut. From the hotel room to the last losses the subtractive test finds little: each station on the river takes something from the crew or from the viewer’s idea of the war, and each is a step further from the law that sent the boat. The tiger is brief and required; it gives Chef the rule the voyage breaks. The plantation sequence, left out of this cut, shows a film made by subtraction. What holds the axis lowest is the compound. The photojournalist’s patter runs long and repeats, and Willard’s days in the cage and Kurtz’s scenes in the dark are permitted their length rather than compelled to it. The voice-over at times states what the image has shown.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. The war is a show the country puts on for itself, with its surf, its rock music, its Playmates and its television crew, and the show kills: Kilgore takes a village because the waves are good. The moral bookkeeping is hypocrisy, and Willard says so. Kurtz is the war’s logic with its staging stripped away, condemned by the command that made him. The sampan is the exact case: the crew gun down a boat of civilians, would then carry a wounded woman to help, and Willard shoots her so the mission can go on. Held a tenth above the gate: the last act turns from meaning to incantation, and the Vietnamese are nearly absent as people, so the condition disclosed is American only.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The elevation is dreadful, and it returns. The treeline erupting in silent slow motion under “The End”, the rotor dissolving into the ceiling fan, Willard’s face upside down over the jungle. The helicopters coming in over the sea with the Wagner from their loudspeakers, cut against the schoolyard below. Kilgore on the beach with the treeline still burning. The tiger out of the green; the Playmates’ helicopter rising from a lit stage; Do Lung in flares and tracer; the faces in the reeds and the bodies on the steps; Willard rising from black water, and the killing cut with the sacrifice. Held a step from the top by the middle of the compound, where the height falls into long stasis.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth built, not cited. The first structure is the descent: a boat and its crew going up a river that runs out of history and out of law, to a place of the dead. The second lies on Kurtz’s table, in Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Weston’s From Ritual to Romance: the king of the grove, killed by the man who comes to replace him. The film enacts it. Willard kills Kurtz as the compound slaughters a water buffalo, the two cut into one rite; the people bow and lay down their weapons, and he drops his own and leaves. Take the books away and the structure stands. Held a step from the top because the books signpost the myth, it arrives late, and the compound’s people are figures in a borrowed, Conradian picture of the primitive.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the American war film, split by 1979 between the patriotic combat picture and the new grief of The Deer Hunter and Coming Home (both 1978). The film turns from both. It treats a war four years over as hallucination rather than record, sets a Victorian novella of empire in Vietnam, scores an assault to Wagner and the war’s opening to a rock song, and ends in ritual and silence. The stake was as large as any in American film: Coppola’s own money, years of his career, his reputation, and a premiere as unfinished work. Held below the top by precedent: Herzog had made a river descent into madness in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), and the frame is Conrad’s.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is that the war is a regression. The form is a single line upriver, each station older than the last: the television crew, the surf and the Wagner; the lit stage; a bridge with no commander; arrows and a spear; a stone temple and a sacrifice. The river is the journey from the modern to the archaic. The dossier is part of the form, since Kurtz is read into being as the boat nears him; so is the sound, since rotor and fan become one and the war is heard in the hotel room before it is seen. Held below the top where the river ends and the compound becomes tableaux, and where the voice-over carries what the form should.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise, and forty-seven years of it. The questions stay open: whether Kurtz saw the war truly, is mad, or is the war’s own logic in a man; whether Willard becomes Kurtz or refuses to when he leaves; whether the film indicts its spectacle or is carried away by it, a charge raised at release; how it pictures the Vietnamese and the people of the compound; how it stands to Conrad; and the ending, to which the maker has returned twice. Each is still argued, and the film settles none. Formal depth yields too: the sound, the staged shows, the order of the deaths. Held below the top by span and by what is set aside: forty-seven years are a short record, and much of the attention goes to the legend of the production rather than to the work, which is not credited.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Released in 1979, so force and reach are scored together. The force: the film turned the war film from record or protest into a descent through a culture’s appetite, and showed that sound could carry a film’s structure as much as image. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Vietnam films that followed worked in its shadow and against it, among them Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987); in Jarhead (2005) marines watch the Kilgore assault before their own war; and Kilgore’s line on napalm and the assault to Wagner are fixed in common speech and in parody. The force stands a step below the reach, because the frame was borrowed.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Survival is weighed across forty-seven years of continuous exhibition and re-release; the form is wholly legible and has never left view. The maker’s later assemblies, Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) and Apocalypse Now: Final Cut (2019), are weighed here alone: they did not displace the 1979 film, still the version the culture quotes, and the charge is small. Presence is wide: the film has outlived the war’s politics, and later wars have been read through it. The fabric is fixed to its moment in part: the rock music of the late sixties, the grain of the late seventies. That surface and the span hold it level with Taxi Driver, three years older, and Gravity’s Rainbow, whose longer span its wider presence matches, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Storaro’s photography: the coloured smoke, the flares at Do Lung, the compound lit by fires, Kurtz’s head emerging from black and returning to it. Murch’s sound: the rotor that becomes the fan, the layered night at the bridge, the silence before the tiger. Tavoularis’s design, from the beach to the temple, at a scale that could not be faked. The cutting of the assault, clear in every line of action across sea, sky and village. Sheen from the mirror to the water, and Duvall’s Kilgore, a whole man in a few scenes. The costs are weighed: Brando’s Kurtz, in shadow, improvised and slow, is the least shaped performance at the climax, and Hopper’s is a turn more than a part.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Playmates’ show, near farce, and the killing of Kurtz, a rite. One law covers them: the war is a performance staged by power for itself, and the river strips the staging away until only the rite is left. The surfing, the television crew and the lit stage are the performance; Do Lung is a stage with no director; the compound is a theatre with one spectator; the killing is the oldest show of all. The strain is in the last act’s register: two thirds ironic and swift, then a compound solemn and incantatory, with the photojournalist’s comic patter uneasy inside it. That change may be the law’s last term or a second law, and it counts partly against.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Several orders are held, integrated by a river that carries each past one consciousness. Consciousness: Willard’s throughout, and Kurtz’s as read and then heard. The state: a general, a colonel and a civilian at lunch, and an order not on the record. War and labour: the air cavalry, the crew’s work, the grenadier at the bridge. Entertainment, as the culture exported to the war. The family, in sharp fragments: Willard’s divorce, Colby’s letter to his wife, Clean’s mother on tape as he dies, Kurtz’s wish for his son. The sacred, from Kilgore’s mass to the rite; the natural order, river, jungle and tiger. What holds it: the Vietnamese order is barely held, and history, which the subject most demands, is present only by implication.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 9.2, The Made at 9.1 and The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, then Pressure on Tradition and The Bottomless Well at 8.9. An elevation of dread that rises again and again, from the burning treeline to the black water; a making in which photography, sound, design and cutting bear weight in nearly every scene; a myth of descent, and of the king killed by his successor, that the film enacts rather than cites; a turn in the war film that its heirs worked in and against; and questions about Kurtz, Willard and the film’s own spectacle that forty-seven years have not closed.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2, held by the compound: the photojournalist’s patter, the days in the cage and Kurtz’s long scenes in the dark, where length is permitted rather than compelled. Next above it, The Encompassed at 8.3, where the Vietnamese order is barely held and history is present only by implication, and The Inner Law at 8.5, strained by the turn from irony to incantation in the last act. Two of the three limits share one cause: the river ends, and the film slows into tableaux.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.1, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.9, The Swerve at 8.8, The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, the last by a tenth. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it covers falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Apocalypse Now as released in 1979, an Omni Zoetrope production distributed by United Artists, from the treeline to the whisper. No print, script or recording was consulted. The theatrical cut is the object. It was released in a 70 mm form without end credits and a 35 mm form whose credits run over footage of the compound burning, and the film is read as ending where both forms end their narrative, on the boat. Apocalypse Now Redux (2001) and Apocalypse Now: Final Cut (2019) are later assemblies by the maker: they are weighed under The Imperishable alone, as changes to what survives, and are used elsewhere only as evidence of what the 1979 cut chose to leave out. Eleanor Coppola’s Notes (1979), the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991), directed by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper, and the maker’s later statements record the production and are not the work, and the legend of the production is credited nowhere but in the stake. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Herr’s Dispatches are sources, not the work, and are named only where the film’s relation to them bears on a judgment. Dialogue is quoted only where the words are certain; songs are named by title alone; the little Vietnamese and French heard in the film are not quoted. Figures that could not be verified, among them the running times of the two release forms, the length and cost of the shoot, the box-office returns and the division of the editing among its four editors, are not given.