: Study Questions: Week Thirteen

Vietnam, II: When Facts Become Legend, Print the Legend

Apocalypse Now (1979) and Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985).

The experience of the war in Vietnam was so alien to American cultural myths (particularly those myths embodied in the war films of the 1950s and 1960s that filmmakers were at a loss to find narrative forms appropriate to a war which divided the American public and ended in defeat. The familiar story of American fighting men defending democracy against predatory totalitarian enemies turned The Green Berets into a travesty of historical events by imposing the ideals of World War II on the battlefields of Southeast Asia. Go Tell the Spartans sought to capture the disaster by turning the conventions of the war film upside down in order to reveal the ways in which Vietnam destroyed the ideals embodied in those conventions. Apocalypse Now and Rambo developed new narrative strategies to explore and explain the Vietnam War. Coppola chose Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness as a model, suggesting that Americans in Vietnam, like colonists in the Belgian Congo at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, had entered a world which corrupted noble intentions and reduced heroic figures like Kurtz (Col. Kurtz in the film) to states of savagery. The result is the chaos of the night battle at the bridge and the corpse-strewn headquarters of the renegade Green Beret. Rambo moves in a different direction by dramatizing a revisionist view of the War that was widely-accepted during the 1980s. American soldiers had been betrayed and deprived of victory by the nation's political leaders. By returning to Vietnam and rescuing the American POWs believed to be left behind after the evacuation of Saigon in 1975, Rambo hopes to redeem an earlier defeat and restore his country's lost honor. This narrative became the model of many films about Vietnam (including the highly regarded The Deer Hunter).

The contrasts between these films might serve to define an important change in popular attitudes toward the war in Vietnam. Disillusionment with War and the Cold War ideologies which precipitated it gave way to a celebration of America and its heroes. The 1980s saw a renewal of Cold War hostilities as both East and West engaged in a new arms race and President Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as the "evil empire." Interestingly, this final phase of the Cold War never inspired the fear and hysteria of the 1950s (and captured in Hollywood films like Big Jim McClain)and a strong desire to restore the pride in America that characterized the 1950s. In many ways the renewed Cold War was an exercise in nostalgia, a dream of returning what the head of the CIA during the early 1980s described as "the good old days."

1. What is the significance of the opening scene of Apocalypse Now? What does it tell viewers about Willard? About Vietnam generally? Why the sinister use of overlapping sounds of fans and helicopters? What is the significance of the musical sound track (esp. Jim Morrison's "This Is the End")?

2. In the sequence of Willard being given his new assignment, how does the evasive language used by the General and the CIA agent suggest the unwillingness (or inability) to face the realities of the War? What does "terminate with extreme prejudice" mean? Would it surprise you to know that this term was widely used during the actual War?

3. How does the crew of Willard's boat reflect a cross section of the Americans fighting in Vietnam? How are Willard and the boat's commander significantly different from the rest of the crew?

4. The narrative is made up of a series of loosely connected episodes. How mighteach be seen as a moment marking Willard's journey to the "heart of darkness"?

5. What does the encounter with Col. Kilgore reveal about the War? How does the dramatic attack (to Wagner's music) contrast with the first shots of the village (with its uniformed schoolgirls). Is Kilgore a satirical portrait of the American military, a sort of hero, or a moral monster? How does his uniform link him to the western genre? What is the significance of this association?

6. How does the OSO/Playboy show reveal the same dangerous combination of the violent and the erotic explored in Dr. Strangelove? How does the vulgarity of the spectacle echo the nature of the War itself? What doe the costumes of the dancers symbolize?

7. How does the encounter with the boat people embody America's experience in Vietnam? What do you make of Willard's treatment of the wounded girl?

8. Why is Willard's experience at the nighttime battle at the bridge an appropriate preparation for his encounter with Kurtz? How does the episode tend to justify Kurtz's later criticism of the way the war is being waged by his superiors?

9. What gives Kurtz his power over the mountain people and his American followers?

10. Is Kurtz to be seen as a heroic figure driven to extremes by the nature of the War he was forced to fight? Or, is he the demonic consequence of America's excursion into Asia?

11. What is the thematic significance of Kurtz's death? Why is it intercut with the sacrifice of a bull? What famous cultural myths are evoked?

12. How do you read the ending of the film? Has Willard eliminated Kurtz or replaced him? Why do you think Coppola has so much difficulty finding an adequate conclusion to the film? Could the difficulty have something to do with his ambivalent treatment of Willard and Kurtz?

13. How many similarities can you find between Kurtz and John Rambo. Consider their relations with superiors, their reasons for rebelling, their respective fates. On the other hand, how might they be contrasted?

14. Why is Rambo introduced as a prisoner in his own country? What does his condition say about the way the spirit of American patriotism and manhood) treated by his country's leaders?

15. What patterns of imagery tend to associate Rambo with Christ and the dying gods of classical mythology? How is emergence form a swampy pool similar (visually and thematically) to Willard's emergence from Kurtz's prison? What is the significance of the allusions to rebirth and renewal?

16. How does the figure of John Rambo try to fuse a rebellious populist individualism with the values of the military professional? What contradictions are evident here?

17. The film ends with a freeze frame of Rambo shooting up his own headquarters. What does this ending say about Rambo's fate? Is he victorious? Or, is a merely caught in another trap, one which replicates the film's opening prison sequence? Did he "get to win this time"?