Ideologies

Apocalypse Now attempts to straddle the line between Dr. Strangelove and a real propaganda film: American Sniper. To use a well-known idiom, Director Francis Ford Coppola appears to be trying to have his cake and eat it too. There are some fun moments in which the fourth wall is broken—when Coppola makes a cameo. He’s filming the soldiers while pretending to be an “On the Ground” news-reporter. At the end of the day, for all the film tries to tear down and the void it attempts to get us to look into, it still has the effect of lionizing the soldiers. Enjoyment of the sheer military might goes hand and hand with the guilt of destruction and loss of human life. The two things are intertwined. The ideology is here and the shame, but Coppola is still out to make a fun film—it’s his job. One can only admire, how the comforts of home—in the form of canned alcohol beverages—surfing, and pornography are made readily accessible. There is a phrase that goes something like, “an army runs on its stomach,” but if this is true, why wasn’t the Vietnam War a sure victory? Coppola film appears to be making some kind of statement—how this is a generation that so surrounded by omnipresent and readily made available comforts it doesn’t know that there is a very real world waiting for them in Vietnam.

In contrast, Tim O’Brien’s story attempts to humanize the war. To talk of it in some random chaotic way. He weeds through the crudity, but eventually buries the entire story under in a deep quagmire. It works because O’Brien is a writer. While O’Brien’s narrative probably the most authentic of these, it feels impure somehow—because one cannot be certain of what is true and what is not. O’Brien’s stories aren’t fun and anyone that reads them subjects themselves to the kind penance. He is anti-ideology—and O’Brien spends so much time trying to disentangle himself from it.

Coppola gives the audience what we want, while O’Brien is giving us what he thinks we need.

Yusef Komunyakaa approach is probably my favorite, because he achieves tonally what the other two do not. Komunyakaa’s poems are the cleanest thing we’ve discussed in the class. His approach is also probably the most thoroughly digestible for a reason—it encases provocative imagery without explicitly mentioning any of the horror.