Europe in the Round

Apocalypse Now is finally here, so belatedly that even its marketing technique has been anticipated by The Deer Hunter. There is a sense in which three years of supercolossal gossip and a cost of at least $30 million cannot be topped by any actual performance, and it is to the film’s credit that at least sizable chunks of it are not anticlimactic. Even so, it is a deeply depressing film, because it exhibits to an almost unprecedented degree what T. S. Eliot (who is quoted in it to bad effect) called dissociation of sensibility.

To Eliot this meant that, starting with later seventeenth century poetry, “the language became more refined, the feeling more crude.” Soitisin Apocalypse Now, where the cinematic language can do just about anything, but the ideas and feelings of the director, Francis Ford Coppola, and his co-scenarist, John Milius, are not only crude but also immature and pretentious. Even the notion that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness could provide the basis for a large-scale attack on the Vietnam War, and modern warfare in general, is puerile and self-serving. Conrad’s darkness is a metaphysical darkness that merely manifests itself in existential events; his heart is the everyday, noncombatant heart that we like to imagine as a valentine, but that Yeats taught us is a foul rag-and-bone shop.

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John Simon

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Apocalypse Now is finally here, so belatedly that even its marketing technique has been anticipated by The Deer Hunter. There is a sense in which three years of supercolossal gossip and a cost of at least $30 million cannot be topped by any actual performance, and it is to the film’s credit that at least sizable chunks of it are not anticlimactic. Even so, it is a deeply depressing film, because it exhibits to an almost unprecedented degree what T. S. Eliot (who is quoted in it to bad effect) called dissociation of sensibility.

To Eliot this meant that, starting with later seventeenth century poetry, “the language became more refined, the feeling more crude.” Soitisin Apocalypse Now, where the cinematic language can do just about anything, but the ideas and feelings of the director, Francis Ford Coppola, and his co-scenarist, John Milius, are not only crude but also immature and pretentious. Even the notion that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness could provide the basis for a large-scale attack on the Vietnam War, and modern warfare in general, is puerile and self-serving. Conrad’s darkness is a metaphysical darkness that merely manifests itself in existential events; his heart is the everyday, noncombatant heart that we like to imagine as a valentine, but that Yeats taught us is a foul rag-and-bone shop.