THE NEW FRONT ON VIETNAM : Modern ‘Rambo’ Hero Replaces Classic ‘Apocalypse’ Protagonist

I caught a screening of “Apocalypse Now” on pay-TV the other night and, once again, sat mesmerized by the horrible beauty of Francis Coppola’s allegorical re-creation of the Vietnam War.

The film, an instant classic when it premiered in 1979, captured so much of the utter lunacy that my peers and I had felt about the war. It seemed, at once, so real and so distant from us. A college student during Nixon’s Vietnamization of the war, I had a high draft number and was lucky never to confront the horror. I never had to make that journey up the river.

“Apocalypse Now” was the only Vietnam War that I ever really knew. It was the only Vietnam that I wanted to know, for the movie affirmed the existence of that deep foundation of existential absurdity that, I had learned as a literature student, lies in the recesses of the modern psyche.

This was art--tragedy wrought to its uttermost.

As the movie the other night stirred those powerful feelings once again, my mind raced to the present, where Vietnam still mesmerizes and enthralls moviegoers flocking to Sylvester Stallone’s “Rambo: First Blood Part II.”

Like me, few in today’s audience have any personal experience in Vietnam. Most of us have only the residual feelings that have lingered far longer than the smell of napalm in the morning.

Thinking of then and now, I realized that the mythic cycle of Vietnam has made its half spin, degenerating tragedy into melodrama, substituting the classic hero with the modern hero.

Marlon Brando--the mad Col. Kurtz--finally has earned all of those millions of dollars that he was paid for his brief, shadowy presence. Like the regeneration myth that is so essential to the allegory of “Apocalypse,” Kurtz has been reborn in the image of Rambo.

Kurtz took the war into his own hands, murdering the enemy and serving his poet-warrior’s ethic even as he offended the morally inert military Establishment.

“Bomb them all!” mad Kurtz scribbled--and Rambo does.

In real life, we often call such men of action heroes. In art, we don’t.

It’s easy to see how we can get the two types of heroes confused, especially in an era of video politics and a movie-star President.

As modern commentators have told us, “Rambo” has tapped some hidden spring of national anger about Vietnam. Aesthetically, the new movie also has tapped that same black attraction that the classic hero, Martin Sheen’s Capt. Willard, had for Kurtz. It is the same fascination that we all have for the man of action, the ubermensch , who, like Kurtz/Rambo conducts his own private war according to his own rules in his own time.

Too, war is an eternal source of drama. It provides the writer or film maker an inherently dramatic, often epic, backdrop. Because of its elemental nature, war is a very human experience in which, on the smaller scale, we can affirm so much of our better nature even as we confirm our worst on the grander scale.

The artist, however, is no mere journalist, dutifully reporting the events of war. The artist is compelled to fashion the crude elements into something else. Usually, the most successful artistic efforts are the stories of individuals changed by war--whether Napoleon and his doomed invasion of Russia, an American expatriate in the service of the Spanish Republic or a hungry Southern belle brandishing a tuber against a blazing sky.

Rambo’s cheering audiences suggest that, like my friends and me, the ‘80s audience has confused the real-life Vietnam War with the cinematic one. The difference is in what each film maker set out to do and the aesthetic experience that each movie provides.

“Apocalypse Now” is a journey to the heart of darkness--Sheen’s Willard leaving absurdity at the mouth of the river and confronting divine madness at its head. “Rambo” is the darkness itself, unilluminated and unilluminating.

“Apocalypse Now” works as art regardless of anyone’s particular feelings about the war. Indeed, Vietnam is only the latest setting for a story that has been told and retold since before Homer, and the journey to Kurtz’s camp is based on a 1902 novel.

“Rambo” is very much of the here and now. It presupposes that well of Vietnam feelings in the audience that, once tapped, creates the aesthetic experience of the film in their guts. As Rambo taught President Reagan, we all know what to do the next time.

Provided, of course, that next time the war is as neatly scripted and the special effects are as masterfully manipulated. Like the short-term memories of generals ever fighting the war last finished, Rambo’s fantasy is a pathos of what might have been.

It denies the horror.

DR