As ‘Apocalypse’ Fades to Black, Its Din Lingers

Yesterday is what I hear when I hear the cyclical thwack of rotor blades. Thirty-three years after returning from Vietnam, I still tighten when a helicopter passes overhead.

This old demon and I came face to face the other day. I went to the movies. Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now Redux” expands the most ambitiously ambiguous film I’ve experienced, the 22-year-old “Apocalypse Now.”

To borrow from Brando: the sound.

America played its part in that misbegotten war in the vacillating key of helicopter rotors. They signaled the attack, and the retreat. They sounded impending danger, and imminent rescue. They provided the background noise for all the tedious logistics in between.

“Apocalypse” opens with the distorted, half-speed whisk of a helicopter, as you might hear it through the jungle canopy with your adrenaline at high-boil while the whole world erupts around you in slow-motion confusion.

Film critics say “Apocalypse” has gotten better by the addition of new scenes. I’m not so sure. But I would watch 10 hours of Coppola’s outtakes and consider myself lucky. So who am I to judge?

I do wish he had spared us the dinner conversation in the restored French plantation scene, which sounded like an academic symposium and ran counter to the suggestive tone of the rest of the film. And I didn’t need the debasement of Playboy bunnies to be reminded that the war had a corrupting effect on civilians too.

But with either version, “Apocalypse” surely stands alone as the film to emerge from the maelstrom of Vietnam. I hope, after reflection, moviegoers will no longer regard the war as the overwrought morality play of Oliver Stone’s “Platoon.” Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” was truer. But neither went deep enough to reach that other primitive part of the brain: those cool, dark cells where experience is reduced, boiled down, simplified into shorthand and filed away by key words: Nixon/Watergate. LBJ/Vietnam. Drugs/Evil. “Apocalypse Now” serves, as only great moments in storytelling can, to interrupt this process.

To ponder this film is to remind ourselves that Vietnam was neither good nor bad, neither futile nor heroic--it was an exaggerated mix of all, and to a tragic end, which Coppola conveys with the artist’s gift for exaggeration. Remember, only Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz is willing to accept that winning means being as ruthless as your foe. For America in the age of Vietnam, to express this was evidence of insanity.

Coppola has been quoted as saying he feels America is now ready for this film, which was ahead of its time in 1979. I hope he is correct. Because his keen appreciation of ambiguity would serve us well, not just as we look back on Vietnam, but as we confront the present.

America is stronger militarily now. But overpowering strength did not win a war for which there was no resolve, and would not again.

And we are not stronger in our resolve now. A nation born of militias and collective sacrifice has turned the job over to a mercenary army recruited by advertising jingles. Sacrifice is no longer part of the equation. We are not clearer in purpose, either. We turn our backs on global treaty obligations to build a wall, not around us but above us, all the while unsure where the enemy lurks.

But don’t you worry, I’m told. If things get tough the country will pull together. It always has.

To that, I say, no, it hasn’t. Things got plenty tough a generation ago. America didn’t hold together. Helicopters rose in the sky over a country far away.

If you want to know what it sounded like, what it meant down deep to fight a war that your country didn’t believe in but wouldn’t stop, what happened when good men went crazy because of it, you can go to the movies.