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It is hard to point out a villain in the classical sense in Coppola's „Apocalypse Now” that
being the result of the heavy influence of existential philosophy in the movie and the application of
moral relativism, which is often encountered in war-related movies (i.e. “Full Metal Jacket”).
Therefore nearly every single character can be described as an evil-doer when analysed in the field
of Christian morals. I am going to set the focus on the two main characters, Cpt Benjamin Willard
and Col Walter E. Kurtz, since their search for identity is the most detailed and due to the fact that
even though they have completely different personalities and background (the only connection is
that they are both soldiers of US army) as the story unwinds itself they become more and more each
other's mirror images in their pursue of freedom and their downfall from grace into villainy.
All of the characters can be divided in separate groups as these in philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard
and Friedrich Nietzsche. Kierkegaard divided a person's development in three stages:
– slaves (men of aesthetics)
– knights of infinite resignation (men of morals)
– knights of faith (men of absurd faith)
Each of these stages are represented by various characters most of which represent slaves
with the except of the protagonist and antagonist. When Cpt Willard begins his journey in Saigon he
fits the image of Kierkegaard's Knight of Infinite resignation or a Nietschean slave – he is over the
world of beauty and peace – he's divorced, unable to live a normal life, yet he finds the war he's
fighting to be depressive and senseless at the moral level – hence his infinite resignation and his
fleeing form pain of his memories. Kurtz on the other hand resembles Nietschean Ubermensch or
Kierkegaard's knight of faith – he is already beyond the barriers good and evil, he has freed himself
from the morality of slaves and is capable to act in whatever manner he finds appropriate and fitting
the situation, no matter how ridiculous his actions would be. When he encounters Willard for the
first time he poses a question:
“Have you ever considered, any real freedoms? Freedoms from the opinions
of others. Even the opinions of yourself.”
He also describes the very moment of his transformation into a being of a higher tier:
“I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries
ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We'd left the
camp after we had inoculated the children for polio. And this old man
came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn't say. We went
back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm.
They they were, in a pile. A pile of little arms. And, I remember, I
cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I
didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never
want to forget it. I never want to forget it. And then I realized,
like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond bullet through my
forehead. And I thought, My God, the genius of that! The genius. The
will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And
then I realized, they were stronger than we. Because they could stand
it. These were not monsters. These were men, strained cadres. These
men who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children,
who are filled with love...that they had the strength, the strength to
do that.”
The psychological trauma allows him to set himself free from the common morality. This
quote clearly remarks how he rejects the morality of slaves and moves on towards the morality of
masters. Shocked at first he than has an oblivion and considers the barbarity he has witnessed on a
new level more appropriate for his newly reordered psyche. As he applies his experience to the war
he is waging he slides from a position of respected, honoured commander, “grown for top slots in
the corporation – general, chief of stab, these kind of things” to a “rag-assed renegade” which is
“to be terminated with extreme prejudice”. He willingly and deliberately cuts himself off from the
society – he act on his own will as a commanding officer and refuses to carry out orders given by
the high command which results in a charge of murder ergo – a total exclusion from the society (in
that case – the military). Than he looses contact with his wife and son, knowing that in his state he
is unreachable for them. One of his soldiers, a keen follower of Kurtz's vision, writes a brief note to
his wife:
“Sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids, I ain't never going back”
Willard and other characters give a number of comments on colonel and his morals:
“[...] Never get off the boat. […] Kurtz got off the boat. He split from
the whole fucking program.”
“The Colonel guy. He's worse than crazy. He's evil!”
“Walter Kurtz was one of the finest officers this country has ever
produced. A very humanitarian man. […] But than his... methods became
unsound.”
Willard, on the other hand, is at the beginning of his journey, far from oblivion that Kurtz
has had. He is yet to witness all the atrocities of the war. This journey of PBR Street Gang crew's
resembles that of Dante's Inferno, yet, in opposition to Dante's Inferno, they take part in the events
and are, in some cases, heavily influenced by them.
For Willard the first layer of hell, Inferno's Limbo is the hotel room in Saigon. Same as in
Limbo he does not really feel pain, but rather has immense feelings of loneliness and is longing for
heaven – be that the war or his past of wife and home. He feels the waiting draining his power and
giving it away to enemies he is to face.
“Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker. And every minute
Charlie squats in the bush...he gets stronger. Each time I looked
around...the walls moved in a little tighter.”
The second layer is the rendezvous with Col Kilgore – the second layer of Inferno is
reserved for people who couldn't control their senses and perceptions – a description that perfectly
fits Kilgore and his men, for whom the war is a perfect opportunity to master their surfing skills and
throw barbecue parties on beautiful Vietnamese beaches.
Third layer is guarded by Cerberus and is reserved for people sinning with gluttony – in this
case the Cerberus being a tiger which almost shreds Le Chef to pieces on his search for a mango
tree.
The fourth layer is the USO show the crew encounters in the middle of the jungle – this
place is for sinners of extravagance and wastefulness.
The fifth layer on the banks of river Styx is populated with haters, people of envy and
laziness – the medical camp on the bank of the river Do-Long, where the crew encounter the
Playboy bunnies fits this description. The soldiers living in the camp spend their days playing
random pranks on each other. The crew also discovers a body of a man killed by one of the bunnies
in an outbreak of loathing and hate towards her profession.
Heretics reside in the sixth layer of hell – Willard becomes one by shooting an unarmed,
wounded civilian just to gain on time, hence standing against everything a solder should be.
The seventh is the first of the lower layers resided by those who sin against their neighbours.
This is well portrayed in the film as the last US outpost on the river – the Do-Long bridge –
constantly under enemy attack, with continuous fire-fights and explosions which can very well
symbolize a rain of fire falling on the sinners, again fitting the Inferno.
The eight layer is portrayed in the meeting with French colonists – in Dante's Inferno's it
was populated with hypocrites and false prophets. In over the table conversations the French
despise Willard and the US Army for waging a war for “biggest nothing in history” - trying to forget
their own war in Vietnam. Than, after the supper Roxanne tells Willard:
“There's two of you, can't you see? One that loves and one that kills”. That also can be found
hypocritical, as it is a clear prejudice to Willard's state of mind as a soldier, when at the same time
she is a wife of a soldier who fell in the same war.
The final layer is reserved for those sinning against their own kin and their nation – perfectly
fitting Col Kurtz and his men. In addition it is interesting to note, that the three most evolved
villains – Kurtz, Willard and Lance resemble the three persons encountered by Dante in his journey
– Judas, Brutus and Gaius Casius Longinus.
That journey represents the change which Willard and his crew members are undergoing –
from men of aesthetics, wanting nothing more than to return home safely through men of morals
horrified with the atrocities and absurd of the ongoing war to become what can be perceived as men
of religion – possessed by the feeling of a higher goal, no matter how absurd. Willard is his own
Vergilius for this journey, only at the very end replaced by Kurtz.
What both Kurtz and Willard have in common – they both rise themselves in tiers of humanity,
striving to finally transform into an Ubermensch at the expense of their bonds with society, in this
case personified by their commanders and the whole military structure. It also applies to the rest of
the crew. As they start to travel the military hierarchy on the boat is strictly obeyed, even by Willard
:
“ Then there was Phillips, Chief. It might have been my mission, but it
sure as shit was the Chief's boat.”
The further they travel the more this structure cracks and shatters, resulting in arguments and
even a brawl. The moment Willard kills a civilian just to gain on time he gains the leadership on the
boat – that being the exact moment when he finally cuts off all remaining bonds with the society. He
than also states that he has “learned a couple of thing on Kurtz that weren't in the dossier” - that
making him advance in his mental evolution and understand the motives which had driven Kurtz by
becoming more like him.
What also make them alike is the understanding of the fact of being cast out. Willard states
his acceptance to his wife's departure at the very beginning:
“When I was home after my first tour, it was worse. I'd wake up and
there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to
a divorce.“
Than, at his moment of transformation he sees that the crew, not yet evolved as himself, rejects him:
“[..]boys were never gonna look at me the same way again, but I felt
like I knew one or two things about Kurtz, that weren't in the dossier.”
They both accept that fact and the probability that the rejected society will take revenge on
them for their desertion. Kurtz refers to Willard as a messenger from the civilization that came to
settle their scores. He states that he has a right to kill him, but has no right to judge him, clearly
accepting the upcoming fate. When they first talk a dialogue breaks out:
“-I expected someone like you. What did you expect?
- Are you an assassin?
- I'm a soldier.
- You are neither. You're just an errand boy, send by the
clerks to collect a bill.”
Several minutes later Willard again emphasizes his isolation:
“They were gonna make me a major for this, and I wasn't even in their
fucking army anymore.”
The fact that Willard states nothing about the consequences of his betrayal may have several
reasons. Firstly, he evolves travelling the boat, having little time to assimilate with these new
conditions he found himself under. Secondly, depending on the version of the film (there were tree
or four alternative endings), he kills Kurtz therefore fulfilling the society's bidding and redeeming
himself. At the same moment (again depending on the version) he fulfils Kurtz's last will calling in
a napalm strike to bomb the entire site. That motif has a great meaning as a return among the
righteous in the classical meaning of good and evil as the codename for the bombers is “almighty” -
suggesting a turn to god in the moment of doubt and having him eradicate the evil.
But even if we consider both Willard and Kurtz straight madmen there is a far greater villain
lurking in the background of the whole story. On several occasions both the protagonist and the
antagonist refer to the jungle or the river as the source of all the surrounding evil. Nature,
represented by the river implies the change upon the characters and forces them to evolve, even
against their will. It is important to notice how the members of the crew either evolve to what may
seem insanity or get disposed of by the river. The first impact with the nature happens when Chef
and Willard walk out into the jungle in search for mangoes. The attack of a tiger shakes the
foundations of Chefs sanity making him develop fear of leaving the boat – he never gets off it
again. Lance first takes LSD, than is horrified by Willard killing the civilian to finally evolve at
Kurtz's camp and becoming one of his soldiers. The characters who deny the change are killed
sooner or later, depending on the level of their psychosis. The innocent, seventeen years old Mr
Clean gets killed in an ambush on the river.
Chief Phillips is disposed of later on as a hardened and experienced soldier, who is not
shocked by the overwhelming atrocities. Chef, because of the state of his mentality survives to the
very end where he is killed by Kurtz, who is acting as an agent of the jungle” when he becomes
sane again and refuses to give in to the madness. Lance and Willard are the only two members of
the crew who survive, because of the evolution (Willard) or giving in to the madness (Lance). When
Willard approaches Kurtz's camp he is informed by the journalist that the colonel is not present – he
went off to the jungle with his people, where he feels safe. Moments later, when Willard sets off to
kill him, he states:
“Everybody wanted me to do it. Him most of all. I felt like he was up
there, waiting for me to take his pain away. He just wanted to go out
like a soldier. Standing up. Not even like some poor, wasted rag-assed
renegade. Even the jungle wanted him dead. And that's who he really took
his orders from, anyway.”
Earlier in the story, general briefing Willard on his assignment gives a speech on greatness
of Col Kurtz than carrying on to his madness:
“Well, you see, Willard, in this war, things get confused out there.
Power, ideals, the old morality, and practical military necessity. But
out there with these natives, it must be a temptation to be God.”
It is safe to assume, that at some point Col Kurtz realized the influence of the forces of
nature and that this thought led him to his end. He asked Willard to be the keeper of his memory
and the one to set things right after his own death – even the despised photo-journalist suggest such
possibility and theorizes about Kurtz's madness. Talking with imprisoned Willard he says:
“I know something you that you don't know. That's right, Jack . The man
is clear in his mind, but his soul is mad. Oh, yeah. He's dying, I
think. He hates all this. He hates it!”
It is hard to determine when Kurtz understood that he mistook the absolute freedom for
madness and tried to save his dignity and redeem himself in the eyes of his family. We can also
theorize whether the choice of such end wasn't a part of his limitless freedom – a freedom from
himself. Surely all of the characters cut their bonds off – Chief feels no connection with the girl he
left home, he also rejects his superiors when he is informed of Willard's mission. Willard and Kurtz,
despite their partial recovery to some sort of sanity despise the army to the very end and even being
“in the worst place in the world”, the ninth layer of hell reserved for the ones who betray their
relatives and country doesn't change that. Therefore it can be concluded that they keep their
freedom and in this sense – remain the worst possible villains.
