Bad Faith of Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now is a piece of visionary propaganda about the Vietnamese war— oppressively ugly for most of its length, with an emotional sordidness that teases and at last wears down and baffles the audience—a confidently brutal film, grating in its record of the terrible events, aimless-seeming, like the sequence of actions it describes, and like them difficult to learn from. But the general direction of the propaganda is plain. It is prowar. All its reservations concern the way the war was fought: our American strategy, we learn here, was paralyzed by two great burdens of a liberal state, conscience and technology. We should have forgone these, and fought terror with terror, in single-soul combat from one village to the next. Even so we might not have won the war; but we would have saved our souls. Our mistake was to suppose that conscience ever came into the question. We opted out of any authentic combat by using advanced weapons; and at the same time, we disarmed ourselves for soul-battle with the vice of pity. Unhampered by these, the Vietcong could range freely, and do what the logic of victory demanded.

The heroes of Apocalypse Now are kindred to the guerrillas whom they oppose: an Am...