overview for CascadeOfLight

This might be a strange one but 'Apocalypse Now' has one thing in particular for me that's completely inexcusable. Mainly that, for a film supposedly based on Heart of Darkness, a book that is very clearly critical of imperialism and racism, it completely inverts its message.

Like, on the face of it, it's anti-war, and even anti-US in that the US Army is shown as completely dysfunctional, run by cold-blooded psychopaths like the COs at the start who set Martin Sheen off to "terminate with extreme prejudice" or brain-fried madmen like the helicopter commander who just wants to surf, and it's shown how much damage and devastation the US has caused for no tangible gain (but then again, only in a 'why are we even here' type 'oops, the US accidentally stumbled into another war' kind of way).

But the whole film is from the perspective of the US, the Viet 'Cong' [sic] are never shown to be real people, just a nebulous menace lurking out of sight, and every sequence of the 'madness of war' is dripping with glorification of it. I mean, maybe this is shouldn't be a surprise, because it was written by John Milius, the guy who wrote Conan the Barbarian and fucking Red Dawn, but there's no way the film that contains the Ride of the Valkyries helicopter sequence can be said not to glorify war. It's like if the Starship Troopers film, while still supposedly intending to be a satire, was written by an actual fascist instead.

So in Heart of Darkness, when Marlow finds Kurtz, he's this emaciated, pathetic figure, who has gone insane in the wilderness of his ivory trading post and turned the area into his personal playground, cowing the local tribes with his guns and putting the heads of 'rebels' on pikes - and okay, the Africans are kind of passive and servile, but given that the novel was written in 1899 and the European colonialist is depicted as this savage, disgusting wretch it has to be given some credit. At best, he's a victim of his own power in a place where that makes him a god, and the natives of that place are his victims.

But in the film, Kurtz is a larger-than-life dominating presence, whose goal is not to fuck around in his personal kingdom but to keep fighting the war. When Marlow meets him after being captured, Kurtz gives a monologue (video), where he describes seeing a pile of children's arms that have been cut off. In real life, the Belgians committed horrific crimes like this against the Africans, but in Apocalypse now, the children had received vaccines from the US, and because of that their arms were cut off by Vietnamese soldiers. And that serves as the basis for his outright fascist screed about the power of will and shamelessness and the primordial instinct to kill and a bunch of other grade-A John Milius bullshit. And yes, the film presents him as insane, but more than that it presents him as a victim of the brutality of the colonized people resisting their oppressors.

That's an absolutely fucking unconscionable change to make and turns the whole thing inside-out. The horrific conditions of life for the Africans shown in Heart of Darkness were a paraphrasing of real historical crimes actually committed by real Belgian colonist monsters. Taking inspiration from that novel, but making the colonized people into the perpetrators of that crime is absolutely unforgivable and renders the whole film into true fascist apologia. Literally, utterly unforgivable.

Anyone else find European libshits a tad bit worse than Y*nkoids at times? in c/chat@hexbear.net

[–] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 31 points 4 days ago (3 children)

American hogs are so mouth-frothingly angry all the time that it's easy to point them out, they wear their fascism right on their sleeve. But there's a certain type of central European EU-loving neoliberal who presents this soft and friendly facade, wearing sensible business attire and never raising their voice, who is so rabidly anticommunist and anti-immigrant it would give the ghost of Hitler pause - basically Democrats but intensified in every way.

They are the PMC spreadsheet holocaust technician, peloton fascist, health and wellness, mindfulness meditation, concentration camp builders who are so totally immersed into the 'European identity' that they're indistinguishable from Nazis. They'll explain why Ukraine needs unlimited weapons to deter Russian aggression, but immigrants need to be rounded up and deported or drowned in the Mediterranean, the same way you'd explain to a wayward child that you shouldn't touch the stove - or even with a tone of righteous indignation, 'speaking truth to power' as if they weren't 'the power' and as if they were telling the truth. And then they'll go for a bike ride along one of their many beautiful publicly-funded cycle paths.

They have completely internalized their existence as 'gardeners', the superior enlightened cultural pinnacle of the world (as opposed to the powerful but crude and tacky US), which they earned by just being better than the rest of the world in a way that gives them the right - no, the burden! - to lecture everyone else, especially the people they formerly colonized; after all, Europeans are basically trustworthy and righteous, in a way that no one else can be, because they overthrew Hitler! It's their duty to warn the naive simpletons in Africa and South America against the predations of the kind of dangerous authoritarians that the Europeans defeated, and so have been immunized against - such as those in Asia, who are all sadly pathological due to their culture but with some tough love and Balkanization could maybe one day be guided into the light of liberal democracy.

All of which gives them a totally unassailable sense of moral superiority and inner peace. The garden is blooming, the jungle is walled out, the dictators are chastised and the 'children' are receiving our guidance - all is right with the world. They're like the Eloi, except they're the ones eating people.