discourses on war

[Peter B. High]

At the end of his last posting, Aaron made the following interesting comment:

>Looking at that film [Kaitei gunkan] and many others in which the Japanese (even in 
>the guise of the world defense 
>force) military saves the day, I get the impression that many of the Toho 
>tokusatsu films are fantasies about Japan winning WWII (the fact that 
>such fantasies are still common in video games and book fiction confirms 
>the depth and longevity of such fantasies).  These discourses I think 
>influence the later Godzilla and undermine their status as a pure 
>expression of horror and anxiety about nuclear war.

This is of course I perception I myself share. The overriding issue is, of course, the 
manner in which cinema participates in the national psychic drama of dealing with a 
lost war. America too has lost a war, Vietnam, and it might be interesting to compare 
the Hollywood response to such a trauma with the Japanese. Actually, exactly a year 
ago, there was an enthralling, wide-ranging discussion on  the H-Film mailing list 
about "how to teach APOCALYPSE NOW to students too young to know about Vietnam." One 
of my own contributions was an effort to "contextualize"APOCALYPSE within the film and 
literature discourse about Vietnam which was emergoing at the time of the release of 
APOCALYPSE. Although it is not always gfood form to quote oneself, I think iyt m,ight 
be interesting to post here that stab at contextualization. It goes as follows:
*****************************

Having followed the  the discussion about teaching APOCALYPSE NOW, I have one 
observation to make. It seems to me that teaching the film mostly in terms of itself 
(is it good? bad? faithful to the Conrad original? etc.) may be less fruitful than 
placing the discussion in one or another possible context.
1.) The Sociological Context: As a National Coming to Terms with Defeat
   APOCALYPSE NOW is, along with DEER HUNTER, one of the first of a series of American 
films attempting to grapple with a lost war (as the VN conflict surely was). The most 
obvious difference between this film and its successors (PLATOON, FULL METAL JACKET, 
etc) is  its radical denial of the VN War as an  event capable of being placed in a 
linear, "factual" history. Rather, it attempts to re-express the conflict--along with 
its consequent disappointment, humiliation and perhaps even the sense 
of "national guilt"--within the boader moral perspective of Conrad's story about 
individuals confronting unimaginable and incomprehensible evil. Regardless of its 
relative success as an individual film, the attempt is interesting on many levels. The 
first being the question of why Coppola chose to step out of the realm of factual 
history, choosing instead the realm of the archetype, or at least the fable. Was he 
consciously playing the (national) myth-maker? And what was he attempting to achieve 
with this approach? Considering the issue in a sociological context, one might hazard 
the guess that his aim was solace. Those of us  old enough to have experienced 
the aftermath years of the war, will remember them as a period of  confusion and 
fierce national self-doubt. And there was anger and the sense of betrayal too. "I am 
your yankee doodle dandy,"  the mutilated vet Ron Kovic raged "your fourth of july 
firecracker/exploding in the grave" 
   In his Surrender radio address on August 15, 1945,  the Emperor of Japan called 
upon his people to "endure the unendurable." While the American situation in the mid- 
to- late-seventies was hardly as extreme, the difference was only one of degree. 
Qualitatively it was much the same. How does one confront national humiliation , tame 
the sting and, hopefully, give it all meaning? In the immediate post-WWII years, 
Japanese filmmakers addressed  the task of finding solace and of 
making sense of their own lost war. Although the the models they chose were quite 
different from those used in American VN War films, various Japanese filmmakers (most 
notably Imai Tadashi and Kobayashi Masaaki) searched around for motifs to serve the 
purpose. Kobayashi (in THE HUMAN CONDITION) chose to focus on the impotence of good 
individuals struggling to preserve at least some measure of that goodness while 
serving loyally in an immensely evil enterprise. Imai chose a different route,  one 
which became the dominant in most subsequent films: national 
victimization (i.e. "we Japanese were as much victims of the war as any other 
people"). The Hiroshima films demonstrate the tremendous moral authority this motif 
can possess.  Although I am less familiar with the German equivalents to such films, 
it strikes me that Karl Ritter`s semi-existential films --OPERATION MICHAEL 
(Unternehmen Michael,1937), HOLIDAY ON WORD OF HONOR (Urlaub auf Ehrenwort, 1937) and 
PATRIOTS (Patrioten 1937), all made in Nazi Germany with the avowed purpose of 
"showing German youth that senseless, sacrificial death has its value" (Ritter)-- were 
an attempt to re-explain/re-valorize the German defeat of World War One. The 
post-WWII, U-BOAT surely represents an attempt to salvage meaning (even if it is 
"senseless" meaning) from their '39-'45 experience. I am sure there are other German 
films, attempting something like this, of which I am unaware.....There is much more to 
add to a discussion of this context, but I think I`ll allow the threads to 
blow tantalizingly in the breeze for the present.

2.) The Intertextual (literature/film) Context:
   Although I have not made a concerted study of the field of American VN War 
literature, I have read most or many of the standard texts. I would argue  it is in 
this area that we can find some legitimate leads as to why Coppola abjured a 
"straight" history approach in favor of  fable-making. During the war years, there was 
much talk of "pardigms" for capturing the significance of our involvement (the "domino 
theory", to name but one). Johnson`s invocation of the image of  "the men at Valley 
Forge" only inspired the rebuttal that in Viet Nam, our troops were more like the 
Redcoats. Robert Stone's DOG SOLDIERS ('74) describes how Americans witnessed the 
destruction of LBJ`s view of history. Remember the "credibility gap"?-- press coverage 
of the war became almost as controversial as the war itself. By '68,  it had become  a 
commonplace that no set of rational arguments, no placement of it in linear history, 
no compelling narrative (fictional or not) could penetrate to the core of what, 
obejectively, was happening. In the novel THE GREEN BERETS, Robin Moore wrote that he 
had intended it to be a "factual book," but that there were so many "obstacals and 
disadvantages...I decided I could present truth better and more accurately  in the 
form of fiction." And what a crock of fiction he wrote, too!  In the words of 
vet-novelist Michael Herr, it was all "history without handles". 
  It seemed you could say anything, or nothing, about Viet Nam and it would all be the 
same. Norman Mailer affixed the title WHY ARE WE IN VIET NAM ? ('67) to a novel that 
never mentions the place or the issue, and certainy doesn`t add much even to a 
metaphorical grasp of the question. He brought up the issue and left it a blank 
category. 
  "Where Is Viet Nam?" wrote Ferlinghetti . "Its all a state of mind," was 
the only logcal answer. Finally, even as the daily body-count dominated the nation's 
six o'clock news, in "Wichita Vortex Sutra,"  Ginsberg  made what was to turn out to 
be a very significant breakthrough: "The war is language, language abused."  
Thereafter, the corruption of VN-related language became a literary focus.  Michael 
Herr  defined it as  "the bureaucratically camouflaged language in which Vietnam was 
lived ."
   By the time we get to the post-war literature, there is already a collapse of the 
distinction between "story"/"history". Already, in his '68 novel ARMIES OF THE NIGHT, 
Mailer had been talking about "history as a novel, the novel as history." By the 
time Philip Caputo`s novel RUMOR OF WAR ('78) came along, "history" had such a stink 
to it that the author felt it necessary to open with the line: "This book does not 
pretend to be  history." "Reality," he writes, " had caught up with us and made us 
permanently crazy."  With no objective reality to cling to, it was up to the "grunt" 
to spin out his own personal psychodrama--and the format in which it was cast was 
almost inevitably the Cinematic, One soldier quoted by Caputo complains that "the 
trouble with war is that there isn`t any background music!" And for Caputo himself, it 
was also like a movie: "I can recall snatches of that time; fragmentary scenes 
flicker on my mental screen like excerps from a film...I often had in action the 
sensation of watching myself in a movie." 
  Michael Herr's DISPATCHES ( '77) talks a lot about the psychodrama by which the 
individual discovered a deeper truth than "straight" history...he calls it "the secret 
history"--"Vietnam is as much a state of mind as a place or event. It is a kind of 
mystery which cannot be represented or even adequately named by straight history."
   I can`t say whether this literary legacy influenced Cappola, or that he had even 
read much of it by the time he made APOCALYSE NOW (so, maybe someone should ask 
him?...or, who knows, maybe someone already has?). My point is that it was in the air  
like some allergenic pollen. 
   Seen in this context, it seems only natural he should fish around for some 
fabulistic expression of the national psychodrama, some entre to that "secret history" 
whose true shape escapes us even now. And, in this context, we might be able to 
evaluate the attempt which APOCALYPSE NOW represents.

*****first posted H-Film 5/28/97****************************

PB High
Nagoya University, Japan

--
Peter B. High
j45843a at nucc.cc.nagoya-u.ac.jp