The Art Of Darkness - Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket

Martin Lawrence - The Art Of Darkness - Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket

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"War is hell," the cliché proclaims, but it seems to be attractive hell. Along with other ghastly subjects such as murder and vampirism, war ranks among the most beloved and ordinarily used field matter of filmed entertainment, and no war has yielded more or great films than the one in Vietnam in the middle of 1955 and 1975. Whether detailing the effects of the war by studying its aftermath or getting right into the heart of the battles, the Vietnam War has proven to be a source of boundless interest for filmmakers and moviegoers alike. Possibly it is the moral ambiguity of Vietnam that makes it the most attractive war for film adaptations, and no films elaborate this ambiguity great than Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) and Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987).

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Martin Lawrence

Apocalypse Now was the first and still, arguably, the best film to take place in the midst of the war itself, shot shortly after its ending in the mid-'70s and released on the brink of the Reagan era in 1979. Inspired by Joseph Conrad's 1899 novella Heart of Darkness, Coppola and screenwriter John Milius supplant the metaphorical journey of its central character from 1890s Africa to the Southeast Asian jungle of the 1960s. Intimately tied to this shift in viewpoint is that, while Heart of Darkness's narrator, Charlie Marlowe, begins as a sane and garage man who faces madness and the inherent evil of mankind in the form of Mister Kurtz, Apocalypse Now's narrator, Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen), has already been driven at least to the verge of madness by his former Vietnam palpate before the beginning of the film. This turn of perspective suggests that morality and sanity had come to be much more tentative and ambiguous in the time of the Vietnam War.

At the 1979 Cannes Film Festival premiere of the film, Coppola stated that "My film is not about Vietnam; my film is Vietnam." We are thrust into a world of madness with no moral center, an apt foresight of conditions in the Vietnam War. This intention is evidenced not only by the chaotic and violent nature of the whole film, but also in the decision to make the story's narrator a madman, thereby depriving the viewer of a more traditionally relatable gateway into the film's story.

Just as the film itself "is Vietnam" in macrocosm, three of its central characters also are Vietnam in microcosm: Willard, Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) and Captain Kilgore (Robert Duvall). Willard has been in the jungle so much it has come to be who he is; in the film, he says of Vietnam: "When I was here I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle." Kurtz and Kilgore are two sides of the same coin, the soldier gone mad from the madness of war. Kilgore is the joyful madman who revels in battle ("I love the smell of napalm in the morning," he says in one of the film's most famed scenes. "Smells like victory") and has managed to keep a tenable position in the forces despite randomly decimating whole villages, to the tune of Richard Wagner's "Flight of the Valkyries," for the sole purpose of clearing a neighboring beach so that he and his men can go surfing. Critic Michael Wood, in his narrative "Bangs and Whispers" from the October 1979 New York retell of Books, asserts that Kilgore should have been the Kurtz shape of the film, a man so flamboyantly insane that he provides a clear counterpoint to Sheen's Willard, but the closer similarities in the middle of Willard and Brando's Kurtz hint at a metaphorical journey of Willard into himself, into the darkest reaches of his own soul, that echoes his literal journey downriver to Kurtz's lair. When he completes his assignment by killing Kurtz, he has Possibly silenced the encroaching darkness in his own heart.

Apocalypse Now's unabridged foresight of madness - from Willard to Kilgore to Kurtz, along with attractive side characters such as Sam Bottoms's Lsd-abusing surfer/soldier and Dennis Hopper's fanatical photojournalist - paints a disturbing photo not only of the Vietnam experience, but of all humanity in a world that made the atrocities of Vietnam possible. As Coppola himself says about the development of the film in Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper and Eleanor Coppola's 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, "We were out there with too much equipment, too much money and too much time... And we all went a little insane," which can be seen as an astute annotation of America's position in the war itself. Ultimately, Apocalypse Now is more than merely a war film, which may be why many critics think it the best war film ever made, and Possibly even the many American film of any kind.

Full Metal Jacket has also been "acclaimed by critics nearby the world as the best war movie ever made," according to Warner Home Video Inc.'s 1990 video publish of the film. Though it could be argued that Apocalypse Now is a greater cinematic achievement, it is less tenable to say that it is more true-to-life. Apocalypse Now is highly stylized and subjective, while Full Metal Jacket has a unavoidable documentary feel, despite its often remarkable cinematography and use of stylistic devices such as slow-motion. These approaches reflect the background of each director: Kubrick began with documentaries like "Flying Padre" (1951), while Coppola got his start at B-movie producer Roger Corman's American-International Pictures.

Full Metal Jacket's more objective, realistic perspective also reflects the point-of-view of its protagonist and narrator, secret Joker (Matthew Modine), who goes through marine training to come to be a field reporter in Vietnam. Though Joker is a much more sane and rational character than Willard, he too is deeply corrupted by his experience, as he becomes more and more cynical throughout the film. As Joker says at one point in the film, in the persona of John Wayne, "A day without blood is like a day without sunshine." This cynical loss of innocence is a cohesive basal theme in the film, which, like Apocalypse Now, is a journey into the heart of darkness. This is established in the opening sequence, which shows its varied characters having their heads shaved, set to the tune of Johnny Wright's "Hello Vietnam." Full Metal Jacket is, essentially, a coming-of-age story - albeit a very brutal one - that is divided into two self-contained, but connected, stories within the film.

The first story thrusts the viewer into the rigid, violent life of marine training camp and, though Joker is established as the protagonist from the start, the central character of this first story is unquestionably Leonard Lawrence (Vincent D'Onofrio). Leonard, dubbed "Gomer Pyle" by sadistic drill educator Sgt. Hartman (R. Lee Ermey), is a superior schoolyard bully's victim: overweight, slow-witted to the point of mild retardation, highly vulnerable and prone to crying under duress. Hartman, as a drill instructor, has made a vocation of being a bully, and the two immediately fall into this dynamic, with Hartman repeatedly choking, slapping and humiliating Leonard throughout the film. This story arc is unquestionably broken into three acts: Leonard's humiliation, Leonard's education, and Leonard's revenge. Ironically, the completion of Leonard's education is the point at which he goes mad from the humiliation and abuse he has suffered at the hands of Hartman as well as the other recruits. Leonard ultimately snaps when Joker shows his first sign of corruption: after befriending Leonard and helping to educate him, Joker ultimately takes part in a ritualistic beating of Leonard after he and the other recruits are punished for Leonard's transgressions. At this point, the story moves into its third act, in which Leonard takes revenge on the bullying Sgt. Hartman, whose last words are more unrepentant bullying: "What is your major malfunction? Did your Mommy and Daddy not give you adequate love when you were young?" Ultimately, though, Leonard forgives Joker and spares his life before taking his own.

The title of the film comes from this first half, in a soliloquy Leonard gives for his rifle, which represents to him a part of cleanliness and order in the "world of shit" in which he exists. This basically sums up the theme of the film, which is also indicated in its two-part structure: no matter how disciplined and structured a warrior's training and weapons may be, the war itself is still chaos. This chaos runs rampant in the second half of the film, in which Joker finds himself in the midst of combat, at first as an outside observer reporting what he sees, but ultimately having no option but to participate in the violence all nearby him. Like Apocalypse Now's Willard, Joker is somewhat on the fringes of combat, but still deeply effected and corrupted by it; while Willard is a hired killer working outside the main friction of the Vietnam War, Joker is in the midst of this friction but, in the beginning at least, does not participate in any killing.

Both films touch on a field that is mostly avoided or neglected in war films: that of sexuality in wartime. in the middle of Apocalypse Now's aborted Playboy Bunny visit early on in the film and Full Metal Jacket's Vietnamese prostitutes in the second half, both films eloquently elaborate the assertion so eloquently voiced in Chris Hedges's 2002 memoir of wartime journalism, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, that "there is in wartime a nearly universal preoccupation with sexual liaisons." The undercurrent of rape and coercion present in both cases points toward the moral ambiguity of this type of sexuality, which, by extension, shows the questionable morality of war itself.

This ambiguity is also seen in the journeys undertaken by the central characters of each film. In Full Metal Jacket's second story, Joker is given a mission by his commanding officer, Lt. Lockhart (John Terry), which leads him into the heart of darkness, where he faces the greatest corruption of his own heart (a microcosm for humanity as a whole) when he kills a young female sniper (Ngoc Le) at the end of the film. Like Willard's assassination of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, this killing is an act of obligation, but both occupy the morally uneasy ground of vengeance; Kurtz's assassination is a cold, detached act of forces revenge, while Joker's platoon collectively kills the sniper in a more heated, personal retaliation for her murder of their fellow soldiers. These differing perspectives are reflected in the tone of each film: Full Metal Jacket is a more visceral and real palpate than the highly stylized Apocalypse Now.

Full Metal Jacket ends as it begins, with Kubrick's impeccably acceptable musical cues. The diegetic singing of the "Mickey Mouse Club Theme" by the platoon in the film's final shot brings the coming-of-age full circle, and the Rolling Stones's "Paint It Black" over the end due perfectly mirrors Joker's conclusion narration: "I am in a world of shit, but I am alive, and I am not afraid." He has clearly reached the heart of darkness; the only remaining ambiguity is Whether his lack of fear is a follow of his succumbing to the madness of war.

To this day, wars continue to inspire films of varying quality. As long as the world continues to be colored in shades of gray, rather than black and white, the most thriving art will all the time reflect this with a degree of moral ambiguity. Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket have paved the way, and it is to be hoped that future artists will find it, though it is doubtful that any can surpass the artistry of these two great films.

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