Concluding Post: Down the Memory Lane
Do you have to apologize for events that you did not cause?
Can you claim you knew what happened?
Can you talk on behalf of those who have deceased?
How do you remember? Or, would you rather forget?
Writing this post is difficult. Eight posts into Apocalypse Now, I still cannot claim what stories we should tell. The premise of this blog has been to uncover the voices that were missing – those of the Vietnamese in Apocalypse Now or of the natives in Heart of Darkness, the novel on which the movie was loosely based. As I wrote in the comparison posts of the two mediums (here and here), I could find very little narrative coming from the natives. Granted that as a movie, Apocalypse Now has limited space to feature several plot lines, when compared to slightly more freedom for sideway descriptions in the case of the book. Even in Heart of Darkness, however, there were not many scenes when the natives did more than crawling or babbling. The Vietnamese has an even more limited role in Apocalypse Now. The story rests in Captain Willard’s silent struggle with post-traumatic disorder, in the sight of napalm swallowing trees and people, in Lance‘s firing frantically into a fishing boat, and in Kurtz’s recall of the ruthlessness of the Viet Cong. We never learned about what the Vietnamese might have thought, as they watched their loved ones and belongings burn down. Without the other side, the narrative seems incomplete to me.
The truth is, I might not be the intended audience of Apocalypse Now when it came out in 1979. As I noted in my earlier post, this was when the Right was trying to retell the story of how Americans did not loose. That Americans were simply not brutal enough, or that Americans sided with the “softer” side, the Southern Vietnamese. If Apocalypse Now was intended for Americans, its narratives might have been complete. I realized this more than ever in my conversations with my friend, someone who only learned about the war in a chapter in his history textbook, and his grandfather, who served in the Air Force right after World War II. To my friend, the war in Apocalypse Now was the backdrop to feature dehumanization and what came out of it. As such, the movie could have been about any war, and its message would still have stayed the same. To his grandfather, the war was a justified cause. When I asked his grandfather his opinion about the war, he said he did not have one. “If the government thinks it is right to go to war, we go to war.” Someone in the room reminded him that Americans lost 58,000 men, but two millions Vietnamese from the North and South lost their lives, and as many as 400,000 boat people died at sea when they tried to migrate. He did not respond.
If we base our stories and interpretations on our prior experiences, none of our reading of the movie is wrong. This is a topic we discussed at length in class – how narratives target certain audience and build on experiences. My friend’s grandfather, as a member of the Great Generations, is proud of America and its exceptionalism. My friend is as curious to learn about the war as I am, to see what we could have done differently. I cannot claim that my interpretation is better than theirs, because I also did not really experience what happened.
However, narratives do not bound us to rigid beliefs; they could open up the opportunities to question the untold stories. “A story happens when someone walks out of town and someone else walks into town”. It is from questioning what triggered the action that a new narrative emerges. Reducing the story to “a war narrative” in subsequent productions in other genres—including a fantasy series and a Sci-Fi—eliminates the opportunities to dig deeper into the Apocalypse Now storyworld beyond its surface-level messages. It is in this aspect that I consider the storyworld project a success, because as much as it prompted me to explore my own assumptions as a Vietnamese, it also caused me to interact with the other narratives, even when they were uncomfortable.
You learn about the other narratives not to become apologetic or accusatory. Rather, you acknowledge these stories to not repeat the same regrets.
What Was Left Behind? – The Narratives that Transcend
What is in the Vietnamese movies from the same period with Apocalypse Now? There is The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone (1979), a film by the North Vietnam. The film shares a surprisingly similar setting with Apocalypse Now, featuring the life under helicopter bombs in the Mekong Delta. The landscape, albeit mostly taking place within the scope of the abandoned field, reaches from under the water to the sky edges as American helicopters were firing. The film focuses on the day-to-day interaction in a family of three: husband, wife, and their child in a small shack in the middle of the water. The film is not free from bias. The American troops, if seen, are most often drunk and shooting at random. When a helicopter shoots the husband, however, the wife revenges by shooting the helicopter down. The most notable scene is when the film with a photograph falling from the shot pilot’s chest. In the photo are his wife and child. Yes – the pilot is an American. Yes – he just killed a Vietnamese and got killed. But he is also a human pulled into war.
Helicopters in the sky, water meadow underneath, does that seem familiar? (Picture: Poster of The Abandoned Field)
I cannot claim to have uncovered the hidden voices if I only mentioned films by the North Vietnam. Regrettably, since most of the movies by the South Vietnam were banned from screening, I did not know of any growing up. One movie that I know of from the 1970s is an anti-war film named The Land of Sorrows (1973). The movie features a family who could not flee the war in Central Vietnam during the Tet Offensive of 1968. There was internal conflict, as members in the family—an anti-war son, a captain on the South Vietnam side, a sister about to marry someone who is neutral in the war, and another brother who has just been drafted—walk the line between patriotic and familial values. Mixed in with the main narrative are real footages of people fleeing from the battle, including scenes of dead civilians and children. Rather than fighting back, the middle son, a singer who opposed the war, sang amidst armored cars:
When peace returns to our country
I shall visit many sad cemeteries
And tombs covered with grass
When killing ends in our country
Then children will sing on the roads
When peace returns to our country
I shall be continuously on the road
From Saigon to the centre
From Hanoi towards the south
I shall share everyone’s happiness
And I hope to forget the history of my country
Taking on the antiwar lens, The Land of Sorrows is a far cry from the rather propagandistic The Abandoned Field. In fact, I would not have heard about The Land of Sorrows had it not been for this project, because the movie was banned from screening in Vietnam. When we zoom in on the civilian losses in the two movies, however, their sufferings are not that different no matter which sides of the war they were on. These are the lives that Apocalypse Now does not include.
Recall Captain Willard’s voice recollection in Apocalypse Now’s opening:
It was no accident that I got to be the caretaker of Colonel Walter E. Kurtz’s memory, any more than being back in Sai Gon was an accident. There is no way to tell his story without telling my own. And if his story is really a confession, then so is mine. (Apocalypse Now, 00:09:47)
Just as Willard carries onward Kurtz’s memories to remind himself of his own version of Vietnam, no war story should stand alone. This project has been an opportunity to connect the themes of Apocalypse Now with the narratives about the Vietnam War in other works, from a Southern Vietnamese movie to a documentary (Ken Burns’ Vietnam War, which I wrote about earlier). In the beginning of the documentary Vietnam War, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger suggested that America needed to “heal the wounds and put Vietnam behind us.” Similarly, what happened in the war, as seen in Apocalypse Now, were only chapters along a river in an unknown land that Willard might have left behind. That is not an option for reconciliation. At the end of the day, there were losses on both sides. I saw my dad tear up when he talked about his emotions upon watching the Vietnam War documentary series and Apocalypse Now. He talked about the soldiers from his platoon who could not make it for the first time, something we never did when I was at home. Only when you approach “the wounds” with respect and openness to the untold stories can you really heal.
I will leave you with these questions.
Do you have to apologize for events that you did not cause?
Can you claim you knew what happened?
Can you talk on behalf of those who have deceased?
How do you remember? Or, would you rather forget?
Rosenburg, Alyssa. What Ken Burns Wants You to Remember. The Washington Post, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2017/09/29/the-american-war-youve-watched-all-18-hours-of-the-vietnam-war-heres-what-ken-burns-wants-you-to-remember/?utm_term=.e4b27e4cd66b
Spector. The Vietnam War. Encyclopedia Britanica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Vietnam-War
Trueman. "Vietnamese Boat People". The History Learning Site, 2015.
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/vietnam-war/vietnamese-boat-people/
(1) Thank you, Jason, for suggesting me to include the Vietnamese films and compare the narratives. If you are curious, you can watch the two movies here, The Land of Sorrows and The Abandoned Field: Free Fire Zone.
(2) Eighteen hours into the other narratives — the 10 episodes of The Vietnam War, by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick can be watched here.
(3) In the beginning of the class, I mentioned looking at the physical remnants of Apocalypse Now based on the documentary about the making of the film. What I meant by physical remnants was the legacy of the places where the film took place. For example, the residents of Baler, the fishing village in Northern Philippines where the movie was actually filmed, took up surfing because of the surfing scene in the movie. Or how the filmmakers started widespread child prostitution in the villages they came to, years after they left. While those are also interesting hidden narratives, if I were to write this blog again, I would still stick to the war narrative, particularly the natives’ voices, as it allows me to bring the film close to home.
