"Manson specter stalks 'Apocalypse Redux'"

("Apocalypse Now: The Complete Dossier" was released on DVD this past August. This story originally appeared in The Denver Post in August, 2001, when "Apocalypse Now Redux" was released.)

By Steven Rosen

"Apocalypse Now." "Helter Skelter."

Two key phrases of American popular culture and social history. Two key shorthand-summaries for the violence and alienation, scars and wounds, of the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet I had never connected the two so viscerally until my recent viewing of "Apocalypse Now Redux," Francis Ford Coppola's newly edited (with 49 minutes of additional footage) version of his 1979 classic about the Vietnam War. This is a movie that never will become "Apocalypse Then."

With time and distance, it takes on new meanings. Or, rather, we see additional layers of meaning that weren't at first visible to us. For instance, while it would be foolish not to acknowledge "Apocalypse Now" as a movie about Vietnan, it also uses the war as a metaphor for our own domestic upheaval. Specifically, for the country's dark side that emerged in the late 1960s. A dark side, some say, that only has gotten darker with time and events like the Oklahoma City bombing and Columbine.

When you see the words "Apocalypse Now" scrawled along a wall in renegade Col. Kurtz's overgrown Cambodian jungle-temple compound, the connection to another famous written phrase is immediate. "Helter Skelter" was smeared (and misspelled) in blood on the home refrigerator of murdered victims of Charles Manson's cult in August,1969. Manson, the hippie who went bad, idolized the Beatles and especially their song "Helter Skelter." It seems Coppola meant for us to see that Manson connection.

Watching the original (not "Redux") "Apocalypse Now" now, it's surprising how few specific references it has to the current events of its story's time period. It basically unfolds in its own hallucinogenic, surreal world - Vietnam as a kind of hellishly beautiful Middle Earth.

But the most overtly specific reference to the home front occurs on the naval patrol boat ferrying Capt. Willard (Martin Sheen) toward Kurtz, when Chef (Frederic Forrest) opens a letter from home and finds a newspaper clipping about Manson's arrest: "Charles Miller Manson ordered the slaughter of everyone in the home as a symbol of protest,"' Chef reads, looking at his chilling photo. And he adds, "That's really weird, ain't it?"

Another connection to Manson, although not so direct, is the film's use of music. "Apocalypse Now's" unofficial theme song is "The End," The Doors' mournfully hypnotic, Oedipal ode to familial destruction. The song choice is particularly appropriate for those who see the evil acts of Manson's so-called "family" as the death of the 1960s - a proposition often put forth by cultural critics. One other Manson parallel is Kurtz's babbling, wayward-hippie acolyte, a photojournalist played by Dennis Hopper.

When "Apocalypse Now" first was released, after long delays in completion, I saw it as "getting the war right." Although I hadn't been there, it seemed true to what I had watched on TV news reports at the time. The film felt utterly naturalistic, depicting the way an unpopular war was fought by reluctant, counterculture-influenced soldiers.

This was most evident in its portrayal of the youthfully hip and rebellious crew aboard the boat shepherding Willard. Lance (Sam Bottoms) was a surfer boy; Clean (Laurence Fishburne) a child of 1960s ghettos; Chef was, well, from New Orleans, the coolest city in America. Their commander, known as Chief, was a wary and protective black man who seemed to have survival - not victory - on his mind. (Albert Hall's performance as Chief, especially cradling the slain Clean, today holds up as one of "Apocalypse Now's" very best.)

By contrast, Marlon Brando's weirdly charismatic presence as Kurtz (and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's piercingly intimate close-ups of his shaved head) kept up flagging interest in a final sequence that seemed to lose convincing narrative thrust. Kurtz was obviously more of a metaphoric character than a naturalistic one, it seemed then. He was a product of Coppola and co-writer John Milius' attempt to shoehorn Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" into a movie that didn't need it. It was memorable, but less satisfying than what had preceded it.

But my perception has changed. All of "Apocalypse Now" now seems metaphoric - and the Kurtz scenes play better than ever.

Many people remember "Apocalypse Now" as an utterly realistic war film, a documentary-style look at Vietnam. Yet in Peter Cowie's new "The Apocalypse Now Book," journalist Michael Herr - who wrote Willard's pessimistically melancholy narration - is quoted as saying, "It's not really a naturalistic film. It's very expressionistic, very operatic."

Even though direct American involvement in the war had ended in 1972, and the North Vietnamese had captured Saigon in 1975, it didn't really seem over by 1979. The country was still involved in anguishing over its war-related conduct - toward the soldiers who fought in it, the protesters who resisted it, the Vietnamese and Cambodians who died or had to escape their homelands because of it.

That's why "Apocalypse Now" seemed so true at the time. Also, it seemed about Vietnam exclusively, whereas the major Vietnam films preceding it, "Coming Home" and "The Deer Hunter," seemed more about the war's impact on domestic life.

But with the opportunity that "Redux" gives us for re-evaluation, the film's much-vaunted realism can be questioned. The war couldn't have been consistently, continually fought the way the patrol-boat crew (and thus us) experiences it.

For instance, the entire sequence in which Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) coerces Lance into surfing during a military attack almost certainly wasn't typical conduct of officers. But it is symbolic, in a 1960s way, of "troubled waters." Now Kilgore, played so struttingly by the brilliant Duvall, has a certain "Dr. Strangelove" quality.

Similarly, the famously riotous nighttime USO appearance by Playboy playmates, scored to Hendrix-like guitar licks and ending with them escaping by helicopter as soldiers grasp the machine, seems a parallel to the domestic rock-festival experiences of 1969 - Woodstock and Altamont combined. The appearance of rock-concert promoter Bill Graham in this sequence underscores the connection.

And the druggy, frightening battle at Do Lung Bridge, where leaderless black soldiers fire artillery into the darkness, is representative of what Vietnam meant to the generation fighting it - a "bridge too far" in Cold War militarism. It's also a blunt statement on this country's then-growing racial divide.

"Apocalypse Now" does, of course, sometimes remind us all too well of the war. The riot also recalls the chaotic fall of Saigon. And Chief's bungled inspection of a sampan, and the resultant massacre of its occupants, connects to recent revelations about former Sen. Bob Kerry's war activities.

But putting it all together, the entire boat journey has a strong metaphysical quality I never noticed in 1979. It was a trip toward trying to answer why the war was being lost - there was too much going on in American culture to want to die.

And it all led to ... Charles Manson?

I'm not alone in connecting "Apocalypse Now" to Manson. At the 1994 Southwest Music + Media Conference in Austin, I attended a seminar called "Helter Skelter," about Manson's impact on rock "n' roll. (A relatively unknown Marilyn Manson was one of the panelists.)

While music was the topic, and the way young people flirted with "Mansonmania" to look anti-establishment, "Apocalypse Now" had a peripheral presence. People spoke of a Manson T-shirt with him behind prison bars on the front and the "Apocalypse Now"-derived phrase "Charlie Don't Surf" on the back. Another had Manson's face with an "Apocalypse Now" slogan.

Now, more than ever, you can wonder whether Manson and not Conrad's literary creation was the source for "Apocalypse Now's" Kurtz. And if so, what then is "the horror?" Himself, or the rot - including the war - surrounding him?