I've heard it said that Apocalypse Now loves war and as insane as that once sounded to me, I can actually understand such an interpretation now.  Few films wrap their arms around the pure insanity and hypocrisies of war, embracing its paradoxes so entirely and looking the beast directly in the eyes.  The connection to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness cannot be overstated, but I find Coppola’s vision of the perversions of imperialism to be far more disturbing and haunting in its juxtapositions of an American sense of privilege and cultural superiority and the primordial chaos of the Vietnamese and Cambodian jungles.  I am instantly struck by its unique strangeness, using Sheen’s Willard as the viewer’s silent surrogate whose gaze is distanced, almost completely removed, from the experience of the war.

The entire Lieutenant Kilgore sequence in the first act is masterfully self-reflexive, presenting the cinematic representation of war as a similarly fictional construct as the equally constructed realities that Kilgore creates for and with his men and Imperialism itself creates within the countries it supplants.  The camera crew on the beach, the soldiers surfing amidst the dropping bombs and the famed “Ride of the Valkyries” sequence could all easily be seen as aggrandizing, even celebrating, the madness of war if they were not so perfectly aligned with Conrad and Coppola’s representation of the deformed hybrid that is born of notions of cultural and moral superiority that are put into place through the most violent and barbaric means necessary.  For Coppola, war is by its very nature an unending series of contradictions that slowly but inevitably unearth the darkness within man, but what fascinates about the film is the representation of the resulting hyper-reality that is gradually revealed as the PBR Street Gang heads down the river, not only to the heart of darkness, but to the ultimate paradox of war and absurd contradictions of civilization.

What lurks in the jungle is not barbarism or primitive madness, but a part of mankind’s nature that the forces in power are constantly striving to cover up and make us forget.  The USO Tour sequence is particularly brilliant in its irony – presenting itself as a, obviously false and somewhat twisted, reminder of home, civilization, yet it does little more than play to the same primal instincts and emotions that the Army finds so terrifying and threatening in Kurtz and the natives.  It is surreal not only because it is out of time and place, but also the juxtaposition of the false allure of glamour and an environment that represents its true intentions.  The theme of transforming everything into a show runs throughout the film, a distinctly American way of distancing themselves from the true nature of their exploits (a distance found even until the very end; for example, Hicks’ line about the savagery of the natives guarding Kurtz’s hideout ignores that he and the other men have committed similarly atrocious acts).  These feelings of inherent supremacy simply mask the fact that the arrogant implementation of a policy of cultural theft relies on the same basal instincts (aggression, fear, violence) played out in ritualistic form.  The horror is not as much the darkness that lies within man as the atrocities he leaves behind through his arrogance, hypocrisy and cruelty.