The Uncanny "Method" in the Madness

Apocalypse Now has been interpreted as addressing the Vietnam War in a similarly mythological and hence ahis¬torical way as the high modernist poetry recited by Colonel Kurtz. The closer, post-colonial view of this paper in the German language, however, shows that the 2001 “Redux-“ version of Coppola’s film questions the imperialist US sys¬tem on several levels. By mockery it subverts the ide¬ology of free-trade underlying the confrontation between the super powers in the Cold War and the Vietnam War itself. Also, the movie’s technique of montage fundamen¬tally questions the author¬ity of the military apparatus and exposes the un¬tenable nature of Willard’s killing mission. The visit of the Captain’s boat crew in the French colony serves to further outline the extent to which the doomed imperial war project is grafted – as a palimpsest – on the equally outdated re¬mains of the French colonial past. As a conse¬quence both forms of intervention are cinemato¬graphically dele¬gitimized, especially by means of uncanny props exposing the de¬gree to which they are haunted by the contradictions between ide¬ological justification, US-historical genocidal past – in the case of the Vietnam War – and a belligerent present oper¬ating also by means of arbitrarily constructed alterity.

This makes obvious Redux’s practice of – in Edward Said’s termi-no¬logy – establishing ”anti-imperialist re¬sistance” against the US warfare. One of the movie’s key strategies to expose the inhumane moral universe of the war theatre is Kurtz’s ”method” of making Willard – and the viewers of the movie – experience the large-scale massa¬cre in a lavish, synesthetic total work of art in¬spired by Stanislavski’s ident¬ifi¬catory “method acting” and Ri¬chard Wagner. This didactic “Gesamtkunstwerk” also makes use of further cin¬ematogra¬phic adaptations of uncanny ele¬ments – ac-cording to Sig¬mund Freud – and strategically mobilizes a displaced version of mimicry.