The Left and the Heart of Darkness

Vincenzo 2022-03-22 09:01:02

Because Coppola intends to tell a story from a dark center, this is not a story of the Vietnam War. The intertextual effect the director wants to achieve is that, compared with the colonial activities of the Great Britain’s Sunless Empire in the Congo in the nineteenth century, the American war in Vietnam is exactly the same as the old imperialist colonial nature. Conrad’s "The Center of Darkness" In ", the British Kutz abandoned the so-called "civilization" during the colonization of the Congo, voluntarily demoted to a "barbarian", and was regarded as a god by the indigenous people, while the United States, a young country that claims to have no historical haze of imperialism, is still affected by it. Evil blood in the hands. Therefore, the anti-Vietnam War only became a young career in the United States in the 1960s. Just like the confused generation during the First World War, the younger generation dreamed of the mission of patriotism, but in the end discovered that they were accomplices to imperialism, so this country began to bear the original sin, and the United States was no longer a pure Garden of Eden. People no longer turn a blind eye to the original sin committed against the Indians). So Hemingway and Fitzgerald returned to Europe, gathered in France, and re-experienced the exquisite old world in various salons in Paris. The young people during the Vietnam War also found that the call of government patriotism was also the soul of the remnants of imperialism. So disillusioned and rebellious. This time their gaze is still Paris, which is a more intense "May Storm." The students there even took Chairman Mao's quotations to fight the government and the army fiercely.
If "Forrest Gump" is an American right-wing propaganda film, because it indeed still promotes America's justice, honor and unquestionable tradition, while "Apocalypse Now" is the reproduction of the global left turn in the 1960s. It Radical and adolescent hormones criticize the old system that it thinks is rotten, but this is not the real Vietnam War, it is the Vietnam War under the ideology, this is understandable, who can transcend ideology to obtain a zero-degree perspective?

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Apocalypse Now quotes

  • Kurtz: Have you ever considered any real freedoms? Freedoms from the opinion of others... even the opinions of yourself?

  • Colonel Lucas: Your report specifies intelligence/counterintelligence with ComSec I-Corps.

    Willard: I'm not presently disposed to discuss these operations, sir.

    Colonel Lucas: Did you not work for the CIA in I-Corps?

    Willard: No, sir.

    Colonel Lucas: Did you not assassinate a government tax collector in Quang Tri province, June 19th, 1968? Captain?

    Willard: Sir, I am unaware of any such activity or operation... nor would I be disposed to discuss such an operation if it did in fact exist, sir.