Are you being serious? I have not seen this film, I have always avoided it with some zeal. Should I reconsider?
I do remember getting quite involved, but I remember no specifics. Is there any line in particular that stands out?
For me the best delivered line for that film is: “It’s okay, I wouldn’t remember me either”. I still want to say that to someone, if the occasion presents itself.
That’s exactly what they are meant to do, and do all the time, I would say. Film is in a sense a continuation of the art of rhetorics. To place a perspective in a context, so as to make it believable and acceptable, to an audience that is at first uninvested. This very effective scene is a good example of how you can make any issue seem like the world is at stake.
Yes, FC, I am serious. The movie is a very good but not great action/thriller type. Crenna just eats this speech for lunch, though. A little bit comic-book character, but that what i like about it.
What’s well delivered is the fear, rather than the striking of it. (Although if you haven’t seen this movie watch it — it completely trumps morality, extremely Hegelian, positing determination (absolute spirit) as culminating from slavery through suffering and suffering overcome, to pride and then victory. This order of things, this is the genius.
I get the impression that it’s the position of the American writers guild, that this is the first American in French – but in being this, it surpasses the American film. Nothing is added, but one thing subtracted: prefabricated morality. A morality is being built up.
It was never really established in the film that Colonel Kurtz was even sane. To wit:
[b]Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.[/b]
There are always value judgments. It is only a question of jamming all the conflicting ones together and coming up with the least dysfunctional behaviors. But this can never be more than a point of view. Kurtz’s own included folks dangling from trees and decapitated heads strewn about everywhere.
The moral narrative I impose on Vietnam revolves around political economy and the assumption that those who prosecuted the conflict were less interested in democracy and human rights for the South Vietnamese and more concerned with preventing the falling Commie dominos from taking more and more cheap labor, natural resources and markets from the folks who owned and operated Wall Street and Washington D.C.
Morality “out in the world” has far more to do with the whims and the wherewithal of wealth and power than with the carefully calibrated philosophical propositions we get from folks like Aristotle and Kant.
Virtue? That’s always been for sale. It’s just that some folks want to rationalize things bought and sold as Virtue.
On second thought, I think that it precisely does address this - ! perhaps the line as it is written does not, but the delivery is too convincing to take lightly. I find it the most frightening part of the entire play of perspectives.
Yes, you’re right. Beautifully written.
But what do you think that was he doing there in the first place? What might he have thought, on his way over, possibly on a similar boat-ride?
In Vietnam the military industrial complex came to light. From what I gather (in large part through film) is that this was the death-blow to American morality, from which it is now properly beginning to suffer. And meanwhile, “communism” (statist dictatorship) is triumphing all over the world.
In a word: will-to-power.
Yes, that is true of course, and it has always been. The truth wears a friendly mask.
[size=85]"Brick Top: You’re always gonna have problems lifting a body in one piece. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together.
Sol: Would someone mind telling me, who are you?
Brick Top: And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it’s no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies’ digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don’t want to go sievin’ through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, “as greedy as a pig.” [/size]
But this raises a question. If pigs like to eat humans, and humans like to eat pigs -
I will watch it. I have perhaps an unusual question for you: if we take “Apocalypse Now” to be the film equivalent of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (in terms of chewing the scenery), what might be considered the “First Blood” of philosophy?