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.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S30W10BixDg[/youtube]
A guy getting told he’s going to kill someone. (1:00)
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.
“Heavy is good, heavy is reliable… if it doesn’t work you can always hit him with it.”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8XaVWAsT9A[/youtube]
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.
What else do you like, that is somewhat in the same vein?
From Snatch -
[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 -
Faust - I just realized that it is irrational to ask for something in the same vein as the very best. But I cannot locate this quote on te internet.
“A man who’s been trained to ignore pain, ignore weather, to live off the land, to eat things that would make a billy goat puke.”
This made me laugh. It is not quite the typical hailing of an invincible soldier.
The film as a a whole is almost the anti-Apocalypse Now. Now poetry, no myth, no one chewing the scenery. Moves along well. I like this picture.
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?
The Public and Its Problems (John Dewey)
The ten divisions Kurtz spoke of constituted the enemies that American soldiers were fighting. They were men fully capable of chopping off the arms of young children that had been vaccinated against a horrific disease.
“The Horror! The Horror!” revolves precisely around acknowledging how we live in a world where such an events can occur at all. One can easily imagine it being “based on a true story”.
But the bottom line remains: The soldiers can be used to achieve any particular end. They are merely the most effective means of achieving it. Why? Well, in this case, because [unlike the American G.I.s], they are disciplined and committed.
As Captain Willard notes while watching the ludicrous USO/Playboy bunny fiasco, “Charlie had only two ways home, victory…or death”.
But does that make their cause [Communism] more noble? more virtuous?
iambiguous:
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.
True, but I did not see Col. Kurtz’s own “methodless” nihilism as any more palatable than the policies “the clowns who ran the circus” back in Saigon and Washington pursued. Again, the horror [for me] is always embedded in the realization that “Vietnams” keep rearing their ugly heads over and again throughout the historical evolution of “human condition”. At any given time, there are dozens of them [large and small] infolding in the morning headlines.
There were no “heroes” to be found in the film—anywhere. And Coppola’s take never delved into the military industrial complex. Instead, it was rooted more in Joseph Conrad’s novella Hearts of Darkness. And while Conrad explored the at times brtutal role of European capitalism/colonialism in Africa, most folks tend to focus on the third theme: the “darkness” that haunts the soul of man, enabling him to do all manner of terrible things.
And while the “will-to-power” explains it in part, capitalism surely offers it a fertile ground in which to sprout all manner of historical monsters. Some even rationalizing their deeds by way of “the virtue of selfishness”.
Of course I had to go look this up, you have without a doubt read much more than I have. I realize that raiding quotes from wikipedia is only preferable to remaining ignorant in case of a properly representative wikipedia entry. He seems like a very rational man. This was a pleasure to read:
What a great insight!
My philosophical “lineage” is Hume, Nietzsche, Dewey, Russel and Ayer. I don’t always include Dewey on this list, because he seems to be little read, especially outside the US.