#30 ‘Apocalypse Now’
Sweat, Madness, and the Erotic Power of White Male Breakdown
Apocalypse Now (1979) is Francis Ford Coppola’s hallucinatory descent into the heart of darkness—by which, of course, we mean the sweaty inner monologue of a brooding white man staring at other people’s suffering and calling it enlightenment. Ostensibly a Vietnam War film, it’s really just a jungle opera of masculine unraveling, where bombs explode, ethics disintegrate, and the women are either dead, naked, or French.
Martin Sheen plays Captain Willard, a haunted assassin sent to terminate—with extreme prejudice—one Colonel Kurtz, a rogue officer who’s gone full Nietzsche in the jungle. Willard drinks, broods, and voiceovers his way down the river, passing through increasingly absurd vignettes of military lunacy. Each stop is a fever dream of testosterone, war crimes, and cultural erasure—because nothing says “anti-war” like turning Southeast Asia into your personal acid trip set design.
Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando in a mumbling fog of colonial regret and ego worship, is the film’s final boss—a bald, sweaty whisperer in the dark who reads T.S. Eliot and murders people for vaguely poetic reasons. He’s presented not as a villain, but as an oracle. The horror, indeed.
The Vietnamese? Barely present, mostly silent, or dead. The Cambodians? Props in Kurtz’s god-fantasy. Women? Let’s count: there are some Playboy bunnies airlifted in for the boys’ pleasure and promptly forgotten, a French plantation widow who exists to provide some tragic colonial eye candy, and an anonymous Vietnamese woman who is shot in the gut so Willard can look sad. That’s it. That’s the female presence in this three-hour war epic about moral decay: breasts, ghosts, and bullet wounds.
The film pretends to be about the madness of war, but it’s really about the aestheticization of it. Coppola doesn’t condemn the violence—he renders it operatic. Flaming jungles to Wagner. Surfing during a bombing run. Severed heads as home décor. It’s not a critique—it’s a vibe. An orgy of masculine crisis framed as profundity. Willard isn’t just witnessing war, he’s discovering himself through it. How brave. How boring.
Yes, the cinematography is ravishing. Yes, the sound design is immersive. And yes, it’s a landmark of 20th-century cinema. But it’s also a textbook case of white male storytelling: other cultures used as metaphors, other people’s trauma mined for aesthetic intensity, and women reduced to punctuation marks in a soliloquy about the cost of man’s soul.
3 out of 5 napalm sunrises
(One for Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography. One for the sound of the helicopters. One for the sheer, absurd ambition. The rest drowned somewhere in the Mekong, weighed down by Brando’s ego and a thousand pounds of colonial self-pity.)
