Apocalypse Now

In Apocalypse Now, it is within this opening scene that we can clearly see that Director Frank Coppola is drawing upon televisions role within the war to bring his audience into the reality of his picture. By having this camera crew invade his cinematic space Coppola was able to deliberately break the 4th wall convention of cinema and erase the boundary between his screens fiction and his audience's reality. By fracturing his audience's distinction between fiction and reality Coppola pulls his audience into his picture, no longer are they at a critical distant from the atrocities on screen they are now reminded that all the events they will see on this screen have reels of real life footage stocked away in news archives across the world. This film evokes the memory that this war was real, that these events actually happened, it invites its audience to feel apart of that reality and therefore could be remembered for its graphic depiction of the wars realism. Citation to consider when writing a research paper: In Coppola's words "My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam, It is Vietnam." Yet many would argue that this film should not be considered as a realistic medium used to remember the past, as throughout the 1970's Hollywood Viet Nam films have simply been "a rape of history" produced only to create a glorified product that could be marketed to the masses. It is true that Coppola does glorify the spectacle of war within this film by including scenes focused on the alluring elements of 1970's popular culture, like dancing showgirls, glittering technologies of war, retro music, drugs, drink and surfing. It glorified what it may have been like to live within that world of youth and combat.

Whilst this glamorization of war may not have been a realistic portrayal of the conditions experienced by soldiers who fought the war, apparently, it was a way for Coppola to "subordinated codes of realism in order to depict the war metaphorically and finds its larger meaning"; Coppola juxtaposed these familiar scenes of glamorized nostalgia with later scenes of blood, lust, confusion and rage in order to create the notion that these young soldiers where simply not mentally prepared to fight in a terrain of alienation and unfamiliarity. There only escape from the atrocities that engulfed them was through a retraction back to the elements of popular culture that comforted them and gave them an identity. Quite likely, Apocalypse Now will be remembered as film that stripped away the American identity down to its commodified core and exposed the true nature of a war that was fought without unity or direction among a group of individual boys drafted in to fight in a world they did not know and for reasons they did not understand. A custom essay should emphasize that through the darkness and deprivation of many of Coppola's scenes it is clear that he wanted to tap into social fears over the American psyche after the atrocities of My Lai massacre and the photographic mediums that exposed the true evils of the American war effort. People needed answers to why and how their nation of perceived civilization could rape, murder and kill innocent people in the name of their own personal freedom. Although Apocalypse Now provides no clear answers, Coppola's epic film does invite its audience to remember the truly dark and psychologically damaging effects of the war.