The GOOD, BAD, and the UGLY

Part 3

 

 

 

I recently watched Apocalypse Now Redux, years after seeing the original version, and it wasn't only the inserted scenes which enabled me to view the film differently, but my own personal views regarding character conflict and drama.

I ask the following:

Who was the villain in Apocalypse Now?

Perhaps others more intelligent than I have long understood the story in the film as I have recently come to understand it, so feel free to consider this either new views or old news.

Who was the villain in Apocalypse Now?

The answer to this question, as I see it, is what makes that movie a masterpiece of human drama.

Who was the villain in Apocalypse Now?
I said the following in my intro in The Good the Bad and the Ugly Part 1:

“The ultimate villain is the act of War itself. It turns good people on both sides into necessary killers, and depending on which side you're advancing from, it makes the other side evil from your perspective. It causes suffering among the combatants as well as the innocent noncombatants, and in many cases it haunts and pains the survivors for the rest of their lives. War simply is, by its very concept, the ultimate villain."

But that is not the point I'm getting at, though it is certainly connected. There is certainly a cause and effect in that quote's relation to the film, but it is not the answer I am seeking.

Captain Benjamin Willard was sent on a mission to kill the renegade Colonel Kurtz, and along the long journey up the river (or was it down?) he and the gunboat crew witnessed, engaged in, suffered through, and caused, some of the horrors of war. War is the ultimate villain after all, but that is not the answer I am seeking to bring out.

Who was the villain in Apocalypse Now then? When Willard finally moved himself to fulfill his mission and go home, when he entered the living space of Walter Kurtz, when he raised the sword over his head before Kurtz and swung it down on his target, who was he really trying to kill?

What bothered Willard most is that he began, through his journey up the hellish war torn river, to understand Kurts, even to see himself in his place. He was trying to kill the side of himself that he saw in Kurts, his own potential to become Kurtz after the changes he endured through the war and his river journey. The river was shaped by the war, just as the men involved were shaped by it. But the point I was making was that in this example the villain was what Willard had become, what Kurtz had become, what Willard saw in Kurts that he realized was in himself at that point.

I see it as cause and effect, a causality loop.

Kurts and Willard were shaped by the war...
Willard wanted to kill in himself what he saw in Kurts...
Willard wanted to kill in Kurts what he saw in himself...
Kurts and Willard were both shaped by the horrors of the war...
Willard was affected by the events on the river, the horrors...
The horrors of the river were the effect of the war...
The war was shaped by men like Kurtz and Willard...

If you note the first and the last point, they are the same.
War makes men like Kurts and Willard; men like Kurtz and Willard make wars.