Today was some pretty disturbing stuff as we go further down the river with Willard and the gang. We've come a long way from Willard comically stealing Kilgore's surf board and the sound of Kilgore himself pleading for Lance to return the board. As we said in class today, the selling of the playmates was not in the original: nor was the scene above, the French plantation scene. Perhaps they do nothing to advance the plot—in fact, one can argue they impede the plot as they slow down Willard's and our fated introduction to Kurtz. But we like them: we think they make the movie richer and more nuanced. And they are beautifully composed and shot. I know I think they help the film.
Several questions:
1. What is your reaction to the massacre of the Vietnamese on the junk?
2. What is your reaction to the crew—to Chief, Chef, Lance, and Clean? Some of you said you were unmoved by them: fair enough. But they get almost as much screen time as Willard. Coppola put them there for some reason. Interestingly enough: two black men, two white men. Two of them are members of what we call the underclass today: Chef with his eighth grade education, and Clean, who is from "some shit hole in the Bronx." Lance is a world famous surfer—who often appears to have not a thought in his head. Chief is the professional: maybe a lifer in the Navy, but he certainly is the most polished, professional, and sharpest of the crew. And he seems to almost be a father-figure to Clean. So: what do you think of each of them? And: why do you think Coppola put them and their prominence in the movie?
3. Your reaction to Wllard now? Has it changed since you wrote about him on the first day? If so—how so? If not—why not?
4. What is your reaction to the plantation scene, part of which is above? Why do you think it's in the movie?
5. Finally. After the massacre scene, there is a slow, steady fade to black: and it stays black for several seconds. When the screen comes back to light, it is on the boat in the darkness heading down the river. Your sense of why Coppola did this? Or: what was the effect of this fade and the darkness that follows it?
Again, take 20-30 minutes to write. We'll see you tomorrow.
1) It is terrible, sad, and speaks a lot about war. Although these people were innocent, with the correct documentation and making no threatening moves, they are massacred. Why? Because Clean and Lance are nervous with quick trigger fingers and because Chief has to inspect the ship, because anyone Vietnamese could be helping the enemy. It shows that war isn't just those who choose to fight it, but random citizens who get killed through miscommunication and nervous and bored soldiers.
ReplyDelete2) Chief --> I originally liked Chief. He was calm, collected and focused on the mission, but wasn't hard on the men about relaxing when they had time to. However, after the massacre scene I lost a lot of respect for him because he followed orders and the mission too closely. He orders the search and pushes Chef to do it, when it is clearly not necessary.
Chef --> I have gained more respect for Chef, and I think I like him, although not too much. He seems like a good person, who only wanted to be a Chef. He is clearly broken up by the massacre of the Vietnamese citizens. He is also talkative and personable. However, it is hard to forget how he took advantage of the playboy girls.
Lance --> I am still somewhat indifferent to Lance, although I lean towards not liking him. After the playboy incident, he became quiet and odd and even more so after the massacre. He doesn't seem to be too concerned about the death of Clean either, only looking for his puppy. I wonder if it might be because he is suffering some mental problem, becoming numb due to PTSD or something of the sort.
Clean --> I dislike Clean, but I feel sorry for him. Clean is somewhat obnoxious and tries too hard to be cool and tough, but I can't really blame him. Clean is young, drafted into a war full of death and destruction so early. I think he isn't mature and thinks of the entire thing of some kind of game at times.
I think Coppola put them into the movie to help show us human nature, especially in war. We are given our other heroes and villains (Willard and Kurtz), but they are both put in important roles and have important backgrounds. These other characters are average humans, forced into a war they didn't start. This movie is as much about humanity and wars as it is about the mission against Kurtz, and I think these characters are put in to show the watchers what war is like with regular people.
3) I'm not sure I like Willard or dislike him. Maybe something in between. He's hard to place. Willard always begins to seem like a good guy, but then does something questionable or cold that always takes away any respect he gained from me. Like the playboy bunny scene or the Massacre scene, where he tells Chief to leave them alone, but then shoots the woman, although she may not have survived.
4) It kind of confused me. The scene seemed somewhat out of place, much like the people in the plantation seemed out of place in the jungles of Vietnam. It does give a new perspective on the war and shows the leftovers of the colonialism that began to destroy the country and lead it into war, which I think is interesting, although I'm really not sure.
5) I think for two reasons. First of all, I think both the characters and the watchers need some time to process what just happened, the senseless killing of innocents. I think the incident changes both the characters and the watchers opinions of the characters for the worse and I think this is reflected by the new way they are seen, in the dark. I also think this plays around with the title of the original book. They are getting closer to the heart of the darkness, physically by getting closer to Kurtz, but also mentally, closer to the darkness of humanity.
I apologize for the short post, guys! I typed my responses before, but it erased itself.
ReplyDeleteWhat Chief's men did to the people on the goat was inhumane. I know it must happen a lot in war, and Coppola doesn't seem like the type to water things down. But Chief's men kept shooting even after it was clear that everyone was dead. And for what? A dog. Multiple lives lost because a woman was trying to hide a dog. It's sickening.
I think that Coppola wanted us to understand that soldiers are people too. Clean, Chief, Lance, and Chef all have a story. None of them asked to be here, and soldiers aren't the mindless killers following orders some of us might think they are. This idea is prominent when Clean is killed, and we hear the recording of his mother telling him to come back home safely. He had a family and and life back home waiting for him. He's a person just like we are. Lance is a surfer, Chef was an actual chef (a saucier, at that) and Chief was a naval officer. They were just people doing their jobs until they were drafted into the war. They could be any of us.
The way Willard shot that Vietmanese woman without any hesitation makes me wonder what's going on in his head. Did he do it for the good of his mission? Or to prove his point to Chief? Was it to show them who's in charge? Whatever the reason, it made me see Willard in a more negative light.
Although I'm not sure why it's in the movie in the first place, I understand why it wasn't in the original. It's not necessary for the plot to move ahead, and like Pen said, it doesn't really fit with what we've seen so far. It doesn't make sense for a French plantation to be in the middle of the Cambodian jungle. I feel like without the scene, we would've still gotten the same effect from the movie.
It definitely relates to the idea of man's "heart of darkness", after that scene I don't think anyone is thinking anything positive about Willard and his men. The blackness lasts longer than fades like that usually last between scenes, maybe so that we can think about and process what just happened. Was Willard's men did was dark (like the screen) and maybe even verging on evil.
(this got to be a bit long so #4 and 5 are in the next reply)
ReplyDelete1. The massacre of the Vietnamese on the junk symbolizes the problems of the war. First, anyone who isn’t American military is suspicious. Then, the actual target of the war’s aggression is almost ambiguous—who is bad? Is it just the communist Vietnamese or is it anyone who goes against the orders of the American military? Finally, the soldiers are so desperate to get out that they’ll do anything to prolong their own lives: the deaths of a few Vietnamese civilians or possible danger to the soldier’s lives? Their choice is clear. The violence that we see, aimed at the junk, is frighteningly random (the targets could have been any civilians), desensitized (the civilians aren’t humans, they’re possible threats), and, ultimately, apparently without cause—which no member of the crew chooses to bring up. Willard even shoots the single survivor so that the crew can continue upstream.
2. We know the back-stories of crew, but we don’t know the crew, themselves. Unlike almost every other war movie, Apocalypse Now doesn’t explain the current mentalities of the core crew. The audience only gets flashes of who the men actually are, or what they’re really thinking—Lance and the puppy or Clean and the tape with his mother’s voice. The audience is almost desensitized to the men, in the way that the men are desensitized to the Vietnamese civilians. Being able to understand someone’s psyche is to be able to exert power over him or her. If the American military can understand the communist Vietnamese, they could fight a better war. If we understand the crew, we can predict their future moves and we can manipulate the rest of their personalities in our heads. However, we don’t have this. There are gaps in the personalities of the crew that are important, that would allow us to make a more educated summation of their personalities, but we don’t have that information. Therefore, Chief seems to know what he’s doing. He’s likable in that he wants to keep his crew safe, but unlikable in that he’s willing to risk everything to do it, including the lives of others. Chef seems like he should be the comic, or the likable one, of the group, but he’s as quick to fire as the rest of the crew. His sauce chef history is endearing, but even when he cries over Clean’s body, something’s off, as if he knows that he’ll move on quickly. Lance is the least likable of the crew—he’s an airhead who goes trippin’ on acid in the middle of a mission. However, there’s an odd contrast when he gets obsessed with the puppy. It quickly becomes clear, though, that Lance doesn’t understand reality—he’s looking for the puppy after Clean is gunned down. Clean pilots a machine gun during the junk attack, killing a number of civilians in the process. Then, he dies while listening to his mother’s voice. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about him. He appears to have a sort of breakdown during the junk affair, but he didn’t seem to show remorse afterward. More than anything, I think he’s a symbol of what the war is doing to what should be regular guys.
3. I actually have more respect for Willard than I did on the first day. I don’t necessarily like him more, in fact I’ve begun to despise him a bit, especially after he shoots the woman on the junk, but he has proved himself. In the beginning, he seemed like a bit of pile who just took his orders without question. Now, he’s at least willing to fight and prove himself—by foraging for the crew and other assorted tasks. I said he was “decent” in the first post—I don’t think he’s decent. I don’t support his “trade” with the bunnies’ manager or his execution of the woman.
(part 2)
ReplyDelete4. I think the plantation scene is an essential part of the film, because it shows the contrast between believing and caring and then just fighting. The family of the French plantation seems like les pieds noirs of Algeria, but in Vietnam. They won’t leave because they actually consider the country they’re living in to be home and that’s why they’re fighting for it. This is contrast to the Americans who are fighting for the prevention of communism, I suppose, along with theoretical dominance.
5. I think Coppola wanted us to take a moment and think about what we’d just seen. I think he wants us to revaluate every character based on what we’ve just seen—each character has just shown another side of themselves.
1. Oh dear. It was awful. The worst part is that what the woman was trying to save was something as innocent and sweet as that puppy. I think this makes the already horrific scene even worse. I think the reason Lance and Chef later fight over that puppy is to try and prove to themselves that they are still caring and humane. I think after the massacre, they are worried that they have become heartless killing machines. This also shows the paranoia of the military during the Vietnam War. The crew shot first and asked later.
ReplyDelete2. I think Chief is the perfect military prototype (or at least what the military would consider the perfect military prototype). He follows orders, acts responsibly, and maintains authority. However, I did not like that he was so stuck to the rules that he made them check the junk, who's inhabitants they eventually massacred. I think Chef is a likable character. He has a lot of personality and has plans for the future. However, unlike Chief, he is not as put together as Chief as seen from his behavior with the playboy bunny and with his general behavior on the boat. Clean is likable enough. He is funny, young, and energetic. However, he, like Chef, is also very immature. I hate that someone as young as he has to be involved in war. This makes me more sympathetic towards him. I don't like Lance too much. He's very into himself, and, like most of the crew, is very immature. However, I started to feel more sympathetic towards him after he adopted the puppy. I think, at that point, he needed something that needed his care, not just needed him to kill people. I think Coppola puts these characters in the movie because they represent the large variety of people who participated in the Vietnam War. Their personality also helps us view these characters as not only soldiers, but also as human beings.
3. Over this last section of the movie, Willard's character has further developed. As I get to know Willard, I trust him less and less. He seems mentally tortured from his previous experience in the war, his divorce, and his failure assimilate back into society back home. He also seems to have a drinking problem. He does not show strong emotion like the members of the crew. When he has acted, his actions have not been very honorable. He kills the woman on the boat, and he also sells their fuel to buy prostitutes for the crew. Over all, I think I feel bad for Willard because of his past experiences, but I feel like some of his actions are inexcusably cold.
4. I think this scene shows the prospective of colonialists, which is interesting. It also gives some background on the history of the area in case anyone watching the film was not familiar with it. However, so far it does not seem to advance the plot very much.
5. I think this pause gives the viewers and characters a chance to process what just happened and leaves out some of the agony of this processing. It also is possibly an allusion to "Heart of Darkness", directly attaching this scene to the evils in the hearts of human beings. It also shows that this "heart of darkness" is not only present in Colonel Kurtz, but also in the members of the crew to which we have grown so close.
1. It was a very disturbing scene. For some reason, I thought the bombing of the village by Kilgore was the most disturbing scene in the movie, but this was almost equally as horrifying. Willard believed they were wasting their time with the boat off the bat, and if it weren’t for Chief’s insistence to check it thoroughly, the civilians would not have been killed. Then just because the woman jumped to protect something, Clean and Lance began shooting and shooting. It kind of goes to what Kurtz was saying about how if there were focused soldiers they would win the war with ¼ of the soldiers. Willard knew they were wasting their time, he was focused on the mission, but the others just needed to feel like they were doing something maybe, and needed to engage in violence.
ReplyDelete2. Chief is probably the crewman I like the most. He takes his job seriously and is very respectful most of the time. He didn’t need to be so insistent on checking on the Vietnamese, that was wrong in my opinion. I’m not a big fan of Chef, just because he seems a little creepy with his Playboy magazines and his line “I even wrote the c*nt once.” However, I do feel sorry for him because maybe those magazines are the only way he can find normalcy or connect with anyone in a real, non-war way. And he had a life back home in New Orleans as a great saucier, but he had to give that all up. And after they kill the civilians on the boat, you can see that Chef feels really horrible things. As for Lance, I really don’t like him. He doesn’t really react to the horrible things around him and seems kind of selfish, but again maybe ignoring the situation is a coping mechanism. I really liked Clean in the beginning, I thought he was sweet and caring and a fun guy. But even he does and says some questionable things that make you wrestle with your feelings for his character. I think Coppola is trying to use “regular guys” to show how anyone can be affected by the war and the culture of the war of sex and violence. Probably in their normal lives back home, they are all really great people, but even they do horrible things and act without human decency at times because of the culture they are part of.
3. I think my opinion of Willard has changed a little bit. Like Sarina said in class, Willard always seemed really focused on the mission and never buying into unnecessary army additives, which distract the rest of the soldiers a lot. But then he trades time with the Playboy bunnies for fuel. Maybe he’s just doing it for the crew, I don’t know, but it seemed like he was consciously adding to the system and just contributing to the larger problem.
4. I thought the plantation scene was interesting. I had no prior knowledge that France had colonial holdings in Vietnam, so it was interesting to learn about that and it definitely added to the history of the U.S. foray into Vietnam. There wasn’t a whole lot of purpose to it for the specific plot of Apocalypse Now, but I do think it helped Willard realize the pointlessness of the American occupation of Vietnam and make him question the army and everything Kurtz was fighting against even more.
5. I think maybe the boat heading down the river in darkness after a few seconds of total darkness on screen perhaps symbolizes how the war will just keep getting darker and disturbing and more pointless as they keep going along. It also seems like Coppola is saying something about the massacre, that they crossed a line and have entered a dark part of themselves and the war.
1) This scene shows something about each of the characters. Cheif chooses to strictly follow regulations, whether or not they may end up doing harm. Chef doesn't want to be there; he's grumpy as he searches the boat, and upset after the massacre. Clean is immature and nervous. He opens fire as soon as the woman starts to move, killing all of them with Lance. Lance seems to not process the horror of it all, instead trying to get the puppy, showing his youth and, to some degree, innocence. Finally, Willard is straightforward and cynical. He warns Cheif not to search the boat, predicting the likely result. Afterwards, rather than trying, and probably failing, to patch the woman up, he shoots her. He doesn't do this out of sheer cruelty, but he knows that she will slow down their mission, and still probably die.
ReplyDelete2)
Cheif- As mentioned before, he is very professional and sticks to the plan, but sometimes this harms people. I respect him, but I also think he should be less blind in his obedience of rules.
Chef- He ends up in the war after learning to cook, despite his limited background. Just as it seemed he might have been able to escape his poor childhood, and be happy with his food, he was sent off to madness. I think he seems like a fundamentally good guy. As Pen said, he did take advantage of the Playboy girls though.
Clean- I don't really like Clean, as he doesn't seem to take the war seriously, despite the fact that people are dying. He is the first to open fire on the the Vietnamese boat. He jokes around and doesn't commit to the war in the way Kurtz thinks soldiers need to.
Lance- Lance, like Clean, seems not to view the war as as serious as it is. In him, it seems almost like he does this out of a combination of stupidity and almost innocence. He, instead about thinking of Clean, who has died, is worried that puppy is lost, showing how he isn't ready to deal with Clean's death.
Coppola wanted to show the actual people who were fighting the war. One out of four took it seriously, while the rest had been drafted, and either hated it or just tried to act like it didn't exist. They weren't soldiers, they were chefs and surfers who had never shot a gun before being drafted.
3) I have more respect for him, in an odd way. He more directly approaches and admits to the failures and lies in the army. He own's up to what has happened, and shoots the Vietnamese woman on the boat, rather than sidestepping it, as he did Corman's questions. Though he is no more moral, he is more honest.
4) Though, as Pen and Talia said, it seems somewhat out of place with the rest of the movie, this section shows how not even all Europeans supported America's war in Vietnam. Though it is quite confusing, several of them seem to be socialists or communists, who would support the Viet Cong. They still accept American soldiers though, showing that they mostly want to just continue as they are. This shows once again how disruptive the Vietnam War was to everyday life.
5) Just before this, we see Willard shoot an innocent woman, injured and on the ground. Before, everyone he had killed was either Viet Cong or was in open combat. Killing an injured civilian shows a dark side of him that he can't leave behind, and leaves even our hero's morality in question.
1. The scene was absolutely horrific. The fact that the thing in the yellow can that the troops (well, at least Clean) suspected of being a weapon was actually an adorable puppy made it so much more impactful than if the yellow can was empty, for example. The troops have been so affected by the war that are conditioned to connect Vietnamese people with the enemy, which makes them feel as if they have to kill or be killed. While this type of connection can help them stay alive if the Vietnamese people they encounter are actually trying to kill them, the people on the boat were civilians and died wrongly.
ReplyDelete2. I'm still neutral on all of them. They are presented as humans, not as the caricatures of heroes. They do terrible things--Chef and Lance with the playboy bunnies, Chief with the massacre of the civilians, Lance with the LSD (I get that he was struggling to cope with the massacre, but he shouldn't have taken LSD and then gone into the dangerous bridge area with Willard. The other men knew that he was on drugs and they shouldn't have let him go.). They also have endearing traits--Chef's passion for cooking, Clean's hopes for his future and his family (that he died while his mother's recording was asking him to come home safely was heartbreaking), Chief's refusal to see the playboy bunnies. I think Coppola wanted to expound on war's effects on a diverse (in race, in class, in personality, in experiences) group of people. Including lower-class people is more historically correct, as many upper-class people who were drafted were able to avoid combat because they were in university or worked crucial jobs.
3. I admire how focused he is on his mission--if he sets a goal, he won't stop until he reaches it. I also like that he tried to get his men to leave the Vietnamese civilians on the junk alone, but I think that he could have kept his men from doing what they did. I'm not terribly pleased with how he allows his men to take advantage of the playboy bunnies. I think it's really interesting that one of his good traits, his focus, is also one of his bad traits in that he is so focused that he is willing to make extreme moral compromises. This duality really shows how human nature is morally 'grey'--people and their traits are not inherently moral or immoral, and how sometimes the most moral choice is the one that prevents the most suffering or immorality. I am intrigued by his character development. He is starting to see that the war and the people who give him his orders don't make as much sense as he thought he did, and it seems like he is beginning to agree with some of Kurtz' ideas. We learn that the man who was also sent on Willard's mission joined Kurtz, which I think makes Willard question Kurtz' supposed immorality even more.
4. It helped me draw parallels between the French colonialism in Vietnam and the American push for victory. One of the Frenchmen said something along the lines of "we don't leave Vietnam because we want victory," and that reminded me of many of the characters' attitudes towards the war. It's interesting because Johnson was originally apprehensive about entering the war because he didn't want to support colonialism, but the behavior of the American troops in Vietnam indicates the same desire for victory over the "natives" that the French expressed.
5. Because the scene was so intense and difficult to see, I think Coppola wanted to give his viewers time to process what they just saw. The "hidden weapons" that the Vietnamese civilians were killed for turned out to be a puppy. That's really heavy and painful. A sharp transition into another scene would be inappropriate. The soldiers who just killed the civilians wouldn't process their actions quickly and move on, and neither should the viewers.
1) The horror of this scene is the final indication, for me, that Kurtz's complaint about the US Military is accurate; an untrained, unprepared army acts irrationally and emotionally. All of the boys on the boat were too nervous/hyped to act like soldiers. I actually thought that Willard's involvement, though harsh, was the right thing to do. He acted and thought the way a responsible man has to when he is part of a war. He didn't let that woman suffer unnecessarily and was unyielding in his resolve to continue on his mission.
ReplyDelete2) Coppola's characters; Chief, Clean, Lance, and Chef, all fit the stereotypical stock character roles of military fiction, and yet they add a very human feeling to a story which is otherwise about a man with questionably mental/moral aptitude in a very foreign environment.
Chef's character is probably the most familiar to me. A lot of him seems to be holding on to his life back in New Orleans because he finds it too painful to live in the present wartime conditions. Tiger sightings and puppies have seemed effective tactics of jarring Chef into the real world, and it's incredibly sad to watch how unbearable reality is to him.
It's hard to think about Clean outside of his tragic death and the ways his character symbolizes the era's racism/racial inequalities. I think that mostly he was just a kid. He was also one of the few characters who seemed to be capable of actual joy. If he'd made it back home, I would've picked him to be the one that ended up okay.
I think chief is very respectable and a very solid reliable person. I also think he is too unyielding in his professional attitude, and in the real world, this proves to be costly.
I really don't like Lance. Unlike Clean, whose spirit I think is in the right place, Lance seems less interested in being happy in the present and more interested in not being in the present at all. He's rude, he doesn't seem to care about any one else, and he's entirely irresponsible. He has the maturity of an eight year old, and I doubt he'll ever realize it.
3) I think we're still getting to see Willard's character unfold, and I'm not quite ready to make a judgement about him. Everything I've seen him do so far seems like it was done in an effort to figure out where he landed with Kurtz's ideology. I disagree with the idea that Willard traded the fuel for the same reasons Kurtz did what Kurtz did. I think that Willard's trade was a reaction against Kurtz's idea of how the military should behave. Willard seems to be trying things out and making up his own mind about what to do with Kurtz. I have a feeling we'll see where he falls pretty soon.
4)I thought the plantation scene showed the interesting perspective of a country that has been on the losing side of wars. Vietnam is famous for being the first war that America lost. The plantation scene seemed like a very accurate and ominous warning.
5) I think this fade out signifies a 'part two' of sorts. After this first moment where we face real death, a new chapter starts: the characters are too far down river to turn around, and they're being ushered into a much more serious conflict that they've yet encountered.
1. I thought it was an extremely disturbing scene, but it illustrated a significant part of the Vietnam war. It depicted how impulsive the Americans, for example Captain Willard's crew, were in killing people. This innocent family appeared bad to Clean and Chef, so they made the compulsive decision to kill them, implying that they prejudged the Vietnamese as inherently dangerous. It made the American military seem more savage than their assumptions of the Vietnamese.
ReplyDelete2. I think as a whole, this specific crew is a microcosm for the type of people who joined the US Military. Clean is the stereotypical young kid. His naïveté is presented when he starts shooting an innocent family for absolutely no reason, and his comments tend to be immature. To me, it seems like him and the rest of the crew were used by Coppola as a sort of comic relief in the heavy topic of war, assassins, and defining insanity. Chief, parallel with his name, is a seasoned military officer who is older and significantly more mature than Clean and Lance. He is confident and more serious than other members, and more respectable. Lance is a surfer, automatically giving him the association of a California airhead. He is also childish, as shown when he's more interested in a puppy than the death of Clean. I don't dislike Lance's character because I think that while he isn't necessarily productive, he has good intentions. Him and Chef showed how disrespectful and simply horny they are in the scene with the Playboy Bunnies. This made me look at their characters in a slightly more negative light, and I think that Chef is my least favorite. He is goofy but very annoying and immature, and he (along with Clean) seem to view the whole war as just a game. However, him freaking out about the tiger leads the audience to assume that the war is strongly effecting him emotionally and mentally.
3. I like Willard a lot, maybe more than many in our class now. I think that he's doing a good job of sticking to his mission and working cooperatively with his crew. An important argument against him is the fact that he traded fuel for women, objectifying them degradingly. I don't see this act as villainous, though, because he simply wanted to please his men. I think they can be blamed for enjoying it so much, and it doesn't necessarily make Willard sexist to try to reward his horny and immature crewmen. I appreciated that he shot the woman, because she was already very injured and would have struggled to survive until they could have gotten medical help, which even seemed uncertain as they were in the middle of nowhere on a river.
4. I thought that it was very confusing. Even when the characters were speaking English, they still had thick and nuclear accents. I did take from the scene, though, the prominent idea of struggle for power. The French man resented always losing in various wars, and wanted to fight for victory. I liked this scene because it was a nice break from the explosions and disturbing war scenes.
5. I think the primary reason for this prolonged black fade out was for dramatic effect. It was intense and the blackness let suspension build for the viewers of the movie. It was definitely a memorable technique, though. It also seemed like a little time to reflect on what we had just seen, and to breathe after such a stressful scene
1. It was horrible. I felt sick watching it happen. I couldn't believe my eyes, that these American soldiers, would annihilate all the people on the ship just because the woman looked like she tried to save her puppy. The hardest part about being an American troop in Vietnam was that you couldn't tell who was bad just by looking at them, they mixed in with the Vietnamese civilians. The War made them this way. It made them distrustful of anyone who could possibly be helping the bad people in Vietnam.
ReplyDelete2. At the beginning of the film I didn’t have a good feel for any of the guys yet, but after the scene with the Playboy Bunnies, I really gained feelings for each of them. Chef seemed very controlling toward the woman and made her like some sort of item. Him doing so gave me a very unsettling feeling about him. I was very surprised with Lance in his encounter with the woman. He was very inconsiderate of the woman’s feelings. When the woman told him that she didn’t like how people took advantage of her, he was sitting, “listening” to her while he moved his hand up her leg. I’m still unsure with how I feel about Chief, but I believe that he tries to do good. Clean really just wants to feel like one of the guys, he is considerably younger than the other four men on the ship. I think that Clean was just a scared kid who acted out of fear before he thinks, thats why he started shooting at the civilian ship. I think that Coppola put these men into the movie because he wanted us to understand that these men were humans too. I feel like he wanted to show us that these men weren’t any different from anyone we could know. He showed that anyone could be put into the situation that these men were put into. Chief, Chef, Lance, and Clean aren't the cookie-cutter military type. He shows that man in the War could be any man that you’d see walking down the street. We can relate to these men much easier than we can to Willard or Kurtz, they act as the ordinary Americans.
3. My reaction toward Willard has changed, but not a lot. I respected Willard a lot less after he shot the innocent woman on the boat after the massacre. I think that he shot her to prove a point to Chief, that he was in charge, and he wanted Chief to know that if Chief disobeyed his orders then people were going to get hurt. I said that he was real, and I still believe that, but I didn’t expect him to kill the innocent woman on the boat.
4. I was a little confused watching the plantation scene in class and as to what exactly was going on. Although, I do think that it was important to have the scene in the movie to show another side of the reason people were fighting in the War. Americans were fighting in the War to end communism in a place where they don't even live, while the French were fighting for land, their land, where they actually wanted to live. Although, this scene didn’t really go with the rest of the movie though.
5. I believe Coppola does this to give us a minute to let what we just saw sink in. Why some movies aren't as good as they could be is because there's always something coming at you 24/7, they never give you time to understand what you just watched. Watching the massacre scene sort of puts you in a dark place, and by making the screen dark, the feeling stays with us a little bit longer.