The Uncanny Method in the Madness

Apocalypse Now has been interpreted as addressing the Vietnam War in a similarly mythological and hence ahistorical way as the high modernist poetry recited by Colonel Kurtz. The closer, post-colonial view of this paper in the German language, however, shows that the 2001 "Redux-" version of Coppola's film questions the imperialist US system on several levels. By mockery it subverts the ideology of free-trade underlying the confrontation between the super powers in the Cold War and the Vietnam War itself. Also, the movie's technique of montage fundamentally questions the authority of the military apparatus and exposes the untenable nature of Willard's killing mission. The visit of the Captain's boat crew in the French colony serves to further outline the extent to which the doomed imperial war project is grafted - as a palimpsest - on the equally outdated remains of the French colonial past. As a consequence both forms of intervention are cinematographically delegitimized, especially by means of uncanny props exposing the degree to which they are haunted by the contradictions between ideological justification, US-historical genocidal past - in the case of the Vietnam War - and a belligerent present operating also by means of arbitrarily constructed alterity.

This makes obvious Redux's practice of - in Edward Said's termi-nology - establishing "anti-imperialist resistance" against the US warfare. One of the movie's key strategies to expose the inhumane moral universe of the war theatre is Kurtz's "method" of making Willard - and the viewers of the movie - experience the large-scale massacre in a lavish, synesthetic total work of art inspired by Stanislavski's identificatory "method acting" and Richard Wagner. This didactic "Gesamtkunstwerk" also makes use of further cinematographic adaptations of uncanny elements - ac-cording to Sigmund Freud - and strategically mobilizes a displaced version of mimicry.