‘Apocalypse Now’: How one movie line captures the farce of the Vietnam War
One of the most infamously troubled productions in history, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now emerged on the other side of a legendarily difficult shoot to immediately be received as an all-time cinematic classic and one of the greatest movies ever made.
A startling rumination on the cost and effects of war on both sides, the epic is packed wall-to-wall with unforgettable imagery, iconic soundbites, unforgettable performances, and haunting thematic undertows. There are many scenes that have endured as bastions of cinematic excellence, but the intonation made by Robert Duvall’s Bill Kilgore holds a much deeper meaning than simply infiltrating the collective consciousness and refusing to let go.
The cast of Apocalypse Now is phenomenal across the board, with Kilgore getting one of its most indelible lines of dialogue. “I love the small of napalm in the morning” went down in the history books, but that’s only the first sentence. “You know, one time we had a hill bombed for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of them, not one stinking dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like victory.”
Delivering the line to Martin Sheen’s Willard after ordering a strike on a Vietcong-controlled village, it’s said in an unsettlingly matter-of-fact tone. He doesn’t flinch when an explosive goes off behind him, either, underlining just how deeply warfare has seeped into his bones. He actively enjoys the scent of something so destructive that’s claimed so many lives, and that borderline deification of conflict cuts deeper, knowing that the Vietnam War is regarded as one of America’s greatest historical failings.
Using Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ as the backdrop to the aforementioned assault is heavy-handedly operatic but nonetheless indicative of Vietnam as a whole. From the perspective of the American forces, they’re backing a noble cause, whereas Kilgore’s love of the napalm-tinged air speaks to the immoral methodology of annihilating local citizens before immediately celebrating the very thing that just killed them in huge numbers, distilling the farcical nature of the war at large into a single scene.
The United States was a massive military power that was expected to sweep to victory with the greatest of ease, only to become embroiled in a long-running overseas conflict that increasingly saw the tide of public opinion turn against it. Kilgore has grown ambivalent to the chaos he’s been ordered to cause, a representation of how the entire country was divided by Vietnam from beginning to end.
Co-writer John Milius was the one who came up with the line, but as he explained to CNN, he had no idea it would go on to become one of Apocalypse Now‘s defining moments. “I just wrote it, it just came up, that’s what happens,” he admitted. “People love to think that all this stuff happens when you write a famous line, that you really thought about it a lot.”
Kilgore is so disinterested in the after-effects of napalming the locals that he treats the smell as something to be embraced, admired, and breathed in deeply. It’s haunting in microcosm but illustrative of how life-or-death situations were treated by those in the trenches as part of their day job. They had to get used to it one way or another, but Kilgore treated it as a borderline spiritual experience.
