When Sloterdijk speaks of Military Cynicism in chapter 8 of Critique of Cynical Reason, a chapter called The Cardinal Cynicism, he speaks of it in a way that seemed a bit strange to me. He speaks of three characters on the battlefield, the hero, the hesitater and the coward, and he traces these three figures from the feudal age, through the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, and up to the nuclear age. But I would have expected a chapter on warfare today, and especially in a book that seems to be very much on ideology, to have talked about insurgents, guerillas, terrorists. To me, that seems the main theme of post WWII military history: Empires loosing wars to nationalistic insurgents. Everyone has lost, Britain in Ireland and India, France in Algeria and Indochina, Soviet in Afghanistan, the US in Vietnam of course, and the wars this last decade. Big armies struggling against insurgent tactics. That Sloterdijk doesn't talk about this probably has a lot to do with his historical position: In 83 Soviet wasn't loosing in Afghanistan (and neither was the US, of course), nuclear warfare seemed a much more important subject to write about, and that the succes of insurgents/guerillas/terrorist had anything to do with their ideological strength could seem weird when the most recent groups were people like the RAF and the Red Brigades in Italy, people who seemed to have even less reason to fight than for instance the armies in Vietnam or Algeria, and who chose 'insurgent' tactics for strategic reasons. Yet now, thirty years later, I'd say that the fight against insurgents seems the most important military theme, and I think that Apocalypse Now has a lot of opinions on this subject.
Heart of Darkness, and Apocalypse Now by implication, is not about a man succumbing to evil. That is the explanation that the generals give Willard in his briefing in the beginning of the movie, and obviously, it is untrue ideology. 'There's a conflict in every human mind, between rational and irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph' This is obviously rubbish, the problem the common soldiers has is the complete absence of these concepts, and solid ground to differentiate between the two sides. When the soldiers massacres a boatfull of people by mistake, Willard gets up and executes the final wounded person, and it prompts him to think: 'It was the way we had over here of living with ourselves. We'd cut them in half with a machinegun and give them a bandaid. It was a lie, and the more I saw of them, the more I hated lies' An easy and politicized reading of the film would be, that the war was wrong and the soldiers struggled with that, but it is far from that simple.
The points of ideology and reasoning is spelled out in the scenes on the French plantation, that was restored to the film in the Redux version. The Vietnamese fight for their nation, the French people fight for their homes, the Americans fight for 'the biggest nothing in history' Keep in mind, it's not like the other sides fight for something real, they are caught up in their lies just as well as the Americans. But their lies are founded in something, so they can delude themselves. As the old man is followed out, he repeats to himself: 'I know we can stay, I know we can stay...' When Hubert deMarais explains their situation, he says at least two untruths: He claims that they created the plantation out of nothing, but they bought plants in Brazil, meaning that they created the plantation out of their own money. The Vietnamese could conceivably have done the same thing if they had had the same resources. And he claims that the plantation holds the family together, but we immediately learns that he has recently lost his wife and child, and Roxanne Sarrault has lost her husband. That they stay there tears the family apart, obviously, but they can deny that to themselves. The solid facts of the plantation and the family makes these people able to lie to themselves about why they do what they do.
The weird part of the story is then, that the thing that Kurtz and Willard struggles with is not that truth and goodness has gone, it's that they have had to stop believing in their own lies. The things Kurtz are being punished for turned out to be the right things to do. He executed four South Vietnamese officers, and it turned out that they were the traitors. Both Kurtz and Willard manages to suddenly see through the veneer of American ideology, but they react in two very different ways. Kurtz obsesses about lies and truth. He taunts Willard by reading obviosly propagandistic newsclippings to him - 'things felt much better, and smelled much better over there' - and the photographer even gives Willard a course on Dialectic Logic: 'No Maybes, no supposes, no fractions [...] There is only love and hate, you either love somebody, or you hate them!' We get to Kurtz' problem when he asks Willard: 'Are you an assasin?' 'I'm a soldier' 'You're neither. You're an errand boy, sent by glocery clerks to collect the bill' The right answer is, of course, that Willard is all three of these things, but Kurtz is only able to see one side at a time. He has become obsessed with right and wrong, truth and false, love and hate, and he has become unable to function in grey areas.
But Willard chooses another path. According to the documentary Hearts of Darkness, the script originally had a scene where Willard was asked why he did what he did, and he answered that it made him happy. But the finalized film has a much better solution. Wilard has completely realized the falseness of the lies that brought him there, and he has realized the senselessness of his mission. What happens when a human being has finally awakened from Ideology? In this case, he chooses to return to the ideological world, even though he has made it through. He murders Kurtz even though he knows it makes no sense. It is brilliantly juxtaposed with the ritual slaughter of a bull, cause that's what it is. It's a ritual. American military Ideology has returned not just to the pre-enlightened religious phase, it has returned to pre-religious mythic phase. As Willard returns from the temple, he is a God, a painted apparation that the natives bows before, but he is also the new man, the true post-ideologue, who has killed and taken the place of the first failed attempt at post-ideology. He has completed his mission though it made no sense. He has taken his place in the military system, though he in no way believes it is right or good, and has as such become the exemplary soldier in the modern army. To say it as short as possible: He exits the temple as a newborn Cynic.
Birth of a Cynic
Next week: Propaganda, marketing and Inception
[Part I: Introduction and Mad Men]
[Part II: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance & Police, Adjective]
[Part III: Brothers Karamazov and Melancholia]
[Part V: Inception]
[Part VI: Inglourious Basterds]
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