Tools of Characterization
Characterization in Apocalypse Now
Direct Characterization
Much of what we know about Kurtz we know through direct characterization: Willard and the army brass tell us about him. Up until the time Willard actually meets the guy, that's how we get our info.
CORMAN: Walt Kurtz was one of the most outstanding officers this country has ever produced. He was a brilliant and outstanding in every way and he was a good man too. Humanitarian man, man of wit, of humor. He joined the Special Forces. After that his ideas, methods have become unsound. Unsound.
LUCAS: Now he's crossed to Cambodia with his Montagnard army, who worship the man, like a god, and follow every order however ridiculous.
Willard keeps filling in pieces of the puzzle of Kurtz:
WILLARD: At first, I thought they handed me the wrong dossier. I couldn't believe they wanted this man dead. Third generation West Point, top of his class. Korea, Airborne. About a thousand decorations. Etc., etc...I'd heard his voice on the tape and it really put a hook in me. But I couldn't connect up that voice with this man. Like they said he had an impressive career. Maybe too impressive...I mean perfect. He was being groomed for one of the top slots of the corporation. General, Chief of Staff, anything.... In 1964 he returned from a tour of advisory command in Vietnam and things started to slip. The report to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Lyndon Johnson was restricted. Seems they didn't dig what he had to tell them. During the next few months he made three requests for transfer to airborne training in Fort Benning, Georgia. And he was finally accepted. Airborne? He was 38 years old. Why the f*** would he do that? 1966 he joined the Special Forces, returns to Vietnam.
The photojournalist gives us some more description of the colonel. All this direct information gives us a set of assumptions about Kurtz that is tested when we meet him in Cambodia. Kurtz is actually on camera for just a few minutes, but thanks to the miracle of direct characterization, we know much more about him.
Actions
Everyone in this movie is morally compromised. How do we know? We see the boat crew shoot and kill Vietnamese civilians whom they mistook for hostiles; Willard unflinchingly shoots a severely wounded woman just for expedience, so they don't have to take her in for medical attention and delay the trip upriver; Kilgore attacks an area full of civilians but also gives water to an enemy prisoner; and, finally, Kurtz commits all sorts of atrocities but allows Willard to assassinate him.
The almost robotic, violent actions of Kurtz and Willard show us just how disconnected they are from their feelings and from societal norms. They're psychologically deadened. Kilgore kills with enthusiasm; he's a brutal killer, but he's still engaged with the world and his men.
Family Life
Willard has this to say about his wife:
WILLARD: I'd wake up and there'd be nothing. I hardly said a word to my wife, until I said "yes" to a divorce.
That's it. The war has completely replaced her and everything else for Willard: it's his world. He doesn't have room for a normal family life.
The same thing happened to Kurtz. Kurtz still has a wife and a son, but he's abandoned them in order to become a war god to his group of followers in Cambodia. Ditto Lieutenant Colby, the first guy sent to terminate Kurtz but who ends up joining his psychotic crew. Willard reads Colby's last letter to his wife:
WILLARD: Sell the house. Sell the car. Sell the kids. Find someone else. Forget it. I'm never coming back. Forget it.
You can sell kids?
Unlike Colby, Kurtz still thinks about his family and he's concerned for them. He makes Willard promise to tell Kurtz's son the whole truth about what his father has done, because he (Kurtz) hates lies. That shows some shred of connection, we guess.
These men's family situations clue us in to how insanely alienated and distorted their lives have become. The Guardian's Linh Dinh thinks that the film is less about the horrors of the jungle than the allure of the jungle:
Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Willard and Kurtz in Apocalypse Now are also escaping from the familiar, from the wives at home, into the exotic and the unknown. After their first Vietnam tour of duty, they signed up for another. […] The jungle becomes a hotbed of wild desires, where you can hobnob with savages, shoot them, get shot in turns, burn down acres of forests, get scared by tigers. (Source)
There's got to be easier ways of getting out of your marriage.
Location
The location in Vietnam sets up the cast of characters: American soldiers, Vietnamese civilians, and Viet Cong fighters. It also explains why so many of them have gone off the deep end. Coppola gives us a menacing, dark, unpredictable jungle, where tigers, arrows, or rockets can kill you any second. Not to mention the heat and humidity. No wonder everyone's on edge.
Kurtz's Cambodian temple complex says a lot about him too—namely, that he's crazy. You know that nobody completely sane would voluntarily live in that nightmarish setting.
Occupation
All the major characters in Apocalypse Now are servicemen, but there are two very different types. One is the career man like General Corman or Kilgore, experienced officers. They've chosen the military life, so we know something about what they find meaningful and even, in Kilgore's case, enjoyable. They're probably cut out for the life, or at least they've adapted enough to decide to make it their career.
The young guys are mostly draftees; they didn't sign up for this, so we assume they're inexperienced, easily rattled, and more vulnerable than the officers. They probably aren't suited for the military life, Lance the surfer being Exhibit A. They don't know what to make of this war because they're only following orders, not seeing the bigger pictures that the officers have. All they want is to go home, but they probably have the least chance of it.
Physical Appearances
Kurtz looks larger than life when we see him, though he usually remains partly hidden in the shadows. It adds to his god-like status with his followers. He looms above the normal person like a giant. Coppola had a body double stand in for Brando during full-body shots, because Brando was looking more like a Buddha at that point. The shaved head adds to his menacing persona.
The youth of Willard's crew contrasts with Willard's war-weary demeanor. Lance, with his painted face and tripped-out appearance, looks like the stoner surfer he is, but one thrown into a nightmare situation that he can't cope with. Everyone is sweaty and filthy, adding to the stark contrast between the kids that they are and the hell that they're all living.
Sex and Love
There's not much love in this movie, and just a little sex. (In the Redux version, there's a little more sex, since Willard and company hook up with some of the Playboy Playmates.)
The Playmates start to perform their provocative dances, but the soldiers rush the stage and the Playmates have to run back to their helicopters. The scene shows us that these are a bunch of guys already driven half-crazy by their isolation in the jungle; the sexual excitement just pushes them over the edge.
Willard, watching all this calmly from the sidelines, is either too mature or too far gone to be affected by all this.
Props
Col. Kilgore brings a surfboard with him to Vietnam. It makes sense, right—they've got some great beaches there. Kilgore is so into the war war that it's almost recreational for him. Surfboard, napalm—they both fit his definition of a good time.
Another important prop is the severed heads—they're always good for livening up a deserted, nightmarish temple compound. It tells us all we need to know about Kurtz. Murder, insanity, and mayhem: that's his trip.
Speech and Dialogue
We learn a lot about the American photojournalist from his speech patterns. Basically, it becomes pretty clear that he's a babbling nutjob:
PHOTOJOURNALIST: Do you know what the man is saying? Do you? This is dialectics. It's very simple dialectics. One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions…you can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, with fractions…what are you going to land on, one quarter, three-eighths…what are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something…that's dialectic physics, OK? Dialectic logic is there's only love and hate, you either love somebody or you hate them.
So, yeah. Whatever.
Being out in the jungle and immersed in war has fried this guy's brain. Like Kurtz, he's lost contact with normal human life. Casting Dennis Hooper in the role was a no-brainer (pun intended). Nobody does manic like Hopper.
Kurtz is given dialogue that confirms the journalist's view of him as a mysterious poet-warrior. He recites poetry in that mumbly Brando voice, gentle but with menace lurking underneath; he delivers his dialogue in a slow, dramatic cadence. He discusses horrific atrocities in a measured, detached way. Clearly this is a guy whose motives are beyond any understanding.
Willard's voiceovers strike us as having a deadened, hard-bitten quality that reminds us of those terse, world-weary detectives in hard-boiled, noir-ish crime fiction. No nonsense, just the facts, who cares, everything's meaningless anyway. Here's an example:
WILLARD: Charley didn't get much USO. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast. His idea of great R&R was cold rice and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home: death or victory.
Willard's voice is drained of emotion even when he's talking about horrific things. It adds a mysterious quality to him because we can't tell what he's going to do based on what he says. Even he doesn't know.
Thoughts and Opinions
At the beginning of the movie, Willard's really eager to get back into the jungle and fight. He's a trained killer, after all. But through his voiceover segments, we get the sense that he's got a pretty nuanced perspective on the war. He starts saying things like:
WILLARD: It's a way we had over here for living with ourselves. We cut 'em in half with a machine gun and gave 'em a Band-Aid. It was a lie. And the more I saw them, the more I hated lies.
Kurtz hates lies too, but instead of leading him to oppose the war, he supports open and acknowledged brutality. He praises Vietnamese soldiers for hacking the arms off children whom Kurtz had recently helped inoculate against disease:
KURTZ: And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men...trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love...but they had the strength...the strength...to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly.
Kurtz thinks being brutal is just being practical. We can see that this isn't a perspective that a person could keep over the long run and still stay sane, so it's a sure bet that Kurtz isn't able to hold it together.