Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’ and Faulkner’s “The Bear” in the Haze of Slavery

Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Faulkner’s “The Bear” deliberately confuse and disquiet our comprehension of slavery’s traumatic past.

When Malcolm Cowley assembled the pieces to include in The Portable Faulkner in 1946 for Viking Press, he felt the burden of introducing to his readers a writer whose reputation with the public was questionable. Although William Faulkner had published 13 novels, at that time, only one was in print. So Cowley was cautious.

In his introduction to the long story “The Bear”, he wrote: “It is divided into five parts. If you want to read simply a hunting story…you should confine yourself to the first three parts and the last, which are written in Faulkner’s simplest style. The long fourth part is harder to read and deals with more complicated matters”.

It is difficult now to imagine the story without that fourth section, but it is also crucial; it is the beating heart of “The Bear”. The other parts tell the story of young Ike McCaslin’s participation in an annual hunting trip in the Mississippi woods, a coming-of-age tale in which Ike learns to respect and love the Southern land that is being encroached upon by railroads and land developers and slowly disappearing.

The fourth section, however, interrupts and disrupts that narrative to tell a different version of Ike’s coming of age. It tells us how, at 21, he inherits his family’s plantation and property, and in reading between the lines of the plantation’s ledger books, he is forced to reckon with the history of slavery, the poison lurking at the heart of his inheritance. He learns from the ledgers that his grandfather raped one of his slaves and had a child with her, then later raped that child—his daughter, his slave—and had a child with her.

This family history comes to serve as a microcosm for the violent horrors of slavery and for American history writ large. The past that is obliquely evoked in the fourth section of Faulkner’s story is the history that has created the world in which the other sections of “The Bear” take place.

That’s one plantation. The other one appears in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now. As with Faulkner’s “The Bear”, its place in the text is contested.

Faulkner’s Plantation in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now

Apocalypse Now was released in theaters in 1979, following a notoriously difficult shoot in which Coppola seemed to become a version of Colonel Kurtz himself. Like Marlon Brando’s Kurtz, Coppola seemed to be a man given too much power who disappeared into the wilderness (in this case, the Philippines, rather than the Vietnam of the film or the Congo of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published in 1899). The people who had sent him there wondered if Coppola had gone mad, or native, or what. Apocalypse Now, as it appeared in theaters, was a mere two and a half hours long, and much of what Coppola had envisioned and shot had been cut.

In 2001, emboldened by the proliferating “Director’s Cuts” that DVD technology enabled, Coppola released a considerably longer version that restored some of the excised footage, titled Apocalypse Now Redux. The key restoration was a sequence in which the main character, Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), pauses in his trip up the Nùng river for an evening at a colonial plantation still inhabited by a large French family.

You can see where I’m going with this. The fourth section of “The Bear” is analogous to the French Plantation sequence in Apocalypse Now. That sequence is the longest and most substantial one restored for the “redux” version of the film, and it is also the one that suggests a movement backward in time, evoking the past that has shaped the world of the film.

The sequence is set off from the rest of the film; in a narrative that is always episodic, this is the most distinctly separate episode. Willard and his companions come upon the plantation through a dreamlike veil of smoke, and this haunted-house apparition, combined with the bizarre unlikelihood of the plantation’s survival and the fact that it is Apocalypse Now’s sole foray into a space that could be described as domestic, surrounds the sequence with a supernatural aura.

As with “The Bear”, Coppola’s film also ends in smoke and uncertainty, concluding with Willard looking dazed and smoking opium with Roxanne (Aurore Clément), a young Frenchwoman. Thus, the sequence appears to occur outside the boundaries of any objective reality, and everything that happens there is obscured, designed to baffle any attempts at understanding.

There is a veil of mosquito netting that surrounds Roxanne’s bed and interferes with Willard’s view of her, and the sequence ends with him reaching out to touch her through this veil, which then dissolves into the fog surrounding the boat as the film continues on its way. It is as if Willard had been transported back in time, not to a specific moment, but to a symbolic space in which the history that created the Vietnam War can be evoked —a history that is nowhere else in the film as directly present.

The Deliberate Obfuscation of Slavery

That history, as in “The Bear”, is signified at both the local and the macrocosmic levels. We are asked to witness the history of French involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia and the Indochina War, and through it to reflect on the large, violent, centuries-long history of European colonialism itself. This extrapolation is underlined by the film’s use of Heart of Darkness as a source text.

As with slavery in Faulkner’s story, this is “the horror” in Conrad’s seminal work; the original sin that creates the fallen, and still falling, world, the apocalyptic present through which the little boat pursues its course. It is the thing that cannot be seen whole, but whose lurking presence makes the narrative itself necessary.

Necessary—but also, in the case of narrating this complex and enormous past, impossible. As Malcolm Cowley warned his readers, the fourth section of “The Bear” not only deals with the history of slavery, it does it through a prose style that is deliberately difficult, one that forces the reader, like young Ike McCaslin, to decipher the meaning of the plantation’s ledger entries. That takes the form of long, elliptical, and bafflingly complex sentences. Indeed, perhaps “sentences” is the wrong word since the prose Faulkner employs often deliberately omits syntactical signposting like capital letters and periods.

The formal logic at work here is Freudian. As the text approaches the horror at its core—the traumatic history that the present has disassociated itself from—it becomes symptomatic, distorted, dysfunctional. The closer the narrative gets to that traumatic past, the more it dramatizes the difficulty of telling about the history of slavery, the difficulty of dragging that history to the surface of our consciousness.

Something very similar is at work in the French plantation sequence. As I pointed out above, it begins and ends under a veil of smoke and fog, and the sense of things obscured, and of the difficulty of perception and understanding, lingers throughout. The scene of Willard’s dinner with the inhabitants of the plantation is difficult in its own way.

The members of the de Marais family talk, argue, and accuse Willard, who, to them, is a stand-in for America itself. They discuss the history of Vietnam, the history of France and French colonialism, and the 70-year history of their plantation and family, with the conversation taking sharp turns and puzzling digressions, and with the speakers sharing a knowledge base that Willard does not possess.

This is all made even more confusing by the fact that their speech alternates between French and heavily accented English, with no subtitles provided, and the whole conversation is hard to follow, competing with the sounds of clinking knives and forks, loud insects outside, and the murmuring of other speakers at the table. For a while, there is even an accordion player who wanders around the dinner table, further disrupting the conversation and interjecting his own questions and remarks between bursts of music, as if he were performing a classic French cabaret act about the Vietnam War.

Here, more than any other sequence in Apocalypse Now Redux, Willard becomes a surrogate for the viewer. Throughout the dinner, he sits confused and dour while the conversation swirls around him and he weathers accusations of American complicity and of the stupidity and pointlessness of American military action in Vietnam.

The fourth section of “The Bear” is also a story about complicity. It is largely concerned with Ike’s attempt to “relinquish” his claim on the plantation, his attempt to refuse to profit from or participate in the ownership of land that has been forever cursed by the historical crime of slavery.) The evening sunlight is shining full on Willard, and he continually shades his eyes, squinting—a metaphor for the incomprehension and uneasiness that the audience might be expected to feel.

This is a particularly noticeable gesture in a film that is so consistently focused on those eyes, that is in some sense a film that is about Martin Sheen’s eyes, Willard’s eyes, with their permanent and unreadable stare, as they guide us through the film and bear witness to its horrific images and events.

At the end of the meal, when Roxanne talks about the losses that the family has suffered, Willard says “I understand”. It’s hard to believe that he does. At this point, it’s hard even to know what it is that he is claiming to understand.

Like the fourth section of “The Bear”, this sequence of Apocalypse Now seems to be designed not to be understood; not fully, not at once. In both texts, formal difficulty serves as a marker that signals the presence of the atrocious history each text must evoke to begin to comprehend the present moment it describes.

These indigestible and seemingly separate chunks of historical material are the secret hearts of the texts themselves, the impossible confrontations with a horror that is not abstract but that takes the form of a past that cannot be exorcised. So we could skip over these problematic sections of both “The Bear” and Apocalypse Now Redux, but if we do, like Ike McCaslin and Captain Willard, we won’t know that we don’t know what’s really going on.