Fearful Symmetries (Frames and Fragments Focus #001)
This note, and perhaps future posts from a series — which I have titled dismally (as in @GreatDismal), thus suggesting that there might be more than this one, is partly inspired by Nicholas Rombes’ 10/40/70: Constraint as Liberation in the Era of Digital Film Theory and partly by my sense that frames and fragments have their life too, paltry as those lives are. In this case, a few days ago I was watching Denis Villeneuve’s brilliant Sicario (2015) and one of the shots flared up for me, reminding me of Apocalypse Now (1979).
Coppola’s is, of course, the American story for the late 1970s. Interestingly enough, one of the most famous frames (below), whose variants have been widely used in the film’s paratexts (posters, DVD covers, etc.), does not, in fact, appear in the film.
The actual shots are only slightly less dramatic, though.
Vittorio Storaro’s iconic photography (with the equally iconic sound) of Bell UH-1 helicopters are a perfect encapsulation of the U.S. geopolitical position in the 1970s. Coppola’s film may well be the ur-father of the dark strand in the Vietnam War cinema (not that there is much of a lighter strand), but it also (pre)configures the political as well as cinematic imagination of increasingly advanced technology in the service of new imperial endeavors. This is a war that, at least from the position of those who wage it, can be won through sheer firepower and technological sophistication. Helicopters belong here to the same imaginary clade as the F-family fighter jets, the Gulf War’s Patriot missiles, and contemporary strike drones.
No longer figured by the gun-carrying soldiers of the Omaha Beach, the American military is synecdoched here by its new cavalry. Against the rising sun of the new era’s bloodshed and the Wagnerian soundtrack resounding over a jungle half a world away from the American soil, the helicopter squadron comes to symbolize Kilgore’s Ahabian madness as much as the American mode of politics during the late Cold War.
In the poster image, entering from stage right, for some theater practitioners a position of power, and coinciding with the Western sense of the direction of progress (think about the “x” axis for various timelines and the direction of reading in Western alphabets), or, in the actual sunrise shots, moving downstage towards platea, the acting area of the stage, the helicopters are visual shorthand for global dominance: built in multiple variants by American contractors, fueled by Saudi oil, and deployed all over the world from Salvador to Israel to Afghanistan. The second most-produced military helicopter in the world, the UH-1's mark the glorious return of the now-global f/F-rontier and their depiction in Apocalypse Now is largely — if not single-handedly — responsible for insinuating them into contemporary military pornography all the way to Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (1993) and Michael Bay’s movies.
(Incidentally, Mindel’s shot from Star Wars: The Force Awakens, clearly inspired by Storaro’s, suggests a similarly simplistic understanding of the Manichean operations of power. It invites contemplation of the ways in which TIE fighters and UH-1's represent the same paradigm of politics, but it also preempts the Star Wars narrative-verse of the political subtlety of such sf novels as Dune.)
Now, consider one of Roger Deakins’ many ecstatically gorgeous shots from Villeneuve’s Sicario, which, to my mind, beautifully resonates with the helicopter scene of Apocalypse Now but also aptly comments on the current political moment the U.S. has found itself in (Warning: Sicario spoilers follow).
Compositionally, the frame is a negative mirror of the Apocalypse iconic image: sunrise vs. dusk, enter right/exit left vs. enter left/exit right, hardware carrying humans vs. humans carrying hardware, flying vs. walking, overseas vs. home, lifting at sunrise into broad daylight made even brighter by napalm vs. going into an even deeper darkness of an underground tunnel into Mexico used by one of the cartels to smuggle drugs into the U.S.
Above all, though, in the same way in which Coppola’s sequence says heaps about the 1970s, Villeneuve’s frame tells a story of the dramatic geopolitical re-alignments of 2015. This is not an open war of traditional domination, however misconceived and misguided. The U.S. Army’s elite Delta Force no longer serves as a surgical instrument of global intervention. Pulled from Afghanistan, they are now part of drug wars — and not even of the maligned but much-publicized, capital W and capital D, War on Drugs but of an evil charade with nightmare-grade allies. The global Pax Americana has now deteriorated to a flimsy semblance of politico-business order worked out not between the U.S. and despotic regimes but between the Firm (CIA) and a firm (Medellín). Coppola’s version of Heart of Darkness is a 20th-century analog of Moby Dick — both are grand narratives of guiltily admirable insanity but with the moral compass still around. In Sicario, that ship has already sailed — much as we are likely to feel for Agent Macer (Emily Blunt), we also unwillingly concede to Graver’s (Josh Brolin) and Gillick’s (Benicio del Toro) devilish logic.
The position of these images in their respective films is, to my mind, very meaningful, too. Storaro’s helicopter photography is placed early in the grand story of the war, which, however protracted, had the beginning and the end and whose convolutions (and convulsions) can be mapped with relative ease. This story lends itself to linear narration and requires an effective establishing sequence. Deakins’ shot is buried two-thirds into the movie and, while in itself candy-like beautiful, does not aspire to any centrality in the mood of the overall narrative. That story is unchartable with no clear beginning (U.S. involvement in Latin America? Nixon’s War of Drugs? Collapse of the Medellín cartel?) and no end that is even imaginable (much like the Žižko-Jamesonian end of capitalism). That story has unclear priorities, muddled causality, and no central human protagonist; it happens not in a fiery storm of napalm ridden by mad military Valkyries but in the non-glare of night-vision scopes and satellite imaging POVs operated by men who don’t even exist on government payrolls.
Sic transit gloria mundi. Well, only as long as Bell choppers are glorious.
(This continental/international re-alignment is also, to a degree, evident in the production of both films. Apocalypse Now is a Euro-heartland film: based on a novel by a Pole/Englishman, directed by an Italian-American, shot by an Italian, and scored by a German {well, at least the helicopter attack sequence}. Sicario is a work of the erstwhile marginals: directed by a Québécois, centrally acted by an Englishwoman and a Puerto-Rican, and magnificently scored by an Icelander. In all fairness, though, it is supremely filmed and edited by two Englishmen.)
