The Vietnam War through Hollywood’s Lens, or Coppola’s so to speak

A critical analysis of ‘Apocalypse Now’ through the work of Jean Baudrillard.

“Now of all the existing media the cinema alone holds up a mirror to nature. Hence our dependence upon it for the reflection of happenings which would petrify us were we to encounter them in real life. The film screen is Athena’s polished shield.”
(Kracauer, 1965: 305)

“More generally, the image is interesting not only in its role as reflection, mirror, representation of, or counterpart to, the real, but also when it begins to contaminate reality and to model it…”
(Baudrillard, 1986: 16)

In evoking the myth of Medusa, Siegfried Kracauer draws a comparison between the film screen and Athena’s shield, not only in the sense of mirroring reality, but also in providing a safe proximity to the horrors of the Real. For Jean Baudrillard, however, this analogy would prove problematic since the image does more than merely mirror its referent. Given that images ‘only seem to resemble things, to resemble reality, events’, it can be problematic when we view the film screen as a mirror, especially considering ‘much of what we know about the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the Vietnam War comes from Hollywood films about the Holocaust, the Second World War, and the Vietnam War that we have seen’ (Shapiro 2014). The problem lies in the fact that Hollywood has the power to re-write these narratives; that said, I will adopt…