July 31, 2025 : Wondercab Mini (95A)

From the Archive

AN EXTENDED PASSAGE FROM “VALKYRIES OVER IRAQ”

My essay “Valkyries over Iraq” (from the November 2005 issue of Harper’s magazine, later included in my Uncanny Valley book) was originally occasioned by the release of Sam Mendes’s 2005 film of ex-Marine Anthony Swofford’s Kuwaiti war memoir, Jarhead, for which Walter Murch had been required to edit a scene in which Marines were getting jacked up for battle by chiming in ecstatically across a screening of the harrowing Valkyrie helicopter raid scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s would-be anti-war Vietnam film Apocalypse Now, which Murch himself had edited almost thirty years earlier. A passage from that essay came back to my mind the other day when I attended a retrospective screening of Coppola’s wife Eleanor’s superb (and harrowing) Heart of Darkness documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now. And then of course, what with the release of his new book, I’ve been thinking a lot about Murch as well these days. On top of which, I just realized that this year we are at the 150th anniversary of that fateful year 1876, which—well, you’ll see.

Anyway, half way through that Harper’s piece, the entirety of which you can read here, things come to this:

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Somewhere in there I spent a weekend watching the original Apocalypse Now again and again, gnawing at this problem of whether it's even possible to imagine creating an antiwar film, or whether any depiction of war in film necessarily lends itself to military-pornographic exploitation.

I should perhaps note here that I'd been one of those who'd resisted the blandishments of the film when it first came out, in 1979—or rather, maybe the claims made on behalf of it and Michael Cimino's virtually simultaneous, equally ambitious, and similarly touted Deer Hunter.

Coppola on the set of Apocalypse Now, Cimino on that of The Deer Hunter.

There was a lot of talk at the time about how these films were at last going to confront the moral depravity of the Vietnam War. "It was my thought," Coppola had said, "that if the American audience could look at the heart of what Vietnam was really like—what it looked like and felt like—that then they would be only one small step away from putting it behind them." There was something strange in the air, this sense that we were somehow collectively going to be able to get Vietnam behind us by merely going to see Apocalypse Now, or, even more tenuously, by belonging to a country in which such a film could be created (even, or maybe especially, in the face of the government's opposition). What exactly was it that we seemed to be hoping that Coppola could do for us? There was moral hubris in Coppola's aspiration to single-handedly confront the Vietnam experience with such ferocious lucidity that he might wrest penance for the entire country in the process. And there was moral vacuousness in our secret yearning that he'd be able to do so.

In the event, furthermore, there always seemed to me a flaw at the heart of both Cimino's and Coppola's efforts. I mean, it seemed to me kind of important to note that, in the case of the former, there were actually no recorded instances of Viet Cong or any Vietnamese engaging in Russian roulette human cockfights—or, in the case of the latter, of bands of Montagnard tribesmen, dazed by suffering, lining up behind a demented Special Forces officer, elevating him to godhood, and then following him over the precipice into orgiastic violence and debauchery from which, unable to rescue themselves, they had to be delivered by the arrival of another, albeit differently conflicted, white man. If you complained along these lines at the time, as I remember doing to a friend of mine, you were likely to be told that no, no, you didn't understand, Vietnam was merely the launching-off point, that Cimino and Coppola were after something much bigger than Vietnam—the taproots of masculinity, the abyss of existential dread, the lure of violence, etc., etc.—ALL THE BIG THEMES—and presently names like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and of course Conrad (or in the case of Cimino, Hemingway) would start getting tossed around. And I just remember thinking, But wait, there is nothing bigger than Vietnam. Vietnam, and what we did there, is as big as we are ever going to get in our generation. Vietnam was all the theme a director could possibly hope to encompass. And there was something fundamentally flawed in a response that used it as a launching-off point for larger significations. (Wasn't that, after all, the origin of the Vietnam disaster in the first place? For Johnson and Rostow and Nixon, Vietnam had never been just about Vietnam either. It was always about Something Much Bigger. God save those poor souls, I remember thinking, from Americans tracking Big Themes.)

Having said that, even then I could acknowledge the evident power, the fierce integrity, and even the ferocious lucidity of much of the filmmaking in Apocalypse Now, especially across the first half of the picture—in particular the Valkyrie scene and, even more so, the sequence detailing the catastrophically botched meeting (a mini My Lai) of the Navy speedboat with that peasant sampan on the river. (It turns out, incidentally, that the latter scene was never in the original script, and that it got conceived and inserted only as the film was being shot, and, according to Coppola himself, at the specific urging of Walter Murch.)

And one's admiration for the film—over and beyond the Big Theme terms its admirers set for it when it first came out—only increases with time, or so I found myself feeling, watching it again and again that weekend.

And damn, but damn: that Valkyrie scene.

Kilgore's boy raises the bugle to his lips and lets rip with that cavalry charge,

and I feel myself falling through a trapdoor of history, into, I suppose, an alternate genealogy…

The year being 1876, back in the days when cavalries still charged out on horseback ...

July: Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer—preternaturally dapper, gung-ho, buff: oblivious—leads several mounted battalions of the Seventh Cavalry into wretched debacle at the Little Bighorn.

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August: In Bayreuth, Richard Wagner inaugurates his stupendous Festspielhaus with the world premiere of his full Ring cycle, the way he has always intended it be performed, with armor plated, horse-borne Valkyries striding powerfully onto the stage at the opening of the third act of the second play, a perfect manifestation of the Master's doctrine of Gesamtkunstwerk, the all-around, all-convergent happening, with all the arts (music, stagecraft, painting, literature) combined (none claiming precedence over the others—in fact, as he specifically stipulates, with the orchestra removed from its traditional position and hidden away down below, such that its sounds will seem to be rising from all over) in order to lavish the audience in a veritable debauch of sensory experience.

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That same year, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford purchases an estate in Palo Alto and, having done perhaps more than anyone else to render horses obsolete as transportation, turns to raising them for sport, having enlisted the photographer Eadweard Muybridge in a novel effort to capture their stampeding gait in the fullness of its being. Within a couple of years, Muybridge will do just that through his innovation of animal motion studies, for all intents and purposes inventing cinema along the way.

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Toward the end of that same year, the United States will see its most tightly contested presidential election to date. Samuel Tilden will actually win the popular tally and come within a single electoral vote of claiming the prize, only to see his mandate stolen by Rutherford B. Hayes, who triumphs by promising the Southern states that he will withdraw the federal army, thereby achieving the Klan dream of ending Reconstruction, an outcome immortalized not quite forty years later ...

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... in 1915, as The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith's own lavish Gesamtkunstwerk, featuring, as we have seen, at its climactic moment, the Klan riding on horseback to the rescue of embattled Southern white purity to the rousing strains of Wagner's"Ride of the Valkyrie" ...

... a theme taken up once more twenty-five years after that, back again in Germany, in countless Nazi propaganda newsreels—the Luftwaffe in tight formation raining righteous terror down upon all the opponents of Aryan purity—thereby bearing out the insights of Theodor Adorno, who, as early as 1937, had been decrying how in "Wagner's case what predominates is already the totalitarian and seigneurial aspect of atomization; that devaluation of the individual vis-a-vis the totality, which excludes all authentic dialectical interaction"—the composer-conductor (as Andreas Huyssen recently characterized matters in his remarkable essay “Adorno in Reverse") beating the audience into submission through orchestration that has "the tendency to drown out the individual instrument in favor of ... large-scale melodic complexes," all culminating in a phantasmagoria, which is to say, in Adorno's words, "the illusion of the absolute reality of the unreal," with (Huyssen again) "the drama of the future, as Wagner called his Gesamtkunstwerk," prefiguring "that nightmarish regression into an archaic past which completes its trajectory in fascism." Having thus nailed Wagner and Nazism, Adorno would go on to seek refuge, through the war years, in Southern California, where he would while away his days, sourly surveying what he came to see as Wagner's legacy in the machinations of the entire culture industry, and Hollywood movies in particular.

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The insurgent Zoetrope studio in formation.

Which in turn brings us to the film schools of Southern California, a generation after that, steeped in some of the New Left critique of the Hollywood system that was Adorno's legacy, as well as in a whole set of soaringly Gesamtkunstwerk Sensurround ambitions of their own, from out of which would emerge the likes of Coppola and Milius and Murch, who, a few years after that—as a matter of fact in 1976, exactly one hundred years after Custer's debacle and Bayreuth's premiere and Stanford's purchase and Hayes's deal—would begin work on their own shattering masterpiece, complete with its ironically inverted homage to Griffith, that horrific Valkyrie raid of the choppers of the airborne cavalry, a scene that less than a generation later would be being deployed (pithed of all irony) to stiffen the resolve of an auditoriumful of jarheads at Twentynine Palms Marine Base bound for a whole fresh war of their own, in a scene that, less than a generation after that, and in the midst of yet another whole new war, would itself be forming the fulcrum, the very hinge, of yet another effort to nail down the whole self-immolating, self-devouring, agonizedly churning monster of a perplex.

I type out an abbreviated version of the above and email it to Murch, and by way of reply he notes dryly how across his stay here in Manhattan, as he continues editing his latest picture, Particle Fever, he has been a guest at the National Arts Club, off Gramercy Park, which is to say, the old Samuel Tilden mansion. So, go figure.

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So there was that. And, meanwhile, there will soon be this:

ONE:
Weschler on Vermeer, near Albany, NY, Tuesday evening, August 7th, 7:00 p.m., free

Thursday, August 7 (7:00 PM)

Some Recent Kerfuffles in Vermeer Studies

A Lecture by Lawrence Weschler

Arts Letters & Numbers Studios
1548 Burden Lake Road, Averill Park, NY

(a 20 minute drive east of Albany)

Lawrence Weschler presents “Some Recent Kerfuffles in Vermeer Studies,” starting with Penn and Jilette’s film Tim’s Vermeer from a few years back (with a denouement in Chris Marker’s La Jetée); then the Art Crime of the Century So Far (the so-called restauration of what was once one of Vermeer’s greatest and most biographically pivotal paintings, now pretty much destroyed—Dresden’s heartrending Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window); then the Main Event: mounting evidence that Ben Binstock may well be right that the Girl with a Pearl Earring is not (per Tracy Chevalier) Vermeer’s mistress but rather his oldest child, his daughter Maria, who was also his assistant and ongoing painting partner, completely responsible for fully 8 of the 34 paintings currently attributed to her father—including several of the most beloved (such as the National Gallery’s Girl with a Red Hat, which is Maria’s self-portrait, and the Frick’s Mistress and Maid, currently at the center of their big grand reopening celebratory Three Vermeer Love Letters show).

Finally, a coda on Gerhard Richter’s own well-beloved painting Betty, a Vermeer-besotted portrait of his own daughter—and just what she is looking at.

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TWO:
Weschler in conversation with Walter Murch, Hammer Museum, Westwood/LA, Tuesday August 12, 7:30 p.m. — free but tickets at box office on a first come / first served basis.

Walter Murch and Lawrence Weschler

TUESDAY AUG 12, 2025 7:30 PM

Triple-Oscar winner Walter Murch discusses his new book Suddenly Something Clicked: The Languages of Film Editing and Sound Design, offering a masterclass on six decades of cinematic innovation. The legendary editor and sound designer behind The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, and The English Patient shares personal stories of his time alongside Coppola and Lucas at Zoetrope studio and creative insights from his groundbreaking work that helped revolutionize modern cinema. Murch will be in conversation with the prolific author Lawrence Weschler, former staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU.

Stay after the program for a book signing with Murch and Weschler (books available for purchase).

ATTENDING THIS PROGRAM?

Ticketing: Admission is free. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. Box office opens one hour before the event.

For more information, including on parking, see HERE.

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See you next week!