Page 66 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

50 Ideologies

Now (1979) argues from a conservative perspective that liberals were too
weak to conduct foreign policy properly. The threat of enemies abroad
(mostly again, poor people ’ s movements for economic justice) required
toughness, viciousness, and the will to transcend both legal and human
laws and rules in order to defend the right of a small conservative minority
to over - accumulate social resources. Later, such arguments would be used
to justify the breach of international laws in regard to torture. Those later
arguments are already visible in Apocalypse Now . The narrative is struc-
tured as a struggle between the heroic, conservative individualist and the
bureaucratic military establishment that serves as a metaphor for liberalism

throughout the film. A CIA assassin is assigned to go into the jungle to fi nd
Walter Kurtz, a renegade Special Forces colonel. The assassin is portrayed
as a lost soul who is weak and out of control at the start of the narrative.
As he pursues his assignment, he realizes that Kurtz is not a renegade; he

is in fact a genius who has figured out how to defeat the Communist insur-
gents in Vietnam by being vicious and by operating outside the rules of
war. Along the route of his journal, the assassin sees how ineffective the
American military is. In contrast, Kurtz is supremely effective, but to do
so, he has had to leave the military establishment behind. In the end, the
assassin becomes an initiate of Kurtz and carries out his assignment of
assassinating Kurtz with the needed viciousness. He then become Kurtz ’ s

replacement with his army of indigenous fighters. The film draws on myths
of the Fisher King, whereby an initiate kills the old king in order to replace
him, thus fulfi lling a cycle of death and rebirth.
Throughout, the indigenous insurgents are portrayed in a racist manner
as almost animalistic killers who serve as a model for the conservative
argument of the film that one must leave liberal rules behind to succeed.

One must compete with viciousness. In one sequence, the regular military
attack a village known to be an insurgent headquarters. The sequence
depicts schoolchildren who would appear to seem innocent but in fact they
conceal insurgent killers who deceive and kill American soldiers. The motif
of the treachery of the adversary is common in conservative ideological
discourse largely because it is a mirror of conservative thinking itself, which
is inclined to be deceptive and to misrepresent reality for the purpose of
self - interest. The way this sequence is constructed is a good example of this
tendency. Americans are depicted as victims of treachery. A woman runs
toward one helicopter and throws a hidden grenade inside, killing a recently
wounded soldier. She is then chased down and killed. This sequence inverts
actual events such as the US attack on the village of My Lai, where over a