Apocalypse Now

Originally published 18/06/23 on Letterboxd

Some words I wrote in relation to Assayas’ Demonlover here, which continue to apply to this horrifyingly singular work:

In 1987, Jean Baudrillard published his continuation of his discussion of the image introduced in his seminal Simulacra and Simulation. Titled The Evil Demon of Images, this work applied the semiotic framework – that is, of the simulacra becoming a separate entity from that which it is an image of – to New Hollywood cinema, particularly Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Baudrillard suggested that Apocalypse Now was symptomatic of how war has become “cinematographic and televisual,” framed as something to be consumed by hordes of famished consumers. Whilst acknowledging Coppola’s construction of war as being a particularly overwhelming, thrilling one, Baudrillard also notes that it is “precisely when it [the image] appears most truthful, most faithful, and most in conformity to reality that the image is most diabolical.” The notion that the image necessarily reflected that which it draws from is sharply dismissed, since the production of such images precedes the real, thereby inverting the logical order of the original followed by its copy.

Therefore, gratification via consumption of images does not require the existence – in material terms – of something in order for the image to be drawn from it. Instead, what is depicted in the bounds of the image replaces the original – in witnessing footage of the Gulf War, as Baudrillard famously argued, the audience consumed the image of what appeared to be a conflict of infantries rooted in notions of sacrifice, when in fact the actual occurrence of events mirrored a massacre more than it did a war of equal capabilities. In a similar vein, gaining catharsis or pleasure through the witnessing of violence does not necessarily require these acts of violence to be executed. However, the troublesome nature of the contemporary image is that the border between the image and the “original” act that is being alluded to begins to dissolve. Therefore, what may appear to the consumer – or more specifically, the voyeur – as a mere diorama may in fact be “the real thing.”