Coppola is not a hat but a director. The director of Apocalypse now, not Pierino to the rescue. In the collective imagination, it is the best known film about Vietnam. So well known that many say they have seen it even if it is not true. Often we limit ourselves to the "pappa-papparapappa ..." making the verse to Wagner's Valkyries who accompanied the Huey helicopters to attack a Viet village.
We talk about many things without knowing them, it is a bit the common thread of our times. Those who say cat but don't have it in the bag, those who criticize without reading, those who read without criticizing, those who lecture, those who confuse ...
The fact is that fate has created two Charlies: one pronounced in English with the accent on a and one in French with the sweet ch and the accent on i. The first was the American code for the C of Cong, later becoming the nickname of the Vietcong in general; the second represents all those who on social media talk about freedom from the massacre of the cartoonists in Paris onwards. Je suis Charlie. It is always about shooting and death. Mock the History. One name, many tears.
Old Charlie was born of the sympathetic arrogance turned myth thanks to the brilliant madness of Robert Duvall as Colonel Kilgore. The new Charlie is quite another thing: a name, an agency, a viral phenomenon that is abused.
In the sad Charlie of Vietnam there was a slow, bottomless madness. The imprint of a sick war, destined to last forever. Pain and horror over the years have become epic, story, memory. Thanks to the director-hat Coppola we digested and metabolized by issuing a strong, unappealable, educational judgment.
Whatever the reason for using a Je suis or a Je ne suis pas Charlie, today everything seems faster. It's easier to connect and disconnect, prey to an enveloping paranoia of participation. Easier to find out and draw here and there, staying on the piece of generic indignation that mixes hit and guilty, guilt and bang and above all makes an anthology of nothing. 90% of those who talked about Charlie Hebdo did it randomly and in any case today they have already forgotten.
The horror in Indochina had something romantic, sad, poetic about it. In 40 years, Vietnam has become a chapter carved in time. It is difficult to imagine that today's violence remains a trace. Everything is fragmented, reduced to moments, to atoms. Without ties there is no memory and without memories there are no stories. Facts and tears are described, analyzed, squeezed and then thrown away forever. Others will come and still others, always different, always the same.
Saigon fell in April of '75. The North Vietnamese armies settled their accounts with the collaborationist South, a friend of the Americans. Despite the official name Ho Chi Minh City, for friends the city remains Saigon. The irony of history has it that in Thi Sac, in the river area, there is a trash place reminiscent of Coppola's film: Apocalypse Now. The Vietnamese learned to do the drama business back then. Between gasoline drums and barbed wire, on one wall there is a board with the words Charlie don't surf, a symbolic phrase of an epic film. Evil is exorcised, because it is remembered.
Today evil, wherever it is, leaves no aftermath. Create a wave of reactions that crowds can surf en masse but only briefly. Everything is chewed, everything is digested before being swallowed up by the media machine that will propose other facts, other dramas other Charlie.
Today's pain lacks class and style. There is no time for either. We talk a lot but for a little while. War is in a hurry too. Game over and we start again.
The marble of the tombstones remains, for definition always equal in time. In front of that, however, think of it, you get the hat. Indeed the Coppola.
40 years have passed since the end of the Vietnam war. Je suis or Je ne suis pas Charlie. Charlie surf or don't surf. Perhaps on this, there really is no difference.
Giampiero Venturi
(in the opening a frame taken from Apocalypse now)
