President Donald Trump over the weekend posted what appeared to be an artificial intelligence-created meme on his social media platform that showed him as Robert Duvall’s character in “Apocalypse Now.” The post included a quote that Chicago was “about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
There’s a lot going on here, but let’s set aside for now the fact that the president of the United States seems to be declaring war on a U.S. city. The post just raises the question: Did anyone involved in this post ever see “Apocalypse Now”?
To start with, Duvall’s character is named Lt. Col. Kilgore, which should be a tipoff. He wears a black Stetson cavalry hat that was a throwback to the Indian wars of the 1870s. And his main role in the plot is to order a napalm strike from helicopters playing “Ride of the Valkyries” by Richard Wagner, Hitler’s favorite composer.
Napalm is like gasoline that sticks to your skin. It’s a horrific weapon of war that causes severe burns and asphyxiation as it sucks the oxygen out of the air around you. Seven years before the movie, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a young Vietnamese girl whose clothes were burned off by napalm became one of the most iconic images of the anti-war movement.
So when Kilgore says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” you are not supposed to cheer. You are not supposed to want to be like him, and if you’re the president, you’re definitely not supposed to quote him. (The social media post also changed “napalm” to “deportations,” which doesn’t even make sense.)
The post reminded me of the two guys in my dorm who taped a printout of Jack Nicholson’s “you can’t handle the truth” speech to their door in an act of defiance. I know it’s a popular movie quote, but I always wondered whether they realized that the speech is quite literally the downfall of Nicholson’s character, who ends up under arrest after he loses his cool in court and confesses to an illegal order that led to the death of a Marine.
Now it’s one thing for two guys in a college to misread “A Few Good Men,” but we’re talking about the people running our government. We’re living in a golden age of misreading. (Note: I’m using “golden age” sarcastically, as I am arguing that misreading is bad and you should not do it. Capisce?)
In recent years, conservatives have loved quoting “Come and take it”— and the related “This is Sparta!” line from the movie “300″ — as a call of defiance. Recently, a Trump administration official even used the original Greek phrase to argue she would stand against “elites” who threaten, uh, girls’ sports.
After King Leonidas tells the invading Persian army “molon labe,” they do, in fact, take it.
But again, did anyone see the movie? Or even read the Wikipedia entry? After King Leonidas tells the invading Persian army “molon labe,” they do, in fact, take it. Leonidas dies, Thermopylae falls, and the sole consolation is that his army held back the invading force as long as it did. Is heroic defeat the message conservatives intend to send?
It has become popular on the right to bash the humanities, which are seen as needlessly woke and not useful for getting a job. But it seems like more and more Americans don’t have the basic critical thinking skills you’d pick up in a freshman-level English class. (Imagine the grade Trump would get on a film studies course for saying that the moral of “Citizen Kane” is “get yourself a different woman.”)
In the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” Gordon Gekko’s line that greed is good was supposed to show he was morally depraved. The movie ends with him facing charges of insider trading as the moral conscience of the film advises another character to “create, instead of living off the buying and selling of others.” But actor Michael Douglas has said he was surprised at how many people idolized Gekko. “We just never anticipated that all these MBAs, these people in business school would just be ranting and raving that this was the person that they wanted to be,” he said in 2010. Martin Scorsese’s 2013 movie “The Wolf of Wall Street” went to even greater lengths to show that Leonardo DiCaprio’s pump-and-dump hustler was a bad guy, and yet the character still ended up as a celebrated antihero among the broker class. The movie even addressed this phenomenon, showing an exposé in a business magazine backfiring by inspiring more ambitious young brokers to seek out the firm. The Amazon TV show “The Boys” set out to skewer America’s fascination with superheroes by portraying them as venal, self-serving fascists, but the show’s creators kept having to make the character of Homelander more obviously evil because the audience wasn’t getting the message. In 2020, showrunner Eric Kripke was stunned to see a photo of a Trump supporter in a Homelander costume at a rally. “Um… are they actually watching the show?” he asked with incredulity. This epidemic of misreading led “Breaking Bad” creator Vince Gilligan to call for more movies and TV shows about good guys. Acknowledging that the character Walter White was “one of the all-time great bad guys,” he said in a speech this year that he’d rather be celebrated for “creating someone a bit more inspiring.” But when a rebooted “Superman” brought back the old-timey moral righteousness of the Man of Steel, conservative pundits complained he had gone “woke.” Look, some texts aren’t hard. Superman is good; Homelander is evil. Lt. Col. Kilgore, Gordon Gekko and Walter White aren’t role models. It’s bad enough that so many Americans can’t handle these basic readings, but the fact that the president is one of them is tragic for all of us.
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
