The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [78]
I think we live our lives hoping—impatient—for a time when things are resolved. I think that time will never come for any of us—and that’s part of the irony, even in this movie. Although there seems to be a resolution of some kind: that the healthy devour the sickly, and there is some sort of life/death, night-becomes-morning cycle taking place—to me the irony is that we stand on the edge, on the razor blade, all the time, and that’s why Willard looks to the left, looks to the right, and you hear, “The horror, the horror.” “The horror, the horror” is precisely that we are never really comfortable understanding what we should do, what is right and what is wrong, what is rational behavior, what is irrational: that we’re always on the brink.
“The horror, the horror” at the end, the fact that I wanted to end it on choice, because I think that’s the truthful ending—We hope for some sort of moral resolution about Vietnam and about our part in it, our participation in it. At the [true] end, you don’t have a resolution. You’re in a choice, still, between deciding to be powerful or to be weak. In a way, that’s how wars start. The United States chose: It wanted to be powerful, wanted to be Kurtz, in Southeast Asia. It chose not to stay home. But choice was just the only way I thought it could end.
Heart of Darkness ends with a lie. After Kurtz’ death, Marlow goes to Kurtz’ girlfriend, the intended, and she says, “What did he say before he died?” And Marlow says, “He mentioned your name,” when in fact what Kurtz said was, “The horror, the horror.” So I feel all lousy because I think the ending I had on the movie was the truth, but this ending that I’m going to put on it now is a lie—and I justify it to myself because Conrad would have ended with a lie, too.
TOM WOLFE
by Chet Flippo
August 21, 1980
Probably the most striking thing about ‘The Right Stuff’ is that it has made you very respectable. You’re no longer the hit man who literary people fear and hate. Now you’re eminently respectable.
Most of the things I have done have not been send-ups or zaps, but those things are remembered somehow. People love a little merciless mockery. So they’ll tend to remember something like Radical Chic, particularly, or The Painted Word, since, if you even make gentle fun of people who inhabit the world that you and I live in or the world of the arts, or anything having to do with expression, they scream like murder. And of course they have the equipment to bite back, so the fight starts. Everyone kind of enjoys it whether they’re paying any attention or not. But The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was not a send-up, was not mockery or satire.
It was not necessarily a subject the literary world understood or endorsed.
Well, the literary world certainly doesn’t endorse the subject of astronauts; it hasn’t been a very popular subject. As a matter of fact, one of the things that interested me most was not the space program but military life. I could see that the military, particularly the officer corps, had really been a vacant lot in the literary sense. Serious writers stopped looking at the military around 1919—in any sympathetic way or even empathetic way. It’s around then that you start finding the fashion of dealing with the military in a way in which the only acceptable protagonist is the GI, the dog soldier, the grunt, the doughboy, who’s presented as a victim, not as a warrior, a victim of the same forces as civilians.
I would think the astronauts weren’t eager to talk to you, some weirdo saying, I’m from ‘Rolling Stone’ and I want to investigate your private life. Obviously you didn’t say that; how did you go about it?
They weren’t all that tough. By that time, some had left the astronaut corps. They were a lot looser about the whole thing, they were no longer under the Life magazine contract. I think many had become rather bored with