It is an astonishing cultural transformation: the “Ride” remade into an anthem of American supremacy. This displacement is of a piece with other troubling historical continuities of the postwar era: Nazi scientists migrating to America, Gestapo-style torture techniques resurfacing in Iraq, the cult of the sculpted body perpetuating Riefenstahl’s Aryan ideal. Eric Rentschler, in his book “The Ministry of Illusion” (1996), writes, “Contemporary American media culture has more than a superficial or vicarious relationship with the Third Reich’s society of spectacle.” Nothing in film history demonstrates that idea as vividly as “Apocalypse Now,” in which the German will to power gives way to God-bless-America imperialism.
Alex Ross, “Wagner in Hollywood”, The New Yorker (31 August 2020), 23.