ABSTRACT
Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was inspired initially by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), which indeed informs the film throughout. The narrator, in the former named Willard and in the latter Marlow, takes a terrifying river journey. In the novella this is along the Congo in the days of the imperialist scramble for Africa; in the film it is through Vietnam to Cambodia during the American war against the Vietcong. He is trying to locate a mysterious figure, in both cases called Kurtz, whose mind has apparently been deranged by his years in the wilderness. Kurtz has become the object of native worship, and has encouraged the most barbaric practices. The film goes beyond Conrad’s tale in that Captain Willard of the US Army has received instructions to ‘terminate with extreme prejudice’ the command of Colonel Kurtz – that is, kill him – because his ‘methods’ are ‘unsound’. In other words, his mission is the murder of a man who has set himself up as a god. This murder is performed in parallel with the natives’ sacrifice of a buffalo. In both novella and film, Kurtz’s
last words are: ‘The horror! the horror!’ But where Marlow returns to England to persuade the fiancée of this ‘universal genius’ that his final utterance was her name, Willard leaves Kurtz’s temple to be faced by his followers’ bowing down before him, as the new god. Refusing this role, he leaves the settlement; the final sequence, seen over the closing credits, shows it being bombed by American helicopters.
