Apocalypse Now & Heart of Darkness
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The film Apocalypse Now (1979) is a translation of Joseph Conrad's short novel Heart of Darkness to the milieu of the Vietnam War. In doing so, screenwriters John Milius and Francis Coppola utilize the basic plot structure of the novel, with elements altered to reflect the horrors and terrors of the war. Underlying both the novel and the film is the idea of the journey into the darkest areas of the human soul. The film indeed carries this much further than does the novel because where Conrad features a central character who comes to question his own righteousness and to wonder whether all men could not become a Kurtz under the right circumstances, Milius and Coppola see the war in Vietnam as made up of precisely the "right" circumstances. The war is a veritable cauldron of evil forces in which the central character not only fears he might be just like Kurtz, but in the end is precisely like Kurtz. Director Coppola finds a visual style that makes concrete the sese of evil, darkness, and human disintegration that Conrad manages to create through his prose style. The film also takes a more direct route in one sense, since the framing story of the film is different from that of the novel, a difference that is important in considering the different intentions of the filmmakers as opposed to the novelist. In Heart of Darkness, the character of Marlow, a persona for the author used in several stories and novels, makes a journey from civilization into the darkest part of Afric
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cene in which Willard is given his orders contrasts sharply with that in the novel. Marlow himself will be portrayed as a force of light in comparison to the darkness of Kurtz, and he begins in the light of the Intended and her world, a civilized world which will contrasts sharply with the world of the jungle and the darkness into which Marlow must journey. In Conrad's novel, women are the protectors of the social order, as the Intended represents when she asks Marlow to find Kurtz. In the end, upon his return, Marlow lies to her so he will not have to reveal the nature of Kurtz's fate. Women are barely represented at all in much of Conrad's fiction, and in Heart of Darkness the civilized woman remains behind as the protector of order and as the embodiment of civilization for the male.
There is no sense of social order in Apocalypse Now. All order has been destroyed, and the world that is left is nightmarish. The opening scene finds Willard drinking in a hotel room in Saigon, and every bit of furnishing in the room has a horrible life of its own. The man is in the hotel room, but he stares at the whirling fan on the ceiling and is suddenly back in the jungle and in all the horrors of the war. This opening image plunges
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1893
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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