Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness

Breaking on through to the Other Side and Passing Judgment in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now Redux: A River Journey to Hell and Back
The river journeys in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Copolla’s Apocalypse Now Redux are journeys into Hell—journeys that provide revelations on the horror of the modern world. Marlowe and Willard represent two different takeaways from these journeys, however. Marlowe’s journey is up the Congo; Willard’s is up a fictional river into Cambodia. Both are looking for Kurtz, and for both Conrad and Coppola the jungle rivers serve as opportunities to reflect on the madness at the heart of modernity as it dares to dance with untamed wilderness without moral protection. Even Dante had the help of Virgil as the poet descended into Hell. In the river journeys in these two works, there is no moral guide, no moral protection, no moral mooring. Marlowe himself becomes the reluctant voice of morality when he lauds Kurtz for identifying the “horror”—a thing the reader suspects Marlowe would like very much to do himself but cannot because he has adopted a distant and somewhat aloof disposition towards the “droll” comedy that he calls life (Conrad, 2009, p. 65). For Willard, his participation in the horror—but mainly his hacking to death of Kurtz—is what suddenly prompts his awakening. He spends the entire film asleep, as though like a Manchurian candidate obeying the signals given him from on high. By the end of the film, he throws down his murder weapon and departs the jungle with the musings of Kurtz under his arm, indicating that he will study the moral teachings of the man who identified the “horror.” Willard goes from somnolent stooge of the state to wakeful student of the deceased. Marlowe goes from aloof, nonchalant, sailor-for-hire, to messenger of the other side—of the reality that there exists another side—of the need for an acknowledgement that what the modern world is missing is moral judgment. Unfortunately, it takes Conrad and Coppola a trip into Hell up rivers into the wild jungle to finally break on through to the other side.
In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness there is the “bond of the sea” that establishes the familiarity, fondness, respect and appreciation that Marlowe has for his pilot-like captain, noted at the beginning of the novella as the forward-looking Marlowe begins his backward-looking account (Conrad, 2009, p. 1). In Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux, there is an altogether different bond that opens the film: it is the bond of blood, the bond of war—a bond in which a pound of flesh is to be extracted by the horror personified deep in the territory of the Viet Cong as Willard sails up river to find his target. There is no appreciation, fondness or familiarity among Willard and his crew—only a sense of foreboding and fear; a feeling of confusion as everything—every encounter—seems a foreshadowing of the stark-raving madness they will encounter once they finally reach Kurtz’s camp, where Kurtz’s mad disciple, the photographer, serves as a kind of anti-John the Baptist, denouncing Chef’s judgment of Kurtz’s mental state with a fawning tribute to the Colonel’s esoteric methods: “If you could have heard the man just two days ago, if you could’ve heard him then. God. You were gonna call him crazy?” (Coppola, 2001). What makes the photographer’s remark so meaningful is that it gets to the utter hypocrisy of Willard and his mission: he and his crew are no more or less sane than the man Willard has been sent to kill. Kurtz, in fact, serves as a kind of double for Willard, who has already displayed his own cold-bloodedness in the execution of the Vietnamese peasant woman on the sampan in order to get on with the mission following the harrowing “blow up” of his armed crew over a perceived threat that is actually a puppy. The irony there is thick—and it too foreshadows the irony of the end of the film—i.e., that Kurtz has broken through to the other side, has seen the horror—and instead of being lauded for defining it, as happens in Conrad’s book when Marlowe sings his praise of Kurtz, Coppola’s Kurtz is executed for his pronouncement.
Earlier on the river, Willard’s cold execution of the Vietnamese woman gets a “fuck you” and a “fuck them” from Chef, who, in spite of the momentary insanity that grips him in the sampan, does still retain some sense of the line between right and wrong. Willard does not care to determine a difference: he is already horrific in that respect. He has transcended good and evil, transcended Vietnam, the river, Cambodia, the war—he has transcended it all and risen into nothingness, his sole aim being to eradicate the personification of rebuke that Kurtz is—the stark representation of the failure that is the modern world, which is why the modern world has to go to such great lengths to eliminate him: it will tolerate no such rebukes. In this sense Willard is transcending his surroundings but also descending from them into the horror of Hell—and making his peace with it along the way.
For Conrad’s Marlowe, there is no making peace with the Congo journey or what is found there at the end of it. Rather than “Mistuh” Kurtz serving as the rebuke to the modern world, Marlowe himself serves as the rebuke—he represents the modern world—a world without belief in the next, without faith, without the ability to judge right from wrong. Marlowe knows this and identifies himself as one who “would have nothing to say” (Conrad, p. 65) were he to be on his own deathbed and have one last opportunity to make a grand pronouncement on what the grand river of life is all about: he is just as empty as the next modern. The only difference between him and others is that he knows it and retains a sense of what it means to be capable of judgment. In this sense, he is like Chef, who, though he loses his mind at times, is not without a sense of right and wrong. Marlowe recognizes in Kurtz the greatness of the man because, quite simply, he was able to make a judgment on the modern: “He had summed up—he had judged. ‘The horror!’…It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats…but it was a victory!” (Conrad, 2009, p. 65).
Marlowe respects Kurtz because Kurtz said what others will not: he dropped the pretense and made it known that try as the modern world might like, it cannot escape its own sins, which are leading the world into Hell. The jungle river journey is an allegory of this journey into Hell—and at the end of it, in both Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now Redux, is the madman at the gate, who is rather less mad than many of the others who are taken as sane or at least as respectable—for he has been to the other side, the side which respectable life back home in so-called civilization chooses daily to ignore. The madman in the jungle has seen through the lies and has pointed the finger at himself, his own soul, and—as Marlowe points out—has passed judgment: “The horror!” Marlowe is, after all, a moral man—more like Chef than like Willard. Willard is simply a representative of the War State: at this point, there is nothing redeemable in his character. He is an angel of death, an usher of Hell. Marlowe is, at least, far more willing to embrace Kurtz for his pronouncement of judgment because it calls out the modern world, its ethos, its falsity, its disrespect for the other side. However, once Willard concludes his mission, and Kurtz leaves him with his final teaching (“the horror”), capitalizing on the ironic quip about soldiers being allowed to firebomb villagers but not being allowed to write “fuck” on their airplanes because the latter is obscene, the light hits Willard full in the face and he recoils at what he has become. This realization marks the first stage in the journey out of Hell for him—the first stage of his possible redemption. As Conrad explains, “Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets” (p. 65), Marlowe is never one to give up his skepticism—but he also appreciates the facts. Willard represents the man who is given the chance to escape—and does so—with knowledge in hand.
References
Conrad, J. (2009). Heart of Darkness. CT: Dover.
Coppola, F. F. (2001). Apocalypse Now Redux. LA: Miramax Films.