The Heart of the Apocalypse

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness begins with the retelling of a story. This story is, actually, recounted to us twice – once by Marlow, who is telling a group of amateur seamen of his journey throughout the Congo in search of Mr Kurtz, a renegade agent; and again by the unnamed narrator who relates to us how he himself had listened to Marlow’s story. In her article “Modernism and Vietnam: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now,” Margot Norris has argued that this repetition frames Mr Kurtz’s spiral into darkness as a lesson to be retold and shared over and over again. For Norris, Marlow’s listeners represent the careless and languid Western world. The unnamed narrator is, therefore, also the intended audience.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which was loosely based on Conrad’s book (and in which Kurtz is re-born as Colonel Kurtz), could be argued to fit into this cycle of repetitions. It also begins with an almost-unrelated scene that is separated from the “core” narrative of the film, which takes place in the jungles of Cambodia and Vietnam.

At several points in the film, Colonel Kurtz is seen reading articles, making grand speeches and generally using the persuasiveness of his voice, which Conrad largely alluded to in Heart of Darkness (Mr Kurtz is portrayed as knowing poetry, philosophy and a number of topics) but only utilized sparingly. But as Conrad himself points out, Kurtz’s powerful voice is but a veneer hiding his twisted soul, the emptiness he wrongly seeks to fill by killing and pillaging, through blood-lust and unchecked greed. He is the extreme embodiment of colonialism and the philosophy of colonialism, which so often philosophized about the paternal and enlightening position it had to uphold in relation to the lands and peoples that it had conquered.

Though the book and the film use different methods, both emphasize how Kurtz conquered and enchanted those around him with his mere words. Both versions of Kurtz are demonstrated to be capable of extreme violence, but the emphasis is more often placed on his ability to persuade. Indeed, Marlow spends the majority of Conrad’s novel waiting and wanting to be pursuaded – to have someone to give purpose and make sense of the nightmare he had willingly stumbled into. And so we have come full circle – from the anonymous retelling of Marlow’s retelling of Kurtz’s enticing orations and back to Marlow and to the anonymous narrator. Kurtz’s story is central to these retellings, but it is also re-shaped by them into a critique of colonialism. Apocalypse now does not mirror this narrative structure, but the mere fact that it draws inspiration from The Heart of Darkness may almost be considered merely another retelling following all those which had preceded it – a cautionary tale of colonialism, imperialism and the obsession and darkness they both entail.