Apocalypse Now vs. Heart of Darkness

[amado1]

The Shallow Differences:

- In Conrad's Heart of Darkness, his protagonist is named Marlowe and his antagonist is Kurtz. In Apocalypse Now, the protagonist is Willard. The antagonist is still Kurtz. (How can you improve on Kurtz as a villain name, honestly?)

- Apocalypse Now updates the story to take place during the Vietnam War rather than the 19th Century English ivory trade in the Congo.

- Marlowe is a ship pilot sent to collect ivory from Kurtz's outpost and possibly replace him; Willard is an Army assassin sent by Intelligence to kill a renegade colonel named Kurtz

The First Two Acts:

The first two acts of Apocalypse Now really fit Wikipedia's definition of a "loose adaptation." We start with burnt-out Captain Willard on R&R in Saigon, losing himself to alcohol while he waits desperately for a new mission to come his way. When he's finally summoned, he listens to an eerie voice recording of a decorated colonel named Kurtz, who the CIA wants assassinated. Willard's superiors explain that Kurtz is wanted for murder; he extrajudiciously took out four Vietnamese spies he suspected of being double agents.

Willard is working on his own, but he's given a Navy river patrol boat to semi-command, helmed by an E-7 known only as Chief (realistic lmao). The dynamic between Willard (an O-2, or low-ranking officer) vs. Chief (an E-7, or high-ranking enlisted) was beautifully depicted, imo. The screenwriter, director, actors, etc. all nailed it. In the military, there's obviously a great adherence to rank, but when it comes to O1s-O3s vs. E-7s to E-9s, things get more complex. Officers must have college degrees; they attain power through education, and that means that often you have very young men commanding enlisted men who are much older and more experienced than them. That is most sharply clear when an O-2 (for example) interacts with a Chief (E-7 through E-9). Chiefs are grizzled, experienced, and tough. They may not have a college degree, but they likely have 20 years of military service under their belt, and all of that time is spent in the grueling, physical workaday tasks that officers never have to learn and are often clueless about. A young officer rarely feels comfortable bossing a chief around, and instead defers to his experience, while also uncomfortably aware that he needs to be seen as the one in charge.

In the film, Willard and Chief have a wary respect for each other and you can ALWAYS feel their tension as they navigate that blurred boundary of who's really in command here. Willard is on a top-secret mission; he outranks everyone onboard the gunboat. But Chief has his own mission (patrol), and while he's willing to give Willard a ride, he's not going to neglect his own tasks.

As they head up the river in search of Kurtz, Willard reads the CIA dossier on Kurtz and becomes conflicted. He's drawn to Kurtz; he respects him, sees that he's a remarkable man (went to Special Ops training at 38!) and begins to doubt the CIA's interpretation of what happened with the 4 Vietnamese spies. To Willard, the data in this file seem to suggest that Kurtz was dead-on. And while he's killed six Vietnamese by hand, Willard can't shake the feeling that this murder will be different. After all, this is an American man, a highly-decorated officer...

Along the way, Willard and his crew run into trouble with their aircab, and Willard witnesses the brutal attack on a Vietnamese village, where the showboating officer in charge plays Ride of the Valkyries from his helicopter, massacres everyone in sight, and glibly suggests that his men go surfing while the killing winds down. Faced with men like this, Willard wonders how anyone in Vietnam can be charged with murder ... if one of them is guilty, then all of them are.

In what I consider roughly the end of Act 2, Chief spots a Vietnamese vessel on the water and insists they inspect it. He asserts his authority and experience here in a battle with Willard, who wants the gunboat to leave the Vietnamese vessel alone. Once they've stopped the other boat, Chief orders a pacifistic sailor (Chef) to go onboard and inspect each and every basket, certain that there must be weapons hidden beneath the fresh produce on the boat. Another young sailor (played by a teenage Lawrence Fishburne) mans the gun. This is an excellent fucking scene, guys. The personalities of the RPB crew all come together in the perfect clash. Willard, growing more and more disillusioned with the war but still focused on his own mission, insists that they leave the Vietnamese alone and move on. Chef, gentle and romantic, traumatized by war, tries repeatedly to refuse the Chief's commands, protesting almost petulantly, louder and louder. Mr. Clean, young and adventurous, mans the gun; he's loyal to his Chief and eager to follow orders, to see more of war. Lance, the California surfer, has become gradually more and more spaced out on drugs and silent as the film progresses, and in this scene he paces along the deck with his gun in hand, his movements swinging from jerky/tight to inattentive. Chief, fed up with Willard's high-jacking of his mission and the danger he's put his crew in, insists on continuing the search despite the lack of any evidence.

As the tension reaches its highest point, Chief orders Chef to check a yellow bucket which a passenger on the ship had been sitting on. The passenger runs toward Chef; Chief shouts; Clean opens fire; Lance follows, while Chef falls back in horror and throws his hands up against the bullets. When the dust clears, the family on the Vietnamese vessel lies dead, and inside the yellow bucket there's nothing but a tiny puppy the woman wanted to protect. As Chef collects the puppy, the other sailors notice that the woman is still moving, and Chief orders Chef to bring her aboard so they can find medical attention for her. At this moment, Willard breaks his silent observation to shoot the woman dead.

The obvious interpretation is that Willard can't allow his mission to be delayed further, especially when the woman seems unlikely to make it to shore. But in narration, Willard offers another lens -- that what really made him do it was his disgust at the Chief's "lie," the lie of the Vietnam War in general -- that American troops could shoot as many innocents as they want and then slap a Bandaid on it and call it okay. To Willard, it seems more honest (perhaps more honorable) to kill them outright.

Act Three:

This is when Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness really intertwine, and the "loose" part of "loose adaptation" fades away. A rain of harmless arrows fall on the crew of the RPB as they cross into Cambodia, searching for Kurtz. Completely lost to LSD, Lance lights off smoke grenades in different colors, an act which attracts enemy fire and kills Clean just as he's listening to a tape his mother sent him. Her voice plays as the crew tends to Clean's body. The rain of arrows is taken directly from Heart of Darkness, and so is the next scene: mired in fog, the crew hears mysterious wails in the jungle, sorrowful noises that Lance mimics while high. Chief, the helmsman, is killed by a spear to the chest, but his death differs from the helmsman in Heart of Darkness in one important way: while Marlowe callously dumps the helmsman's body overboard, Willard allows his crew to give the Chief a river burial.

Why was this change made? In the book, Marlowe's reaction serves as a helpful hint to the reader. It tells us, "This man is not as good as he tells you he is. You need to look critically at everything he says; don't take his conclusions for granted." In the film, this is already accomplished by the patrol raid where Willard shoots the wounded Vietnamese woman. To have him act so callously once again would be a bit of overkill; more importantly, in this story, it would be out of place. Marlowe's callousness is partially explained by the fact that his helmsman is Black, and Marlowe is a 19th Century Englishman who sees his Black crewmen as savages and cannibals. Willard, by contrast, sees his crew as somewhat-equals: all Americans, all soldiers or sailors of different ranks. It's more important, imo, that we see how Willard's mission kills the relative innocents on his crew one by one. An exact remake of the helmsman's death in the book would be ham-fisted. The gradual destruction of his crew is more subtle.

Kurtz:

When Willard finally reaches Kurtz's camp, the similarities to the book continue. Kurtz's Russian sycophant is here interpreted as an American war journalist with a tinge of desperation and fear to his idolatry. Kurt'z illness remains, but (portrayed by a powerfully large Marlon Brando) his presence is menacing and he seems in utter control. The progression of events here is near-identical to the book with one key difference: where Marlowe tries to bring a dying Kurtz back home with him, Willard is first seduced by him, then fulfills his mission, killing Kurtz with a machete while a tribesman outside kills a water buffalo in the same way.

Brando's performance is truly iconic. His voice is scratchy, resonant, sometimes thoughtful and slow, other times stuttering through concepts like he's in the early stages of malaria-induced delirium. He washes his face by scooping water over his bald head like a medieval penitent; he crouches in the dark corners of his room reading T.S. Eliot's poetry. We get the sense that Kurtz IS a good man, remarkably good, remarkably proper, someone who did everything right every step of the way ... and that because of his unique goodness, he fell to American interventionism in a uniquely evil way. He sees this himself; he knows what the magnetic tug of colonialism has done to his soul and he talks in circles trying to justify it.

Willard himself feels the same tug. When he kills Kurtz, he makes no effort to hide himself. He presents himself to Kurtz's loyal followers with the machete still in hand, coated in Kurtz's blood - and Kurtz's men just kneel to him. When he drops his weapon, they drop their weapons too.

Themes:

Heart of Darkness is a straight-forward anti-colonialist tale. We are presented with an Englishman from a good family with a good education, a man who believes in his own morality above all else. He waltzes past the atrocities in the Congo without batting an eye. He does nothing to intervene when slaves are worked to death or tortured for offenses they didn't commit. When he meets Kurtz, someone who is also a good man, intelligent and charming, he's unnerved by the insanity Kurtz has fallen prey to. He flees from the Congo and from colonialism. But, unable to cope with the total up-ending of everything he believes in, Marlowe tells himself it's not colonialism that infected Kurtz -- it was the savage darkness of the Congo herself.

Apocalypse Now pursues its own theme, using the story of Marlowe and Kurtz to instead interrogate the Vietnam War. How do good American boys convince themselves that napalm and rape are okay? How much will they delude themselves to maintain the idea that this is a moral war, and what happens when they no longer can? Is there a tipping point where the trauma breaks their old worldview, or does suffering only enforce it? But for all that it explores its own, more timely theme, Apocalypse Now doesn't abandon the original theme of anti-colonialism in the slightest. Instead it merges the two, faithfully adapting Heart of Darkness both in terms of plot and theme while also updating the story to assess a then-current conflict.

It's important that Marlowe and Kurtz (novel) and Kurtz (movie) all conform to the audience's expectations of what a Good Man should be. They are wealthy. They come from "good" families. They're educated, intelligent, philosophical, well-read. Kurtz (novel) displays "admirable" ingenuity in the hunt for ivory. Kurtz (movie) has grit and willpower that amazes Willard as a fellow soldier, and handles the VC like a pro, dispatching double agents and running his own successful operations without waiting for the go-ahead from high command. These are driven, resourceful and sensitive men with an unusual streak of empathy for the "natives," and this empathy does not help them escape the infectious strain of imperialism in the slightest. In the end, they don't have the moral fiber to escape what their country wants them to do. They only have enough individuality to recognize what it's turning them into, and to either shrink from it in fear or to embrace it, fatalistically -- to cling to the honor of a Job Well Done and pursue this dark mission better than any other man could -- and wait for the welcome assassin to cut them down.

Willard:

From the outset, Willard is different from his counterpart in the novel. Marlowe is a proper gentleman, sheltered and naive but a firm believer in the Crown's directives. Willard, by contrast, is introduced to us a jaded and traumatized vet drinking himself to death, the type of man who slashes his fist open on his own mirror during a drunken fit and has to be carried naked to the shower by lower-ranking men. What turned Willard so cynical is never discussed. We never learn about his background -- whether he's an educated officer or an enlisted man promoted on the battlefield, what kind of family he comes from. And Willard, unlike Marlowe, has doubts about his mission from the start. But he carries it out nonetheless.

He observes the napalm strike and massacre by the aircabs. He watches as the family in the Vietnamese boat is destroyed. He sits quietly while Clean is killed by friendly fire and ducks through a chaotic outpost without lifting a finger either to help the American soldiers or to defend the Vietnamese. He infiltrates Kurtz's camp and wanders freely there for days, never interfering with Kurtz's tyranny. Nor does he react to the dead Cambodians hanging from trees or the heads rotting on Kurtz's front steps. Willard is in many respects a passive observer, but this passivity marks him as different, makes him seem somehow impervious to the fever of war. He can't be goaded into firing his gun or emotionally manipulated into rescuing the innocent. It's not hard to believe that something inside Willard makes him better than the other men: more thoughtful, less fanatic, an independent thinker who resists groupthink and herd mentality at all times.

But is that a proper reading of Willard? There are two moments when his immunity breaks. The first is when he kills the wounded woman on the Vietnamese vessel. The second is when he assassinates Kurtz. Was it right to kill that woman? Was it right to kill Kurtz? Maybe Willard thought so. Maybe he didn't. What these two moments reveal is that Willard, for all his thoughtfulness, is not immune at all. He doesn't kill Kurtz because he believes it's right, nor out of mercy: he does it because that's what the American government ordered him to do.