Apocalypse When?

Colonel Kurtz: Marlon Brando eerie portrayal of Kurtz embodies the themes of Heart of Darkness set in the Cambodian juggle in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalyspe Now.Joseph Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness reveals the sinister side of the human mind as the affects of the colonial situation in the Congo reduces Mr. Kurtz to a primal form. In the film inspired by the novella, Apocalypse Now, Colonel Kurtz, as hauntingly envisioned by Marlon Brando, encompasses the most extreme form of amorality that war perpetrates on its participants. Colonial atrocities and war both serve as the setting for the philosophical and psychological affects of mankind inflicting pain and suffering on other human beings. In both the novella and the film the journey through mankind’s moral wasteland culminates with the introduction of the purest evil product of the ethical destruction; Kurtz. In part three of Heart of Darkness Kurtz’s final moments serves as a reflection on the evil he perpetrated in his life. Colonel Kurtz’s memorable succeeds in revealing the themes of Conrad’ about his true moral confusion by illustrating the evil of mind more explicitly, than Kurtz in the novella who does not reveal as much of his thoughts.

When the reader is finally present in the story the reader has gathered many ideas and perceptions of who Kurtz through many different sources. It is revealed that Kurtz has pillaged become a demigod by essentially enslaving the natives and brutally pillaging the land for ivory and this is enough to reveal the deep malevolence of Mr. Kurtz. Just before Mr. Kurtz is met the Russian tells Marlow about Kurtz, “You don't talk with that man-you listen to him.” (53 Conrad) This builds Kurtz to a higher level as the man that has not utter a word the entire novella is hailed as a philosopher with many ideas to share. The speech in the film effectively illustrates what Marlow in the book perceives of Kurtz in relation to the loss of ethics. Marlow assesses, “the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness--that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions” (55). By metaphorically comparing Kurtz’s primal brutality to the dark primitive nature of the jungle Conrad reveals the demigod’s total lose of morality.

Colonel Kurtz’s speech encompasses all the conceived images of the man that the book seeks to establish as the true evil that exists in ever human being. The Colonel professes “horror, horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends.” (Coppola). Kurtz believes that one must desensitize himself from frightening and otherwise objectionable activities and eliminate the need to do what is right. This illustrates Conrad’s Mr. Kurtz’s decent into absolute setting a side of moral values in order to become a brutal pillager and the man who exclaims in writing, “Exterminate all the brutes!”(50). The Colonel illustrates his ideas about ‘moral terror’ by telling of an experience in which children’s arms were hacked off and that he thought, “My God, the genius of that, the genius, the will to do that.”(Coppola) Kurtz has marveled at the ability of a group of people to inflict pain without considering the savagery of their actions.

In essence the speech in Apocalypse Now further characterizes Kurtz’s to become free from moral inkling. In a the colonial world were most try to conceal the brutality they are inflicting on the natives by claiming to civilizing the natives, Kurtz is the only one that knows exactly where he stands. There is no question that Kurtz spirals into madness but he is not insane because he knows exactly how views the world and what darkness lies within every human being’s heart.

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