Often a novel filmed as a movie departs from the original story, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. However, many great works of literature have inspired movies, and served as the basis for a great film, even though the film may approach the literature in a different way. Such is the case with Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, which was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Coppola and the screenwriter, John Mileus, took a story written nearly eighty years earlier and used its basic theme of the inner darkness of man and the idea of the journey up a river into the unknown to tell a story about one of the darkest, most confusing chapters of American history: the Vietnam War. Coppola’s alterations to Heart of Darkness serve to exemplify his overall point, namely, that the United States’ involvement in Vietnam was itself a descent into the “heart of darkness”. Coppola was able to make a movie with such a theme for an American audience that was still dealing with Vietnam. The movie came out five years after the last troops finally left Vietnam, and the American public was still asking itself what had been accomplished and why we had been involved, while the troops who had served there were haunted by memories of the horrors they had seen, and were left wondering what it had all been worth as well. Coppola found a story in Heart of Darkness that dealt with the same issues of darkness and confusion, and he applied them to Vietnam to accomplish the task of demonstrating the darkness that was the Vietnam War. Coppola uses the basic plot structure and theme of Heart of Darkness to convey a message that America was wrong in the Vietnam War, and he comes…
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… saw the darkness of a bloody, confusing war that surely parallel Conrad’s colonialism, but that also showed that the inner darkness of all man was still at work in the world. He shows that war is at its heart only a manifestation of that darkness. As Mike Wilmington puts it in his article “Worth the Wait: Apocalypse Now,” “It’s a search . . . toward death and dissolution. Probably Coppola . . . could not explain what that search was meant to find” (288). With Apocalypse Now, Coppola has looked down a crooked unclear path into the heart of darkness.
Works Cited
Chatman, Seymour. “Two and a Half Versions of Heart of Darkness.” Conrad on Film. Ed. Gene M. Moore. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Wilmington, Mike. “Worth the Wait: Apocalypse Now.” Heart of Darkness, Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988.
The Creation of God in Apocalypse Now in Relation to Frazer’s The Golden Bough
The Creation of God in Apocalypse Now in Relation to Frazer’s The Golden Bough
Very rarely do filmmakers intend to create cinematic masterpieces which integrate and draw upon lush literary qualities and leave the viewer with a deeper feeling of life and death than he or she had before viewing the film. Even if some filmmakers do attempt to create a masterpiece, symbolic and complex, many fall short. However, when Francis Coppola created Apocalypse Now, he succeeded in creating a masterpiece, drawing upon the complicated story within Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the savage observations within Frazer’s The Golden Bough. The character of Colonel Kurtz in both Conrad’s and Coppola’s works, is one of a complicated, volatile renaissance man; he is at the same time a ruthless, body collecting warrior and a artistic philosopher. Kurtz’s “divinity is like fire, which under proper restraints, confers endless blessings, but if rashly touched, burns and destroys what it touches” (Frazer 13). Kurtz, as a savage icon, is capable of greatness and is brutally malicious at the same time. Where Coppola strays from Conrad, he does so to show Kurtz’s deliberate choice to become a god-like figure and be destroyed in the tradition of the savages. Through the savage beliefs of tabooed head and hair, the slaying of the divine king, and sympathetic magic, Coppola creates a more savagely realistic character in Kurtz.
Perhaps one of Col. KurtzÕs most prominent physical features in Apocalypse Now is his shaven head. Frazer explains that, to the savages, the head and hair of their divine king is tabooed, and “to touch the top of the head, or anything which had been on his head was sacrilege” (Frazer 812). To the savages, their king ra…
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…in Cambodia after he slays Kurtz because either Chef had ordered the air strike, or because Willard, eventhough he is mesmerized by the culture, is a unwavering part of the western world. Just because Willard is portrayed by Coppola as a unconventional man and can slay Kurtz in accordance with savage customs, doesn’t make him a savage. Eventhough Frazer is an Englishman, Coppola believes his observations of savages are precise, and so he chooses to create his born again savage god-king, Kurtz, accordingly.
Works Cited
Frazer, James. The Golden Bough. 1922. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1951.
Vickery, James B., The Literary Aspect of ‘The Golden Bough’. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’. Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Human Press, Inc., 1979.