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Introduction to the Theme of Fascination with Abomination
Mankind’s “fascination with the abomination” (Conrad, 31) is the general theme which permeates both Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart Of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s film adaptation Apocalypse Now; both stories follow a man’s fascination with the abomination, as well as his eventual initiation and descent into the ‘heart of darkness’. Both Conrad’s original novella and Coppola’s film reimagining are portrayed as frame-stories—stories told within stories—narratives woven within one another, flashbacks within flashbacks, quotes within quotes; both Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now tell the story of a protagonist and follow his voyage into darkness, bookended by a prologue and an epilogue.
Narrative Structure: Frame-Stories and Mediated Narratives
Conrad’s novella begins with an anonymous narrator’s account of a tale he was told recently aboard the ship The Nellie while idling in the Thames River; Captain Marlow’s tale. The majority of the novella is the anonymous narrator’s recounting of Marlow’s tale, recited as though it were in Marlow’s own voice. Marlow’s words are voiced seemingly invisibly by the narrator—acting as a conduit relaying information; remaining the unseen and mysterious ever-present mediator. The mediation provided by the anonymous narrator is a near-perfect analogue for the mediation provided by a camera lens in the context of a film; both are invisibly interposed between the audience and the author, controlling everything we hear and see. This mediated narrative structure is therefore comparable to the nature of filmmaking; and as in Heart of Darkness the narrator is present to retell Captain Marlow’s story, Francis Ford Coppola’s camera in Apocalypse Now is present to retell Benjamin Willard’s tale.
Setting and Atmosphere: Congo vs. Vietnam
The settings for Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now are drastically different, the former taking place in the African Congo and the latter taking place in Vietnam; however, the narrative structures and use of sound and lighting found within both stories are undoubtedly similar. Both narratives are stories within stories being relayed to us the audience by a mediating narrator—the story is narrated retrospectively in the disembodied first person. Our first introduction to both of our protagonists, in the novella and in the film, is with their account of how they received the appointment detailing their river voyage. Heart of Darkness is bookended by the same location—The Nellie; the introduction is calm: “the day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance […] the water shone peacefully; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unsustained light” (Conrad, 28). Apocalypse Now, in contrast, begins with discord—chaotic images that dissolve into one other; palm trees beget poisonous gas; palm trees beget impending helicopter blades. Both works then similarly transition into the exposition of the river voyage, both move from darkness into light; from Conrad’s quiet brooding sunset and from Coppola’s silent dimly lit hotel room we are taken back in time to a world which immediately blinds us with light and sound.
Journey into Darkness: Marlow and Willard’s Voyage
Both protagonists, Captain Marlow and Captain Willard, begin their river voyage with the aim of collecting company materials—Marlow retrieving ivory and Willard retrieving valuable information—by travelling upriver and visiting several company outposts; both Marlow and Willard are entrusted to travel to the furthest outpost upstream to locate a Captain Kurtz and bring him back to London. At Captain Marlow’s first stop, the government controlled outpost located at the mouth of the river, Marlow witnesses enslaved African natives who are yoked together by metal collars and chains. Marlow describes this scene by remarking that he witnessed “a lot of people, mostly black and naked, [who] moved about like ants […] they were not enemies, they were not criminals” (Conrad, 42). These people are victims of an imperialistic system which had transformed these men into “black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom” (Conrad, 44). Marlow stays at the government station for a total of ten days before continuing to the Central Station; during the journey between these two stations, Marlow describes the desolation of the land; abandoned villages covered in burnt grass. Once Marlow reaches the Central Station, he is told that his steamer vessel cannot travel and must be repaired over the next several months. In Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola combines the first two stops of the protagonist’s journey into one single stop, and all of the action which in the novella takes place over several months is condensed into a mere two days. Captain Willard’s initial stop is with the purpose to rendezvous with his river escorts, the Air Calvary. Similar to Marlow, Willard’s first stop is heavily characterized by victims of an imperialistic system; the United States Military has assumed authority over a small village in Vietnam and is utilizing its absurdly powerful firepower to mow down seemingly unarmed natives. Similarly to Marlow having to wait for his steamship to get repaired at the second outpost, Willard also faces an issue that impedes his further progress: only two points exist where there is enough drawn water to enter the Nung River, and both are being controlled by the Viet Song. A decision must be made regarding which is the more beneficial to assault of the two sites so that Willard’s ship may be delivered safely to its destination. A massive and hellish helicopter attack is launched on the decided site, a scene which portrays mankind at its most monstrous while the audience watches. Both scenes describing the horrors of imperialism are crucial to the underlying theme of the texts, do all of us harbour a hidden fascination with the abomination? Marlow is intrigued by the state of affairs as he observes the horrors in the Congo, and we as an audience are intrigued by the choreographed violence taking place in Vietnam. For both protagonists, the journey upriver transforms into a deeper exploration—the journey to the very deepest psychological interior, characterized by outposts which one after the other become increasingly more savage, wild, and irrational.
In both Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now the protagonists make two scheduled stops before they reach Captain Kurtz’s inner station; Captain Marlow visits the first government controlled station and Captain Willard conducts a rendezvous the Air Calvary and must stop to refuel—in addition, both Marlow and Willard must make a series of unscheduled stops. Marlow describes a series of unscheduled stops which must be made: “Sometimes we came upon a station, close by the bank, clinging to the skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumbledown hovel […] seemed very strange” (Conrad, 67), while Willard is placed in a direct recreation of this moment as he experiences visiting the Isat Army outpost which is ‘clinging to the skirts of the unknown’. Willard witnesses a mass of bodies at the outpost swirling in a pool of water, desperately crying out to anyone, begging to be saved; Willard attempts but ultimately fails to locate a commanding officer in an attempt to report the strange sight. The journey continues on, becoming increasingly stranger and stranger, gradually initiating each of our protagonists into the darkened twisted world of Captain Kurtz.
The protagonists’ impending approach to Kurtz’s inner station, in both the novel and in the film, occurs in the midst of an incredibly thick fog; a threshold which the protagonists must cross. In the novel, the crew hears human cries coming from behind the fog, and Marlow describes that it is “as though the mist itself had screamed, so suddenly, and apparently from all sides at once, did this tumultuous and mournful uproar arise” (Conrad, 73). In Coppola’s film, we see Captain Willard make the same assessment: frightened, confused, hairs standing on end. The native inhabitants screams intend to scare both Marlow and Willard, as well as their respective crews, because they revere Captain Kurtz as a god and do not want him to be taken away or threatened. Following the native screams, a barrage of arrows fly out of the fog attacking Marlow’s and Willard’s vessel, which fires back at the shore. Eventually, Marlow does cross the threshold and meets with Kurtz, the godlike force being worshipped by the natives.
Confrontation with Kurtz: The Heart of Darkness
Both Marlow and Willard, upon confronting Kurtz, eventually come to the same realization: after our protagonists are given a look at the ‘great abomination’, both must ultimately confront the absolute moral terror characterized by the prospect of human nature being pushed far beyond any reasonable limits. Marlow and Willard are both profoundly changed by the experience of meeting Kurtz. Though Conrad’s Marlow is a character who has returned from his voyage with his moral perspective and sanity untarnished, Coppola’s Willard is by contrast initially immoral: and by an immoral protagonist for a moral one, Francis Ford Coppola has created a character who is incapable of recognizing the abomination; Willard is a man who is incapable of knowing or understanding evil when he experiences it—is surrounded by it. Willard does not undergo a mass discovery, Willard is simply a murderer who is confronting another murderer. Thus, while Heart of Darkness invites us to observe a character with a moral centre, Apocalypse Now is a journey told through the lens of a character lacking a moral centre; that being said, Conrad’s book does not technically maintain an inner moral centre, for Captain Marlow’s ultimate lesson and moral of his story is that human existence itself lacks moral heart—Marlow has not returned from the river expedition with his conception morality intact, it is altered. Willard, by the end of the film, is comparatively altered by his experience voyaging upstream into the darkness: Willard is made wiser by the experience; Willard himself has been changed, he has become humbled by his confrontation with both the darkness found inherent in Kurtz, found equally in both himself and in human existence.
Conclusion: Reflections on Human Nature and Morality
These two separate protagonists’ journeys, that of Captain Marlow and Captain Willard, who travel upriver into the unknown to encounter the most abominable form of human existence and cruelty, follow remarkably and understandably similar narrative patterns, while taking drastically different approaches to setting and character development, to arrive at a unified truth. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is a thematic and structural film-stock analogue to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—obviously, the former being an adaptation of the latter—exploring the descent of a character as he discovers what people are capable of doing when unrestrained from a moral code; by confronting Captain Kurtz, both Marlow and Willard must confront human nature at its most terrifying—lacking compassion and the recognition of human decency: a theme which can prevail in any time period, be it focused on imperialistic rule in the colonization of Africa or the use of excessive force on native inhabitants in the Vietnam War.
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