Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [133]
6 (p. 181) a sword over our heads: In classical mythology, the tyrant Dionysius demonstrates the precariousness of worldly power by having a sword suspended by a single hair above his courtier Damocles’ head. The phrase “the sword of Damocles” is used figuratively to mean an ever-present peril.
INSPIRED BY HEART OF DARKNESS
Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins they gave me one.
—MARTIN SHEEN AS CAPTAIN WILLARD IN APOCALYPSE NOW
Numerous legacies have washed up in the wake of Marlow’s steamship. The epigraph for T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men” (1925) is the concise announcement “Mistah Kurtz—he dead.” Eliot had planned to use the passage from Heart of Darkness that ends with Kurtz’s “The horror! The horror!” as the epigraph for his long poem The Waste Land (1922) until Ezra Pound persuaded him against doing so. Barbara King solver’s novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998), modeled on Heart of Darkness, is set in the years shortly before and after the Congo won its independence from Belgium in 1960. Narrated by the wife and four daughters of a Kurtz-like American Baptist missionary, the tale reflects the continued exploitation of the Congo region by Western powers generations after Conrad was there.
The adaptation of Heart of Darkness that makes Conrad’s novella particularly relevant to the modern era is Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979). When the film—a brilliant retelling set against the background of the war in Vietnam—finally opened in theaters after three years of highly publicized delays, it sent shock waves throughout the United States and beyond. Many view Coppola’s treatment of this literary classic as the greatest war film ever made.
Operating on a shooting schedule that was initially slated for seventeen weeks but instead sprawled over sixteen months, the film crew, on location in the Philippines, was subjected to a steady stream of dire events. A monstrous typhoon ripped through the islands and washed away film sets; star Martin Sheen suffered a near-fatal heart attack; some actors were fired while others frittered away their days in a drug haze; and helicopters lent by the Philippine government of Ferdinand Marcos were routinely called away by the military to combat Communist insurgents nearby. Far exceeding its original budget, the disorganized production began to drive its crew literally insane, and eventually came to mirror the convoluted Vietnam conflict itself. As Coppola described Apocalypse Now at a press conference: “My film is not a movie; it’s not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.” The drama and agony of bringing the film to the screen was later showcased in the 1991 documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, by Fax Bahr and George Hick enlooper, inspired in part by documentary footage, notes, and tape recordings made by Coppola’s wife, Eleanor, during production.
Apocalypse Now strips away surface and grapples with humanity’s primordial nature, aptly capturing the spirit of Conrad. The film opens with the jungle tree line ablaze with napalm fire and the hypnotic drone of helicopter blades dissolving into a whirring ceiling fan in a hotel room. Captain Benjamin Willard (Sheen) is assigned to track down Colonel Walter Kurtz, a decorated war hero gone missing whom the military has accused of murder. Willard is ordered to terminate Kurtz “with extreme prejudice.”
In the climactic confrontation between Willard and Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando), Kurtz describes the superior fortitude of the Vietcong. He relates a tale in which his Special Forces unit was sent to inoculate the children of a North Vietnamese village for polio. The soldiers later return to the village, only to find the inoculated limbs in a pile, hacked off by the Vietcong. As a result of this experience, Kurtz realizes that America’s military will never defeat those who possess the will to amputate children’s arms, and he disciplines himself to embrace the inner darkness of humanity to the point of insanity. This insanity threatens Willard, who struggles with the absurdity of America