Heart of Darkness written by Joseph Conrad and "Apocalypse Now" a movie directed by Francis Coppola are two works that parallel one another but at the same time reflect their own era in time and their creator's own personal feelings and prejudices. "Apocalypse Now" was released in 1979 after two years in the making, as Coppola's modern interpretation to Joseph Conrad's novel, Heart of Darkness . Conrad's book is an excellent example of the advances writers and philosophers made in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This advance deals with civilized humanity's ability to be prepared for and know the unknown. Comparatively, Copolla's movie does the same in the late 1970's. "Apocalypse Now" dares to breach the edges of soldier sanity in a stressful and protested Vietnam War.
One of the many similarities between Heart of Darkness and "Apocalypse Now" is race. Joseph Conrad and Francis Coppola both use white men as the characters that have dominance (Bradley). The white men not only dominate their respective crews, but also the peoples native to the country the white men are visiting. The character Conrad uses, Marlow, and Coppola uses his character, Willard, both look at the natives as though white men are the civilized culture and the native people are the savage culture (Franklin). Both works also reflect the theory that "civilized" white men that go into an uncivilized land become savage and do not return to white civilization. An example of this that is in the book is Marlow’s appointment with the doctor. The doctor measures Marlow's skull to compare its size at the present time to the size of his skull upon his return from the Congo. The thought is that a civilized man’s skull is a different size than a savage's skull. When Marlow asks the doctor how what the results of this test have been in the past, the doctor comments that there are none because no civilized person has ever returned from the Congo. An example of this in the movie is when Willard faces his own personality of whether or not to complete his soldierly mission of killing Kurtz or to abort it. If he completes the mission he is still civil, if he does not, the Vietnam jungle has conquered him. The first soldier that is sent to kill Kurtz did not kill Kurtz, but in fact became one of his followers. The jungle overcame the first soldier. Marlow is portrayed as a wanderer of the sea. The narrator described him to somewhat of a hero. Their mission is to find Kurtz and take him down at all costs. In both stories Kurtz is a psychotic rebel, worshipped as a god, who threatens the stability of his original unit, but in one it is an ivory trading company and in the other it is the US Army. Kurtz, who had begun his assignment a man of great idealism and the highest morals, had become strangely savage. Tribes of natives worship the man who lives in a hut surrounded by fence posts topped with recently acquired human skulls. Kurtz has undergone a total breakdown of the physical, psychological, and spiritual. Along the trip into the wilderness, Willard and Marlow discover their true selves through contact with savage natives. As Marlow ventures further up the Congo, he feels like he is traveling back through time. He sees the unsettled wilderness and can feel the darkness of its solitude. An important similarity of the main characters in each work is that each character has a sympathy for Kurtz and when Kurtz dies, Marlow and Willard see a little of themselves in this degenerated savage white man (Harris). Perhaps the similarity of the book and movie is that we, the reader and viewer are intended to discover the darkness in our own hearts.
Both stories are about a man’s journey into his self, and the discoveries to be made there. They are also about Man confronting his fears of failure, insanity, death, and cultural contamination. In Heart of Darkness there is an outside narrator telling the story that he heard Marlow tell. Conrad uses Marlow’s imagery and objective observation to establish a criticism of “civilized” society. The very opening paragraphs create a dark image of London, the center of civilization during Conrad’s time. The comparison between the pilgrims and the cannibals on Marlow’s ship yields another example of the savagery of civilization. Marlow also exhibits a resolution of frankness and truth. Throughout the novel he emphasizes his contempt for shallow, materialistic men, and his value on honesty. This brings up a theme of hypocrisy or insincerity in the story. Another theme is hegemony. Whenever fundamentally different cultures meet, there is often a fear of contamination and loss of self that leads us to discover more about our true selves, often causing perceived madness by those who have yet to discover.
Evil often breaks out during times of isolation from our culture, and whenever one culture confronts another. The use of a political, military, or economic domination of one country over another, ivory trading, is imperialism. This is another theme of the story. The title of the novel, “Heart of Darkness”, has several meanings. Perhaps it means how we refer to the Middle Ages, when science and knowledge was suppressed as the “Dark Ages”. According to Christianity, in the beginning of time all was dark and God created light. This can have two meanings: Kurtz is worshiped as if he is a god. Perhaps he created light for his tribe. Or according to “Heart of Darkness” before the Romans came, England was dark. In the same way, Africa was considered to be in the ‘dark stages’. Yet, when it is looked into deeper, the usual pattern is reverse and “darkness means truth, whiteness means falsehood”. This reversal tells a political truth about races in the Congo, a psychological truth about Marlow and any number of moral truths such as the use of ivory trading which is dark and dirty. It also can represent the “heart of Africa”.
Although there was much similarity between the two works, there are many discrepancies that make Heart of Darkness and "Apocalypse Now" dissimilar. The settings of the stories were different and written in different time periods. Heart of Darkness, written in the late nineteenth century, was set in a wild African jungle frontier. "Apocalypse Now", released in 1979, was set in a war torn and hostile Vietnam. This could have been Coppola's opinion of a wrong political action and the brutality and senselessness of war (Harris). Conrad used ivory traders as his characters and the ivory trade in Coppola used of soldiers and the Vietnam War. Another difference in the two is that the ivory traders were in the Congo of their own free will and greed. The soldiers were not there of their own free will, many were drafted into Vietnam. Character differences in the two works reflect that Willard, Coppola's adapted character of Conrad's Marlow is really nothing like him. Marlow was eager to meet Kurtz and perhaps learn secrets of the ivory trade in Zaire. Willard on the other hand seemed to have a death wish. Throughout the entire movie, Willard is a depressed human. He has a soldier's killer instinct; this is something Coppola added to his character.
The ties between Joseph Conrad’s book, Heart of Darkness and Francis Coppola’s movie, Apocalypse Now are unmistakable. Apocalypse Now’s accuracy in following the story line of the Heart of Darkness is amazing even though the settings of each story are from completely different time periods. From the Congo in Africa to the Nung River in Vietnam, Joseph Conrad’s ideals are not lost. In both the book and the movie, the ideas of good and evil, whiteness and darkness, and racism are apparent. Both examine the good and evil in humans. In my opinion, the compared themes in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now is that they are both on a quest for Kurtz, which turns into an obsession or fascination of him. I also see them as a journey between the polar opposites of a western, civilized, army command center, and the jungle of Kurtz’s camp. I found the novel to be boring and slow paced, while the movie was action packed and seemed to be a great success. Apocalypse Now is similar to Heart of Darkness in the ground-laying outline but mainly differs in many aspects. Both have excellent insight into the madness of men, the insanity of the situations, and the emotional changes imminent as a result of a traumatic journey. Although the two stories are similar in several aspects, their contrasting approaches achieved two different meanings and conclusions. Both successfully portray the inherent darkness evident in men’s souls that Conrad strove to reveal.
It is difficult to Heart of Darkness without the mention of "Apocalypse Now". Parallels in the movie and novel tie them together as a modern version or revision of an older masterpiece. A comparison of this is Shakespeare's play version of Romeo and Juliet written in 1595 and Baz Luhrmann's 1996 film version of the same work. It is perplexing that the story is lifted from the pages of a book and placed in a completely different context, is written and engineered in a way that retains some of the ideas and themes that Conrad addressed in his book.
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