Never get out of the boat

The last of my weekly papers for World Literature through Film. I wrote it in late October.

Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, follows the plot of the novella very closely in some respects, but it updates the setting of the story and freely adjusts detail to support the new context it has created. Although Conrad's work may easily be recognized in Coppola's film, the novella does not limit the movie. Apocalypse Now does not merely transfer the narrative from nineteenth-century Africa to wartime Vietnam. Instead, it transfers the central ideas of the book to a new context, allowing the narrative to reorganize itself to meet the requirements of a different intercultural milieu. The events of Willard's journey upriver flow naturally from the new environment rather than from the events of Marlow's parallel journey in the original text. The result is a cinematic adaptation that stands very well on its own. By illustrating the applicability of the novella's theme in a different situation, Apocalypse Now contributes well to Conrad's literary legacy. If the purpose of Heart of Darkness is to demonstrate that human depravity is universal, this film reinforces Conrad's work by showing that it holds true in contemporary events.

Interestingly, however, Coppola's intention in creating the film seems not to have been to reinforce Conrad's thesis about humanity, but to adapt Conrad's work to make a statement about the Vietnam War. The original narrative has political implications, of course, but the film adaptation could have retained the original political context or used a new setting of minimal political importance. Instead, Apocalypse Now addresses a recent political controversy that is parallel to the anti-imperialist message of the earlier work. It treats the American intervention in Vietnam the same way that Heart of Darkness treats the European economic penetration of Africa. Both interventions are supposed to represent a theory of societal superiority in action, and both are held irresponsible because they allow the latent barbarism of these cultivated societies to emerge.

In addition to presenting the story in a contemporary context, Apocalypse Now creates a sense of immediacy by changing the circumstances of the protagonist in subtle ways. Both Heart of Darkness and the film include first-person narration by the Marlow/Willard character, but the film allows the audience a greater glimpse into this narrator's thoughts than it might otherwise, by altering somewhat the nature of his mission and the state of his health. In the novella, the protagonist serves a foreign trading company; in the film, the protagonist serves his own (and the intended audience's) government, preventing the viewer from blaming some other culture for the evil that the story presents as universal. Furthermore, the degradation of Marlow's health, which serves as a metaphor for his susceptibility to the evil that has claimed Kurtz, is illustrated more vividly in the movie by the moral degradation that claims Willard and his companions. By the time Willard kills an inconveniently wounded Vietnamese girl in the film, it is clear that very little separates his morality from that of the maniacal Colonel Kurtz. The narration reminds the viewer several times that Willard is coming to understand Kurtz as the journey progresses. By the time Willard reaches his destination, it is difficult to be sure that assassinating Kurtz makes any sense at all; the war is robbing all parties of their souls, and the methods of the mad colonel make as much sense as anything else—perhaps more, given their effectiveness. What the book represents partly through metaphor, in other words, the film illustrates primarily by example.

The effectiveness of this adaptation may be taken as a lesson in storytelling. Apocalypse Now is original enough in content and approach to be considered as fine literature in its own right, even though it presents someone else's story. The film puts an idea into a different context from the original. It allows the new context to determine matters of detail. By doing this, it demonstrates the transcendence of the original theme and applies that theme to a contemporary problem, lending support to both the abstract concept and the particular political inferences made from it.