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Apocalypse Now (1979)
My guess: This is my last one, but I've forgotten everyone now so uh
“The horror . . . The horror” says Colonel Walter E. Kurtz in the last scene of Apocalypse Now. We can't really be sure, but I guess he speaks of the horrors of humanity he has experienced, which lie at the core of the theme in this movie. Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece becomes especially fascinating when compared with William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies, published several decades earlier. Both works were produced in response to a war, at heart are pessimistic and dark, and convey the message that man’s essential illness is evil.
Lord of the Flies opens on a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific. There is water and food aplenty, and no identified danger. It is a paradise of sorts, an ideal landing for the plane crash that brought Ralph, Piggy, and all the other boys to the island.
After the first scene, where Piggy and Ralph first interact, they find a conch on the beach. Ralph, at Piggy's suggestion, blows on the conch and creates a loud sound, causing all the boys on the island to find and approach them. At this point, the conch becomes a symbol of all the civility and order that will ever be on this island. After deciding who to make chief -- Ralph- and how to make a fire -- with Piggy’s glasses -- things begin to settle down to a daily routine of play and work.
However, this isn’t Coral Island. It isn’t Swiss Family Robinson or Robinson Crusoe. There are no “good versus external bad” conflicts, although much of the conflict that does occur sprouts from a fear of an external bad. This “bad” is the beast. The beast begins as a fear of the unknown, a deep-rooted suspicion of what lurks in the shadows. As more and more evidence piles up in favor of the existence of a physical beast on the island, the conch and the democracy it symbolizes is forgotten, and chaos and evil erupt.
While characters like Simon, Piggy, and Ralph attempt to reinstate reason in the minds of the corrupted boys, some of the corrupted, like Jack and Roger, come to represent the inner evil and savagery that eventually prevail. By the end of the novel, Simon and Piggy have been killed. Ralph, in the process of being hunted to death, is luckily saved by a “civilized” British officer who saw fire on the island, and so came to rescue them. He is disgusted by the boys’ savagery and their resulting guilt, and turns away to let them gather themselves before taking them off the island.
It is worth noting that both Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now draw their inspiration from earlier novels -- the former from Coral Island, and the latter from Heart of Darkness. Both of these stories take their inspiration and transform it into something entirely different and unique. Apocalypse Now does this by conjuring the same themes and ideas as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but making the setting and characters -- soldiers in the Vietnam War -- much more relatable to modern times, and better able to convey a strong message. Heart of Darkness is criticized for its racism - barbaric instincts are compared with native Africans which the "civilized Europeans" come into contact with. Coppola smartly removes this, and instead makes the horror the war itself - from both sides.
By digging out the inner content of the film - that we are - and can only hope to be - nothing once we lose contact with civilizations demonstrates how Apocalypse Now effectively relates to Lord of the Flies. For instance, in his fantastic essay on the film, Roger Ebert never blatantly says this, but when he talks about “truths we would be happy never to discover,” he refers to the same truths that the boys in Lord of the Flies become by the end of the novel.
Apocalypse Now opens with four minutes of no dialogue while the protagonist, Captain Willard, sits in his hotel room in Vietnam thinking about the war. He wants the war to end but he doesn't want to go home. He wants to be back where nothing matters. The scene blends fantasy and reality to the point where the audience wonders what is real and what isn’t. Willard is obviously driven mad by the war, having divorced his wife and turned alcoholic. But things change for him when he is sent on a mission to “terminate” Colonel Kurtz, an officer who has also been driven mad by the horrors of war, although in an extreme way. Kurtz has secluded himself from all contact and is hiding in Cambodia. He has been ordering mass murders on people on both sides of the war.
The journey that ensues is symbolic of Willard slowly getting drawn into the literal heart of darkness, or the inner evil of the human race. Willard’s actions in the mission become increasingly evil as a result, and the only gunshot he fires in the movie is near the end, when he kills an injured Vietnamese woman so the men don’t have to waste time getting her to a hospital. By doing this, Willard has completely transformed from the man at the beginning- one disgusted and horrified by war- to one partaking in violent actions. He has turned into the same character as that of Jack in Lord of the Flies; one whose inner evil has won out.
The characters he encounters also become increasingly more hostile in nature. For instance, the famous Ride of the Valkyries helicopter attack includes many of the men celebrating the deaths of civilians in the Vietnamese house they are attacking. Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore even responds to one of these civilian bombings by saying, “Outstanding, Red Team. Get you a case of beer for that one.” Kilgore’s words imply a certain pleasure taken from destroying human life.
Willard eventually locates Kurtz, who takes him prisoner. Before freeing him, Kurtz tortures and interrogates Willard. As Willard passes through Kurtz’s bizarre hideout in Cambodia, he begins to realize what kind of man Kurtz really is, and what Kurtz has discovered about human nature. Kurtz tells Willard why he became this way, saying that he discovered what lengths the Vietnamese take to for efficiency (specifically, they hacked off the arms of children infected with polio). It was then that he saw the true secret of war. Kurtz says, “If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral, and at the same time, who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without a feeling, without passion. Without judgment.” Having penetrated the reality of war, Kurtz eventually realizes how evil mankind can be - and has to be in this situation, and accepts it rather than fighting it.
Willard eventually musters the strength to kill Kurtz and complete his mission. While the natives sacrifice a water buffalo, Willard stabs and kills Kurtz; an absolutely breath taking, visceral, disturbing yet beautiful scene. After a gruesome stabbing, Kurtz still has enough breath to utter the famous closing lines to the movie: “The horror . . . the horror."
It is the “horror” that Kurtz speaks of that is the heart of the themes in both Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now. Kurtz told Willard earlier that “Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.” His words take on a new significance as Willard begins to realize the very thing that drove Kurtz to madness. He has killed Kurtz, and completed his mission, but the true horror of everything people do will never cease to exist until humanity does. Kurtz knew this, and understood that the horror would have destroyed him had he not bent to its will.
The horror in Lord of the Flies is what changes Jack and his hunters from “civilized” to “savage,” which is not an actual transition. Instead, it’s the surfacing of a trait that was always there. The ending scene particularly exemplifies this because the naval officer come to rescue the boys is disgusted by the war they have been having. However he is ironically partaking in his own civilized nuclear war back at home, in which the same evil and savagery go on, but his actions are praised rather than frowned upon.
Only two characters fully understand the horrors of humanity in both Golding’s and Coppola’s masterpieces. These characters are Simon and Kurtz. Simon knows "mankind’s essential illness", but it doesn’t drive him to insanity. However, he has a symbolic confrontation with the devil, and this affects him horribly. Before the effects of this realization can change him, Simon is murdered by the boys on the island. Kurtz finds this horror out too, from his time at war. Instead of fighting it, he embraces it and becomes a ruthless murderer in his secluded part in Cambodia. As Willard kills him, he -- unlike Simon -- has the time to share with someone “mankind’s essential illness,” as Simon called it.
While Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now have extremely different characters and storylines, their inner message is the same: destruction, hatred, evil and blood can all be "innocent," they are all thoughts and acts that we are fully capable of - and, even more repulsively, lie deep within us. Apocalypse Now makes me feel gross and evil. And it's a masterpiece.
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