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Apocalypse Now Sabrina Baiguera Università degli Studi di Bergamo Letteratura Anglo-americana LMI A.A. 2011/2012 Paolo Jachia’s Francis Ford Coppola: Apocalypse Now. Un’analisi semiotica , an intertextual reconstruction of the texts, of the cultural references that lie behind the film. Apocalypse Now (1979) Two versions: the orginal version (1979) and the extended version ( Apocalypse Now Redux: 2001 ), released in 2001. The film is set during the Vietnam war (the action takes place approximately in 1970) It tells the story of U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard who has the mission to proceed up the Nung river into Cambodia, find Colonel Kurtz and “terminate” his command, by whatever means available. Willard starts a journey up the Nung river on a PBR (Petrol Boat) with a four- man crew (Chef – a saucier; Chief – the chief of the boat; Clean – a 17 year- old young from Bronx; Lance – a professional surfer). Kurtz had deserted the U.S. Army to start his own private war in the middle of the jungle. There he is worshipped as a god by his own Montagnard army, but he has gone insane and his methods are “unsound”. The artistic dimension Source texts of Apocalypse Now : 1. Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899) 2. James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) 3. Jessie Weston’s From ritual to romance (1920) 4. Goethe’s Faust (1808) 5. The Holy Bible 6. T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and The Hollow Men (1925) 7. Baudelaire’s The Albatross (1861) 8. The Doors’ The End Heart of Darkness (1899) “In the case of “Apocalypse,” there was a script written by the great John Milius, but, I must say, what I really made the film from was the little green copy of Heart of Darkness that I had done all those lines in.” (Coppola) Heart of Darkness was not credited as a source text when the film first came out. However, both the filmmakers (Coppola and Milius) acknowledged that they owed a great debt to the novella. Coppola himself said that, besides using John Milius’ original script, he used his little copy of Heart of Darkness – full of comments and things he had noted down – as a handbook. Be that as it may, the film cannot be considered a mere adaptation (transposition) of the novella. On the contrary, it is a recontextualization of most of the contents of the book, a free translation from one genre to another, from one context (Congo, colonialism) to another (the Vietnam war, imperialism) Heart of Darkness tells the story of Marlow, an Englishman who goes to Congo to serve as a steamboat captain for a Belgian trading company. There he starts a journey up the river Congo to find Mr Kurtz, an ivory trader who holds influence over local tribesmen. His journey will be a trip into the hypocrisy of the Western civilization, as well as an exploration of the depths of the human nature. In this sense, the oxymoron contained in the title of the book is revelatory: Heart symbolizes a positive light, Darkness suggest the idea of something evil, something sinister. Explicit literary references In the last part of the film, Willard is roaming around Kurtz’s compound, and a slow pan, moving from left to right, shows us four books on Kurtz’s night table. These four books are The Golden Bough by Frazer, From Ritual to Romance by Weston, Faust by Goethe and the Holy Bible . Later on, Kurtz reads the poem The Hollow Men by T.S.Eliot. These explicit references form the dense network of relations that lie behind the text: 1. Weston’s essay is based on Frazer’s theories 2. Conrad wrote his novella after reading Frazer 3. T.S.Eliot’s Waste Land is constantly referring to Frazer and Weston’s theories. He himself was a big fan of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness : the epigraph of The Hollow Men “Mistah Kurtz – He dead” is a quote from Conrad’s book. Originally, Eliot wanted to use Kurtz’s last words “The horror! The horror!” as epigraph of the Waste Land All these books serve as a guideline to the interpretation of Apocalypse Now The Golden Bough: a study on magic and religion The Golden Bough is a book on ancient myths and folk legends written by Scottish anthropologist James G. Frazer in 1890. In this book he shows how, in ancient myths, kings were thought to be religious figures, deities closely related with the prosperity of their reign. In such societies, the king is allowed to rule only for a fixed period of time, after which he must be killed in order to ensure the regeneration of his land. In Frazer’s words: “[…] if the course of nature is dependent on the man-god’s life, what catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay.” (Frazer: 272) The film goes in this direction too. Kurtz is the wounded king of a waste land, a land that must be regenerated through a sacrificial ritual. In the ending scene, the image of Willard killing Kurtz overlaps with that of an ox slaughtered by the Montagnard tribe in a ritual. Only through Kurtz’s sacrifice would his reign be brought back to life: “Even the jungle wanted him dead” Kurtz is aware of this and he chooses deliberately to be killed. He wants Willard to kill him because he is younger, stronger than he, and also because he wants him to be his successor. That’s what the photographer means when he says: “He likes you. He really likes you. But he’s got something in mind for you. Aren’t you curious about that?” And even Willard understands this: “If I was still alive, it was because he wanted me that way” J. Weston and From ritual to romance Jessie Weston was one of Frazer’s most brilliant students. In 1920 she wrote the book From Ritual to Romance , a study on the origins of the Holy Grail legend. T.S.Eliot will take the title of his most famous book, the Waste Land , from Weston’s book. Weston’s theories are grounded in Frazer’s studies, but she gives further insights by linking the archetypal figure of the Fisher King to pagan fertility rituals and myths, which, she claims, have suffered a process of “christianization”. Fisher King: the old-age wounded king of the Waste Land, who needs the Grail for his healing and for the regeneration of his domain. The quest for the Holy Grail needs a Healer, a youngful character who will become the King’s successor. If we interpret the film from this chivalric point of view, Willard is the Healer; Kurtz is the Fisher King; the Holy Grail is the pursuit of truth and of Willard’s own identity. The Book of the Revelation and the Apocalypse The film belongs to the apocalyptic genre. Starting from some memorable scenes (the opening scene: napalm, jungle on fire, the song “The End” by the Doors; the Air Cavalry attack), to the title of the film itself, Coppola is constantly referring to the Holy Bible, in particular to the Book of the Revelation. The title : the “Apocalypse of John” is the other name of the Book of the Revelation, but, apart from the catastrophical image that the word “Apocalypse” creates in our mind, it has also a second meaning, which is to “uncover”, to “reveal”. And to uncover the lies of the Western civilization is precisely what Kurtz has been doing in his whole life: “And they call me an assassin. What do you call it, when the assassins accuse the assassins? They lie. They lie and we have to be merciful, for those who lie. Those nabobs. I hate them. I really hate them”. Kurtz could have been a liar, but he did not want to be an hypocrite, he preferred to be himself: “He could have gone for general, but he went for himself instead” Characters : Colonel Kilgore ( Kill - gore). He has an evil behaviour (he drops Death cards on Charlie) Willard notices that there is a devilish air that surrounds him: “He was one of those guys that had a weird light around him. You just knew he wasn’t going to get so much of a scratch here” He has devilish connotation. But his reign, like that of the Antichrist in the Revelation, has an end. (Lance and Willard snatch his surfboard; in this way they deprive him of his power, they castrate him) Kurtz is both Satan and Jesus Christ. Satan: The journey of Willard up the river Congo is a sort of descent into the Inferno, and Satan lies at the bottom of the underworld (Kurtz’s compound is at the end of the Nung river). Kurtz has made a deal with the devil (and the fact that we find the book Faust on his night table is not accidental). His methods are unsound (Conrad talks explicitly of “ceremonies of devilish initiation” and of “unspeakable rites”). Satan is the Lord of the Flies, and Kurtz catches a fly. Jesus Christ: in a scene, Kurtz is surrounded by children and shows Willard some newspaper articles about the Vietnam war.
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