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Home , Apocalypse Now Redux, Colonel Kurtz, John Milius, Romance (novel)

Sabrina Baiguera Università degli Studi di Bergamo Letteratura Anglo-americana LMI A.A. 2011/2012 Paolo Jachia’s : . Un’analisi semiotica, an intertextual reconstruction of the texts, of the cultural references that lie behind the . Apocalypse Now (1979)

Two versions: the orginal version (1979) and the extended version ( : 2001), released in 2001.

The film is set during the 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 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. ’s novella (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 (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 , 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 Darknesswas 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 , imperialism) Heart of Darknesstells 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 Boughby Frazer, From Ritual to Romanceby 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 by by s he shows symptoms shows s he nfeeblement of his his of nfeeblement neration of his In his of land. neration aired by the threatened threatened by the aired s only one way of averting averting of way s one only must be transferred to a a to be must transferred were thought to be religious be religious to thought were n-god’s life, what life, what n-god’s y of their reign. In such reign. such y their of In ixed period of time, after of period after time, ixed is a book on ancient myths and folk legends written folk legends and myths ancient on is book a

The Golden The Bough: a onstudy magic and religion that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul his and fail, to beginning powers are his that decay.” 272) (Frazer: these dangers. The man-god must be killed a soon as be must killed man-god The dangers. these catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual e gradual from the be expected may not catastrophes i There death? in extinction final their and powers Frazer’s words: Frazer’s figures, deities closely related with the prosperit the with closely related deities figures, a for only f rule to king allowed is the societies, Scottish anthropologist James G. Frazer in 1890. in Frazer G. James anthropologist Scottish vigorous successor hasvigorous imp been seriously it before which he must be killed in order to ensure the rege the ensure to order in be must killed he which “[…] if the course of nature is dependent on the ma the on dependent is nature of course “[…] if the The Golden Bough Golden The kings myths, ancient in how, he shows book In this 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. He wants to uncover the lies and the hypocrisy of the media. In doing so, he is more similar to Jesus Christ. “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John, 14, 6) “Suffer the little children to come unto me” (Mark, 10, 14) Memorable scenes: 1. The opening scene: the film starts with the image of a jungle on fire. The background music is the apocalyptic song “The End” by The Doors. The beginning of the film is the end or, at least, the beginning is overturned in its contrary. We find this also in a verse of the Book of the Revelation: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end” (Revelation, 21) 2. 2. The Air Cavalry attack: the helicopters can be intepreted as the Four Living Beings (Horsemen) of the Apocalypse. In the Book of the Revelation, the description of the arrival of the fifth trumpet seems the description of this scene: “And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth […].like unto horses prepared unto battle. […] They had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails. […] And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.” (Revelation, 9, 1-11) Nietzsche, Faust and the Übermensch

Kurtz has always been interpreted as an Übermensch, in the Nietzschean sense of the term (“über” means “over”, “beyond”; an Übermensch is a man that has gone too far, that has crossed the boundaries of what is good and what is evil). He says, in a letter to his son: “I am beyond their lying timid morality”

In the original script (1975) by John Milius, there is an explicit reference to Nietzsche: “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”, taken from Thus spoke Zarathustra. However, in the film this sentence is omitted. Why? According to Jachia, in Milius’ script, Kurtz was a sort of fascist hero, a model that would lead, some year later, to like Rambo(Milius is the scriptwriter of ) and Coppola did not want a fascist film. On the contrary, Coppola’s Kurtz is ripped apart, broken up, he has made a deal with the devil and “seen horrors”. In this sense he is more similar to Faust, the protagonist of Goethe’s play. It is not surprising that one of the books on Kurtz’s night table is Goethe’s Faust.

Bakhtin and the carnival “In the famous enumeration of the 216 games played by Gargantua (Book One, Chapter 22) there is one called au bouef violles. In certain French cities a costume was preserved almost to our time to lead a fatted ox through the streets during carnival season. […] The ox was led in solemn procession accompanied by the playing of viola, hence its name boeuf violles. Its head was decorated with multicoloured ribbons. […] The ox was to be slaughtered, it has to be a carnivalesque victim. It was a king, a procreator, symbolizing the city’s fertility; at the same time, it was the sacrificial meat, to be chopped up for sausages and paté.” (Bakhtin: 200) Jachia bases his analysis on the concept of the Bakhtinian carnival. In this sense, Apocalypse Now is a tragic and terrible carnival, an event in which laughter and tears are coexisting. The symbols contain both their positive and negative aspects, but nothing is absolute: everything is overturned in its opposite. In the carnival, everything’s permitted: the King can be dethroned and mocked, and the Fool becomes his parodical double. In Heart of Darkness, there is a strong analogy between the figure of the Fool and the Russian, who is dressed with patches [Marlow calls him “harlequin”]; in the film, the role of the harlequin is performed by , the hippie photographer. The language of the carnival is scatological, and the film goes in this direction: “Saigon. Shit.” “Oh, man, the bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above it” Frazer + Oedipus = Apocalypse Now “Father?” – ”Yes, son?” – “I want to kill you. Mother, I want to…” Apocalypse Now is a Oedipal tragedy: Willard both loves and hates Kurtz (father figure). He kills him. The Oedipus complex gets much more explicit in the 2001 version, in which Willard, in the scene of the French colonialist settlement, meets a French widow, older than he, and they have a sexual intercourse. The character of the widow is ambiguous: she is a sort of Mother, but she is also a Cumaean Sibyl: her role is to prepare Willard for his descent into the depths of the human heart, into Kurtz’s morality. “There are two of you, don’t you see? One that kills…and one that loves” Jachia claims that the film makes explicit reference to theories contained in Freud’s Totem and Taboo(1913): every society starts with the ritual killing of a father/deity. It is very unlikely that Coppola read this book. Probably he read Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, a bestseller during the 1960s. Bibliography

Apocalypse Now Redux, an original screenplay, by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola, narration written by Michael Herr: http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/apocalypsenowredux.html Bakhtin, Michail M., Rebelais and His World, Indiana University Press, 1984 http://books.google.it/books?id=SkswFyhqRIMC&pg=PA201&dq=Bakhtin+ %22boeuf+violles%22&hl=it&sa=X&ei=bpiyT- KgH6Hi4QSZldnqBw&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, Harper Press, 2010 Frazer, James G., The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Forgotten Books, 2008 http://books.google.it/books?id=4bT3ACjkRasC&printsec=frontcover&hl=it #v=onepage&q&f=false Jachia, Paolo, Francis Ford Coppola: Apocalypse Now. Un’analisi semiotica, Bulzoni Editore, 2010