The Horror Made Visible: Spectacle, Imperial Guilt, and
the Migration of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into Coppola’s Apocalypse
Now
Sanjay Kumar
Research Scholar
B.R.A. Bihar
University, Muzaffarpur
Bihar, India
&
Dr Durbadal Bhattacharya
Assistant Professor
Laxmi Narain Dubey
College, Motihari
Bihar, India
Abstract: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) chooses not to articulate imperial
violence and condenses the horror into a dense phrase. Conrad’s violence is
veiled in the reticence of cryptic language. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), an adaptation
of Conrad’s celebrated novella, refuses to remain silent, transforming the
horror into a spectacle. The article here will attempt to show how adaptations
like Apocalypse Now break the
defined hierarchy of the text and celluloid, emerging as independent creative
works. The research paper here would argue how Coppola translates the
invisible, unknown horror into a viable reality. Conrad pricks the colonial
conscience, but obliquely. The Conradian narrative is implicit in the narrative
it criticises. Coppola, on the other hand, shoots this film in the aftermath of
the humiliating defeat of America in Vietnam. The film probes the national
conscience of the American people and transforms it into a rite of
self-introspection. The film is both a reflection and a critique of the
novella. Apocalypse Now, through
its visual excess, achieves
what Conrad's celebrated narrative has partly failed to achieve. The paper will
hence argue that adaptation in this case is cultural metabolism, through which
the society negotiates and introspects a truth of the imperial violence and
exploitation.
Keywords: adaptation, Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse
Now, imperial guilt, spectacle, postcolonial cinema.
Adaptations of literary works have a long and
rich tradition in the celluloid universe. Film directors have rendered their
vision and reading into a visible experience. Canonical works like Joseph
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness have, for decades, evoked cinematic
imagination. The novella depicts a journey upriver towards a mysterious figure
who, though from the perceived civilised part of the world, has ended up in its
darker recesses. That mysterious figure of Kurtz has been borrowed, transposed
and reimagined in a different time zone and place. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse
Now (1979) is a celebrated and iconic rendition of the novella. Replacing
Congo with Vietnam is the most striking alteration to the scope and narrative of
the novel. Coppola keeps the spirit of the novella intact while setting it in
the modern period; the European empire is replaced by aggressive American
enterprise. The present research paper takes adaptation as its object of
inquiry, and thus argues that adaptation is not mere faithfulness to the source
text, it is a critical reading of the narrative. It is a cultural appropriation
through which a society engages with its past and lived present.
The central thesis of the entire argument is
that for Coppola, adaptation of this celebrated literary text was not a matter
of fidelity, but it meaningfully engaged itself with the cultural re-evaluation
of the text. Conrad’s horror is metaphysical, unearthly and deferred –
undefined, and unlocated. The entire spirit of the novella is coagulated into
two disyllabic words. Coppola’s horror, on the other hand, is spectacular,
visually compelling, projected through explosion, sound and light. The
invisible yet inarticulate horror of the novella is externalised through the
camera's lens. Essentially, the camera as a tool is inept in capturing the
metaphysical essence. Hence in the course of the projection of the horror as an
external and tangible component, it turns onto the imperial empire itself.
Thus, in contrast to Conrad, Coppola transfers the burden of guilt from one
individual to an entire nation.
This structural shift transforms Apocalypse
Now into a cultural reproduction rather than a faithful adaptation of the
text. The film was released in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam war. As
the United States of America was struggling to come to terms with its defeat in
the Far East, the film’s arrival is a strong indictment of the exploitative and
immoral act of war. The film transforms Marlow’s journey into a purgatory act
of self-introspection; the depiction of the violence in its elemental form is
also a mode of negotiating with its conscience. As mentioned earlier, the
visual excess in the film, which includes helicopters, explosives, and
indiscriminate slaughter, is not a mere visual effect; rather, it implicates
the complicity of the imperial nation. The reading of the narrative in motion
thus dismantles the hierarchical relationship between the text and the cinema.
The subsequent sections on Conrad’s representation of Horror, Coppola's visual
art, and relocation of imperial guilt constitute the paper's argumentative
structure.
I. Conrad’s Representation of Horror:
The narrative of The Heart of Darkness relies
on the element of absence. It is the absence of definite, rational aspects of
Eurocentric consciousness that defines the essence of the text. The narrator of
the text, Marlow, narrates his tale not as a conscientious testimony, it
attempts to indict the ruthless imperial commerce. Marlow eternalises the practice
of imperial conquest and reminds his readers and his companions that the Thames
“has been one of the dark places of the earth” (Conrad 5), and thus draws
parallels between the Belgian conquest of Congo and the Roman conquest of
Britain. Thus, the opening pages of the novel legitimise the practice of
imperialism, which it is supposed to be critiquing. This apparent dichotomy
problematises Conrad's canonical text. The existence of the Empire is thus
granted an aura of universality and is understood to be synonymous with
civilisation.
The novella consistently defers the spectacle
of despicable violence. The imperial atrocity alluded to in glimpses and
fragments is veiled in textual representation. The narrator refuses to present
the violence to its readers in a veritable framework; he often prefers to look
away. His silence and refusal to depict the imperial violence in tangible terms
not only insinuates his complicity but also posits the text in a problematic
position in its relationship with imperialism. The most compelling
representation of colonial violence is not through a series of images, rather,
it is through a statement of Kurtz, “Exterminate all the brutes!” (Conrad 50);
the phrase epitomises brutality in its elemental form. Thus, the colonial brutality
in the novella is textual; the horror of Congo is disguised in the eloquent
rhetoric of Kurtz.
Kurtz himself is an enigma. He, for the major
part of the novel, is a voice. Marlow insists that he is “a voice”, more than a
man of blood and flesh. He is a legend, who presence can be felt, but is
essentially absent. In Derridian vocabulary, Kurtz is a trace: one who
is ever absent, but the narrative is built around the absence. The narrative is
built around the absence of Kurtz, an emptiness around which everything is
defined, much ahead of Kurtz’s presence is formally announced. The entire
anticipation built around the enigmatic figure of Kurtz fizzles out with a
faint but emphatic revelation: “The horror! The horror!” (Conrad 69). Kurtz
dies soon after the arrival of Marlow at the inner station. Hence, a possible
confrontation and a series of possibilities have been infinitely deferred.
Conrad never attempts to articulate the meaning of the pithy phrase. Here, in
Derridian terms, it is clearly a case of difference: a signifier whose
signified is endlessly deferred. The definite meaning never arrives. It is in
the indeterminacy and plurality of meaning that the narrative asserts its
effectiveness; description of violence will quantify and, in such a process,
dilute its untameable horror. Finally, Marlow’s lying to Kurtz’s wife justifies
the act of withholding. The truth can never be articulated, and hence it is
left unuttered.
This refusal to speak the truth, the silence
around the truth, is in itself a problematic act. However, this inability to
articulate the violence adds drama and conflict in the narrative, but it fails
to implicate the European conscience in owning up the crimes that it has
committed. As Achebe argues in his celebrated criticism of the novella that
Conrad represents Africa “as the other world”, the antithesis of Europe and
therefore of civilisation, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and
refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality” (338).The narrative’s
silence on the devastation of Congo is not accidental; it is a choice Conrad
consciously makes. It is in this context Achebe’s criticism of The Heart of
the Darkness as a colonial novel gains credence. Conrad’s refusal to render
voice to the spectacle of imperial violence, and an erasure of the Congolese,
on whom the brutality is enacted, places him ethically in a precarious
position. Coppola, in his cinematic depiction of the narrative, inherits this
ambivalence.
II. Coppola and the Spectacle of the
Spectacular
Conrad’s reticence and refusal to speak is
countered by Coppola’s spectacular vision. Apocalypse Now remains
faithful to the upriver structure of Heart of Darkness. Captain Willard
set out on a journey to execute the defiant Colonel Kurtz, which is a true
replication of the original journey that Marlow undertakes. It is here that the
film follows the structure of the text, yet differs in its depiction of truth.
Conrad’s narrator chose to look away from atrocities, whereas Coppola’s camera
refuses to look away. Coppola plans his journey into a highly structured,
planned and rehearsed scene. The film opens with indiscriminate bombing of lush
green fields and plantations by helicopters, with fire engulfing the
countryside. Here, the spectacle becomes spectacular.
One of the principal scenes of the film,
where Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore’s helicopters carry out an air strike on a coastal
village, with the musical strains of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” playing
in the background, from speakers mounted on the gunships, is an ornate and
brazen display of the operatic imperial violence. Colonel Kilgore’s nonchalant
description, “I love the smell of Napalm in the morning” (Apocalypse Now
49:25) transforms a mass slaughter into connoisseurship. His connoisseurship of
Napalm becomes Coppola’s emblem for imperial violence Conrad insinuates.
Coppola does not withhold anything in his critique of the imperial war fare.
The film is replete with a series of scenes depicting the colossal destruction,
catastrophic obliteration and acute insensitivity of the Empire. Broadcasting
live war scenes with native bodies strewn around, numbering the bodies of the
dead enemy soldiers with a pack of cards, wishing to surf in the midst of
death, entertaining soldiers with musical night and erotic dance and mayhem all
around, not only does the film amplify the horror of war, but the exposition of
the horrors of war in its elemental form also demonstrates the complicity of
the imperial nation. Coppola depicts the cost of war not only to the indigenous
people, but also to the people waging the war on behalf of the Empire. The
details of the carnage that Conrad has left in the footnotes of his novella
become the centre of the film's visual experience.
Kurtz, unlike Conrad’s novella, does not
reside completely in the realm of the unknown. The visual spectacle of the
residue of war reaches its apotheosis at Kurtz’s territory. The way to Kurtz’s
compound was strewn with death, destruction and devastation. Conrad’s Inner
Station, a place of rumour and shadow, in Coppola’s cinematic representation,
is transformed into a dilapidated, smoke-wreathed temple complex, littered with
half-clad dead bodies, severed heads, lit by fire, and a flickering, mystical
light that surrounds Coppola’s Krutz, enacted by the iconic Marlon Brando. The
ever-fleeting voice of Kurtz is rendered visible through the towering corporeal
presence of Brando. However, the elaborate visual projection in the film fails
to reveal Kurtz in his elemental form. Brando oscillates between light and
shadow and recites poetry. In the film, Kurtz recites T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow
Men”, a poem whose epigraph carries the phrase, “Mistah Kurtz – he dead,” which
is borrowed from Conrad’s novella. The film's intertextual reference shows
Coppola’s conscious espousal of the art of adaptation.
Remaining true to the original, Coppola
introduces the eccentric photojournalist, who greets Willard at his arrival.
The character of the photojournalist is a parallel to Conrad’s Russian
harlequin. Both of them interject the Kurtzian myth with their eulogistic
commentary, punctuated by a cautious contempt. Introduction of the photojournalist
in the film was not accidental; it demonstrates Coppola’s awareness of the art
of adaptation.
The film, as discussed above, adds visibility
to the violence perpetrated by the imperial nation. The visibility magnifies
the magnitude of violence. This phenomenon of amplifying the horror through
spectacle can be understood through Derrida’s term, ‘supplement’. The term
‘supplement’ signifies that the excess which seems as mere adornment to an
original, perceived to be complete and self-sufficient, denotes a lack already
present in the work (149). Consequently, Coppola’s visual excess is not
a superfluous addition to the narrative of the novella; rather, it hints at an
absence at the heart of the imperial narrative. Conrad’s deliberate silence on
the atrocities of the empire also implicates the reader. The reader, along with
Marlow, turns away from the violence. In the film, the spectator is captivated
by the spectacular display of violence. He finds pleasure in the sight of
destruction and devastation; guns, bullets and missiles fascinate him. Susan
Sontag observes that rendering suffering as something spectacular and fantastic
risks converting horror into an aesthetic experience. Aestheticisation of
violence transforms it into a form of consumption (Sontag 76). Cinema’s
capacity to aestheticise destruction is in itself a form of imperial currency –
the device which shows the war is continuous with the device that fights it. The
assault carried out by Colonel Kilgore is thrilling, mesmerising. Thus, aesthetic
representation of the war often tends to legitimise it.
III. From Congo to Nung: Relocating the
Imperial Conscience
Shifting the location from the Belgian Congo
to the American Vietnam is not accidental and arbitrary. It is the most pivotal
decision and has greater implications than mere change of race and region. In The
Heart of Darkness, Congo is the colony of the Belgian Empire. Marlow is a
representative of the Empire; he is the pilot of a steamboat for the Company;
he witnesses the violence perpetrated by the others, and he bears the guilt for
the atrocity the Company commits. However, in the film Apocalypse Now, Captain
Willard is sent on a mission to the farthest corner of Vietnam to execute
Kurtz. He, unlike Marlow in the novella, is not a passive witness to the
violence unleashed on indigenous people; rather, he actively participates in
the ritual of killing. Coppola, unlike Conrad, cannot distance himself from the
guilt of the imperial violence, because in Vietnam his own country has blood on
its hands.
Locating the narrative in a different
socio-political and historical juncture differentiates the celluloid text from
the source text. Willard is not
recruited by a merchant company; he is sent on a classified mission by the
United States Army. He has been instructed to terminate Kurtz, who is believed
to have gone rogue. Moreover, it is not only Kurtz, but countless Vietnamese,
who were at the mercy of the military power of the Empire. In Achille Mbembe’s
term, a necropolitical order regulated life in this country of South-East Asia.
The regime determined who may live and who must die. Soldiers kill with an air
of impunity. The air smells, not of napalm, but of death. The jungles become
one of the death-world, whose population are condemned to state living dead
(Mbembe72). The scene where a peasant woman is mercilessly shot on a false
alarm. It is only after her death that Willard's companions discover she ran to
save her puppy. Willard and his companions, hence, are weaponised with a lethal
license to kill. Ironically, the Empire sends a missionary to destroy the
monster it has itself created. However, the gory visuals at Kurtz’s territory
are indistinguishable from the visuals that dominate the world outside. The
line between sanctioned and unsanctioned atrocities is inconsistent; the
hypocrisy of the grand narratives perpetuated by the Imperial Empire to
legitimise its actions is exposed.
Giorgio Agamben classifies these precarious conditions as conditions of
‘bare life’. Agamben illustrates that ‘bare life’ is a state of exception in
which the act of killing is no longer designated as a crime. Kurtz and Kilgore
are products of the same state of exception. In the film, Kurtz does not die a
natural death. He is assassinated by Willard, and the assassination is never an
act of purgation; rather, the Empire eliminates a man who could have exposed
its nefarious design.
Edward Said, in his landmark essay, “Two
Visions in Heart of Darkness”, perceives the novella as a work of profound and
unresolved contradiction, he writes:
Conrad’s tragic limitation is that even
though he could see clearly that on one level imperialism was essentially pure
dominance and land grabbing, he could not then conclude that imperialism had to
end so that “natives” could lead lives free from European domination. As a
creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite
his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them (Said 31).
Coppola, like Conrad, critiques the act of
war and atrocities, but fails to distance himself sufficiently from the
futility of the war. The film, on multiple occasions, denounces the presence of
the Americans on Vietnamese soil, but fails to completely divorce itself from
the idea and the ideology of imperialism. Vietnam and Vietnamese are nothing
but a canvas for the American drama. Like Africa, it is a “setting and backdrop
which eliminates” the Vietnamese “as human factor . . . a metaphysical
battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity,” into which the wandering
Americans enter at their own peril (Achebe 344). Thus, Achebe’s criticism of
Conrad also stands true for Coppola. The guilt-stricken conscience of the
Americans, like that of the Europeans in the novella, is sprinkled with its
racist ideology. The object of the film thus transfers from the colonised to
the coloniser. Conrad’s horror traumatizes the souls of Kurtz and Marlow, with
Africa as a silent ground. However, in the case of Coppola, the guilt is no
longer individual; it is collective, national and visible.
IV. Cinema as Cultural Metabolism:
Linda Hutcheon defines adaptation as “a
derivation that is not derivative – a work that is second without being
secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing” (9). In view of the elaborate
discussions carried in different sections of the paper, it can fairly be
concluded that Coppola’s transcoding of the novella into a film is
‘palimpsestic’. It secures its position as a creative work inspired by the
celebrated novella of Conrad, and does not reduce itself into a poor replica of
the original. The presence of the novella in the film is palpable, yet manages
to leave its distinct imprint on the viewers. The film takes up the haunting
defeat of America in Vietnam; the past refuses to remain in the past, a
reflection of a distorted national psyche, unable to assimilate the horror it
has unleashed on the Vietnamese natives. The chaos, the visual excess, the gory
images are the external manifestation of an internal guilt, which otherwise can
never be comprehended in its totality by the Imperial nation. Adaptation here
is thus cultural metabolism as medium of representation of American trauma.
The horror migrates from the page to the
screen, from spectre to spectacle, from the colonised to the coloniser.
Coppola’s additions are not extraneous additions, but supplements to the
limitations to the narrative in the novella. The withheld and hidden elements
of the imperial violence are laid bare in the film. A society grappling with an
incomprehensible defeat confronts an unpalatable truth about itself through
powerful visual impressions.
The retribution from the colonial crime
remains incomplete. The Congolese remains silent at the edge of the frame.
Despite its vehement indictment of imperial violence, the act of borrowing
indigenous rituals without comprehending its complete significance grants
sanction to the imperial gaze. The film foregrounds America’s confrontation
with its debatable and dark past. The film, as a cultural product and a work of
adaptation, performs the ritual of guilt through a series of compelling images,
yet fails to transcend its own complicity in the war crime. The evasive horror
of the text, made visible through the frames of cinema, turns out to be a
reflection.
Works
Cited
Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism
in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” The Massachusetts Review, vol.
18, no. 4, 1977, pp. 782–94.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign
Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford UP, 1998.
Apocalypse Now. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Zoetrope Studios /
United Artists, 1979.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness.
Edited by Paul B. Armstrong, 4th ed., Norton Critical Edition, W. W.
Norton& Company, 2006.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology.
Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation.
Routledge, 2006.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics.
Translated by Steven Corcoran, Duke University Press, 2019.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism.
Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of
Others. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.