Video#1

In Kurtz’s monologue, Kurt is shown in the dark. He is in the darkness and talks about how he feels about horror. “It is impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face. And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.” Kurtz is shown differently in the movie and in the novel. In the novel, Kurtz is most of the time only a voice or a picture. People admire him and his talents; he is seen as an “exceptional” man. In the movie this is all different. In the movie Kurtz is represented for as an insane man. Kurtz mentions how horror should be your friend but that is only because he has seen so much horror he is used to it. He is traumatized by the horror that he does not fear it now. He is accustomed to it and that is the reason why he acts that way. In Heart of Darkness Kurtz is not murdered by Marlow he is let to die. In the movie, it is necessary for Marlow to murder Kurtz because it gives the audience a stronger sense of what Kurtz represented and how his end should be. Kurtz in both the film and the novel is a representation of darkness and violence that is why he is always associated with the shadows.

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The Ride of the Valkyries is a musical composition that was created for a play as the music that leads up to a part where the characters are all yelling and carrying fallen war-heroes away. They all speak over the music in the opera, so I feel the battle the helicopters take part in over the music fits. The song builds up to a climax, which is where the helicopters all finally fire on the village. This particular scene does not seem to correspond with a scene in the novel. The scene in the movie takes place between the first and second stations on the river, so should correspond with a scene during Marlow’s travels between those two stations in the novel. Marlow’s travels between the two stations includes a walk with many natives and one white man who faints repeatedly and must be carried the rest of the way. This does not really seem to correspond with the helicopter scene. The scene does capture the senselessness of the killing. One could perhaps correlate it to the scene on Marlow’s way to the first station where he sees the people dying in the trees. (page 19) There is no real reason for their deaths, they have just been forgotten, they are unimportant to those in power. There is also no real reason for Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore to take his helicopters and attack that village. The village has no real value. But he doesn’t care about the people he kills, or if the attack makes sense, all he wants is to go surfing on the beach there. There is no purpose to those deaths, just as there is no purpose to the deaths of natives in the dark forest. This visual really shows that theme well.

Analysis: While watching this clip from Apocolapse Now, I noticed how different this scene is compared to the novel. For one thing, Marlow killed Kurtz while in the book, Kurtz died of sickness/disease. That little image caught my eye for the differences from the book and the movie. Also, another key difference I noticed from the movie is the way the director created Kurtz for the movie. In the book he has a disease and it takes over his condition while in the movie, Kurtz is healthy and normal. “..and his body emerged from it pitiful and appalling as from a winding-sheet. I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones on his arm waving. It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze” (126). This is the discription that Conrad gives of Kurtz when they were on the boat home from the “heart of darkness”. It is interesting how the director changes this image of Kurtz, which gives us a sense of emptiness ( from his ribs) and his obsession with the wealth of ivory ( ivory skin) that causes his death, and turn Kurtz into this healthy man in the movie. That is what truely struck me about this movie clip and comparing this image to the images that Conrad creates in Heart of Darkness.

In this scene where Kurtz is speaking he says, “It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means.” This really shows another side to Kurtz. I fell like at this time Marlow realizes what horror means. There is a difference in between the way Kurtz is first shown in the novel and the movie. In the novel we only saw Kurtz as a picture and a voice. In the film we were able to see to what extent how Kurtz became dark. Marlow now sees what horror really is and so in Kurtz monologue he is expressing to him why things have happened the way they did. Kurtz says, “Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared,” by this he means that Marlow should not fear the woods. He should confront it or it will over take you. Both the novel and the film in the end showed who Kurtz really was. The movie gave us the visual to get a deeper understanding of what was going on. Kurtz gives Marlow a deeper understanding of what horror and fear means. In the beginning of the novel the persona of Kurtz is really covered but in the movie F.F.C starts right off the back giving us a visual of what Kurtz is really like. The movie clip does a very good job of capturing the darkness in Kurtz and displaying for the reader to see.

HOD Scene: Not definite, but a combination of the few times Kurtz talks, and Marlow’s reactions to Kurtz.

From a first look at both scenes, a key aspect of the movie scene that relays the book’s meaning are the shadows enshrouding Kurtz as he makes his monologue. These shadows shroud Kurtz in mystery, and through the way the shadows and darkness conceal all but Kurtz’s face, his voice is all that can really be identified. This corresponds with parts throughout the book on how everything Marlow knew, or felt, about Kurtz until he met him was compiled via pictures, voice recordings, etc. In addition, the shadows and darkness represented all the darkness in Kurtz’s heart, and succeeded in giving him that air of calm, mysterious evil that Conrad similarly instilled in Kurtz in the novella by revealing him piece-by-piece.

The most interesting thing in this case is that Kurtz did not actually speak a monologue in the novella; he talked only in short segments as he neared his deathbed. However, I believe Coppola used the descriptions Marlow gave of Kurtz and his form of speech in the novella to construct an original monologue for the movie version of Kurtz that encompassed all of the Heart Of Darkness Kurtz’s emotions, character, and views. This made the monologue quite an effective image in itself because, combined with the utter silence and the darkness, it gives viewers the feel of the “final confrontation with the strongest enemy.”

“It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. 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….we went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm, they had them in a pile, a pile of little arms.”

The Part of the novel that I chose that correlates with this speech of Kurtz’s is the part where Marlow discovers the dying black Africans in the shade outside the first outpost on the river. It is here in Heart of Darkness that Marlow first experiences the feeling of horror in the African continent. He describes the people as “nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.” Marlow is nearly overcome with disgust and pity for these people, which he cannot even bear to call “human”. The video Apocalypse Now captures this feeling of horror and what it means in this monologue of Kurtz, the hacking of the arms translating to the viewer of the movie what the black people mean to Marlow, a symbol of what horror really means in the wilderness. It also shows that this horror must be confronted and made into something that is not feared. Kurtz says that: “Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared.” What he means here is that if you do not confront these emotions as a person then the wilderness will consume you. In Conrad’s scene, this saying is summed up in the first representative that Marlow meets at the first outpost; he is described as “amazing” and “a miracle” but what he really is someone who is comfortable with the horror around him. The matter of fact way that Kurtz sates these things shows how not only is he comfortable with horror, but is also shows how necessary confronting horror is to survive in the wilderness.

The scene in the third video is not a direct representation of a scene in Heart of Darkness. Rather, it is an added scene that serves to convey the message that is found in other parts of the book. The above quote is a fine representation of the message that the helicopter attack on the village represents. The American soldiers with their helicopters and missiles are working to civilize the “brutes”. These “brutes” are Vietnamese villagers, both armed and unarmed. Their lives are viewed less importantly than the lives of the Americans. This view is illustrated both by the emotionless slaughter of the Vietnamese villagers and the music that accompanies the scene. Richard Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” is not the sort of song one would associate with an attack on a village. It is an upbeat, happier song that clashes terribly with the action that it accompanies. However, that is the exact purpose of the musical choice, to echo the carelessness of the slaughter. Along with the scene where Willard’s boat inspects the small fishing vessel, the attack on the village is an excellant visual representation of the idea of civilization through extermination.