Blog #4- Apocalypse Now: Light in the darkness

The focal point of Heart of Darkness is the setting’s sinister description. In the book, Conrad uses adjectives to heighten the tension. He writes, “Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death,––death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here (p. 49). . . . She seemed to know all about them and about me, too. An eerie feeling came over me. She seemed uncanny and fateful. Often far away there I thought of these two, guarding the door of darkness, knitting black wool as for a warm pall (p. 55).” Throughout the novel, these images compound to embody Conrad’s own vision of darkness. In Apocalypse Now, this role is filled with increasing violence and bloodier battles. The major difference lies in what creates the darkness.

Apocalypse Now uses people and human interaction to lead viewers to “the horror.” The movie begins with Marlow hurting only himself. This gradually escalates until the point where he kills an innocent girl who gets in his way. As he states, you "cut them in half with a machine gun and give them a bandaid." The use of Wagner, the man with the cowboy hat, and the surfing highlight the characters, whereas Conrad focuses on setting to show the darkness. “We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair (p. 60).” These bleak images do not waver—there is no lessening of the dark sensations.

On the other hand, the music and personalities in Apocalypse Now provide a bit of comic relief. These aspects weaken the sense of growing darkness that the setting of the book provides. During the serious scene where one soldier sends the dead helmsman down river, the soldier wears a ridiculous bandana with a broken arrow sticking out. This oddity greatly lessens the gravity of the moment. In Heart of Darkness, the most comic character is the Russian sailor wearing multicolored patches. However, he does not provide relief for readers. He behaves oddly, deeply admires Kurtz, and wishes to stay behind in the jungle. These characteristics make the man appear indecipherable and slightly creepy, whereas the odd characters of Apocalypse Now create light in the darkness.