Soldier, Sailor, Surfer, Chef: Conrad's Ethics and the Margins of "Apocalypse Now"

Author(s): Louis K. Greiff

Source: Literature/Film Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1992), pp. 188-198
Published by: Salisbury University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43796549
Accessed: 01-05-2018 14:51 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms

Salisbury University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Literature/Film Quarterly

This content downloaded from 195.43.22.134 on Tue, 01 May 2018 14:51:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Conrad's Ethics and the Margins of Apocalypse Now
I. The Doors

Joseph Conrad receives no screen credits in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.
Many viewers of the film close to Heart of Darkness take this as a kind of confirmation
that Apocalypse Now insults its literary predecessor by repeatedly violating the novel's
original shape and substance. A more complex truth is that amid many real slights
and distortions, Coppola also pays meaningful homage to Conrad by preserving the
essentials of Heart of Darkness on screen in striking and unexpected ways. A mode
for this involves Conrad's much-discussed frame in Heart of Darkness - the Thames
River scene on board the cruising yawl Nellie which opens and closes the tale. One
critic of Apocalypse Now , John Pym, states that it would have been impossible for
Coppola to reproduce Conrad's frame on film, but that without it the ethical relevance
of Kurtz to the lives of "normal" men like Marlow's listeners (or ourselves) is lost
(10). It is hard to imagine Martin Sheen, as Captain Willard, dispensing wisdom on
the Hudson, or in San Francisco Bay, to a group of amateur sailors who also represent
Western culture in general. Such a comic parody of Conrad is mercifully omitted.
Yet in its place Apocalypse Now does provide a creative imitation of the Conradian
frame - a disembodied voice, as was Marlow's own on the darkened Thames, to begin
and end the film. Off-key and compelling, this voice belongs to Jim Morrison, lead
singer of The Doors - the rock group that quite literally provides entrance and exit to
Apocalypse Now . Thus, the film's very first line is Jim Morrison's "This is the end,
beautiful friend." The beginning announces itself as the ending, just as in Heart of
Darkness the initial scene on board the Nellie occurs, chronologically, long after the
events recounted in Marlow's yarn. Also as in Heart of Darkness, Coppola's musical
frame creates an appropriate bridge between the bizarre tale about to unfold and the
wider context of modern cultural experience. With rock music as frame, and particularly

188

This content downloaded from 195.43.22.134 on Tue, 01 May 2018 14:51:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
189/Conrad's Ethics

with The Doors, Coppola has found an image to conflate nightmare with normalcy - the
worst extremes of Vietnam with the givens of American life. Wild, destructive, and
self-destructive as it can become, rock music is also inseparable from our daily lives
as Americans - as common and accessible to all of us as the portable radio beside the
desk at which I write.

II. Soldier and Errand Boy

As with structure in Apocalypse Now , so too with ethical foundation and meaning.
The film, in fact, retains much of Conrad's artistic and philosophic achievement in
Heart of Darkness, but never predictably and always with surprising transformations.
Possibly the most pervasive moral issue in the original text involves Conrad's (and
Marlow's) belief in a proportion between man's endeavor and the quality of his being.
In the world of Conradian and Marlovian ethics, to work well at one meaningful
task - perhaps ideally as a craftsman or an artist works - is to create self along with
visible accomplishment. To work badly, erratically, or at conflicting endeavors, on
the other hand, is to erode human substance toward hollowness - the extreme condition
of moral vulnerability in "Heart of Darkness." Although stated simply here, this
two-sided premise provides a key principle of discrimination between Marlow and
Kurtz - a determinant of spiritual and physical preservation in one life, and of absolute
loss in the other.
For Conrad, Marlow is the consummate salt-water sailor who has crafted his own
identity in the very act of perfecting his trade. The fullness of character which results
from such a lifelong process affords Marlow the necessary integrity and strength to
resist evil and, ultimately, to survive the African ordeal reasonably intact. As Conrad's
solid and internally unified hero, Marlow is likened to an artist in at least two separate
ways. First, he approaches his seamanship (and even fresh- water sailing when neces-
sary) as part craftsman and part lover - the way an artist would approach his medium.
Secondly, in deepening and completing his humanity along with his craft, Marlow
has come to be blessed or cursed with the skill of storytelling. Like Coleridge's Ancient
Mariner, he spins yarns which are unique among seamen, and which have the power
to convey to all men the truth, but not the pain, of his experience.
With artistic inclinations of his own, Kurtz might resemble Marlow if it were not
for the multiplicity, or ultimately the chaos, of his accomplishments. Both painter and
musician, Kurtz also practices ivory trade, journalism, public speaking, and, for a
time, the work of imposing white civilization upon Africa. . .to this day [Marlow
admits near the end of Heart of Darkness] I am unable to say what was Kurtz's
profession, whether he ever had any - which was the greatest of his talents. I had
taken him for a painter who wrote for the papers, or else for a journalist who could
paint - but even . . . [his] cousin . . . could not tell me what he had been - exactly"
(Conrad 151). Everything and nothing, what Kurtz emerges as, exactly, is Conrad's
hollow man. He is deprived of Marlow's stable substance and ignorant of the focused
and yet passionate labor which creates it. In such a condition of emptiness, Kurtz or
any man is at extreme risk of moral and, finally, total destruction - open and available
to the darkest opportunities around him and to the even darker suggestions within.
To turn from this clear contrast of character and value in Heart of Darkness to
Apocalypse Now is, initially, to encounter confusion - at least if one limits the inquiry
to the film's portrayal oř Marlow and Kurtz. In the first place, the opposed professional
lives of these two men - so carefully established in the text - become precisely reversed
in Coppola's hands. It is now Kurtz, Colonel Kurtz, who appears as the solid and
dedicated one - a man, according to his dossier, who has concentrated all his life's
energy on becoming the absolute officer and soldier. By contrast, Captain Willard,
the film's version of Marlow, emerges as fragmented and corrupt in professional
terms. Is he a combat soldier, a CIA operative within the military, or simply a hit

This content downloaded from 195.43.22.134 on Tue, 01 May 2018 14:51:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Conrad's Ethics/ 190

man? The film audience is never certain, nor, for that matter, is Kurtz. The Colonel,
in fact, seems to grasp and to identify Willard's professional emptiness, just as, in
the novel, Marlow had discovered a similar problem in Kurtz. "Are you an assassin?"
Colonel Kurtz asks Willard soon after their first meeting. When Willard replies "I'm
a soldier," Kurtz bluntly corrects him. "You're neither. You're an errand boy sent by
grocery clerks to collect a bill."
If the film's two major characters trade professional stance, in relation to Heart of
Darkness , they do not neatly exchange moral position along with it. More confusing,
any ethical significance in their endeavors is blurred and finally lost on screen, so
that regardless of how differently Kurtz and Willard go about their business, both
seem morally tainted by the film's end and hardly acceptable as a source of wisdom
or human value. Kurtz, the pure soldier, delivers a monologue during the film's last
sequence which aims to justify any atrocity as acceptable in war. Even with the
forgiving assumption that his words articulate a soldier's formula for winning - and
thus ending - a war as quickly as possible, the Colonel is not saved from appearing
as empty and dangerous as his Conradian namesake. All speeches aside, Colonel
Kurtz presides over a Cambodian fortress where chaos has replaced military profes-
sionalism as the order of the day. Torture and bloody execution are the main activities
at Kurtz's camp. They seem to occur to no specific purpose, almost randomly, and
attest, at the very least, to the insanity of the man in charge.
Captain Willard offers little improvement over Kurtz as potential moral center of
the film. The audience first sees him on leave, holed up in Saigon in a condition of
physical and spiritual depravity. He recovers when given a mission, but then enters
a long passive period during the river journey on the PBR. This state is broken only
once by significant action, when Willard dispassionately executes a sampan girl -
wounded by the boat-crew - so as not to be diverted from his mission. In the film's
climactic sequences, at Kurtz's camp, Willard again performs a single major act -
another killing, this time of Kurtz himself. In truth, throughout the entire film Willard
accomplishes just one thing which can be regarded as unambiguously decent. This is
to rescue Lance, a member of the PBR crew, from a feral merger with the Cambodian
tribe. Other reflections of morality in Willard's actions can only be described nega-
tively, in terms of what harm he could but doesn't do. He rejects the option, for
example, of replacing Kurtz as savage king. Likewise, he does not call in a prearranged
airstrike on the fortress or, in Conrad's language, choose to "Exterminate all the brutes"
(123). Despite Willard's questionable mix of passivity and violence, Coppola does
suggest that he has developed inwardly as a result of his journey and encounter with
Kurtz. Yet the nature of such development remains clouded, in any moral or spiritual
sense, because Willard simply and silently fades from view. By the film's close, then,
neither major character emerges as spokesman or example of anything resembling the
Conradian ethic in Heart of Darkness. If the focus is limited to Captain Willard and
Colonel Kurtz, viewers of Apocalypse Now are left - again in Conrad's terms - only
with a choice of nightmares or, at best, with unresolved and frustrating ambiguities
on either side.1

Ill Sailor and Saucier

As with the artist's frame for Heart of Darkness, however, so too with the
philosopher's ethic of human accomplishment. It isn't lost or forgotten at all in
Apocalypse Now so much as it is transformed to challenge, surprise, and finally enlarge
conventional expectation. In fact, the moral conflict of good craftsman and hollow
man takes place with full intensity in the film, but not between its major adversaries,
Willard and Kurtz. Rather, this critical drama is enacted at the margins of Apocalypse
Now - among a grouping of lesser figures with decidedly un-Conradian names like
Chief and Kilgore, Lance and Chef. Three of these characters are crew members on

This content downloaded from 195.43.22.134 on Tue, 01 May 2018 14:51:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
19 I/Conrad's Ethics

the River Patrol Boat which transports Willard to Kurtz's Cambodian camp. The fourth
man, Colonel Kilgore, does not make this journey with the others, yet - in relation
to Conrad's ideas on craftsmanship and its absence - completes the thematic quartet.
Coppola's reconstruction of this issue, among the film's minor characters, is ac-
complished with striking symmetry. The four men in question divide precisely into
two pairs, one to depict Marlow 's ideal of decency and passionate work - the other
to depict Kurtz's emptiness and the embrace of evil which follows from it.
Chief and Chef - as their nearly identical nicknames might suggest - are one such
pair of characters and constitute the bright face of Conrad's Janus. This is true although,
at first meeting, they seem so unlike one another, even incompatible. One is black,
while the other is a white Southerner. The black man, Chief Phillips, is presented as
a model of discipline and self-control, to the point of seeming cold and unfeeling at
times. By contrast, the white man, a would-be New Orleans saucier, overreacts to
everything that happens on the PBR and is never far from hysteria. At one point in
Willard's internal monologue, he comments that Chef is "wrapped too tight for Viet-
nam" and probably "wrapped too tight for New Orleans" as well. Regardless of such
differences Coppola has discovered, in Chief and Chef, an effective means to reestablish
the Marlow persona in contemporary American terms - also to demonstrate, through
these two men, the exact ingredients of Marlow 's ethical craftsmanship: a combination
of hard discipline, on one hand, and imaginative artistry on the other.
In an article on Apocalypse Now published in Critical inquiry , Garrett Stewart
discusses the connection between Chief Phillips and Marlow 's unfortunate helmsman
in Heart of Darkness (458, 463). Joy Gould Boyum also notices this parallel and
refers to Chief in her book as "the black pilot of the boat [who] is a reincarnation of
Conrad's black helmsman" (111). To my mind, the connection between these two
figures is superficial and based almost entirely on the identical circumstances of their
deaths. Both Chief and the helmsman are killed by spears as they desert their boat
wheels to shoot wildly at their attackers in the bush. In the case of Conrad's helmsman,
such an act is typical of his lack of internal restraint and of the undisciplined way he
goes about his job. He is, in short, a simplified version of the Kurtzian hollow man.
For Chief Phillips, however, the same fatal spear comes as a kind of supreme irony
in that he pays with his life for his only moment of pure abandon and rage.
At all other points in the film Chief is far more the responsible Marlow than the
careless helmsman who must be watched at every turn. Although a Navy enlisted
man - outranked by Captain Willard - Chief, like Marlow, is the real captain of the
boat, Willard merely a passenger. Also, since Chief is a Navy man, and not in Willard's
army, he and Marlow turn out to be brother sailors under very different skins. Chief
takes his sailor's role seriously and responsibly, as Marlow does, often reminding his
lax PBR crew that they too are sailors and should act accordingly. When the PBR
becomes fogbound, like the riverboat in Heart of Darkness , it is again Chief and not
Willard who expresses Marlow 's restrained judgment and good sense. In Conrad's
text, the manager, ignorant of the dangers, urges Marlow to proceed despite the fog,
telling him, "I authorize you to take all the risks . . . ." Marlow replies "I refuse to
take any . . ." (114). In Apocalypse Now , this same dialogue is preserved in the
following exchange, except here Willard expresses the manager's irresponsibility,
with Chief providing the sailor's professional response:
CHIEF: Can't see nothin'. We're stopping.
WILLARD: You're not authorized to stop this boat, Chief.
CHIEF: I said I can't see a thing, Captain. I'm stopping this boat. I ain't risking
no more lives!

Chief is critically concerned about risking lives because by this point in the film
one PBR crew member, Clean, has already been lost. Such concern for his crewmen
has been shown in Chief many times before during the river journey - in his somewhat
fatherly regard for all of them, but especially for the teen-aged Clean, and then most

This content downloaded from 195.43.22.134 on Tue, 01 May 2018 14:51:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Conrad's Ethics/ 192

poignantly in the hard tears he cries when Clean is killed. In general, Chief fights his
war not out of a lust for battle, nor even for victory, so much as a commitment to
his professional duty and, beyond that* a humane concern for the safety and well-being
of his crew. Chief's humanity, revealed in such motives, expresses the full Conradian
ethic as rendered on film. In Apocalypse Now , as in Heart of Darkness, the good man
and the good craftsman are inseparable.
Chef, the second figure in this positive pair of characters, is more complex than
Chief - spiritually and even professionally. Before being drafted, he had been a saucier
in New Orleans, planning to go to France to complete his education. Once in the
Navy, he is assigned to cook's school but, in a seemingly illogical move, volunteers
for training as a radio man instead. Although Chef subsequently becomes a machinist,
this detail turns out to be an ominous foreshadowing of his death. Chef will be beheaded
by Kurtz while acting as Willard 's radio man on board the PBR. Despite this sad and
apparently undistinguished progression, Chef emerges as possessor of the second key
ingredient in the Marlovian persona. If Chief represents the precise discipline of
craftsmanship, then Chef represents its artistic or imaginative core.
The film audience never sees him working as a chef, yet learns indirectly that, like
an artist, he is committed to beauty within the endeavor of his choice. In specific
terms, Chef has withdrawn from Navy cooking school (and from the safe assignment
it would have provided) for essentially aesthetic reasons. He tells Willard a long story
about prime rib and how the Navy attempted to tutor him in its destruction rather than
in the creation of a savory and beautiful meal. In running from the Navy's greying
prime rib, Chef is actually trying to reject more than merely bad and ugly cooking.
This detail is one of many references to beef or cattle made throughout Apocalypse
Now , and forming a major image-pattern in the film, which might best be described
as carnivorous or predatory. Beginning with roast beef, served by the General at
Willard' s initial briefing, the cattle image reappears as grilled steak at Colonel Kilgore's
post- victory beach party, as a cow being lifted by an Army helicopter, as Chef's prime
rib, and finally as a sacrificial ox, killed by the Cambodian tribe simultaneous with
Willard's assassination of Kurtz. Implicit in all such references is the image of man
as carnivore and his ultimate extension of the predator/prey relationship, in warfare,
to other human beings. The gentle and sensitive Chef would wish (albeit hopelessly)
to escape from all of this.
In place of prime rib, Chef wants to be involved with mangoes. Opposed to his
story about Navy cooking is an erotic fantasy (or yarn) in which fruit replaces beast
as the central image. Chef will find mangoes in the jungle - with Raquel Welsh playing
Eve to his Adam - and (being a saucier) will turn the fruit into paste to rub over their
bodies and possibly even to eat. Along with amusement, Chef's daydream provides
a rare instance, among the film's characters, of the working human imagination. No
other figure in Apocalypse Now , except perhaps for Lance, sustains any sort of fantasy
life. And Lance's, in contrast to Chefs, is nightmarish and fed by LSD. Chefs fantasy
is an especially attractive one because it adds the erotic ingredient to his already
sensuous activity of cooking. Such a mixture of sexuality with constructive human
labor would surely shock Marlow and Conrad both, and quite likely confuse them.
Yet it strikes a familiar chord to those of the post-Marcusean generation and seems
to extend, rather than contradict, the Conradian notion of passionate endeavor.
Like Chief, the sailor in Apocalypse Now , Chef the artist reveals Conrad's full
ethical principle by combining professional substance with moral sense. Where Chiefs
morality is essentially humanistic, however - as demonstrated in his parental concern
for the crew - Chefs is essentially religious. In fact, Chefs spiritual faith, along with
his bitter hatred of the war, makes him unique among the other characters in Apocalypse
Now. Chef alone, for example, expresses the belief that human beings possess souls
and that - rather than all things being relative - good and evil do exist, tangibly and
absolutely. From this spiritual perspective, Chef regards Colonel Kurtz as purely evil

This content downloaded from 195.43.22.134 on Tue, 01 May 2018 14:51:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
193/Conrad's Ethics

and, despite his fear, volunteers to be Willard's final partner in the fight against him.
Such an odd alliance at the film's conclusion proves grimly ironic since the errand
boy assumes command and since the artist - despite imagination, sensitivity, and moral
depth - is utterly destroyed in consequence.

IV. Surfers

The boat-crew in Apocalypse Now is completed by a second grouping of black and

white sailors - Clean and Lance - two youthful figures to balance the more mature
presence of Chief and Chef. Had Coppola chosen to oppose these light and dark pairs
against one another morally, as Kurtz and Marlow are opposed, his rendering of
Conrad's ethical drama would have been exactly symmetrical. Clean and Lance do
not form such a thematic unit, however, because Clean - unlike the rest of his boat-
mates - is in truth only a child, innocent as his name implies and not yet old enough,
at seventeen, for valid moral choice. Clean's special role in the film, then, is as every
war's victimized infant - victimized in his pathetic death and even victimized in his
pathetic killing of others. Clean initiates a needless and ugly massacre of civilians on
board a sampan, yet he does so out of pure wide-eyed terror, to the point that it would
be very difficult to hold him responsible for the event.
To create his composite of Conradian hollowness, Coppola does single out Lance
but, in place of Clean, pairs him with an Army Colonel named Kilgore, a figure
otherwise unconnected with the PBR crew. Colonel Kilgore at first seems an unlikely
counterpart to Lance because, viewed externally, they reflect the opposite ends of the
American military spectrum. Lance's early appearance in the film suggests the draftee
ill-suited for service life - the beach boy forced into uniform. Kilgore, by contrast,
enters Apocalypse Now as a caricature of the military persona - all swagger, spit, and
polish. Lance and Kilgore are moral (or amoral) brothers nonetheless, different only
in the outward images they project, yet alike within. The first hint of this bond is
given in the revelation that Lance and Kilgore are Southern Californians who share
an identical passion for surfing.
The scene of their first encounter provides useful insight into the moral significance
of both characters. Lance and Kilgore meet in the aftermath of a battle just won by
the air cavalry unit which Colonel Kilgore commands. An enemy soldier lies gravely
wounded, begging his indifferent American and South Vietnamese captors for water.
Discovering this, Kilgore becomes enraged. He drives his own men away and, reaching
for his canteen, mouths a cliché made familiar by many generations of war movies
and westerns: the enemy brave enough to fight me is worthy enough to drink from
my canteen. Almost before Kilgore can get the words out, however, he learns that
Ląnce, a famous surfer, is present. All thoughts of life-giving water are replaced, in
Kilgore's mind, by visions of the perfect wave. The canteen is cast aside, the soldier
left to die, as Kilgore turns away to find his idol and his counterpart. With this scene,
Kilgore reveals not just his own emptiness but, along with it, the film's major and
enduring image for such a spiritual condition. The surfer of Apocalypse Now , in short,
is identical to the hollow man of Heart of Darkness.
In the surfer, Coppola has found a uniquely American figure to portray and project
Conrad's vision of human inadequacy. Perhaps because the word suggests surface,
as well as surf, the film's surfers, like Kurtz, are hollow shells, lacking any trace of
Chief's or Chef's or Marlow's kind of substance. Thus, although Colonel Kilgore
wins victories, he is not really a professional soldier at all - only a surfer assuming
heroic poses and postures. The early scene of the wounded enemy verifies this, as
Kilgore easily forgets his military ethics along with the dying man. Even more pow-
erfully, and ironically, Kilgore's professional and moral blankness is established by
his greatest victory within the film. This is his dawn helicopter assault on a Viet Cong
village, a much-praised sequence largely created by John Milius, the film's screenwriter,

This content downloaded from 195.43.22.134 on Tue, 01 May 2018 14:51:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Conrad's Ethics/ 194

along with Coppola. Kilgore attacks and occupies the village when he learns that its
cove features the only wave in all Vietnam which breaks two ways at once. Casualties
run high on all sides - enemy, civilian, and American - and, needless to suggest, the
battle serves no military purpose of any kind.
Kilgore leaves Apocalypse Now early - just after this hollow victory - but the surfer
figure continues on in the film, through Lance, until the very end. Lance does not,
however, remain the blond beach boy first seen by the audience working on his tan
and water skiing behind the PBR. He begins to evolve toward the primitive, so that
by the time the boat reaches Kurtz's outpost there is little to distinguish him from the
Cambodian tribesmen he encounters there. He is ready both inwardly and outwardly,
in fact, to join them just as Kurtz becomes one with the African tribe in Heart of
Darkness. Like Marlow, however, Chief and Chef are exempt from such a process
of reversion. Their inward substance - either precision of craft or imagination - lends
weight and depth to their personalities, so that both men remain essentially unchanged -
decent human beings from beginning to end. By contrast, the skimmer of surfaces,
with nothing solid inside for balance, becomes quickly overwhelmed by whatever
happens to be "out there" - in this case the chaos of Vietnam.
The portrayal of Lance as evolving toward savagery may be objected to on grounds
of his apparent gentleness. Despite the camouflage face paint, the howls and karate
poses, he never harms a soul - unlike Kilgore whose name bespeaks his ugly brutality.
Such a description of Lance is accurate externally, yet misses the dark heart's truth.
While Kilgore kills and Lance plays among tribal children, they are identical just the
same in their love for the hellish Vietnam experience. Kilgore' s last line before
disappearing from the film is "Some day this war's gonna end," and he speaks it not
with hope but with wistful regret. Similarly, Lance embraces each new and violent
encounter on the river journey with growing enthusiasm. Vietnam has become the
Disneyland of his hollow spirit, so that he finds beauty at the nightmarish Do Lung
bridge, fun in the primitive attack on the boat during which Chief is killed. In contrast
to Lance and Kilgore, Chief and Chef - the film's two men of substance - hate the
war. Both stick with it, and move ever closer toward death, propelled only by their
better natures. Chief, the sailor, does so in an effort to preserve duty and order on
his boat and to protect his crew. Chef, the artist and believer, does so at the very end
to fight against evil and, likewise, to avoid having to die among Kurtz's pagan
followers. Chef tells Willard that he would be willing to lose his life anywhere else
on earth except at Kurtz's infernal camp. He refers, ironically, to the same place
which now delights Lance and provides a playground for his empty soul.2

V. Of Everything that Stands, the End

Based on the present analysis of Apocalypse Now , it could be argued that Coppola
violates rather than preserves Conrad by banishing a centrally important issue in Heart
of Darkness to the edges of his film. Four marginal figures reenact Conrad's ethical
drama in a subplot, while the major characters, Willard and Kurtz, generate moral
uncertainty and an ambiguous resolution at best. Such a reversal, without question,
distorts the original text, yet at the same time maintains a unique fidelity to it. In
relation to Conrad's cultural preoccupation in Heart of Darkness , specifically, the
margin of Apocalypse Now turns out to be its true center. Within the novel, Conrad
puts Marlow and Kurtz forward as discrete individuals yet also as reflections of Western
culture as a whole. Through Kurtz he surely wishes to condemn, or at least expose,
all Europe's capacity for savagery disguised as enlightenment. To this symbolic pur-
pose, Kurtz - despite his German name - emerges as a truly pan-European figure.
"His mother was half-English [Marlow informs us], his father was half-French. All
Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz. . ." (Conrad 122-23). All Europe, in a
certain sense, also contributed to the making of Conrad, the Pole turned Englishman,

This content downloaded from 195.43.22.134 on Tue, 01 May 2018 14:51:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
195/Conraďs Ethics

so that his cultural perspective is by no means narrow or one-sided. Through Marlow

and Kurtz together, and really through all the characters in Heart of Darkness , Conrad
wishes to establish a complete image of Western man - a revelation of his capacity
for every possible human attitude and act. The full spectrum in the text seems to run
from Marlow's crafted and balanced vision, all the way to Kurtz's concealed emptiness,
then finally to Kurtz's moment of honest self-awareness - assurance for Marlow and
Conrad alike that even in complete darkness something of value can be redeemed.
Had Coppola attempted, through Captain Willard and Colonel Kurtz, to create a
similar image for modern America, he would have failed. These figures are simply
too abnormal to be representative - too distorted and strange to carry Marlow's and
Kurtz's kind of cultural weight. In addition, both men belong purely to the military,
thereby remaining somewhat exempt from American norms. Willard, in fact, as assassin
and errand boy, may even be a freak within this special world. By contrast, Lance,
Chef, Chief, Clean, and even Kilgore - the surfer/soldier - tell a separate and far more
familiar story. It is through these seemingly minor characters that Coppola projects
the film's typically American images and creates its cultural spectrum. Geographically,
the spectrum takes in Southern California, New Orleans, and the south Bronx. Ethically,
it proves broad enough to include Kilgore's and Lance's emptiness - malignant and
benign - Clean's innocence, Chef's imagination and belief, finally Chief's decent
humanity - disciplined yet ultimately compassionate. By placing the film's critical
values and counter values among these characters, Coppola has ingeniously centered
the ethical issue by appearing to marginalize it. Like Jim Morrison and The Doors,
it is the characters at the edges of Apocalypse Now who gives us back ourselves as
Americans. In them, as in the rock songs which frame the film, we can detect the
strong and creative rhythms of our own culture and, inseparable from them, its darkest
overtones as well.
Both Conrad's ethical design and his cultural preoccupation are preserved, or suc-
cessfully translated, in Apocalypse Now. Where film and text truly and decisively part
company, however, is in their ultimate capacity for affirmation based on this very
similar vision of the world. Although not generally credited with optimism, Conrad
emerges as far more positive than Coppola in this regard. Within Heart of Darkness,
specifically, Marlow's self-crafted identity as salt-water sailor proves to be his final
salvation on many levels. It renders him immune - as Kurtz was not - to the darker
human possibilities and guarantees him a strength of being which will translate into
moral and physical survival by the end of the African experience. One small, apparently
trivial, event near the center of the novel provides a remarkable omen of all this to
Marlow and to the reader as well. Fifty miles below Kurtz's Inner Station, Marlow
comes upon a deserted hut and disembarks to investigate it. Here he finds firewood,
a message from Kurtz's disciple (the Russian harlequin), and a book which, in symbolic
terms, conveys a second and crucial message from himself:
It was an extraordinary find. Its title was, An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship,
by a man Towser, Towson - some such name - Master in his Majesty's Navy. The
matter looked dreary reading enough, with illustrative diagrams and repulsive tables
of figures, and the copy was sixty years old. I handled this amazing antiquity with
the greatest possible tenderness, lest it should dissolve in my hands. Within, Towson
or Towser was inquiring earnestly into the breaking strain of ships' chains and tackle,
and other such matters. Not a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could
see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to
work, which made these humble pages, luminous with other than a professional light.
The simple old sailor, with his talk of chains and purchases, made me forget the
jungle and the pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something
unmistakably real. (Conrad 107-08)
What Marlow has come upon is the book of himself - unmistakably real and delicious
to any reader. Even though it spins a dull sailor's yarn, it glows for Marlow by

This content downloaded from 195.43.22.134 on Tue, 01 May 2018 14:51:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Conrad's Ethics/ 196

reminding him of the sea, his natural element, and by reflecting a passion for craftsman-
ship - the ultimate source of his own strength and depth of character. For Conrad,
any mirror this luminous is also unbreakable and can be used as a very effective shield.
Along with the shock of self-recognition, then, this moment in the novel becomes a
most hopeful prophecy for Marlow - a kind of mystical reassurance that from his
wholeness of spirit will come endurance, survival, and finally triumph.
In Apocalypse Now a set of events takes place, closely paralleling Marlow's "find"
but leading to far darker conclusions. Chef, the film's artist, actively searches for
what Marlow found by accident - some fragment and reminder of his best self to
oppose the chaos around him. Chef leaves the boat and enters the jungle, as Marlow
did, not seeking a book about seamanship but seeking mangoes - that odd yet fitting
emblem of his creativity and unique spirit. In place of mangoes, however, what the
jungle gives him is an attacking tiger - not Marlow's welcome omen of survival, in
other words, but the prefigurement of approaching and violent death. Seen once in
the film, and only for an instant, this tiger proves to be a carefully conceived and
specific foreshadowing of Chef's destruction - a direct reversal, in short, of what
Towson's Inquiry represented for Marlow. As carnivore, Chef's tiger relates to the
film's many images of meat eating and revives the predator/prey relationship which
the saucier attempted to escape in rejecting naval cuisine. Furthermore, the tiger places
Chef in the role of prey - the prime rib itself - thus hinting ahead all too clearly at
the hideous circumstances of his slaughter. Chef will die beheaded by Kurtz, exactly
as a sacrificial ox is killed, only moments later, by Kurtz's primitive followers.
Afterwards, Chef's head will be delivered to its final resting place - the "tiger cage"
where Willard is imprisoned.3
Before his death, poor Chef does eventually come upon the mangoes he wished for
early on. Here again, however, the circumstances of his discovery reveal Coppola's
vision of destruction in place of Conrad's reassurance that decent men will prevail.
Rather late in the journey, the PBR encounters a sampan on the river which Chief,
in conflict with Willard, insists be stopped for a routine check. Although everything
seems in order, he commands Chef to board and search the sampan. Since Chef had
resolved - after the tiger scene - never to leave the boat, he complies with extreme
reluctance. During the search, a young girl runs to protect her hidden puppy. Clean,
manning the PBR machine guns, misunderstands her movement, panics, and opens
fire. What results is the massacre of all on board and, along with it, Chef's sad
discovery of mangoes at last.
For Marlow in Heart of Darkness, the found image of self carried with it a promise
of survival. Here, for Chef, it provides only another encounter with death - real this
time instead of symbolic. This is true for Chief as well - the second ethical hero of
Apocalypse Now - because the sampan scene is really his version of Chef's search for
mangoes - his own abortive effort to remind himself of who he is. Chief stops the
civilian boat out of what Conrad would surely call "a singleness of intention, an honest
concern for the right way of going to work ..." (108). Beyond a sense of duty and
order, much like Towson's, Chief's action is driven by a desire, at this point in the
film, to reestablish his authority as captain, or as sailor in charge of his boat - for
Willard, for his somewhat ragged crew, but most of all for himself. Chief approaches
the sampan not looking for bloodshed, nor even for contraband, so much as searching
for his own image. When violence occurs despite this, Chief reveals his humanity by
insisting on compassion for a wounded girl, the sampan's lone survivor. His words
are answered by a gunshot from Willard's pistol which ends her life.
In Coppola's darker rendering of Heart of Darkness, then, the sensitive and creative
man seeks his own likeness but finds a vision of death in its place. The disciplined
and compassionate man does the same thing and brings about a dreadful atrocity. An
even fuller measure of Coppola's pessimism is gained by widening the focus beyond
just Chief and Chef to consider the fates of all four Conradian characters together. In

This content downloaded from 195.43.22.134 on Tue, 01 May 2018 14:51:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
197/Conrad's Ethics

simple and specific terms, Chief and Chef do not finally triumph as Marlow did, nor
even survive their journeys. Despite every strength of spirit - imagination, belief,
human decency - they move inevitably toward brutal deaths, the artist beheaded, the
careful sailor impaled upon a spear. By contrast, the two surfers of Apocalypse Now ,
as hollow as Kurtz ever was, escape his final destruction. Lance wanders in an empty
trance, through all sorts of dangers, never to be harmed in the slightest and to emerge
as the only member of the boat crew left alive at the end of the film. While by no
means dazed like Lance, Kilgore, his spiritual brother, behaves in much the same
unconcerned way during battle, ignoring exploding shells and appearing invulnerable
to them. Willard, in fact, expresses the belief that Kilgore is protected by some sort
of mystical force or "weird light," and that he will survive the war without a scratch.
For Conrad, in Heart of Darkness , the physical and metaphysical worlds seemed to
be aligned, so that this sort of immunity afforded protection not to Kurtz but to
Marlow - almost as a reward, or as an outward image of his sturdy and well-crafted
self. At the bitter end of Apocalypse Now , matters are clearly reversed. Men like
Chief and Chef may be deep and solid within, yet this affords them no outward shield
against destruction. Hollow shells like Kilgore and Lance, on the other hand, are not
ultimately crushed flat like Kurtz. They continue to live and to flourish - apparently
forever.

Louis K. Greiff
Alfred University

Notes

' Commentators on Apocalypse Now whose central focus is Willard and Kurtz tend, as I have, to emphasize
the moral ambiguities of both characters but not to link this problem to the professional dynamic. In fact, only
one critic - Veronica Geng, writing for The New Yorker - treats the work issue in any sustained way. Her review
of Apocalypse Now confirms my own uncertainty about what Captain Willard is or does by going outside the film
to search for his true profession. Geng claims that Willard is not really a military man at all so much as he is a
version of the archetypal American private eye - Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe disguised as Joseph Conrad's
Charlie Marlow. Other critics such as Joy Gould Boyum, Diane Jacobs, and Michael Wood discuss and, in general,
agree upon the film's ethical uncertainty as linked to the two major characters. Wood, focusing on Colonel Kurtz
in a New York Review of Books article, believes (as I do) that he is far less meaningful a version of Conrad's
hollow man than Colonel Kilgore, one of the film's minor characters. Jacobs, writing the chapter on Apocalypse
Now for The English Novel and the Movies , compares Willard with Marlow and concludes that "Marlow is a moral
quantity we know; Willard is an enigma" (215). Boyum's section on Apocalypse Now, in her book Double Exposure,
Fiction into Film , takes essentially the same position on both characters, finally suggesting that as a result of their
failure to clarify moral issues, the film "disintegrates into dramatic and thematic confusion" (111). Some radically
different insights into moral ambiguity, Willard and Kurtz, and the general conception of Apocalypse Now are
provided by Francis Ford Coppola himself in an interview with Greil Marcus for Rolling Stone. Amid a series of
interesting revelations, Coppola admits a degree of artistic intention, at least in Willard's uncertain persona. Coppola
discusses his now well-known difficulty in choosing among several endings for the film and states that his
favorite - although subsequently rejected under pressure - provides a final view of Willard as having yet made no
moral choices at all, not even the refusal to become Kurtz's successor (56).

2
Members of the boat crew in Apocalypse Now have received scant critical attention relative to Willard
and Kurtz. Commentators tend to see them, in opposition to my own views, as less compelling than the major
figures and also as less important to the thematic development of the film. The chapter on Apocalypse Now
in Frank Magill's survey Cinema: The Novel into Film, for example, states that "the crew of the patrol boat
. . . capture[s] our interest but never our concern. Though each has some potentially emotional and revealing
moments, we never feel deeply for these men" (236). Another critic, Christopher Sharrett, characterizes the
boat-crew members as escapist and argues that because of this tendency they do not contribute effectively to
the film's moral or political perspective on the Vietnam War. "The PBR crew, with the exception of Chief,
[Sharrett writes] chooses to find in the war new variations on escapism rather than confront its moral or political
aspect, which by extension suggests that their overall awareness of political reality has been extinguished"
(40). This comment clearly provides a direct contrast to my own assertion that the moral center of the film is
to be found among the boat crew. Even Coppola himself seems to minimize the importance of these figures
by referring to them, in his interview with Greil Marcus, as "just fellow travelers on the journey" (55). A

This content downloaded from 195.43.22.134 on Tue, 01 May 2018 14:51:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 Conrad's Ethics/ 198

separate group of commentators on the film finds at least political, if not ethical, implications in the boat crew
but reaches differing conclusions on what this might mean. Michael Dempsey and William M. Hägen suggest
that the boat crew sets up an unavoidable contrast between images of American soldiers in the Vietnam era
and those of an earlier age. Dempsey compares Chief, Chef, Clean, and Lance to a "bomber crew from World
War II movies, though without the gung-ho heroism" (6). In a somewhat parallel comment, Hägen refers to
the boat crew as "technology's children . . . soft, self indulgent, and unequal to their hidden enemy" (238).
A third critic, Saul Steier, provides a more radical perspective on the same idea by suggesting that Coppola
is using the boat crew to satirize and attack the counterculture of the 1960s. "The war scenes themselves [Steier
writes] are merely the excuse for an attack against the 'youth values' of American society in the sixties, as
becomes clear in the trek up the river as well as in the battle scenes, because the crew of the Navy boat which
is taking Willard to Kurtz are examples of these values" (118). Finally, Marsha Kinder offers a political
suggestion on the boat crew in contrast to Steier's when she describes Chief as a very positive character and
a just representative of black rage against corrupt white authority. Her Film Quarterly article on Apocalypse
Now refers to Chief as "the black victim at the wheel who is killed by a spear . . . not a foolish tribesman
but an angry black soldier [sic] who challenges Willard's authority at every turn. The man dies, not merely
with a terrible frown, but with a desperate effort to take Willard with him, by drawing him down on the spear"
(14).

The torture chamber where Kurtz drops Chef's head in Willard's lap is not referred to as a "tiger cage"
in the dialogue of Apocalypse Now ; it is, however, identified as such in the listing of scenes which accompanies
videotaped versions of the film.

Works Cited

Anonymous. " Apocalypse Now." Cinema: The Novel into Film. Ed. Frank N. Magill. Pasadena: Salem Press,
1980. 233-36.

Boyum, Joy Gould. Double Exposure: Fiction into Film. New York: New American Library, 1985.

Conrad, Joseph. "Heart of Darkness." Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer. New York: New American
Library, 1950. 65-158.

Coppola, Francis Ford. Apocalypse Now. Hollywood: Zoetrope Studios, 1979.

Dempsey, Michael. " Apocalypse Now." Sight and Sound 49 (1979-80): 5-9.

Geng, Veronica. "Mistah Kurtz - He Dead." The New Yorker 3 Sept. 1979: 70-72.

Hägen, William M. " Apocalypse Now. Joseph Conrad and the Television War." Hollywood as Historian:
American Film in a Cultural Context. Ed. Peter C. Rollins. Lexington: UP of Kentucky,
1983. 230-45.

Jacobs, Diane. "Coppola Films Conrad in Vietnam." The English Novel and the Movies. Eds. Michael Klein
and Gillian Parker. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1981. 211-17.

Kinder, Marsha. "The Power of Adaptation in Apocalypse Now." Film Quarterly 33 (1979-80): 12-20.

Marcus, Greil. "Journey up the River: An Interview with Francis Coppola." Rolling Stone 1 Nov. 1979:51-57.

Pym, John. " Apocalypse Now: An Errand Boy's Journey." Sight and Sound 49 (1979-80): 9-10.

Sharrett, Christopher. "Operation Mind Control: Apocalypse Now and the Search for Clarity." Journal of
Popular Film and Television 1 Aug. 1980: 34-43.

Steier, Saul. "Make Friends with Horror and Terror: Apocalypse Now." Social Text, Theory/Culture/ Ideology
1 (1980): 114-22.

Stewart, Garrett. "Coppola's Conrad: The Repetitions of Complicity." Critical Inquiry 7 (1981): 455-74.

Wood, Michael. "Bangsand Whimpers: Apocalypse Now." New York Review of Books 11 Oct. 1979: 17-18.

This content downloaded from 195.43.22.134 on Tue, 01 May 2018 14:51:39 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms