Conrad and Coppola

In the film Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen and his Vietnam war platoon mates (random assortment, whatever) go up the Mekong river to find Marlon Brando/Colonel Kurtz (movie was based on Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad). As they go up the river though; things happen to them; stranger and stranger things; surreal sequences with Playboy bunnies in an abandoned helicopter, corpses and villages flash-preserve, a meal at a French plantation with the logical and insane owner attendant with all culinary etiquette, a crew member that waterskis behind the patrol boat, a massacre of boat people by an American, shellling of a Vietnamese village etc.etc; and the boredom that goes on.

At the end in Heart of Darkness, the narrator (Marlow/Sheen) finally reaches Kurtz (also Kurtz) - brutal, brilliant, charismatic, contradictory, mad. Kurtz reads poetry aloud (Eliot for those of you that care), fucks native women, acts as a paramilitary, and is a deserter of sorts - a Lucifer that prefers to reign in hell, without the corresponding Miltonian incandescence.

The essence of Kurtz is emblematic of the savagery and unreason that lies at the core of human beings; that which allows them to commit evil again and again and again. This heart of darkness, is essentially, in both Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness, incomprehensible. It is never explained nor can it be. It is shown by everything that precedes the final discovery; the journey up the river ("going all the way"- Kurtz who has "gone all the way"), the journey to that beating heart of madness that is in war, whether it is Vietnam, Sri Lanka or the British empire in its colonizing brutality.

The audience's ultimate ability to understand these complex works will rest on the vastness of his or her imagination; the ability to imagine the banality of the horrors of war, the ability to imagine him or herself as capable of being perpetrator and victim. It is something I imagine, can only really be understood by all those who have felt it; and even then; not at all; - it cannot be intellectually understood; what permanent disorder really feels like; how it is to live in a state of permanent disorder and the ways in which all the small things as well as the large things, are fucked up.