This week I returned, once again, as I do almost every other month, to my casual viewing of Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic that’s essentially the movie adaptation of the novella Heart of Darkness. I’d like to spend my time describing the similarities between the two. What first stands out to me worth discussing is Marlon Brando’s Kurtz, and Joseph Conrad’s vision of the antagonist. In Apocalypse Now, Kurtz is portrayed as a rouge general, who has gone insane. He beings to fight his own war with the natives against the government’s orders. His physical appearance is meant to mirror his excess of power. His bulk-ness verges on being overweight. Because of the costuming and shadowing it was hard for me to distinguish if Coppola wanted me to view Kurtz as unhealthy overweight or towering strength. Curiously, in the novel, Kurtz is depicted as something skeleton-like. Conrad blatantly compares Kurtz’s head to a skull of ivory. While contextually, Kurtz’s skinny weight can be blamed to his unnamed disease, it’s began apparent to me that Kurtz is shriveled and hollow because of his own excess. This draws an interesting parallel between symbols of excess. Now, realistically the reason why Marlon Brando was so fat was because he showed up to filming obese. He had weight problems. But for the sake of literary merit, Coppola decided that Marlon wouldn’t be sent home. Despite the excess, even if Coppola’s Kurtz appears full, Kurtz is a hollow man. Because of excess, there’s no humanity left, and so there’s only a structural store front that’s supposed to resemble a human. Watching the movie after reading the seventh chapter of Grendel, I spot an interesting comparison to Dennis Hopper’s character, the insane American journalist who decides to stay with Kurtz, and the slightly schizophrenic Grendel. Both obsess over twisted logic in rules that define their worlds. Hopper reveals his true disconnect from reality when he speaks cinema’s craziest dialogue: “this is dialectics, simple dialectics. It is very simple dialectics: 1 through 9, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel to space. You can not go to space with fractions. What do you land on: on one quarter or 3/8th? What do you do when you go to venus or something. Thats dialectic. Physics. Dialectic logic is: there is only love or hate”. Similarly to Grendel, Grendel speaks of conics and keeping a steady balance of everything. The photojournalist holds to the belief that there are no compromises to the truth. There are only absolutes - there can only be polar outcomes. With two such absolutes, there’s almost a balance established between truth and lies. A line that is drawn straight down through reality, where there’s no complex truth. There’s a balance that’s been set in place, a balance that cannot change despite varying opinions and emotions regarding what the truth should be. Both of these characters seem to crack over their obsession for the truth. For enlightenment. While the journalist claims to have had his “mind expanded” by Kurtz, he’s limited himself because within all humans there is a limit. Grendel has difficulty following the Dragon’s logic - it can’t be helped. Both characters are representative of how incompetent humans are to understanding the entire universe; who can blame them? Instead of swimming in ambiguity, theses two characters have chosen a different path. An oversimplification of the truth. They’ve enclosed their minds in limited options as to what the truth can be. Grendel preaches existence’s meaninglessness. The journalist preaches there are only absolutes. One either loves something, or hates it. Ignoring all of the complications show how the character’s minds are receding back into ignorance.
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