AT THE HEART OF DARKNESS:
EICHMANN AND
"APOCALYPSE NOW"?

Victor Nell

grappling with sanguinary

of the Congo in Brussels

an estimated

ratified this extraordinary

fiefdom.

But evil wears noble masks.

Kimbrough
in the centre of Equatorial

in the Congo:

paddle steamer, Joseph Conrad tra-
deadly, like a snake •••
From
of King Leopold II of Belgium;
Under the
by the Internat-
(the city Marlow calls a "whited
Voyaging up the Congo,
that were at that time
(1971)
-They have
Africa,
Placed face to
customs that date back
They must
to general laws, of which the most needful and the most

Towards the end of 1890, in a stern-wheel
velled 1 300 miles up the Congo River (-fascinating,
with its head in the sea and its tail lost in the depth of the land").
1876 to 1908, the Congo was the private.property
in 1884, the Berlin Conference
civi1ising rule of King Leopold and.his agents, administered
ional Association
sepulchre"),
15 million blacks perished.
Conrad witnessed scenes of savagery and brutdlisation
without parallel in the world.
quotes a passage by Leopold on the Belgian mission
of civi1isation
to continue the development
directly from Berlin and Brussels.
receiVing their inspiration
face with primitive barbarism,
thousands of years, they are obliged to reduce these gradually.
accustom the population
salutary is assuredly
H~art of Darkness
published elght years after his return.
and in it the Director-Producer
vehicle for a cinematjc
in the Vietnam war.
The film
fruDI
was five years in the making, much of it on lecation
facility in Los Angeles
where Coppola returned to his Omni Zoetrope prcdLtion
with two hundred and fifty hours of footage, ~inal1y edited down to 153 minutes
(there is also a 701llllversion which runs 12 minutes less).
Coppola cu; and re-
cut the film, creating several versions of different
putting
1977 to Easter 1978 and then to August
back the premi~re date - from December
The film cost between $30 and $35 million,
1979 (American Fil~, September
1979).
for $10 million dollars n~ which Coppola personally
To raise
this enormous sum he has reportedly mortgaged
Godfather movies. his San Francisco home and other property:
but also his future rides on the film, which has been disastrously
most critics.
(August 27, 197~
of the film's "fundamental misconception".

It is a story of transcendent .evi1,
of APOca1vpse .Now. Francis Coppola. found a
statement about evil, for which he finds an allegory

the unpaid royalties on both his
not only his pride
received by
1979) talks

its review "The making of a quagmire"
Veronica Geng in the New Yorker

Richard Coombes (Monthly Film Bulletin, December

For Coppola,

it has bp.en an expensive allegory.

is a symbolic rewol'ldng of Conrad's experiences

in the Congo,

in the Philippines,

length, continually

stands surety.

that of work."

Time magazine headlined

28

it is

3, 1979) is one of the few critics to praise the film'
(Sep~ember
writes, and has coherence, truthfulnes~ and convic-
~~~,~gi~a~U~cessi~~'thshe
1S un 1
It is curiousl
e entrance of Colonel Walter E Kurtz
..
~hat the Time reviewer does not appear to have ~ead Heart of
. y
~nt~restlng
ar ness, wh1le Ms Geng knows the story pretty well by heart;
although
~Poc~l¥pse
No~ can at a push stand on its own, Coppola's film rides on its
~eh1cle and to see it without Heart of Darkness in one's head is
1~nr~d1an
1ke watch1ng Marcel C~mus's 1958 classic, Orfeu Negro, when one is ignorant
~f the Orpheus legend 1t echoes.
The purely cinematic resonances in which'
?ppola clot~es Conrad's story are certainly one of the film's more con-
slderable
What I shall do in this paper is consider the central issue in both Heari
?f Darkness.and
To place this TSSue
1n pe~spect1ve,
aspects of evil and relate these to my own generation's touch-
Osoph1cal
sto~e, ~he.Nazi holocaust, and the man who by virtue of his appalling nor-
mallty 1S 1tS most powerful symbol, Adolf Eichmann.
look at the little that science, and especially psychology, discerns of the
darkness of human heart and has to say about it.

~po~alypse Now, the problem of evil.
1t 1S necessary to consider some of the theological and phil-

I would like to

tr1umphs.

Finally

* * *

a generation

Today, the symbol is

they have

and the coarse-screen

been subject to a dual censorship:

is a peculiarly potent symbol for another reason.

Ia Orang, Khe Sanh and Mylai are no longer place names:

The question of why Coppola chose Vietnam as the allegory through which to
portray Heart of Darkness is worth looking at, and the answer seems to be
th~t a~tho~gh the problem of evil hasn't changed much since the days of Gen-
eS1S, 1tS symbols have, and each generation has its own,
For Conrad's it
was slavery;
later it was the trenches of the First World War
~nd !or the next the Spanish civil war (its horrors have their visual symbol
1n P1casso's Guernica).
For my generation, the symbol is the gas chambers
of Auschwitz
1945 newspaper photographs of long rowS
of corpses like small bundles of striped laundry.
Vietnam;
the darkness of symbols of evil like AUschwitz, Treblinka and Dachau.
Vietnam
War reporting has
traditionally
that of military security
and that of good taste, which meant that material felt to be demoralising to
combatants
or the folk back home (blood and gore, atrocities, wounded child-
ren) was suppressed.
Until Vietnam, journalists and censors shared a set of
our side was fighting the good fight,
tacit assumptions
These common
and journalists,
assumptions
crumbled in Vietnam, because, like the grunts, reporters and
felt themselves fundamentally out of sympathy with the mili-
photographers
tary machine. and the history of Vietnam reporting, from Harrison Salisbury
to Michael Herr. is a history of dissidence.
Salisbury's 1967 reports for
the ~
York Time~ on the bombing of civilian targets in Hanoi created a
in American opinion on the war (Gay Talese. 1969. tells how Dean
watershed
Rusk. after a television appearance at the,CBS studio in Washin~ton"bec~
aggressive
with a member of the Times Wash1ngton Bureau:
Scotch, Rusk looked hard at the journalist and asked, -Why don't you tell
your editors to ask Mr Salisbury to go down and visit the North Vietnamese
Herr's Dispatches (that looks at first to be a flip
in South Vietnam?").
battle slang and anecdote. and turns out to be a marve1lously con-
rec~f
structed consideration
of the terror of war and its beauty) is suffused with
"for years there has been no country here b~t ~e war", he writes:
distrust:
the spokesmen spoke in sentences .with no hope of meanlng 1n th~ sane world
••• The press got all the facts. it got too many of them.
But 1t never found
a way to report meaningfully

about good taste:
like soldiers, wanted to see our war won.

drink1ng hlS th1rd

about death".

29

censorship,

together with the breakdown
filters,
In The

meant that although
of that magazine's

The effect of the sheer weight of media coverage,
sifted through a thousand
of voluntary
measure.
the horror of war penetrated
American
pictures with an eye for the
Best of LIFE, an anthology
to the heroism
main chance, the Vietnam photographs
of war shown for the two world wars (the flag raising on Iwo Jima) and even
Korea, where the call of muted trumpets
The Vietnam pic-
tures (Scherman,
and brutality
that had heretofore
The people at home took their war each night live in their livingrooms,
mainlined
so intimately

homes in unprecedented
are a shocking contrast
is never far away.

1973, pp. 44 - 45, 180 - 181) show suffering

recorded that it became almost unendurably

into the bloodstream.

Vietnam was
real ,

not penetrated

Life's pages.

by television

So when Coppola

experience:
15 000 Americans

terms, Vietnam was a major American

writes Lance Morrow in ~
Even in sheer numerical
1964, US troop strength built up to 543 000 in 1969;
battle in 1968, and close on 50 000 before the last 69 Americans
on March 29, 1973.
looked for a modern allegory
that could stand beside Conrad's Congo, Vietnam was a compelling
That soaring ambition
its swollen bUdget:
of Patmos, recorded
rent era.
knowledge
As we shall see, Coppola's
than the rags of insanity renders his account
rather than revelatory.

to Coppola's
its title evokes the apocalypse
in the book of Revelation

Through this title, Coppola
of future events, and ultimately

from
died in
left Saigon
for evil
choice.
movie is clear not only from
of St John on the Island
in the first century of the cur-

lays claim to a revealed and secret
eschatology.
larger
of the end of days ludicrous

failure to clothe Kurtz in any symbolism

to an authoritative

directly
(April 23, 1979).

attached

evil may appear a harsh

in terms of conventional

of evil, is philosophy's

influence on Jewish and Christian

It implies that there is no eternal struggle between

* * *
To call Heart of Darkness a story of transcendent
this is indeed a
and religion,
morality
judgment;
good and
deviant term.
of God's ways
the justification
Theodicy,
evil because evil has triumphed.
most ancient and
to man in view of the existence
a fundamental
is to postulate
despairing
its most radical solution
quest;
of late antiquity,
who exer-
dualism, and this is the view of the Gnostics
The Gnostics
theodicy.
cised a powerful
from God and thrown into this
held that through the Fall, man is alienated
cannot
world, which, created from evil matter and possessed
Yahweh
be the creation of a good God:
found issue in the
(not highly thought of by the Gnostics).
Christian
(1954,
heresy of Manichaeism
pp. 238 ff.) argues that in the Kabbala, evil is woven into the existence
of
God:
in the wrath
This sinister demonic world of evil forms
of his left hand, the ~itra ahara.
the dark side of everything
The Lurianic
doctrine
century)
when the vessels of creation
of the uplifting
shattered at the outpouring
is a first step for personal
and ultimately
from the earlier doctrine
of evil in the Kabbala and its ultimately
It is in this Gnostic sense that Conrad's
sonal Record, 1912, he writes

by evil demons,
it is ruled by the Jewish demiurge,
and in the Jewish Kabbala. Scho1em

all that is demonic has its root in God, and especially

Gnostic roots is clear.
evil is transcendent

of the holy sparks, dispersed
of divine goodness,

(taken over by the later Hasidic movement

living and threatens

(in his ~-
involves us in so many absurd contra-

The ethical view of the universe

cosmic redemption:

of the nineteenth

These doctrines

it from within.

its derivation

30

(pp.90 - 91):

from which I could not have defended her"

(p. 92).

town on earth."

.•• ~hat I have come to suspect that the aim of creation
I would fondly believe that its object

dictions
~annot be eth1ca1 at all.
1S purely spectacular.
)
there are abundant hints of this fundamental
Thro~g~out
He~rt of Darkness,
The narrative frame is aboard a
th1S sense of triumphant evil.
pess1m1sm,
a luminous sunset with gleams of varnished
yaw~ on the Thames at sunset:
Yet the presence of humans causes the light to be swallowed by
spr1ts.
"A haze rested on the low shores ... and farther back still
a darkness:
into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the big-
seemed condensed
gest! and the greatest,
This image of the swallowing up
of 11ght by the dark is a powerful one that Conrad uses repeatedly:
"The
sun s~nk low, and fro~ glowing white changed to a dull red without rays
heat, as 1f about to go out suddenly stricken to death by the
and w1thout
touch of that gloom brood ing over a crowd of men'."
repeats with even greater force in the last pages, when Marlow
The.image
Kurtz's last slim packet of letters to his Intended in the Whited
del1vers
that is Brussels:
the room grew darker because "all the sad
s~pulchre
11ght had taken refuge on her forehead ••. illumined by the unextinguish-
hers is a "9reat and saving
~b1e ~ight of bel ief and love"
ll1us10n
that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness, in the trium-
phant darkness
The extraordinary
heresy of the 3rd century tells in its creation
cient myth.
The Manichaeian
into the realm of light by Satan, who emerged from his
myth of an incursion
so that part of the Kingdom of Light is ab-
kingdom of endless darkness
smothered by the Matter which engulfs it.
As we have
sorbed
in Darkness,
The symbolism
seen, this theme repeats in the Kabbalic creation story.
of light takes on its modern form in the European En1ightment of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth
centuries, which has as its symbol the blazing sun as
is assured In terms of
the light of reason under which Man's perfectabi1ity
the idea of general progress.
Moses Mendelsohn
the
was darkened by the emergence of
small light of this Jewish enlightenment
modern anti-Semitism
(which blasted Jewish hopes of becoming a nation among
nations),
in the Holocaust:
culminating
the ideals of the Haskalah were
paradoxically
by the Zionist movement, which while rejecting the
realised
ideals of the Haskalah did in fact make of the Jews a nation among nations
and a carrier of universal as well as particularistic
Now the sense of a brooding d~rkness, o! a light absorbed by
In Apocalv~se
Satanism,
images
of dark green
almost black and impenetrable Jungle move slowly across the
framed in the sound and absurdly slow movement of helicopter rotor
screen
blades' and behind the dark palms sombre fires burn ("deep within the for-
est, r~d gleams
seemed to sink and.rise", says Marlow at the
••. wavered,
Inner Station),
and this visual sense of dark llght is preserved through-
out

richness of this symbolism derives from its roots In an-

captured in the unt1t~ed Open1ng sequence:

and the Jewish tlaskalab of the eighteenth

From the Enlightenment movement emerged

century;

Captain Willard's

long upriver journey in search of Kurtz.

1S stunningly

culture.

* * *

31

Conrad's most powerful symbols of evil are those Marlow encounters
at the
beginning of his journey upriver. at the company's first station. on which
the deadening hand of civilisation
Evidence of pointless
waste of material and life is everywhere.
A railway truck lies on its back
with its wheels in the air "as dead as the carcass of some animal", decaying
machinery,
was not in the way of anything.
Slavery was against
ciples. but justice and work were not:
chained together by iron collars around their necks.

rusty rails, a pointless blasting at the face of a cliff which
prin-

Marlow is passed by a group of blacks
law ••• had come to them an

and the outraged

lies heaviest.

King Leopold's

They were called criminals.
insoluble mystery from the sea.

Marlow's description
life nearer our own time. notably Katzetnik's
the living corpses of the death camps:

is uncannily evocative of other descriptions

portrayal of the Musselmen,

of death in

All their meagre breasts panted together. the violently dilated nostrils
quivered.
They passed me within six
inches. without a glance. with that complete deathlike
of
unhappy savages.

the eyes stared stonily up-hill.

indifference

uni-

Cooperation

is a melancholy

by the oppressed

Behind them strolled their guard, "the product of the new forces at work". a
black man carrying a rifle by its middle and dressed in a rudimentary
form;
he grins at Marlow, well pleased with his part in the "great cause of
these high and just proceedings".
in their
own oppression
theme. examined by Hannah Arendt (1963. pp.
109 ff.) in the context of the Jewish ghetto police and militias of Nazi-
occupied Europe.
Marlow then makes his way to the shade of a clump of trees in which he had
earlier noticed that "dark things seemed to stir feebly":
but no sooner
My purpose was to stroll into the shade for a moment;
within than it seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some
lay. sat between the trees leaning
Inferno ••• Black shapes crouched,
against the trunks ••• half effaced within the dim light. in all the
attitudes
They were dying slowly
••• brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of
time contracts
food. they sickened. became in-
and were then allowed to crawl away and rest •., Near the
efficient.
same tree two more bundles of acute angles sat with their legs drawn up.
One. with his chin propped up on his knees, stared at nothing,
in an
intolerable
••• and all about others were scattered
in every pose of contorted
collapse, as in some picture of a massacre
or a pestilence.

of pain, abandonment.

••• fed on unfamiliar

and appalling manner

and despair

'"

Driven to reflect on the meaning of these terrible scenes. Marlow suggests
that there are two kinds of devil about:
greed and "hot desire ••• strong. lusty. red-eyed,"
but these are not the
devils that rule the Congo:

the first is the devil of violence.

sunshine of that land" - and note that we

I foresaw that in the blinding
have here another metaphor for darkness
with a flabby. pretending.
folly.

weak-eyed
It is folly because from the company's
wasteful and economically
unproductive.
that makes Marlow feel he had "never breathed an atmosphere
the implication
Approaching

the station bUildings.

- "I would become acquainted

devil of a rapacious and pitiless
point of view contempt for life is

This is the criticism of Kurtz

so vile". namely
that his methods were unsound from an economic point of view.

Marlow meets a man
32

exh1D,ted a gentle annoya~ce.

"~n such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took
He wears a high collar, broad cuffs, alpaca
~lm for a sort of vision."
"He was amazing, and had a
Jacket, a clea~ nec~tie an~ vi\rnis~ed boots:
pe~ holder beh1nd h1S ear.
Th1s 1S the company's chief accountant, and
am1d the general dlsorder of the station - "heads, things, buildings", his
boo~s w~r~ 1n apple-ple order.
~hen an invalid's bed is put in his office,
'rhe groans of this sick person •.•
h~
And \'lthout that it is extremely difficult to
d1stract my attentJon.
Yet to Marlow's amaze-
guard against clerical errors in this climate.'"
men~ he continues "making correct entries of perfectly correct trans-
and fifty feet below the doorstep I could see the still tree-
actlons;
tops of the grove of death."
This is no homo vulgaris, the common man, that Conrad is describing, but
homo norma lis, the man who 1ives by norms:
Hannah Arendt (1963) remarks
of Eichmann that he was incapable of uttering a single phrase that was not
a cliche:
it is the happy family life of the prison commander and the care
he lavishes on his beautiful garden that may appear to constitute his
On the contrary, it is inconceivable that the administra-
greatest evil.
If the soldiers dicing for Christ's clothes
tors of death act differently.
beneath the cross appal us, how much more appalling would it be were they
to have started in horror at the crucifixion - and failed to uproot the
Cross;
if the guards who led the transports to the showers of Auschwitz
were brisk and businesslike,
how much more terrible would it have been
had they wanted to tear out the airtight seals on the doors, and not
In Musee des Beaux Arts, W H Auden considers this paradox from
done so?
a slightly different viewpoint.
The Old Masters were never wrong about
sUffel'ing, he writes;
they understood it always takes place "while some-
one else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along":

They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run it, course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggie life and the
torturer's horse
Scratches

its innocent behind on a tree.

death or the bleeding victims of a traffic

I think that Auden has got his indifference wrong in the sense that nothing
fascinates us more than suffering, especially getting to wa~ch it:
the
gladiator's
accldent attract
us like magnets (or repel us with all the viol~nce of a good, strong re-
action formation).
The horses and dogs are d01ng as they please because
their masters are off to watch the fun.
Auden is talking about bystanders, whereas our focus of attentlon 1S t~e
torturer himself, whose equanimity arises because he has as~umed ~ sOClal-
1y imposed role from which he can escape only through the d1sruptlon of a
presumably
It is nonetheless
tants, the Eichmanns and the camp commanders:

imperative that criminality be ascribed to th~ accoun-

It should also be not~d t~at

comfortable and secure life-style.

Hannah Arendt wrltes,
fhis new type of criminal, who is in actua~ fac~ hostis gen~ris
bumani (enemy of the human race) commits hlS crlmes under Clrcum-
stances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or feel
that he is doing wrong.

33

A Catholic priest (play-

death is not death if each death is cor-

In psychological terms, what the accountants do is allow th~ meaning of their act
to be absorbed into the act itself:
rectly recorded in a ledger.
In Apocalypse Now, the visionary and amazing accountant becomes the equally
visionary and amazing It-Col Bill Kilgore,played with enormous energy by
Robert Duvall.
The transfiguration of the accountant as Kilgore is a won-
derfully creative piece of scripting and gives the movie t~o scenes of sus-
tained brilliance and power that are archetypes of the sensuousness of
violence:
if the rest of the movie is forgotten, the half hour of Kilgore
is likely to become a self-contained classic of the cinema.
The translation of the inner meaning of Marlow's arrival at the First Sta-
tion into purely cinematic terms is brill iantly realised:
the "pitiless
folly" of the company is expressed here in a huge, toothed bulldozer that
emerges from the sea to swallow up village houses.
ed by a real priest) in crazy flip-up sunglasses gives benediction over a
battlefied altar while a cow, dangling beneath a helicopter, is lifted
high into the air, lowing fearfully:
tne cow is evidently more valuable
than the slaughtered humans.
A tank-mounted flame-thrower advances on a
shack half its size and burns it to a powder in a single fiery breath, a
rather heavy metaphor for American overkill.
Next morning, in order to set Willard's boat down at the mouth of the river,
Kilgore annihilates a Viet Cong-held village that commands the beachhead.
The attack is the ultimate ballet of beautiful violence, the masks of hate
rendered as bloodless and antiseptic as a shootout in a Western.
The heli-
copters of Kilgore's 9th Air Cavalry surge across the screen like winged
horses, make magnificent patterns against the deep green of the jungle.
A
mile out, Kilgore blasts the village with a hugely amplified "Ride of the
Va1kyries".
Strapped above the rockets outside the helicopter - the gt'af-
fiti on its nose is "Death from the sky" - are two surfboards.
Children
cross a tranquil flagged temple courtyard, hear the thud of the rotors, and
flee in panic.
A direct hit sends a
car tumbling from a high bridge into the water below, and in mid-air bodies
fall gracefully out of it.
The helicopters land, the surf boards strapped
above the rockets are un1ashed and Kilgore, whose pronouncements on the
finer points of surfboard design ride the soundtrack above the battle dia-
logue of targets and coordinates, asks his surfers to get into the water.
They refuse, and to silence snipers, he calls in an air strike.
low above the trees and with pinpoint accuracy, huge flame-flowers erupt
along the 1ine of the vil1age.
says Kilgore, and the surfers take to the water.
Where Conrad's accountant shelters in the safe place of his ledgers and
meticulous dress, Coppola's Kilgore takes refuge in the sheer sensuousness
of war.
No one has written more compellingly abol,t the beauty of war than
Michael Herr, (whom Coppola employed to script the narration, spoken by
Martin Sheen who plays Willard).
reviewers says he returned
One of Hen"s
from Vietnam "with the wors t imaginab1e news:
war thrives because enough
men still love it".
even the incoming was beautiful at night, beautiful and deeply dreadful.
I remembere1 the way a Phantom pilot had talked about how beautiful the
surface-to-air missiles looked as they drifted up towards his plane to
kill him, and remembered myself how lovely .50-calibre tracers could be,
coming at you as you flew at night in a helicopter, how slow and grace-
ful, arching up easily, a dream, so remote from anything that could
harm you.

Jets scream
"I love the smell of napalm in the morning",

Rockets slam into the f1irrsyhouses.

Herr describes the nights at Khe Sanh:

34

But the remoteness never lasted very long and fear is very near the surface
in Herr's writing.

* **

Marlo~ arrives at the Central Station to find that a volu~teer skipper had
r~n hlS steamer o~to stones and torn her bottom out:
the manager's predic-
tlon.that there.wlll .be a three month delay proves quite precisely accurate,
and lt lS on thlS pOlnt that C T Watts (1975) bases his exploration of the
~nager's
plot to murder Kurtz oy compelling him to wait on rescue until
Watts argues that this covert murder plot
lllness has carried him off.
must be seen against the fact that Heart of Darkness "has a more richly
Darwinian atmosphere than any other major work of fiction".
The Origin
of Species was published in 1859, and it is a remarkably optimistic docu-
me~t:
belng, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards
perfection."
;he doctrine of perfectability is a tenet of the Enlighten-
ment;
manager's iron constitution is his only asset, while Kurtz is presented
as a petson of far greater stature - whether in good or in evil.
By hav-
ing the Central Station manager survive, whose only asset is "triumphant
health in the general rout of constitutions", while Kurtz dies, Conrad
drives a wedge between biological and moral selection:
the fittest are
not the best, and dark may therefore triumph over light.

"As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each

Conrad's pessimism is essentially modern.

The Central Station

the colonial paradox

It is now possible to focus on two further issues:
and the nature of wilderness.
The colonial paradox rests on the fact that the colonisers are o~tensibly
stronger than the natives, but in fact weaker!
they.carry the blg guns,
but the natives are autochthonous;
the colonla1s, llke the fox, know many
things, but the natives, like the hedgehog, know one big t~ing. Marlow's
first percepti on of the natives is as cowed.an? ~e~ten chaIn-~angs and
enslaved porters:
upriver, he returns to hlS lnltlal perceptlon that the
natives had "a wild vital ity, an intense energy of movement, that was as
natural and true as the surf along their coast.
They want:d ~o excuse for
being there"
the
natives "were not inhuman",
thought of their humanity - like yours - the thou~ht of your r:mote kl~-_
ship with this wild and passionate uproar."
A sUltab1e evo1utlonary dlS
but the common humanity is clearly acknowledged.
tance is maintained
The third stage of Marlow's colonial awakening is at Kurtz's encampment
where he sees another apparition, "a wild and gorge~us... woman
"
savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent •.• omlnous.and stately:
She is Kurtz's woman (p.74), and courageously loyal to h~m:
looks at her (p.81) with "fiery, longing eyes" and "a smlle 0

and he breaks through !o a second ln~lght:

indeed, "what thrllled you was Just the.

(p. 14);

* * *

35

~e.f~rf~lsb~art
1n e lna e

that the hedge-

Oscar Mannoni

more ferocious,

Apocalypse

to us", one of the

in his Prospero and Caliban.

the delicate orientals are unquestionably

At the Inner Station, even the "pilgrims" recognise

how this colonial perception
of the paradox
into race hatred is explored with great in-

things is precisely this paradox, which gives his Deer Hunter its
more tena-
than the colonials.
Now
in his hotel room says that while he

meaning".
hog is stronger than the fox:
of strength becomes transmuted
sight by the French anthropologist
When Michael Cimino says, "Vietnam is very mysterious
mysterious
force:
cious, and perhaps even more courageous
begins by stating the paradox:
Willard
in the bush getting
is sitting there, getting weaker every day, Charlie's
at the Hau Phat supply depot, which echoes the flabby
stronger every day;
Willard
devils of the Central Station (elaborate
that Charlie gets strong on cold rice and dead rat,
remarks in narration-over
while the colonials depend on a vast logistic effort to keep themselves
fed.
An Austrian journalist,
to
penetrate Viet-Cong ranks, tells how a single guerilla, entirely on his own,
terrorised traffic on the Pleiku highway for four months without any expec-
tation of relief, picking up food at villages and replenishing
his ammuni-
tion and explosive stocks at mountain hideouts.
Conrad's
Ultimately,
wilderness
of
Isaiah, and Samuel Johnson's
the antipode
of Paradise which is an orderly garden, and early man's greatest evil (Nash,
It is for Conrad primordial,
1967).
dark and powerful and, as we shall see,
allied with Kurtz and Kurtz's evil.

the natives win because the wilderness
is not our romantic modern concept, but the howling wilderness

Kuno Knoebl (1967), one of the few westerners

"tract of solitude and savageness",

stage, dancing Bunnygirls),

is on their side:

to an examination

of who Kurtz is and what

Coppola has, however, chosen to externa1ise

both find more frequent signs along
his voice will offer

* * *
Marlow and Willard journey together now:
the banks that Kurtz's Inner Station is very near, and their thoughts turn
increasingly
them.
Although the object of Marlow's journey is external,
its focus remains very
deeply an inner one.
Willard's
to reach Kurtz, Willard has to pass through an inner circle of the
voyage:
Vietnam purgatory, the DoLung bridge, "the assho1e of the world", where no-
one is in command and swarms of tracers arch through the fairyland
Beyond the bridge, the background music takes on an East-
along the bridge.
ern eerieness, and the signs that Kurtz is now close multiply.
is impaled
party, like Marlow's,
Finally, Kurtz's encampment
totem poles, cres-
on a spear.
horns atop tall poles, and drifting white and violet smoke.
cent-shaped
The
boat nears the shore through a dense crowd of canoes with white-painted
oarsmen, in soft focus as if Coppola was not sure that he wanted to show
are in .smears of warpaint, with blood-stained
them after all.
hands and corpses hanging from trees, lying on the ground, and sprawled atop
pillars.
(Dennis
Hopper), who giddily interprets Kurtz to a round-eyed Willard.
This enormous weight of external trappings has no inner focus.
Ku:tz's objectives,
eVll are in any way clarified.
Nest and Lord of the flies.
Kurtz himself, played with marvellous
by a rotund Marlon Brando, is located in the depths of a cavernous
and it is a mark of the banality to which the movie has descended

nor the nature of his insanity, nor the quality of his
The set looks like a cross between Cuckoo's
sonority
dwelling
in these

Kurtz's Russian acolyte becomes an American photo-journalist

is attacked from the bank, and his helmsman

lights
Willard's

The Montagnards

comes in view:

Neither

36

of

but in another to its right, which is in pitch darkness:

that Kurtz is not located in the lighted inner alcove that Willard

sequences
approaches,
course Kurtz does have some marvellous lines (telling of the innoculated chil-
dren whose arms had ~een hacked off, he says, "I cried, I wanted to tear my
tee~h ?ut"), but behl~d the lines no coherent moral attitude is discernable.
th~t given Coppola's level of cinematic sophisti-
It ~s ln fact ~sto~ndlng
catlon and dedlcatlon
to thlS particular film, he found himself unable to
make ~ single e~otionally
or morally coherent statement about Kurtz.
the rltual slaYlng of Kurtz by Willard, who is then acclaimed by the Mon-
tagnards as their new ruler, makes little sense despite Coppola's best ef-
forts - the ostentatious
display of The Golden Bough, and Willard's quite
absurd ceremonial
The final stage of Marlow's voyage is the discovery, at the Inner Station,
that he has a choice not between good and evil, but between two nightmares:
between the company's
pitiless folly (the flabby devil) on the one hand and
wilderness

seriousness as he beheads his brother officer.

on the other, because the wilderness had

Finally,

sealed (Kurtz's) soul to its own ... the thing was to know what he be-
longed to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own ••.
He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land.
It is in the light of this revelation - that Kurtz and the wilderness are
one - that one is to understand the scrawled note at the end of the manuscript
which Kurtz had composed for the Benevolent Society which had appointed him
its agent:
at first, Harlow is dazzled by Kurtz's eloquence (among the sav-
ages, white men "can assert a power for good practically unbounded") which
gives him the notion of "an exotic IlTllIensityruled over by an august Bene-
volence"
(a peculiarly empty phrase that recalls Marlow's earlier cOlTlllento~
primeval jungle:
But the -eloquence is meaningless, ,and the depth of its hypocrisy is revealed'
by the hurriedly-made

"an imp1acap1e force brooding over an inscrutable intentiol)").

note at the end, which

'blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in
a serene sky:

'Exterminate all the brutes!'

In the film, we see that Kurtz has written on the last page of his manuscript
in a thick red felt pen

"Drop the bomb.

Exterminate them all~

Wilderness,
abrogation

the second nightmare,
of order and conscience:

is therefore primordial lawlessness, the
"I had turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr Kurt~," s~ys Marlow:
"the smell of the damp earth, the unseen pres~nce of VlctorlOUS corrup-
tion, the darkness of an impenetrable night.

* * *

Conrad's
Kurtz attains demonic stature, but Coppola's f~i1s even to hold ~r
There are some cinematic reasons for this fallure! and some c~l
interest.
tural ones, namely that our western culture by and large denle~ the ~a11ty
the attempt to come to terms wIth eVl1 pe~-
of evil
Although historically
meates ~very last corner of myth, religion and 1it~ratu~e, the attemPtsb~eoP
short with modern science
1
concerns
~urse ves
to deal with t~e fact that flvenfrom
mute on the subject of evil, and unable
power, all men do evil as easily as they breathe. ,We dlsta~ce,ourse v~sr to
this disruptive
truth by pretending that the practlce of eVll lS peCt~llaand
. 1 t
th t Coppola's
monsters
it is into this trap of distantiation
a

Since our cult~re speaks the language of science, we fin

which has been preoccupled wlth more mandagea

and perverts, and requlres specla

and therefore a-rea lsm

ings for its execu lon,

rapp

l'

,

37

Kurtz falls.
This modern denial of the universality of evil, the view that it is only Nazi
beasts or terrorist animals who kill women and children or torture prisoners,
is at odds with our cultural history.
The Old Testament story of the Fall and
the Isaiah myth of the suffering servant trace their origins to even more an-
cient myths, of which Fraser explores some(1922, especially Ch.58).
Growing
out of these myths is the death of the Christian God on the Tree of the Cross,
expressing an irreducible need in human nature to come to terms with darker
forces, to absorb and master evil.
the true origins of Ausch-
witz, of Conrad's Kurtz and Coppola's, are to be sought neither in a mutant
atavism nor in a perversion of human nature, but in our humanity itself.
This is precisely the point made by Hannah Arendt in her study of Eichmann:
prosecutor and judges, she writes (p.l?), "missed the greatest moral and even
legal challenge of the whole case", because they could not believe that Eich-
but entirely normal ("more
mann was neither a liar nor a rabid anti-Semite,
normal at any rate, than I am after having examined him", one of the half-
dozen consulting psychiatrists
The judges found
it impossible to admit that an average normal person "could be perfectly in-
capable of telling right from wrong".
The core of the problem is that Eich-
mann and all those like him are

is reported to have said).

Accordingly,

terribly and terrifyingly
terrifying than all the atrocities put together:

normal ••. this normality was much more

this kind of hostis qeneris humani, this enemy of the human race, corrrnits
that make it impossible for him to know or to
his crimes under circumstances
Central to Arendt's argument is the proposition
feel that he is doing wrong.
that by dehumanising
of atrocities, we rob ourselves of all
hope of understanding
that makes it possible to commit them:
the acknowledgement
observing the savages ashore) is a prerequisite
and his assistants.

the perpetrators
the motivation
of a common humanity (that came to Marlow when he was

for understanding

the torturer

* * *

but it
It is by no means clear that evil is a useful category for psychology,
in order
does seem to be important that whatever fragmentation
is undertaken
to facilitate empirical investigation
should not be allowed to hide the possi-
bility that this larger category lies behind the separate studies.
Of the
multitude of possible points of entry to the study of evil, one that appears
especially promising is the study of power - because the ultimate impotence
is emptiness:
inside him "but a little loose dirt";
Kurtz, as we have seen, was hollow at
the core;

and the talk of the pilgrims and their friends was that of

Marlow describes a "papier-mach~ Mephistopheles"

who had nothing

sordid buccaneers:
audacity, and cruel without courage.

it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without

In the psychological
literature on power, this kind of talk is characteristic
in
of men who are expected to be powerful and find themselves to be weak;
them a need for power develops that often finds an outlet in heavy drinking,
which encourages spurious feelings of power (Nell & StrUmpfer,
1978).
It is
no accident that "Mistah Kurtz - he dead" is the epigraph for one of the most
in the English language, T S Eliot's
powerful statements on powerlessness
Hollow Me~.
Kurtz is the hollow man, impotent, striving for power, and Eliot
hints at darker forces through which such power may be attained:
"a penny
for the old Guy" ref(ifJito the ancient sacrificial rite in which effigies or
human beings were butnt on fires to ensure continued fertility of men and
land (Fraser, 1922, chapter 64) ..

38

The emptiness
and impotence of the weak is in direct proportion to their
need to appear powerful, and to exercise impact and influence.
and lamen-
~ably, the sa!est way in our society to gain assurance of one:s own power
1S by oppress1ng

those who are weaker than oneself.

* * *

chapter of The Golden Bough, Fraser rather wistfully asks whether
In the.final
there 1S not
some lesson, if possible of hope and encouragement, to be drawn from the
melancholy
record of human error and folly which has engaged our atten-
tion to this book.
~arlow has of course struggled with much the same question, and his answer
1S - horror:

the truth, he says

.

"would have been too dark - too dark altogether .•. "

Fraser's answer, in his spirit of true Darwinism, is rather more hopeful:
"The hope of progress - moral and intellectual as well as material - in
the future is bound up with the fortunes of science."

He continues:

"The laws of nature are merely hypotheses ••• and as science has supplan-
ted its predecessors,
so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some
more perfect hypothesis,
perhaps by some totally new way of looking at
the phenomena
(1922, 'p.932).

•.• of which we in this generation can form no idea."

Marlow would shrug his shoulders at such optimism:
in the study of evil may still hope that the dark night give way to light,
albeit a dark light.
References
Arendt, H.

A Report on the Banality of

but those who succeed him

1963:

Faber & Faber, London.
The Reversible World:

Eichmann in Jerusalem:
Evil.
1978:
and Society.
Heart of Darkness.

Cornell, Ithaca,

Bantam, New York.

S~bOliC

ew York.

Inversion in Art

ion

Yale, New Haven.
The Power Motive, ~ Power and Fear of

Journal of Personality Assessment, 42, 56-62.

39

Babcock, B A.

(Ed).

Conrad, J.
Frazer, J G.

1963:
1963

Herr, M.
Kimbrough,

197B:
R.

(Ed).

Knoebl, K.

1967:

May, R.

1976 (1972):

1967:

Nash, R.
Nell, V & StrUmpfer,

Pan, London.
Heart of Darkness:

(Abridged edition •
Dispatches.
1971:
Norton, New York.
Victor Charlie:
Ma11, London.
Power and Innocence:
Violence.
Wilderness and the American Mind.
D J W.
Weakness.

Fontana, London.

1978:

Text, backqrounds and sources.

The Face of War in Viet-Nam.

Pall

A search for the Sources of

Sanford. N. & Comstock, C. (Eds).

1971:

Sanctions for Evil:
Jossy-Bass,

Sources.of
San FranS1SCO

Social Destructiveness.
Time, New York
The Best of LIFE.
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism.

1973:
1954:

Scherman, D.E.
Scholem, G.G.
Talese, G.
Watts, C.T.

1970:
1975:

Schocken,

New York

The Kingdom and the Power.
"Heart of Darkness:
Darwinian

theme.

Conradiana,

The Covert Murder Plot and the

Vol. 7, pp. 137-143

Bantam, New York

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