Sabrina Baiguera
Università degli Studi di Bergamo
Letteratura Anglo-americana LMI
A.A. 2011/2012
Paolo Jachia’s Francis Ford Coppola: Apocalypse Now. Un’analisi semiotica, an
intertextual reconstruction of the texts, of the cultural references that lie
behind the film.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Two versions: the orginal version (1979) and the extended version (Apocalypse
Now Redux: 2001), released in 2001.
The film is set during the Vietnam war (the action takes place approximately in
1970)
It tells the story of U.S. Army Captain Benjamin L. Willard who has the
mission to proceed up the Nung river into Cambodia, find Colonel Kurtz
and “terminate” his command, by whatever means available.
Willard starts a journey up the Nung river on a PBR (Petrol Boat) with a fourman crew (Chef – a saucier; Chief – the chief of the boat; Clean – a 17 yearold young from Bronx; Lance – a professional surfer).
Kurtz had deserted the U.S. Army to start his own private war in the middle of
the jungle. There he is worshipped as a god by his own Montagnard army,
but he has gone insane and his methods are “unsound”.
The artistic dimension
Source texts of Apocalypse Now:
1. Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness
(1899)
2. James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890)
3. Jessie Weston’s From ritual to romance (1920)
4. Goethe’s Faust (1808)
5. The Holy Bible
6. T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and The
Hollow Men (1925)
7. Baudelaire’s The Albatross (1861)
8. The Doors’ The End
Heart of Darkness (1899)
“In the case of “Apocalypse,” there was a script written by the great John Milius, but, I must say,
what I really made the film from was the little green copy of Heart of
Darkness that I had done all those lines in.” (Coppola)
Heart of Darkness was not credited as a source text when the film first came out.
However, both the filmmakers (Coppola and Milius) acknowledged that they owed a
great debt to the novella.
Coppola himself said that, besides using John Milius’ original script, he used his little
copy of Heart of Darkness – full of comments and things he had noted down – as a
handbook.
Be that as it may, the film cannot be considered a mere adaptation (transposition) of the
novella. On the contrary, it is a recontextualization of most of the contents of the
book, a free translation from one genre to another, from one context (Congo,
colonialism) to another (the Vietnam war, imperialism)
Heart of Darkness tells the story of Marlow, an Englishman who goes to Congo to serve
as a steamboat captain for a Belgian trading company. There he starts a journey up
the river Congo to find Mr Kurtz, an ivory trader who holds influence over local
tribesmen.
His journey will be a trip into the hypocrisy of the Western civilization, as well as an
exploration of the depths of the human nature. In this sense, the oxymoron
contained in the title of the book is revelatory: Heart symbolizes a positive light,
Darkness suggest the idea of something evil, something sinister.
Explicit literary references
In the last part of the film, Willard is roaming around Kurtz’s compound, and a
slow pan, moving from left to right, shows us four books on Kurtz’s night
table. These four books areThe Golden Bough by Frazer, From Ritual to
Romance by Weston, Faust by Goethe and the Holy Bible. Later on,
Kurtz reads the poem The Hollow Men by T.S.Eliot.
These explicit references form the dense network of relations that lie behind
the text:
1.
Weston’s essay is based on Frazer’s theories
2.
Conrad wrote his novella after reading Frazer
3.
T.S.Eliot’s Waste Land is constantly referring to Frazer and Weston’s
theories. He himself was a big fan of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: the
epigraph of The Hollow Men “Mistah Kurtz – He dead” is a quote from
Conrad’s book. Originally, Eliot wanted to use Kurtz’s last words “The
horror! The horror!” as epigraph of the Waste Land
All these books serve as a guideline to the interpretation of Apocalypse Now
The Golden Bough: a study on magic and religion
The Golden Bough is a book on ancient myths and folk legends written by
Scottish anthropologist James G. Frazer in 1890.
In this book he shows how, in ancient myths, kings were thought to be religious
figures, deities closely related with the prosperity of their reign. In such
societies, the king is allowed to rule only for a fixed period of time, after
which he must be killed in order to ensure the regeneration of his land. In
Frazer’s words:
“[…] if the course of nature is dependent on the man-god’s life, what
catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his
powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one way of averting
these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms
that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a
vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened
decay.” (Frazer: 272)
The film goes in this direction too. Kurtz is the wounded king of a waste land, a
land that must be regenerated through a sacrificial ritual. In the ending
scene, the image of Willard killing Kurtz overlaps with that of an ox
slaughtered by the Montagnard tribe in a ritual.
Only through Kurtz’s sacrifice would his reign be brought back to life:
“Even the jungle wanted him dead”
Kurtz is aware of this and he chooses deliberately to be killed. He wants Willard
to kill him because he is younger, stronger than he, and also because he
wants him to be his successor. That’s what the photographer means when he
says:
“He likes you. He really likes you. But he’s got something in mind for you. Aren’t you
curious about that?”
And even Willard understands this:
“If I was still alive, it was because he wanted me that way”
J. Weston and From ritual to romance
Jessie Weston was one of Frazer’s most brilliant students. In 1920 she wrote the
book From Ritual to Romance, a study on the origins of the Holy Grail
legend. T.S.Eliot will take the title of his most famous book, the Waste
Land, from Weston’s book.
Weston’s theories are grounded in Frazer’s studies, but she gives further insights
by linking the archetypal figure of the Fisher King to pagan fertility rituals
and myths, which, she claims, have suffered a process of “christianization”.
Fisher King: the old-age wounded king of the Waste Land, who needs the Grail
for his healing and for the regeneration of his domain. The quest for the
Holy Grail needs a Healer, a youngful character who will become the King’s
successor.
If we interpret the film from this chivalric point of view, Willard is the Healer;
Kurtz is the Fisher King; the Holy Grail is the pursuit of truth and of
Willard’s own identity.
The Book of the Revelation and the
Apocalypse
The film belongs to the apocalyptic genre. Starting from some memorable
scenes (the opening scene: napalm, jungle on fire, the song “The End” by
the Doors; the Air Cavalry attack), to the title of the film itself, Coppola is
constantly referring to the Holy Bible, in particular to the Book of the
Revelation.
The title: the “Apocalypse of John” is the other name of the Book of the
Revelation, but, apart from the catastrophical image that the word
“Apocalypse” creates in our mind, it has also a second meaning, which is to
“uncover”, to “reveal”. And to uncover the lies of the Western civilization is
precisely what Kurtz has been doing in his whole life:
“And they call me an assassin. What do you call it, when the assassins accuse the
assassins? They lie. They lie and we have to be merciful, for those who lie. Those
nabobs. I hate them. I really hate them”.
Kurtz could have been a liar, but he did not want to be an hypocrite, he
preferred to be himself:
“He could have gone for general, but he went for himself instead”
Characters: Colonel Kilgore (Kill - gore). He has an evil behaviour (he drops
Death cards on Charlie)
Willard notices that there is a devilish air that surrounds him:
“He was one of those guys that had a weird light around him. You just knew he wasn’t
going to get so much of a scratch here”
He has devilish connotation. But his reign, like that of the Antichrist in the
Revelation, has an end.
(Lance and Willard snatch his surfboard; in this way they deprive him of his
power, they castrate him)
Kurtz is both Satan and Jesus Christ.
Satan: The journey of Willard up the river Congo is a sort of descent into the
Inferno, and Satan lies at the bottom of the underworld (Kurtz’s compound
is at the end of the Nung river).
Kurtz has made a deal with the devil (and the fact that we find the book Faust on
his night table is not accidental).
His methods are unsound (Conrad talks explicitly of “ceremonies of devilish
initiation” and of “unspeakable rites”).
Satan is the Lord of the Flies, and Kurtz catches a fly.
Jesus Christ: in a scene, Kurtz is surrounded by children and shows Willard
some newspaper articles about the Vietnam war. He wants to uncover the
lies and the hypocrisy of the media. In doing so, he is more similar to Jesus
Christ.
“I am the way, the truth and the life” (John, 14, 6)
“Suffer the little children to come unto me” (Mark, 10, 14)
Memorable scenes:
1.
The opening scene: the film starts with the image of a jungle on fire. The
background music is the apocalyptic song “The End” by The Doors. The
beginning of the film is the end or, at least, the beginning is overturned in
its contrary. We find this also in a verse of the Book of the Revelation:
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end” (Revelation, 21)
2.
2. The Air Cavalry attack: the helicopters can be intepreted as the Four
Living Beings (Horsemen) of the Apocalypse. In the Book of the
Revelation, the description of the arrival of the fifth trumpet seems the
description of this scene:
“And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the
smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the
smoke of the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth […].like
unto horses prepared unto battle. […] They had breastplates, as it were
breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of
many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there
were stings in their tails. […] And they had a king over them, which is the angel of
the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the
Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.” (Revelation, 9, 1-11)
Nietzsche, Faust and the Übermensch
Kurtz has always been interpreted as an Übermensch, in the Nietzschean sense of the
term (“über” means “over”, “beyond”; an Übermensch is a man that has gone too far,
that has crossed the boundaries of what is good and what is evil). He says, in a letter
to his son:
“I am beyond their lying timid morality”
In the original script (1975) by John Milius, there is an explicit reference to Nietzsche:
“Nothing is true, everything is permitted”, taken from Thus spoke Zarathustra. However,
in the film this sentence is omitted. Why?
According to Jachia, in Milius’ script, Kurtz was a sort of fascist hero, a model that would
lead, some year later, to films like Rambo (Milius is the scriptwriter of Conan the
Barbarian) and Coppola did not want a fascist film.
On the contrary, Coppola’s Kurtz is ripped apart, broken up, he has made a deal with
the devil and “seen horrors”. In this sense he is more similar to Faust, the protagonist
of Goethe’s play. It is not surprising that one of the books on Kurtz’s night table is
Goethe’s Faust.
Bakhtin and the carnival
“In the famous enumeration of the 216 games played by Gargantua (Book One, Chapter
22) there is one called au bouef violles. In certain French cities a costume was
preserved almost to our time to lead a fatted ox through the streets during carnival
season. […] The ox was led in solemn procession accompanied by the playing of viola,
hence its name boeuf violles. Its head was decorated with multicoloured ribbons. […]
The ox was to be slaughtered, it has to be a carnivalesque victim. It was a king, a
procreator, symbolizing the city’s fertility; at the same time, it was the sacrificial meat, to
be chopped up for sausages and paté.” (Bakhtin: 200)
Jachia bases his analysis on the concept of the Bakhtinian carnival. In this sense,
Apocalypse Now is a tragic and terrible carnival, an event in which laughter
and tears are coexisting. The symbols contain both their positive and negative
aspects, but nothing is absolute: everything is overturned in its opposite. In the
carnival, everything’s permitted: the King can be dethroned and mocked, and
the Fool becomes his parodical double. In Heart of Darkness, there is a
strong analogy between the figure of the Fool and the Russian, who is dressed
with patches [Marlow calls him “harlequin”]; in the film, the role of the
harlequin is performed by Dennis Hopper, the hippie photographer.
The language of the carnival is scatological, and the film goes in this direction:
“Saigon. Shit.”
“Oh, man, the bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above it”
Frazer + Oedipus = Apocalypse Now
“Father?” – ”Yes, son?” – “I want to kill you. Mother, I want to…”
Apocalypse Now is a Oedipal tragedy: Willard both loves and hates Kurtz
(father figure). He kills him.
The Oedipus complex gets much more explicit in the 2001 version, in which
Willard, in the scene of the French colonialist settlement, meets a French
widow, older than he, and they have a sexual intercourse. The character of
the widow is ambiguous: she is a sort of Mother, but she is also a Cumaean
Sibyl: her role is to prepare Willard for his descent into the depths of the
human heart, into Kurtz’s morality.
“There are two of you, don’t you see? One that kills…and one that loves”
Jachia claims that the film makes explicit reference to theories contained in
Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913): every society starts with the ritual killing
of a father/deity.
It is very unlikely that Coppola read this book. Probably he read Marcuse’s
Eros and Civilization, a bestseller during the 1960s.
Bibliography
Apocalypse Now Redux, an original screenplay, by John Milius and Francis
Ford Coppola, narration written by Michael Herr:
http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/apocalypsenowredux.html
Bakhtin, Michail M., Rebelais and His World, Indiana University Press, 1984
http://books.google.it/books?id=SkswFyhqRIMC&pg=PA201&dq=Bakhtin+
%22boeuf+violles%22&hl=it&sa=X&ei=bpiyTKgH6Hi4QSZldnqBw&ved=0CDQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, Harper Press, 2010
Frazer, James G., The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion,
Forgotten Books, 2008
http://books.google.it/books?id=4bT3ACjkRasC&printsec=frontcover&hl=it
#v=onepage&q&f=false
Jachia, Paolo, Francis Ford Coppola: Apocalypse Now. Un’analisi semiotica,
Bulzoni Editore, 2010