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Apocalypse Now
Heart of Darkness and Grail Quests
Carl Jung, T. S. Eliot, and Jessie Weston were equally pronounced influences on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).
“I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one,” Willard says in an early voiceover, connecting his mythic journey into the jungle and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to the Grail Quests so central to figures like Eliot and Weston.
Appropriately, Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz reads a section of Eliot’s 1925 film “The Hollow Men” (a poem that famously begins with a nod to Conrad and the phrase, “Mistah Kurtz – he’s dead”) while the photojournalist played by Dennis Hopper recites lines from “Prufrock” (1915): “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas…”
Dante Imagining Hell
The Thinker depicts Dante (1265-1321) in the act of imagining Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy (1308-1321). There are now many free-standing castings, but it was originally the culminating part of the elaborate Gates of Hell.
The Fisher King
Coppola’s Kurtz delivers diatribes about hypocrisy and violence and has a mad integrity. Presented as a dark visionary with echoes of Rodin’s The Thinker (1904), Kurtz reads Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) and has both James Frazer’s study of comparative mythology The Golden Bough (1890-1915) and Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) on his bookshelf. He is also profoundly dangerous as the final note, “drop the bomb, exterminate them” reminds Willard and the audience at the end of the film.
Willard completes the Grail quest by murdering the Fisher King, juxtaposed in a montage with the slaughter of a bull, but tries to reverse the pattern of cyclic violence by throwing away the blade in a Christian reversal that inspires a similar response in others. Coppola described that as resisting violence with “love,” a description that accords fully with the chivalric Grail quests.
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Film Music
