Heart Of Darkness Vs. Apocalypse Now
...amidst his own country's involvement in the African Congo. Deep in the African jungle his character would make his journey to find the Captain gone astray. Over eighty years later Francis Ford Coppola's Willard would take his journey not in Africa but in the jungles of South Asia. Coppola's Film, Apocalypse Now uses the backdrop of the American Vietnam War yet the similarities between the Conrad's novel and Coppola's film remains constant and plenty.
In 1899 when Conrad first published his story in Blackwood's Magazine the British Empire was the dominant global empire. To the common British man or any British man the emblem of savagery was indeed the place they deemed as the "Dark Continent" of Africa. The people that lived there had an entirely different style of living that did not involved the "civilized" methods of the British empire. The natives had not the manners, clothing, technology nor skin color of Conrad's people. The environment in which they lived of much difference then the British isle. It was hot, humid, dense, exotic filled with dangerous creatures and most of all it was foreign. When Francis Ford Coppola began work on his film Apocalypse Now the dominant power in the world was no longer the British but the United States of America, the same state that was coming off a bloody war fought in Vietnam. To Coppola's United States Vietnam was barbarity. Soldiers returned with loss of limbs, loss of mind, dead or missing. Stories of rape, pillaging, burning and torture seeped out just on the part of the Vietnamese "savages" but
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of the civilized American soldiers, a testament to their envelopment in the Heart of Darkness that is war. Their unraveling of what makes them to be considered civilized and the exotic backdrop is not unlike the British and their exploits in Africa that go along with Conrad's novel.
The parallels between Conrad's and...
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