A curious moment in Francis Ford Coppola’s racist fantasia on the Viet Nam War, Apocalypse Now!: Marlon Brando, playing the mad, purported genius, Kurtz, evinces that he’s aware that his character shares a name — and a possible fate? — with a previous character from fiction — Colonel Kurtz from Joseph Conrad’s racist fantasia on European colonialism in Africa, Heart of Darkness — the acknowledged main inspiration for Coppola’s film. We see and hear Coppola’s Kurtz reading T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Hollow Men,” which boasts as its first epigraph a quote from Heart of Darkness: “Mistah Kurtz — he dead.”
Conrad’s 1899 novella is widely recognized for its racism; Coppola’s 1979 film is widely hailed as one of the greatest films ever, with few caveats regarding its own racism — which is identical to that of Conrad’s work.
Both works, to me, are deeply flawed, narratively, and their shared flaw is bound up in their shared racism. The Kurtz in both works is averred to be a mad, charismatic genius, and yet neither Conrad nor Coppola depicts Kurtz’s genius. They merely assert it, and demonstrate it through each character’s success in winning the devotion of indigenous people. The means by which each character won the devotion is left undepicted, and the indigenous people come off as servile, simple, and completely undifferentiated.
Both works depict the adventurism on which their Kurtzes embarked as moral catastrophes. Conrad doesn’t endorse European colonialism, and Coppola doesn’t endorse America’s razing of Vietnamese villages. Despite that, though, the moral realism regarding the disaster of white violence in both works does not obviate, remove, or alleviate their racist condescension in their apocalyptic hearts.
Hollow stuff. Disturbing.