Conrad in Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) is a transplanted (Korea instead of the Congo), retooled, visual version of Joseph Conrad's story Heart of Darkness. There is much to say about this film, especially in regard to Conrad's story, so I will attempt to be brief in this post. Since I am very interested in film, and how movies are made, the presentation itself is very interesting to me. The writer's/director's uses of shadow and face paint are particularly interesting: as Williard (Martin Sheen) arrives at Kurtz's (Marlon Brando) camp, the shadows become more prominent, the face paint more symbolic. While the other soldiers consistently use the face paint to blend in with their surroundings, to protect themselves, near the end of the movie, face paint becomes Williard's tool for accomplishing his task. Williard paints his face AND submerges himself in the shadows so he can finish the job he came to do. Thus, not only is the face paint a survival tool, it is now a full-blown weapon for Williard. Because the other soldiers have not used the paint quite in this manner, this also depicts Williard as special: he is the leader, the strong one, the soldier who will get the job done. In terms of the visual aspects of the movie, I was also interested in the different colors of smoke, but there is not enough room here to analyze them in detail; and honestly, I am not quite sure what they mean, if anything. Another visual aspect I noticed is that the sounds of warfare can be heard ALMOST constantly, whether through music effects or sound effects (helicopters, bombs, etc.). Finally, the movie is rife with stereotypes and images of the natives as savage/barbaric. One example is when a soldier says, "Fucking savages," and then shows hypocrisy as he and his squad violently "shell" the earth and natives as a way to get revenge, thus becoming savages themselves and, in my opinion, even MORE barbaric. A final example of the use of stereotypes is when the soldier who likes to cook (I can't remember his name) looks around and says that he is seeing "pagan idolatry," which he seems to define as "skulls and altars." Not only is he stereotyping paganism and making sure it is seen as evil, he is presuming that the natives are indeed "pagan," and he does this because of the war imagery that surrounds them. He does not account for culture and the fact that these natives may not know any other way of conducting warfare. He also does not know the conditions under which this war imagery (heads surrounding the cave) was created (re: self-defense, fear, etc.). To put it more bluntly, he is Otherizing the natives, turning everything they do into something terrible, when in fact he is doing the same thing: killing human beings. Maybe that's the issue. Maybe he doesn't see them as human beings.