The question posed by Francis Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now is a
very Conradian one: what does this experience mean? Apart of Conrad’s
achievement as a writer was to introduce epistemological and
existential questions into narratives of adventure. In this way Conrad
transformed the nineteenth-century masculine romance of exploration,
conquest, war and heroism into a modernist form capable of
raising profound philosophical and political issues. While Coppola’s
film is not a version of Heart of Darkness so much as a radical
reworking of Conrad’s novella in the context of the Vietnam War,
Conrad’s text played a crucial part both in the initial idea of the film
and in the problematic final stages of its production when the director,
tormented by the inability to find a satisfactory ending, returned
again and again to Conrad’s text. In this paper we want to suggest
that the concern with the problem of meaning which Coppola derives
from Conrad initially led the director astray, in a search for existential
meaning in a situation where only a politicised account could be
ethically responsive. Eventually, however, Conrad’s sense of meaning
as above all problematic and elusive helped Coppola to introduce
into his film a questioning of its own processes which rescued it from
some of the simplistic or ideologically blind features of many Vietnam
war films. In particular, it led the film to engage fruitfully if
uncertainly with the issues raised by the very project of the representation
of war: the complicity of the spectator, the problem of the aestheticisation
of violence, the problem of communicability itself. In
making this argument we draw on the miasma of inter-texts which
surrounds Apocalypse Now like a Conradian ‘misty halo’: these
include, not only Heart of Darkness itself, but Eleanor Coppola’s
film Hearts of Darkness and her book Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now, as well as Dispatches, the documentary narrative about
Vietnam by Michael Herr, who wrote the voice-over narrative for
Coppola’s film.