Toward the end of Apocalypse Now we reach that supremely Conradian moment when Willard, the Marlow figure, confronts the object of his journey, Colonel Kurtz. Does he come to rescue Kurtz and, in so doing, test himself? If Francis Ford Coppola had chosen to follow Joseph Conrad here, he might have gotten some desperately needed U.S. military assistance. But that was not the kind of script conclusion the director of The Godfather and Godfather II had planned for his war epic.

Still, Coppola underscores the significance of the meeting by altering his style. When Willard is taken into the temple for the first time, the whole pace of the film slows down, as if in imitation of the ponderous immensity of Brando. Brando-Kurtz slowly emerges into the light and pats water on his gleaming bald head, in a kind of ritual cleansing. The camera holds the shots for a much longer period than usual, allowing movement to be dictated by the actors rather than by focusing in or editing. Dialogue too proceeds at a much slower pace, with pauses occurring within sentences as well as between them. Questions are left hanging for a few extra beats, even when there is nothing particularly threatening about them. Of course, the pace has been slackening ever since the Do Lung Bridge sequence, but this scene is so slow it borders on worship. Brando is meant to by mythic, the still center of darkness, worshipped and self-worshipping, capable of every atrocity including self-annihilation through his double. Willard is so affected by the atmosphere of disorder and stasis, that he has to force himself to kill Kurtz. Through lighting, camera angles, and cross-cutting, the murder itself is transformed into a kind of dance in and out of darkness, creating a visual-aesthetic experience quite as isolated as the slow-motion destruction of a Sam Peckinpah film. The acquiescence of Kurtz and the preliminary appearance of Willard out of black water make the whole affair a kind of rite of rebirth-initiation into the world of Kurtz through slaying of the king.

With the exception of the rather abrupt thematic cross-cuts between the murder and the ritual killing of a caribou, the encounters are quite stunning and organic … visually. We could perhaps accept the deliberate departure from Conrad's novel if the director did not also seek to build in the psychological-moral dimensions of Heart of Darkness. His characters may be caught in a ritual of death and rebirth, but he wants them to have depth all the same. He wants viewers to confront the immensity of this war one more time. Above all, he wants to explain everything through Kurtz. So Coppola picks up Kurtz' last words and tries to build a structural theme for the last portion of the film. By the time we hear "The horror!" for the last time, in a memory replay, we are likely to have worked up that fine wrath normally reserved for all those who quote outrageously out of context.

Conrad's Kurtz mouths his last words as a message to himself and, through Marlow, to the world. He has not really explained himself to Marlow before this final exclamation. Through Marlow's summary and moral reactions, we come to a sense of the possibilities of meaning rather than definite meaning. The message is more Marlow's and the reader's than it is Kurtz'. By contrast, Coppola's Kurtz precisely defines "horror"; the only way we can make his definition our message is to see his horror and enact his definition with Willard. The way to judgment lies through vicarious violence. Judgment is self-judgment.

The problem with even this transaction is that Willard seems almost unmoved by his experience. He certainly expresses no moral judgment. The worst he says is that he sees "no method" in Kurtz' operations. This statement may strike the reader of Conrad as uncomfortably similar to the Station Manager's amoral judgment of Kurtz' atrocities as merely "unsound" or bad for company business. The separation of reason from civilized morality, the fragmentation of the self so typical of the technocrat, causes Marlow to prefer the nightmare of Kurtz. Better to commit atrocities passionately than to account them wrong on grounds of efficiency. Like Dante—whose traditional moral hierarchy he reflects—Marlow can summon up a measure of sympathy for those who succumb to their emotions or appetites and reserve unmeasured scorn for those who pervert reason. Within the film, only the general at the briefing and Chef show the rational or emotional repugnance toward Kurtz; Willard, the professional soldier, is more than halfway friendly with this horror. After Chef joins the heads and Willard becomes part of the horror, we may realize that the whole point of the scenes at the Kurtz compound is to make the audience confront Kurtz' horror without moral mediation. From the very beginning, the shots of the compound were carefully filled with more separate images and actions, especially around the edges of the frame, than the eye could integrate. The eye was always kept moving and focusing on different parts of the screen. We did not have Marlow's field glasses or his sensibility to distance us or focus in sympathetically; we were entrapped and overwhelmed in an amoral medium range. Thus, instead of judgment or self-judgment, we are likely to come away from this perceptual overdose with the feeling that it has been a bad trip, and nothing more.

Other contributors to this symposium will undoubtedly analyze this and other portions of the film to show the many differences and similarities to Conrad's text. Hopefully, they will pay homage to the cinematic power of the film. After all of the analyses, however, one may be moved to wonder just what the director-writer and the other contributors had in mind, with regard to Heart of Darkness, or what process led from the novel to such a mixture of visual spectacle and moral-intellectual vacuity.

The program handed out at the screenings of the 70-mm print of Apocalypse Now gives the following script credits: "Written by John Milius and Francis Coppola; Narration by Michael Herr." Nowhere in the formal credits is Joseph Conrad or Heart of Darkness mentioned. The novel is briefly referred to in the program's log: "September 3, 1976. Marlon Brando arrives. He reads Heart of Darkness and shaves his head for the Col. Kurtz role." Within the film itself, the novel is not accorded reference equal to The Golden Bough or T. S. Eliot's poetry; it is not recited as quotation or included among the books in the bibliographic pan toward the end of the film. Of course, for the cognizant, there are plenty of lines, or echoes of lines, as well as the unmentioned epigraph to Kurtz' favorite poem, "The Hollow Men."

In point of fact, Conrad's name originally appeared in the screen credits, but was removed after one of the listed writers protested through the Screen Writer's Guild. Coppola is quite candid about the three texts that contributed to the final script: the novel, Michael Herr's Dispatches—originally published as a series of Esquire articles—, and John Milius' script, entitled Apocalypse Now, which built some of its passages from Herr's book and Heart of Darkness. The script itself went through several phases: the original 1969 script by Milius, collaborative revisions during preproduction period (1975–76). Coppola's revisions during production, and Herr's narration, added after shooting was completed in 1977.

To read the statements regarding Heart of Darkness by the two main architects of the script, Milius and Coppola, is to confront a tangle of high intentions, self-delusion, and probably self-protection. It is harder to verify what Milius says about his original script or its collaborative revision because, apart from two fragments in Film Comment (July-August 1976), nothing has been published. In an interview included with the script fragments, he claims to have used Heart of Darkness "in an allegorical sense." Kurtz went up the river with a military mission and a moral mission: he was to turn the tribesmen into a fighting force and bring them "democracy and Western civilization." He succeeds admirably in the first mission at the cost of the second mission and his own civilized sanity. Milius depicts him as having made sense of the war by embracing tribal values:

[To Willard] We revel in our own blood; we fight for glory, for land that's under our feet, gold that's in our hands, women that worship the power in our loins. I summon fire from the sky. Do you know what it is to be a white man who can summon fire from the sky?

Milius meant for the audience to confront the tribalization of Americans in the very first scene of the original script. That scene depicts the colonel's team members ambushing a column of Viet Cong. G. I.s emerge from the jungle, one by one, dressed and painted like savages. The camera records the scene from the point of view of the victims: the audience is variously blasted by a shotgun, incinerated by a flame-thrower, and scalped by an American wearing a peace sign on his helmet. Quite apart from the Kurtz behind the spooky voice on the tape recording and the ghostlike images of the photos, then, this was to be the reality Willard moved toward. As opposed to the film, this was madness with enough method for a professional soldier to admire. Willard's journey was to be an odyssey, with adventures that threatened to delay or divert him from his mission, while revealing the purposelessness of our war effort. Encounters with a surfing colonel (Cyclops), Playboy bunnies in a downed helicopter (Sirens), the Do Lung Bridge sequence (visit to underworld for further instruction?), and a meal at an old French plantation (Circe? Lotus-eaters?) would make grand scenes and trigger an analysis of his own role in the war.

The jungle was to have the force of the environment in Bridge on the River Kwai, becoming more powerful and primeval as Willard approached the Kurtz compound. Willard's line in the film—"Even the jungle wanted him dead"—picks up a theme enunciated by Kurtz in Milius' script. He shows Willard a rotting hole in his side and points to the insects swarming around him: "The beast of the jungle did the rest. I haven't long to go … the only justice will be had by the beasts…. Theirs will be final, and we will have made no more mark on this jungle than a stone thrown into an ocean." Even though this may sound like Conrad merged with Lord of the Flies one assumes that the Milius script would have stressed the surroundings as a means of initiation to Kurtz' world rather than as a green backdrop out of which pop tigers, banners, tracer bullets, and arrows. Certainly the above-mentioned opening establishes the jungle and swamp first; the ambushers emerge from underwater and behind foliage.

Given the opening view of savage Americans, the inefficiency of the official war effort, and the power of the jungle, the conversion of Willard to Kurtz' side in Milius' script would seem inevitable. They would join forces and die together. Coppola apparently agreed that some conversion to Kurtz' position was the more logical conclusion, but bowed to audience surveys which indicated a preference for Willard alive and faithful to his original mission. One speculates some problems, however, since Willard was to have undergone psychological change during his journey. Was this change to be represented only by a change of allegiance? His late assertion that he kills because "it feels so good," delivered to Kurtz in the Milius script, would seem appropriate at any point in the script for a man "who exists only because of the war." Perhaps he merely joins the more efficient war. At any rate, the self-doubting, guilt-ridden Willard, established in the first scene of the film, is Coppola's creation.

On the other hand, Milius' Kurtz definitely seems more of a piece than Brando-Coppola's Kurtz. If the jungle environment were actually established as a force, if Kurtz' other lines were as strong as those in the published fragment, if we can imaginatively fill out Kurtz by using the comparison Milius makes to the Paul Newman character in Milius' previous film, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean, then Milius' Kurtz would have gone down (with Willard) in a blaze of apocalyptic glory. We would probably have been spared Kurtz' unearned realization of "The horror! The horror!" whispered to us in stereo or sexophonic (70-mm version) sound.

One must be careful, however, not to use a speculated script to construct "the film that might have been." It is quite evident that Milius established much of the plot and most of the lavish scenes in the first half of the film, all of which constitute a major variance from the method of Heart of Darkness. Milius says he wanted the spectator "to see the exhilaration of it all … the horror of it all: you're going right into the war with no holds barred." Certainly his first scene preserves no Conradian mental and moral distance from the action. The direct approach to the war, as a series of perceptual traumas that threaten to reduce the mind to passivity owe as much to the acid journalism of Michael Herr's Dispatches filtered through a sensibility fascinated with war as to what Stanley Kauffmann calls Coppola's "apparent sense that the world is seen most truthfully when it is seen as spectacle." If Milius' Kurtz was more of a piece, he was more a piece of this action, living in splendor with wives, babies, and few doubts.

Coppola was quite dissatisfied with the conception of Willard in the original script. Although Milius claims that his script was not political, Coppola saw the whole thing as "a political comic strip" up to and including the end.

Attila the Hun [i.e., Kurtz] with two bands of machine-gun bullets around him, taking the hero Willard by the hand…. Willard converts to Kurtz' side; in the end, he's firing up at the helicopters that are coming to get him, crying out crazily.

He decided to "take the script much more strongly in the direction of Heart of Darkness—which was, I know, opening a Pandora's box." In particular, one can see problems in his conception of Willard, whom he felt was "literally zero" in Milius' script. He wanted to "psychologize" Willard, following Conrad's lead, but "In no way could he get in the way of the audience's view of what was happening, of Vietnam." The latter statement certainly reveals that Coppola never understood the role of Marlow in the novel. By the same token, I think his instincts were right: one cannot have a spectacle vicariously experienced and an experience filtered through a narrator who has changed mentally and morally as a result of that experience. Scenes which enlarge our sense of a real world, as in the picaresque novel, usually do so at some expense to character; scenes which enlarge or create a crisis for the character who is our vantage point are often not fully objectified. Would the helicopter assault have been as effective if the camera had been restricted to Willard's vantage point? Would Conrad's Kurtz have seemed as powerful if Marlow had faithfully recorded all that he said? Some film theorists would add that Coppola's instincts were right even if he had understood the role of Marlow because film redeems material reality or its immediate perception more naturally than consciousness. Critics who bemoan the medium's tendency to reduce Conrad to large scenes and large characters, to present his work as primarily romantic, might be tempted to agree. At any rate, Coppola's problem was that he wanted it both ways; he wanted the exhilarating episodes of Milius and he wanted the psychological dimension of Conrad's Marlow. Michael Herr's method of grabbing all the experience one can get in the great trip of life would not help him achieve a balance. So he went into production with this problem, hoping that a good actor might help him resolve it. He had hopes that "the part would play the person." The role of Willard was offered to Steve McQueen, Al Pacino, James Caan, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford. Since the problem of Willard was also the problem of Kurtz, many of the same actors were offered the Kurtz role. Apparently, only in the editing room would Coppola realize the results of such contrary impulses—a film with radically different styles in different parts.

During the shooting of Apocalypse Now, Eleanor Coppola, the director's wife, began keeping a journal which was to help her make a documentary film of the production. So far as I know, that documentary was either not completed or not released. She drops all mention of it about mid-way through the journal, where personal and family problems increasingly enter. The journal itself, published by Simon and Schuster under the title of Notes, unfortunately, is too fragmentary and begins too late in the process to offer much information on specific script decisions that moved the film closer to or farther away from Heart of Darkness.

What it does reveal is just how many script decisions were deferred till production was actually underway. Coppola the director shot scenes by day, while Coppola the writer rewrote scenes by night. Throughout, he hoped that important elements of plot, character, and theme could achieve conceptual clarity during the process of production. For instance, although he was sure enough about the Willard part to fire Harvey Keitel because he projected too strongly, he apparently did not realize that Sheen's Willard was verging toward nonentity till late in the picture. At that point, probably after Sheen's physical breakdown rendered him unable to reshoot extensively, Coppola made the decision to have Michael Herr work up the voice-over narration to fill out the character. Even if Conrad's Marlow suggested this method, it was not part of the original script. For another more extreme instance, Notes presents Brando as having virtual veto power over his lines and character. "Francis hadn't been able to write a scene that Marlon thought was really right." He arrived without having read Heart of Darkness: he and Coppola had to work out the character, almost in front of the cameras. Coppola rescripted some scenes after viewing the footage of those very scenes. The isolation of Brando-Kurtz from his men, enshrined in his temple compound, is as much due to the problems of working out character on a two-week time schedule as it is to any thematic intention. In the original Milius script and in Coppola's mind he might have been integrated into that part of the film fashioned by "Heart of Darkness and me," but Notes and the interview make it clear that the anxious director and his overweight, opinionated star conceived and filmed the character at almost the same time. "As soon as Brando started to improvise, Frances could begin to direct, that is, see the direction the scene should go." It is not surprising that the character has more physical and visual presence than psychological power. The cinematographer, Storaro, more deliberately planned his effects.

Some critics have suggested that Notes itself should be regarded as a kind of publicity release. (Did husband, who suggested the journal become a book, also suggest changes? Certainly he filled out some details.) Throughout the journal, the director displays self-doubts about his product, while maintaining the highest esteem for his sources, Conrad's novel and our corporate Vietnam experience. The self-doubt, later displayed in the test showings of different versions of the film, rather artfully becomes Coppola's own journey into darkness during the process of filmmaking. The open-ended approach to script fits right in, of course. Almost two months into production, early in the journal, the director's wife sets up a thematic connection that becomes prevalent in the book:

Willard and Kurtz are not resolved…. Now he [Frances Coppola] is struggling with the themes of Willard's journey into self and Kurtz' truths that are in a way themes he has not resolved within himself, so he is really going through the most intense struggle to write his way to the end of the script and understand himself on the way.

More and more it seems like there are parallels between the character of Kurtz and Francis. There is the exhilaration of power in the face of losing everything.

Later, as Sheen settles into his muted Willard and Brando is due to arrive, the resolution of Kurtz becomes the primary problem. Rereading Conrad does not help Coppola: "The ideas of what Kurtz represents are so big that when you try to get a handle on them they are almost undefinable." Unfortunately, his decision to use a star for the Kurtz role and his own realistic proclivities push him in the direction of defining, whereas Conrad is careful to suggest. Where specific outlines are not credible, the character, like his compound, is presented as too large to be contained in the frame. Isolated bigness and hollowness are the result: a huge temple honeycombed with small barren rooms, a large body with a shining oval head, a rhetoric that echoes more than it means.

The director's journey becomes a personal journey for the whole crew, for his family, especially for this wife, who wants to create something herself. Still later, when Sheen collapses, Coppola seems to collapse too and begins talking about divorce. Finally, the creative journey is connected to the war: "there was no simple solution to the script. Just as there was no simple right answer as to why we were in Vietnam." In the program notes, Coppola ties it all together, projecting the journey as an audience catharsis as well:

Over the period of shooting, this film gradually made itself; and curiously, the process of making the film became very much like the story of the film….

I, like Captain Willard, was moving up a river….

It was my thought that if the American audience could look at the heart of what Vietnam was really like … they would be only one small step away from putting it behind them.

Coppola's statements here may strike us as pretentious and self-serving, but I tend to think that he has made the common mistake of artists who imagine that the experience of the audience and the stature of the artwork can somehow be predicted by the anguish of the creative process. In wanting to improve the Milius script, especially after the Do Lung Bridge sequence, he turned to Heart of Darkness and the somewhat improvisatory method itself. However, by not working out the precise relation of Heart of Darkness to the conception of the film in script form, Coppola insured a less faithful adaptation. In a process of conceptualization and production, different script considerations externalize as physical factors and personalities. Without a firm script or a director with a firm conception, group spontaneity can all-to-easily give way to anxiety and competition. Costly sets, actors, sound engineers, a tribe of extras, stocks of explosives, a meticulous cinematographer (who wants to organize by shot frames rather than by scenes) directly or indirectly pressure the director to help fill in the blank places of the script. In such a situation, the medium may have more voices than the message.

Ironically, although Coppola wanted to draw the greatness of the film from the greatness of the novel, the section of the film most like Heart of Darkness is the weakest because he makes the rather romantic assumption—which is, in fact, a misreading of the novel—that experience itself will immediately dictate certain discoveries. He forgets the years of reflection Marlow has given to his experience, the "recollection in tranquility" that Wordsworth argued must follow "the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions" if they are to be shaped into art. Although one may shuffle the scenes around like cards, although sound or narration may be added, the scenes themselves cannot be done again; celluloid is much less tractable than words.

I tend to see Apocalypse Now as a failed masterpiece, another instance of the fact that the production-editing process cannot bear too much of the conceptual load in a feature film. Coppola needed something definite to improvise against. I would reluctantly speculate that his film would have achieved greater unity if he had relied more on Milius' scripted version of Heart of Darkness than the novel itself.