The Left’s Heart Of Darkness
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It doesn’t get much better than Joseph Conrad’s story “Heart Of Darkness.” So for many years “Apocalypse Now” was a favorite flick of mine. For the reasons spelled out in this article, it no longer is.
“The Horror……The Horror”
by Micheal Rulle
The Anti-American Left Is Born
For the second time on this blog site I quote Karl Marx’s satirical critical witticism of Hegel: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”. Perhaps, like Marx, I too can add a twist to this aphorism. Oscar Wilde said that “life imitates art more than art imitates life”. Lets see if I can sew the giraffe’s head onto the elephant’s body. How about “All great artistic themes in history appear, as it were, twice. First as a tragic representation of profound truth, second as real life absurd farce”.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s cinematic adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, Captain Willard heads down river in search of an Army operative, Colonel Kurtz, who had gone very much off the reservation. In a paradoxical morality play, Kurtz had become so distraught by the horrors war had rendered, he rebelled by endlessly recommitting those same horrors, but without the false pretense of purpose or meaning. The death and torture machine Kurtz established down river was visible to all who approached, as heads, corpses and skeletons lined the entrance to his encampment. Willard fittingly releases Kurtz from his self inflicted psychic hell by hacking him to death with a hatchet/machete while Jim Morrison sings “this is the end, beautiful friend”. Brando/Kurtz memorably leaves this movie-world’s stage straining out the whisper “the horror….the horror”. Apocalypse Now – Kurtz Dies


