The Golden Bough and the Ending of Apocalypse Now
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is famously an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), though a loose one which moves the action both in terms of time and place: from the turn of the 20th century to the 1960s and from the Congo under Belgian imperial rule to Vietnam in wartime. Coppola was a graduate of Hofstra College and evidently had read somewhat widely in early-20th century and modernist literature.
Heart of Darkness is far from the only literary work referred to in the film. Perhaps the other most important literary influence is J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a work of anthropology with a complex publication history: first published in two volumes in 1890; an expanded version of 15 volumes was published between 1896 and 1915; finally, a one-volume condensed version appeared in 1922, and it is probably this final version that is most read and that Coppola used. Even this single-volume edition is a formidable read: more than 700 pages of small, closely packed text in my Wordsworth Reference edition from 1993, example after example taken from across the globe of ancient rituals to illustrate Frazer’s arguments related to ancient beliefs on magic, control of nature and natural renewal through the death of kings or other figureheads. Frazer’s arguments are complex and, for the most part, not accepted by contemporary anthropologists, but his use of language is a delight.
The Final Cut of Apocalypse Now is three hours long, and the final section, set in Kurtz’s compound, takes up 45 minutes or so. It is in this section that The Golden Bough is clearly used as a loose framework for the storyline. Indeed, a shot of Kurtz’s bookshelf reveals that The Golden Bough is right there, in the one-volume edition.
Francis Ford Coppola has stated that Willard’s journey upriver is a journey through time: “My idea was that as they progressed up the river, they were going back more and more in time in a funny kind of way” (Karl French on Apocalypse Now, Bloomsbury, 1998, p. 83) This is more clear in cuts of the film that include the French Plantation sequence than in the original theatrical version. By the time he reaches Kurtz, he has gone back to the era of primitive tribalism, of “savages”, to use Frazer’s word. Frazer argues that for savages the boundary between god and man is much more porous than is the case in more developed religions. Certain individuals, in a savage society, are believed to have powers we would consider godlike:
Kings were revered, in many cases not merely as priests, that is, as intercessors between man and god, but as themselves gods, able to bestow upon their subjects and worshippers those blessings which are commonly supposed to be beyond the reach of mortals, and are sought, if at all, only by prayer and sacrifice offered to superhuman and invisible beings. Thus kings are often expected to give rain and sunshine in due season, to make the crops grow, and so on.
The Golden Bough (Wordsworth, 1993), p. 10
In a society where every man is supposed to be endowed more or less with powers which we should call supernatural, it is plain that the distinction between gods and men is somewhat blurred, or rather has scarcely emerged. The conception of gods as superhuman beings endowed with powers to which man possesses nothing comparable in degree and hardly even in kind, has been slowly evolved in the course of history.
The Golden Bough, p. 91
This is implied to be what has happened to Kurtz in the wilderness. He has taken charge of the Montagnard people and they have come to worship him as a god, do his every bid and indulge his most despotic whims, involving the heads of his enemies on spikes, and so forth. They believe in Kurtz’s godlike stature. It is suggested throughout the film that Kurtz is a remarkable person, talented and brave, a great solider with excellent judgement but a tendency to follow his own rules. Further, Kurtz admires the Vietnamese more than he does the Americans:
[T]hey were stronger than we. Because they could stand it. These were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres.
Apocalypse Now Redux screenplay
When Kurtz, in his intensity and greatness, meets the primitive strength and will of the jungle tribe, they, following the savage belief patterns laid out by Frazer, see him as a god and are able to offer him a type of commitment the American soldiers are incapable of. Both Kurtz and Willard see Americans as being somewhat degenerate (a concept not found in developed form in Frazer, though popular in other writers of the 1890s, notably Max Nordau). Willard says:
Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker. And every minute Charlie squats in the bush…he gets stronger. […]
Charlie didn’t get much U.S.O. He was dug in too deep or moving too fast. His idea of great R and R was cold rice, and a little rat meat. He had only two ways home – death, or victory.
Apocalypse Now Redux screenplay
Given their disdain for Army practices, the appeal of tribal living for Kurtz and Willard is clear. However, in Frazer there are severe drawbacks to being the divine king. Some of these are connected to the huge number of taboos that surround that entity:
The divine person is a source of danger as well as of blessing; he must not only be guarded, he must also be guarded against. His sacred organism, so delicate that a touch may disorder it, is also, as it were, electrically charged with a powerful magical or spiritual force which may discharge itself with fatal effect on whatever comes in contact with it. Accordingly the isolation of the man-god is quite as necessary for the safety of others as for his own. His magical virtue is in the strictest sense of the word contagious: his divinity is a fire, which, under proper restraints, confers endless blessings, but, if rashly touched or allowed to break bounds, burns and destroys what it touches.
The Golden Bough, pp. 202-203
As Frazer outlines, this is a very inconvenient fact for the king and rather than having the absolute power one might expect, he is severely trammeled and his every movement guarded to make sure he is doing that which will produce the right responses from nature. More relevant to Apocalypse Now is another problem for the divine king: he must always be at a peak of strength in order to protect his kingdom. When his health shows the first sign of failing, he must be put to death and power must pass to a younger, more vigorous specimen.
[W]e see a series of divine kings on whose life the fertility of men, of cattle, and of vegetation is believed to depend, and who are put to death, whether in single combat or otherwise, in order that their divine spirit may be transmitted to their successors in full vigour, uncontaminated by the weakness and decay of sickness or old age, because any such degeneration on the part of the king would, in the opinion of his worshippers, entail a corresponding degeneration on mankind, on cattle, and on the crops.
The Golden Bough, p. 269.
Clearly, Kurt’s health is failing. As the photographer says, “he’s dying.” We don’t really know what he is dying of, but we know he is dying and that we knows it too. For the Frazerian savage, to have a king in bad health is a serious problem.
When the photographer tells Willard, “He’s got something in mind for you”, what he means is not clear, at least not until we see the copy of The Golden Bough on Kurtz’s table and if we know what that book says about kings. Then we know that Kurtz, as a king of his tribe, cannot afford to die a slow natural death, but must be killed before he is so weak as to affect the people, cattle and crops of the Montagnards. He needs to die quickly, and he needs a younger successor. The only option for successor is Willard: young, strong, harsh, a committed soldier. (This is rendered somewhat ironic by the fact that Matin Sheen, playing Willard, suffered a heart-attack during the shoot.) That is why Kurtz wants Willard to kill him. He wants to save his people and he hopes Willard will accept the mantle of kingship. That is why he spends so much time talking to Willard on his leading ideas related to moral terror, making a friend of horror and so forth. He can see Willard has the necessary strength and coldness to do that.
Willard kills Kurtz, and then heads out where the Montagnards are engaging in their own ox-killing ritual. At this point, Willard’s act is ambiguous: is he following Army orders by killing Kurtz, or is he performing the ritual killing of the king in order to take his place? As he leaves Kurtz’s chamber having performed the deed, the Montagnards fall to their knees before him and he looks out over them. The viewer believes for a moment that he is about to declare himself their king but instead he walks through them, gets back onto the boat and heads back downriver.
Thus, at the last minute, Willard rejects the Frazerian succession of kingship and Kurtz’s return to primitivism. Having terminated Kurtz with extreme prejudice as ordered, there is nothing to stop Willard simply returning to duty. Indeed, that seems his only option having left the compound and begun the return downriver.
Coppola famously had a great deal of trouble with his ending, rejecting the ending in John Milius’ script and unable to come up with one that satisfied him. This contributed to the shoot going way over time and budget, as chronicled in the feature-length making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse – probably one of the most famous and acclaimed making-of documentaries ever made. The ending Coppola ended up with is problematic. For all the critique of the US Army in the early part of the film, Willard has, by decisively rejecting Kurtz, accepted the chaos of the Vietnam War and the film has performed a 180-degree turn. Apocalypse Now is like two films in one: a Vietnam war film that makes up the first two hours plus and an dramatization of Frazer’s ideas that comprises the final section. By Willard’s rejection of Frazerian kingship, there is an implicit acceptance of the Army regime which obviously was not part of Coppola’s original intention. It is a flawed ending, one which has been critiqued by many while others find it extremely effective.
The Victorian Sage 