In the early 80’s when I watched, Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’, for the first time, it shook the core of me. When this movie, which drew its inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s classic novel, ‘Heart of Darkness’, first came in 1979, it wasn’t a much of a commercial success and even the critics were also not kind towards it. But over the years, it grew on people and now it is considered a Classic and one of the most disturbing war movie.
The movie tells the story of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) who was assigned a new mission to “terminate” the command of Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a renegade army officer, who was believed to have gone insane and set up a camp in Cambodia with American deserters and local tribe.
Before Willard seeks out Col Kurtz’s camp through navigating on boat and ultimately reaches out there and comes face to face with Col Kurtz, he comes across Lt Col Kilgore (Robert Duvall), the man who loves war, and is a warmonger. The one who loves to have fun, right in the middle of the battle field for his pleasure. For Kilgore, bringing back the feel of back home in between the war zone, was more matter of concern than butchering down the civilians of the enemy side.
When Willard reaches Col Kurtz place, he finds out it’s a virtual killing field, bodies and bone scattered around and death stinking in the air. Col Kurtz senses out that Capt Willard is here in an assignment to kill him and he goes philosophical about all this. Kurtz as a man in trans, mumbles to him,
“ ‘I’ve seen horrors… horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer .
You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that… but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror… Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies! I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God… the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.”
When for the first time I heard Marlon Brando as Col Kurtz delivering those words, I couldn’t understand the half of it, but whatever I grasped, it horrified me. I felt a chill down my spine. I could sense that Col Kurtz’s tormented soul was trying to convey some twisted war philosophy of his own but at the same time, it was frighteningly compelling for me to see the darkness within myself.
I, don’t know why this movie, this 4-minute monologue, along with the last words uttered by Col Kurtz, after being hacked by Capt Willard, ‘The Horror… The Horror….’ always kept on haunting me , even when I was hospitalized in isolation, as Corona positive patient. I was there alone, struggling to read the silence and the death surrounding me. There were too many questions hovering around inside me. I found myself in deep solitude and my mind was cracking up. In order to make the sense of my being, I revisited my past, tried to decipher the present and along with that, worked up to make some kind of a sense of the future. While I was doing all this, I suddenly realized, what is, making friend with horror, what Col Kurtz really meant, when he said, ‘Horror has a face’.
I do realize that this scrabbling of my life under the sky of uncertainty, was more than an endeavour of self-discovery. It was subconsciously, an act born out of the fear of unknown. I have let myself terrorised by the darkness around me. I was scared. Only then I realised that what I am going through is not fear but it’s my introduction to horror. In reality, I was face to face with the horror all the time and yet, it took me some time to realise that. Once horror gained a shape and became as real as me, I subconsciously merged myself in the soul of Col Kurtz and dismantled my psyche, in order to make horror my friend.
I was terrified, when I was hacking my status quo, in order to shake hands with horror. But then, when that moment of reckoning passed away, I understood that you cannot be aloof to horror. You can’t ignore horror, as, if it’s not your friend, then horror is your enemy and that too, most feared, an all-powerful one. Being friend with horror gives a chance to illuminate the darkness within. It pushes fear away from raping your emotions and instincts. It stops you from passing judgments on deeds, which arises out of conflicts. It provides the level field where you deal horror with horror, without being amoral.
Now I have come to realize that this is the only way to live before dying and only chance one has, to survive. When you are in a conflict, where your existence depends solely on the outcome, then making friend with horror is the only way out for you.
We must realize that how important is for us, to appreciate Col Kurtz. His war philosophy and his unblemished loyalty towards horror, takes dissection of winning and destroying your enemy, to all together at a different level. Here, it is also true that we do find comfort in making friends with peace but over the time it takes away, our primal instinct of making friends with horror and this makes us a sitting duck in the time of conflict. This also makes us inadequate, not worthy enough to fight back. This is a loss, which makes us prone to get engulfed by the adversaries and it subsequently paves the way of our own annihilation and lay the road for our exodus.
I say, make Col Kurtz your own and shake hands with horror in order to survive or otherwise be ready to be annihilated and runaway to find the last corner of earth.
Pushkar Awasthi
