Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
[1902]


Últimamente vengo comprando varios de la colección Penguin Popular Classics, buenos libros a precios imbatibles. A medida que iba leyendo Heart of Darkness me decía a mi mismo "La pucha, como se parece a Apocalypse Now". Hasta que leo:

I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror -of an intense and hopless dispair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision - he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath - The horror! The horror!

Ok... No se parece, ES Apocalypse now. Obviamente volví a ver la peli en cuanto terminé el libro. La adaptación cinematográfica de Coppola transforma el colonialismo inglés en África en el intervencionismo americano durante la guerra de Vietnam, pero la escencia de la historia, el viaje al corazón de la jungla en busca de Kurz, el descenso a lo hostil, lo primitivo, la locura están presentes en ambas.

Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don't know. (...)For me it crawled toward Kurtz--exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started leaking we crawled very slow. The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there.

Apocalypse Now
Dir: Francis Ford Coppola
[1979]


Será este uno de los pocos casos en que a pesar de haberme gustado la historia original, si tengo que elegir me quedo con la película. Apocalypse Now es épica en concepto y en ejecución y referente total en películas bélicas.

Desde la escena inicial con Sheen desatando su locura en una habitación de hotel en Saigón, pasando por el legendario ataque con helicópteros hasta el lisérgico final, no hay nada de más en las 2 horas y media de película.

Saigon. Shit. I'm still only in Saigon

Any man brave enough to fight with his guts hanging out can drink from my canteen any day!

I love the smell of napalm in the morning. One time we had a hill bombed for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one stinking dink body. But the smell-- You know, that gasoline smell, the whole hill. It smelled like... victory. Someday this war's going to end.

Do Lung Bridge was the last army outpost on the Nung River. Beyond it, there was only Kurtz.


Why don't they fucking attack, man?

Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet-warrior in the classic sense.

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. (...) 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.

They were gonna make me a major for this, and I wasn't even in their fuckin' army anymore.

The horror! The horror!