CHAPTER 2
Orientalism and Hinduism
David Smith
“The horror, the horror.” These words transposed by Coppola from Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness(1899) sum up in Apocalypse Now(1979) both the American
war against Vietnam and Oriental religion. In Coppola’s film the US soldiers in
Cambodia confronted by the ruins of Angkor exclaim at their strangeness, at
the giant heads of the Bodhisattva-S ́ivas entwined with the roots of the all-
swallowing jungle. Amid the ruins, the boat rounds a bend in the river to
discover a motley array of native soldiers, accompanied by a profusion of
hanging corpses. The lost colonel Kurtz – like Conrad’s Kurtz – has gone mad
and is killing wildly deep in the jungle. He, then, is horrifying to those who are
searching for him. But Kurtz has a little shelf of books in his womb-like center
of the temple complex, where a statue of the Buddha sits beside him, a shelf that
bears the Golden Boughand Jessie Weston’s The Quest for the Holy Grail. The mad
colonel, once an “outstanding officer,” is not only waging a private war, but is
also a solitary student of Religious Studies. He has been overwhelmed by what
he sees as the obscenity, the horror of America’s war machine, but is driven to
rival it, his chamber containing what seems to be a large wall panel of Ka ̄lı ̄. The
venturing hero of the film slays this wicked colonel with the sacrificial axe from
a buffalo sacrifice just about to take place. The film in its released version ends
with the wicked American bombers raining destruction on the wickedness of the
mad colonel. There is a bizarre diversion here of the American bombing from its
perceived exterior foe to Kurtz, its inner self. Perhaps the most startling contrast
between the film and Conrad’s novel is between the massive fire power of the
Americans and the impotence of the French gunboat blindly shelling the jungle
shoreline – but the Americans were no less impotent in the end. In Coppola’s
film we have modernity gone mad, no less mad than the film’s version of eastern
religion!
A year before Coppola’s film a book was published that has proved to be an
extraordinarily successful counterblast to the imperialism and colonialism