ESSAY 3: FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, APOCALYPSE NOW (1979)

PLEASE WRITE YOUR COMPLETE NAME AT THE BEGINNING OF YOUR ESSAY

INDICATE THE NUMBER OF WORDS AT THE END
USE A WORD DOCUMENT (.DOCX)
NAME OF DOC: E3-SURNAME-NAME

READ THE FOLLOWING EXTRACT FROM THE ARTICLE BY MARGOT NORRIS,

“Modernism and Vietnam: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now” (Modern Fiction Studies,
Fall 1998, 44, 3)

“[Kilgore’s] insanity is of a different order than that of Kurtz –who sees his own perversity as the
interiorization of the perversity of the war—because it is marked by the absence of any humanity, the
hollowness of feeling and lack of sympathetic sight that makes him autotelic, driven purely by his own will, a
Nietzschean Übermensch [superman] … Kilgore is curiously exempted from the poetics of cruelty that hovers
around Kurtz’s prose and actions, and he presides over his own Conradian “grove of death” … Coppola has
Kilgore merely dispense “Death from Above” playing cards that mark the corpses as his victims, and that
signify the pure arbitrariness and chance of his killing. Kilgore’s use of the card deck exceeds in nihilism that
of Eliot’s Madame Sosostris, the Waste Land clairvoyant who degrades the sacred mysteries of the Tarot by
deploying its symbols for horoscopes. Unlike Kurtz, who steps into the ritualized universe of the primitive –
and becomes, as it were, a mystical Indian—Kilgore remains a flying cowboy, a connoisseur of experience
and sensation.”

Taking into consideration the passage above, write an essay between 1000 and 1500 words
discussing Copola’s use of the characters of Colonel Kilgore and Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse
Now. Relate the portrayal of both characters to Coppola’s reference to Eliot’s “The Hollow
Men” in the film. You may also relate the portrayal of these two characters in the film to Eliot’s
creation of the character of Madame Sosostris in Eliot’s The Wasteland.