Our very own American sacrificial god

Rating: Null/10 (18 May 2002)

Toward the end of this epic story, which simply breathes of the acid-laced consciousness of the sixties, one thing in particular caught my eye: in Colonel Kurtz's private collection of books, he has the Bible on a shelf, while James Frazer's The Golden Bough sits out as having recently been read. Both books deal with death and resurrection. The Golden Bough, however, is a profound ethnographic study of the subject. As Frazer put it, `The killing of the god is a necessary step to his revival or resurrection in a better form. Far from being an extinction of the divine spirit, it is only the beginning of a purer and stronger manifestation of it.'

Colonel Kurtz is obviously synonymous with the ancient `King of the Wood,' the protector of the Golden Bough, a living incarnation of the tree-spirit, who sends rain and sunshine, made crops to grow, women conceive, and herds multiply. He is a god. We hear testimonies of his divinity both from his enemies and his followers. Which is why this movie is so fascinating. In this film, Coppola invests the inevitable murder of the god-king with new meaning: the assassination of Colonel Kurtz is the symbolic sacrifice of the shadow side of the American character, the dark side of America's cheery optimism about making the world safe for democracy, the hidden aggression behind the beautiful rhetoric.
In many ritual sacrifices, the god-king is actually eaten by his worshippers. Kurtz obviously understands himself this way, as he tells the Captain, whom Kurtz accepts as his executioner, that he's neither an assassin nor a soldier, but `an errand boy, sent by the grocery clerks to collect a bill.' As he says this, he strokes his shiny bald head, luminescent against the dark background, oblong and fertile like a giant egg, ready to burst forth with new life. Kurtz tells the Captain, as he prepares himself for the sacrifice, that he has the right to kill him, but not judge him.
This film is eminently worth watching now that we are again on the warpath against evil. It warns us to pay attention, first and foremost, to the evil that lies within ourselves.