Disney Land.....Fuck man this is better than Disney Land......... And that's about the real truth of it.

1. Extract from Apocalypse Now
His mission accomplished, Willard is only heading downstream towards the likes of Colonel Kilgore,
whose similar ties to Kurtz are drawn by Willard himself: "He was one of those guys that had that
weird light around him. You just knew he wasn't gonna get so much as a scratch here." Someone that
invincible can only be a god, or an American film director working in the jungle, lost in his own heart
of darkness.
"The horror, the horror" that is uttered by Kurtz in Heart of Darkness does not refer to the horrors of
the jungle, as some believe, but the horrors of daily life anywhere. That is a much more profound point.
In Conrad's book, Kurtz leaves his English wife only to shack up with an African one. He becomes "at
home" in the jungle. Fleeing one domestic arrangement, he runs right into another. Savages, once you
get to know them, turn out to be no different from the buddies and the wives you've left behind.
Rescued, or rather kidnapped, by Marlow to be brought back to England, Kurtz dies halfway, but not
before croaking out his "judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this earth": "The horror! The
horror!" Back home, his English wife is eager to hear her husband's last words. Marlow answers: "The
last word he pronounced was your name."
Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Willard and Kurtz in Apocalypse Now are also escaping from the
familiar, from the wives at home, into the exotic and the unknown. After their first Vietnam tour of
duty, they signed up for another. Willard confides: "When I was home after my first tour, it was
worse. I'd wake up and there'd be nothing ... I hardly said a word to my wife until I said yes to a
divorce." Kurtz writes in a letter to his wife: "Sell the house. Sell the car. Sell the kids. Find
someone else. Forget it. I'm never coming back. Forget it."
This film, then, is not about the horrors of the jungle but its allures. The jungle becomes a hotbed of
wild desires, where you can hobnob with savages, shoot them, get shot in turns, burn down acres of
forests, get scared by tigers.
It becomes, in short, the ultimate theme park. Halfway through this romp, Lance sums it all up:
"Disneyland. Fuck, man, this is better than Disneyland!" Anything to get away from "the horror,
the horror" of home.