Underworld In Apocalypse Now

Francis Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now opens with a visceral image of hellish chaos. As the camera pans over a seemingly serene forest, a helicopter silently drops into the frame, releasing napalm into the air. A few seconds later, the jungle bursts into explosive flames, transforming the landscape into scene of chaotic torment, reminiscent of the “river of fire” described in St. Paul’s Apocalypse. The encompassing jungles and murky rivers of Apocalypse Now serve as a vision of the 1960s Vietnam underworld, sharing many parallels with traditional katabatic narratives. Just as classical Greek and Roman heroes such as Odysseus, Aeneas and Er descended to a strange and threatening underworld in order to seek out personal truth, Captain Willard

In Coppola’s film, the backdrop of the burning Vietnam war-zone serves as a contemporary underworld, possessing several parallels to traditional katabasis myths, including Virgil’s Aeneid, Homer’s Odyssey, Cicero’s Dream of Scipio, as well as several other classical accounts of the underworld. Just as the fiery pits of torment in Tartarus and the Island of the Damned in Lucian’s True History serve as images of the underworld awaiting punishment for sinners, the napalm-infested jungle of Vietnam acts as a dangerous, seedy and increasingly violent setting for Willard’s spiritual quest for morality in a morally-corrupt world.
Apocalypse Now tells the story of Willard, a psychologically scarred solider in the Vietnam War, who is recruited by the CIA to track down Colonel Walter Kurtz, a former US military officer accused of murdering four suspected Vietnamese agents. According to

Additionally, the dense, dangerous forests of Vietnam that engulf Willard and his crew act as a parallel to another classical work, Virgil’s Aeneid. The thick, shadowed jungles and murky rivers in Apocalypse Now call to mind the “dark lake and shadowy woods” (Virgil). The “Marsh of the Styx”, a key set-piece in classical depictions of the underworld, is analogous to the Nung River that Willard is commanded to pass through on his quest to reach the enigmatic Kurtz. The film also channels the grotesque imagery of mutilated corpses from Plutarch’s “The Vision of Thespesius”. The majority of the film’s background is marked by various images of bodily carnage, such as a Vietnamese man’s corpse that hangs from a palm tree, as well as the partially amputated bodies of American pilots, which are “lying in the water, on the bank and in the trees…all torn apart and bloody” (Coppola, 37). Coppola uses the corpses as decoration in his war-themed underworld, representative images of the horrors that await Willard and his crew as they descent deeper into the jungle. Likewise, the images of the tormented souls that Thespesius sees while on his journey, “souls…forcibly molded and transformed into various kinds of animals by