What’s most bizarre about it is all the references to the work of T.S. Eliot; The Hollow Men, Love Song of J. Alfred Prufroc, etc. Hopper’s jabbering “I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
One of the props you can only make out on the big sreen or the BluRay version is a book on Col. Kurt’z bookcase titled “The Golden Bough” by James Frazier. In it Frazier opines that all pre-Christian religions were fertility cults in which it was customary to periodically sacrifice a sacred king at harvest time so he might be reincarnated in the spring.
In “The Waste Land,” Eliot credits The Golden Bough as inspiration for much of his work. And this allegorically is why the dirty deed had to be done by Capt. Willard and not by some facesless arclight strike. Willard had to spill Kurz’s blood as a form of sacrifice, just like the water buffalo the natives were killing.
Also bizarre how appropriate Morrison’s Oedipean opus “The End” is to the storyline. Appropriate background music to Willard going up the snakey river to kill his symbolic father.
The framework of the film might have come from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but the individual scenes — like the stoner GI called “Roach” who blasts the VC in the wire with his M79 “bloop” gun, aiming only by the sound of their voices in the darkness — are vignettes lifted from Michael Herr’s “Dispatches,” supposedly true stories he wrote while a reporter for Rolling Stone magazine in Vietnam.
A seriously weird and seriously complex film, even without all the drama that went on during its filming.
The scene of Sheen having a break down in the Saigon
hotel room was one of the best pieces of acting in
the whole movie.