‘One can’t live with one’s finger everlastingly on one’s pulse.’
Marlow recalls an adventure to his shipmates on the Thames.
Like any recollection, the story is offered through the filters of memory
and experiences and is prone to the exaggeration of detail and key elements.
This allows for a richness of description of people and place as well as for
the cranking up of tension throughout.
Marlow falls into a job of captaining a steamer on its
journey along the Congo to meet up with a renegade ivory trader called Kurtz.
Kurtz is the one-time darling of the company, but his success and obsession
seems to have gone awry and the respect that he was once held in has festered
into the fear and contempt of those he works for.
As the story progresses, a sense of impending horror builds.
Each of Marlow’s encounters offers foreboding. The chances of surviving the heat and conditions seem slim. The pictures that are painted of Kurtz
offer contradictions, but unify in the danger they emit. As the
time comes for the steamer to arrive at Kurtz’s camp, I felt and genuine panic
and curiosity about what was about to follow. For me, this engagement is
brought about because of the device of the story-teller addressing the audience
directly. It’s also heightened by superb detail where all is viewed through whatever the opposite of rose-tinted
spectacles might be.
The bulk of Heart
Of Darkness (US)
is beautifully put together. The power of the unseen and threatened is immense.
If there’s an issue for me, then it’s that the journey is so much more than the
arrival. Kurtz, such a giant throughout, is something of a shadow of
himself by the time we meet. That which is unseen shrinks as the curtain is
pulled back. This is clearly intentional and it’s more than likely that I’m
missing the point, but the sense of anti-climax I experienced has been difficult to
shrug off. Maybe the issue was that I was expecting Brando to make an entrance
and it felt more like they’d sent on an understudy who had never really acted
before.
I thoroughly enjoyed much of this one. The unpeeling of
humanity down to raw flesh is brutal. The levelling of civilisation to an
animal common denominator is unsettling. The conflict between the futility of
life and the need to fully suck out all of its juices battles to leave a sludge
that’s as dark as the title suggests. The voice of the storyteller is perfect and the images conjured are vivid throughout. The destination may not have been the one
I wanted to reach, but I’m delighted that I finally went along for the ride.
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