Film term paper. About apocalypse Now

Essay by Jim GreeneUniversity, Bachelor'sA, March 1997

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Inherent inside every human soul is a savage evil side that remains

repressed by society. Often this evil side breaks out during times of

isolation from our culture, and whenever one culture confronts another.

History is loaded with examples of atrocities that have occurred when one

culture comes into contact with another. Whenever fundamentally different

cultures meet, there is often a fear of contamination and loss of self that

leads us to discover more about our true selves, often causing perceived

madness by those who have yet to discover.

The Puritans left Europe in hopes of finding a new world to welcome them and

their beliefs. What they found was a vast new world, loaded with Indian

cultures new to them. This overwhelming cultural interaction caused some

Puritans to go mad and try to purge themselves of a perceived evil. This

came to be known as the Salem witch trials.

During World War II, Germany made an attempt to overrun Europe. What

happened when the Nazis came into power and persecuted the Jews in Germany,

Austria and Poland is well known as the Holocaust. Here, humanís evil side

provides one of the scariest occurrences of this century. Adolf Hitler and

his Nazi counterparts conducted raids of the ghettos to locate and often

exterminate any Jews they found. Although Jews are the most widely known

victims of the Holocaust, they were not the only targets. When the war

ended, 6 million Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses,

Communists, and others targeted by the Nazis, had died in the Holocaust.

Most of these deaths occurred in gas chambers and mass shootings. This

gruesome attack was motivated mainly by the fear of cultural intermixing

which would impurify the 'Master Race.'

Joseph Conradís book, The Heart of Darkness and Francis Coppolaís movie,

Apocalypse Now...