Final Scenes of Apocalypse Now

In the morning Willard is carried again to meet Kurtz.
Kurtz sits in the temple and reads T.S. Eliot's poem
The Hollow Men :

KURTZ
"We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;"

PHOTOJOURNALIST
"Do you know what the man is saying? Do you? This is dialectics.
It's very simple dialectics. One through nine, no maybes, no
supposes, no fractions -- you can't travel in space, you can't go out
into space, you know, without, like, you know, with fractions -- what
are you going to land on, one quarter, three-eighths -- what are you
going to do when you go from here to Venus or something -- that's
dialectic physics, OK? Dialectic logic is there's only love and hate, you
either love somebody or you hate them."

Kurtz throws a book angrily at him :

PHOTOJOURNALIST
"This is the way the fucking world ends! Look at this fucking shit
we're in, man! Not with a bang, with a whimper. And with a whimper,
I'm fucking splitting, jack!"

Photojournalist leaves :

WILLARD (v.o.)
"On the river, I thought that the minute I looked at him, I'd know what
to do, but it didn't happen. I was in there with him for days, not under
guard - I was free - but he knew I wasn't going anywhere. He knew
more about what I was going to do than I did. If the generals back in
the Trang could see what I saw, would they still want me to kill him?
More than ever probably. And what would his people back home want if
they ever learned just how far from them he'd really gone? He broke
from them and then he broke from himself. I'd never seen a man so
broken up and ripped apart..."

KURTZ
" I've seen horrors...horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that...But you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face...And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terrorare your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces...Seems a thousand centuries ago...We went into a camp to innoculate the children. We left the camp after we had innoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every innoculated arm. There they were in a pile...A pile of little arms. And I remember...I...I...I cried... I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized...like I was shot...Like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead...And I thought: My God...the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters...These were men...trained cadres...these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love...but they had the strength...the strength...to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral...and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordal instincts to kill without feeling...without passion... without judgement...without judgement. Because it's judgement that defeats us. "

KURTZ (to Willard)
"I worry that my son might not understand what I've tried to be.
And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go
to my home and tell my son everything. Everything I did, everything
you saw... Because there is nothing I detest more than the stench
of lies. And if you understand me, Willard, you'll do this for me."

Evening. Kurtz' soldiers and natives are preparing for
a party. Willard is in the patrol boat :

RADIO
"PBR Street Gang, this is Almighty, over...
This is Almighty, standing by, over.
This is Almighty, how do you copy, over..."

Willard leaves the boat and starts going to Kurtz'
temple with a machete :

WILLARD (v.o.)
"They were going to make me a major for this and I wasn't even in their
fucing army any more. Everybody wanted me to do it, him most of all. I
felt like he was up there, waiting for me to take the pain away. He just
wanted to go out like a soldier, standing up, not like some poor, wasted,
rag-assed renegade. Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that's who
he really took his orders from anyway. "

Kurtz sits in the temple :

KURTZ (dictates to tape)
"They train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders
won't allow them to write fuck on their airplanes because it's obscene! "

Willard kills Kurtz with a machete, simultaneous the natives
sacrifice a water buffalo and kill it with their machetes .

Kurtz is dying, his final words :

KURTZ
"The horror. The horror..."

Willard find Kurtz' manuscript where he has written :

"Drop the bomb. Exterminate them all."

Willard leaves the temple while the natives bow down. He drops the
machete and so do the natives. Willards grabs Lance along and
they go to the patrol boat :

RADIO
"PBR Street Gang this is Almighty, over.."

Willard switches off the radio. The journey back home starts...


"The horror. The horror..."

T H E E N D