Read the following poem carefully. At its conclusion, you will find the question for your essay on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now Redux.

The Hollow Men

T. S. Eliot (1925)

I

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;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

---

We are told that Colonel Kurtz spends much of his time reading poetry aloud, and the one time we actually witness him doing so it is Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”

Take a look at this poem. It’s a complex piece of literature; perhaps you will not be able to parse it all. (Don’t be too worried, for example, if you can’t fathom why he includes the bit about the prickly pear.) But what is your sense of Eliot’s intention here? What does he mean when he says “we are the hollow men”? How can we be both hollow and stuffed? And what does this poem have to do with Kurtz and the film we have just seen?

In a 2-3 page essay, use Eliot’s poem as a starting place to explore the message that Francis Ford Coppola is sending us in his three-plus hour Apocalypse Now Redux. Because of the problems inherent in writing about a film of this length, focus most of your attention on a one or two carefully selected scenes. Discuss how lighting, sound, editing, mise en scene, camera angles, and other directorial techniques help Coppola to create this complex cinematic reflection not only of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but also of Eliot’s existentialist ode to “the horror” within us all.