ing horrors" is the Vietnamese army’s senseless decapitation, torture, and the like. Kurtz is facing a new culture and has a terrible time dealing with it. This was the beginning of his insanity. "All America contributed to the making of Colonel Kurtz, just as all Europe produced Mr. Kurtz. Both Kurtzes are idealized in their function as eyewitnesses to the atrocities. What is reflected is the threat of loss of self, loss of centrality, and the displacement of Western culture from the perceived center of history by those whom it has enslaved and oppressed (Worthy 24)." This tells us that the evil side and the madness in both Kurtzes was brought out by the fear of new cultures different from their own, and their inability to deal with this fear. The disconnection between the opening words of Kurtz's report "By the simple exercise of our will, we can exert a power for good practically unbounded" and the note on the last page, "Exterminate all the brutes!" illustrates the progressive externalization of Kurtz's fear of "contamination," the personal fear of loss of self which colonialist whites saw in the "uncivilized," seemingly regressive lifestyle of the natives. Gradually, the duplicity of man and reality merged for the two Kurtzes, one in the Congo, and one in Vietnam. As this happened, the well defined cultural values masculine/feminine and self/other that had specific segregated roles, could not be sustained in the Congo or in Vietnam. "For the Americans in Vietnam, as for the colonialists in Africa, madness is the result of the disintegration of abstract boundaries held to be absolute (Worthy 24)." "As it attempts to confront the 'insanity' of the war through Kurtz' s madness, that of the filmmakers, and the madness of U.S. culture, Hearts of Darkness exposes the contradictions between the inherent hierarchy and inequality within the cultural forces of the United States and official democratic principles, which led to the perce...
