As I've been reading Heart of Darkness, I've been struck how big of an influence it is on the pop culture I surround myself with. While I've managed, for the most part, to limit my fanaticism for superhero comics from coming into these blog postings/comments, anyone who has read (or seen since last weekend) Alan Moore's Watchmen can see all sorts of parallels in it (Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic series also features Kurtz himself...hooray for the public domain!). But the other thing I always think of is any undercover cop movie (Eastern Promises, Donnie Brasco, Training Day, Reservoir Dogs). You know the cliche...good cop goes undercover to work for a bad man, but ends up realizing that the bad man maybe isn't all that bad, maybe it's the societal constructs that have created him, etc.
Also, Apocalypse Now is more or less a straight adaptation (if not a transposition) of HOD (and is also a huge influence on Watchmen...full circle!).
In any case, I think it's fascinating how a single type of narrative can permeate the entire Western artistic consciousness and leave its stamp on just about every popular/relevant medium. Quite an achievement for a hundred-page novella about ivory traders.
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