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172 As I’ve argued in an earlier book, there are several reasons why Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) could be regarded a distant ancestor of the film noir. Like Hollywood in the 1940s, Conrad employs a first-person narration that involves subjective focalization and a good deal of shifting back and forth in time; he calls attention to the narration by dramatizing it in a manner roughly analogous to the first-person openings and closings of movies like Double Indemnity (1944) and Murder, My Sweet (1944); and he gives a great deal of attention to a shadowy, somber mood, so that the meaning seems to lie on the atmospheric surface—in Marlow’s famous words, on “the outside, enveloping the tale.” Although Conrad’s plot has a family resemblance to a series of nineteenth -century adventure stories about British imperialism, his style is hallucinated, oneiric, greatly concerned with the psychology of the narrator , who says at one point,“It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream.” Hence, no less than any of the classic films noirs, Heart of Darkness has provoked psychoanalytic interpretation. Perhaps the novella’s most general affinity with noir, however, is that although it belongs to the genre of bloody melodrama, it strives to seem relatively unmelodramatic. It does so through a familiar device of gothic fiction that can be seen in such movies as Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Laura (1944), Strangers on a Train (1951), Blue Steel (1990), and Basic Instinct (1992): everyone is a bit guilty and the ostensibly “good” character representing reason and ordinary decency is in some ways a double of the manifestly evil or guilty character. This “secret sharer” theme, combined with Conrad’s foregrounding of style and pessimistic view of Western progress, gives Heart of Darkness a liminal position in modern culture: like most noirish fiction and film, it blends popular adventure with certain traits of modernism. As Fredric Jameson says, it belongs in a zone somewhere between Robert Louis Stevenson and Marcel Welles, Hollywood, and Heart of Darkness Welles, Hollywood, and Heart of Darkness / 173 Proust, and it enables us to sense “the emergence of what will be contemporary modernism . . . but also, still tangibly juxtaposed with it, what will variously be called popular culture or mass culture, the commercialized cultural discourse of what, in late capitalism, is often called media society” (Political Unconscious, 206). Heart of Darkness became a sort of ur-text for Anglo-American modernism ,influencingT.S.Eliot’s“The Hollow Men,”F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and the novels of William Faulkner. In the realm of popular fiction it had a similar influence, especially among sophisticated writers of thrillers. Raymond Chandler’s first-person narrator is named Marlowe; Graham Greene’s “entertainment” novels, all of which became films noirs, were inspired by his reading of Conrad’s novella; and Greene’s script for The Third Man (1949) not only borrows its narrative structure from Heart of Darkness but also contains a minor character named Kurtz. Where later movies are concerned, the novella also became an intertext for pictures about U.S. imperialism in Vietnam: Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) is modeled on Heart of Darkness, and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) has distant echoes of the same source. Surprisingly, however, few filmmakers have been interested in adapting the novella itself.A canonical work known by virtually every college student in the English-speaking world, Heart of Darkness constitutes a “presold” commodity, and by virtue of its brevity it might seem to present fewer problems for a screenwriter than the novels of Jane Austen or Charles Dickens, which have been adapted many times.Yet to my knowledge only one film is based directly on the story: Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation for Turner NetworkTelevision,starringTim Roth as Marlow and John Malkovich as Kurtz, which was filmed in Central America and broadcast in the United States in 1994.This picture was nominated for a Golden Globe by the international press, but it rarely achieves the haunted, dryly ironic quality of its source and in most other ways is a disappointment. Perhaps Heart of Darkness hasn’t been filmed more often because it has no heroic action, not much dialogue, and a great deal of what F.R. Leavis called “adjectival insistence” on horror (119). Leaving aside its racist and patriarchal implications, which create another set of problems, it holds our attention through a kind of spellbinding trickery...

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