We don't get any more new material until Willard has been captured and locked up. Kurtz opens up a steel cage and sits down. He pulls out a stack of articles from Time magazine and begins to read out loud. As with the colonial scene, Kurtz delivers information that viewers probably didn't need in 1979, when the war was still fresh in memory, but it's nice to have here. Kurtz drops the magazines and tells Willard to read them. Kurtz says that Willard is free to move around the compound but that he will be shot if he tries to leave.

Willard, we know, hasn't figured out what to do. Coppola's lead character is morally precarious because he hasn't picked one side or the other. "I took the mission. What else was I going to do," he's told us.

But what he's done, as he's moved up river, researching Kurtz all the way, is learned to admire a man who he's been told is insane. Kurtz is effective. Kurtz has balls. Kurtz is doing a better job fighting the war than the U.S. government is doing.

When he gets there, however, he finds something else entirely. There are half-naked bodies hanging from trees. There are severed heads littered across the steps. Huge idols are fashioned after Kurtz. It smells like malaria and death.

Kurtz has gone insane, but he's also perfectly sane. He's ineffective as a military man, but effective in the war. He's a warrior poet, says the war photographer played by Dennis Hopper. "He can be terrible, and he can be mean, and he can be right ... The man is clear in his mind but his soul is mad."

Kurtz is a self-appointed god -- which by definition cannot exist. But he does, and as a god the only thing that he will not permit is judgment.

Presumably a few days later, the Dennis Hopper character talks to Willard about dialectics. "You can either love someone or you can hate someone," he says. He says fractions are worthless. It's all or nothing.

Then Kurtz goes into his famous speech about the ideal warriors. They are "men who are moral who are able to use their primordial instincts to kill without judgment. It's judgment that kills us."

"It is impossible to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means," he says.

We know he's right, because of all the terrible things that we've seen, and all the terrible things that we know Willard's seen. Now Willard, in a sense, becomes Kurtz -- without judgment. He decides to kill Kurtz. Kurtz decides to be killed. Coppola, by intercutting the murder with a ritual sacrifice, is pointing out that it's a murder in which everyone knows his role.

Here, finally, the terrible duality within Willard culminates in a bloody act -- but one that resolves nothing. As the captain kills he is Willard, the moral, rational agent of civilization, but he is also murderous, instinctive Kurtz. He's carrying out his mission, but he's also carrying out the wishes and unspeakable dreams of Kurtz. He's found his truth out there in the jungle, and it is a truth neither he nor we, the viewers, can draw any consolation from -- but neither can we escape it. And everyone else is dead.

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