Civilized Savagery

"It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of first ages—could comprehend. And why not?" -Heart of Darkness

In both the novella "Heart of Darkness" and the movie "Apocalypse Now," the violent coexistence of a savage world versus a civilized world is stressed. However as each story goes on, the ability to distinguish between the civilized characters and the savage becomes more difficult. In the Heart of Darkness, likewise in Apocalypse Now, Kurtz was a very respectable man. In the movie, he was an excellent general who graduated from Harvard. The officer even remarked that he was raised perfect for the job. In the book, Kurtz was the Cheif of Marlow's Company. Only civilized beings could hold such positions, right? Apparently not. This respectable character, whether it was through his search for power or ivory, transforms to be the head figure of the savages, with heads of his followers speared outside his chambers.
Kurtz is not the only one. The main character, Marlow, also undergoes a similar transformation. In the Novella, Marlow explains how the war cries of the natives felt almost natural to him to the point that there was "a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it." In Apocalypse now, Marlow is covered in darkness during and after the killing of Kurtz--which was brutally carried out with an axe. When he stands in front of all the natives, they bow. Now Marlow has transformed from a fighter from a civilized society to an idle of the savages.