The proverbial Nietzschean abyss that stares at you is now Kurtz’s only mirror. He must allow Horror to survive after him, he must die in Horror because Horror has now become his Law, his Mission. Kurtz wants to die but at the same time he doesn’t, he’s man and God, the Horror tears him apart from the inside and he perceives it, but the only way to escape from Horror is Horror itself. Yet, on the edge of the void, his soul shows for a few moments the signs of a typically human terror that, even if immediately repressed by self-control, wants to show us Kurtz the man, at least for a moment. The vague expression of stupid terror in front of the machete confirms it: Kurtz’s exhausted heart not only accepts death, but invokes it. His soul claims death, yet his mind cannot accept the idea of void. He believes he cannot die, but he wants to die. Kurtz knows he is the Frazerian King-Priest. It’s a thought, a “feeling” that has more than one point of contact with the national-socialist instance of moral duty as a duty of obedience to a superior power (think about Eichmann) and, ultimately, to the most beastly laws of nature. The moral duty of man is to realize his own primitive nature. In him, the moral duty is released from the human imperative, it’s integrated into the animal instinct. The final monologue is clear about this: Kurtz is a victim of the horror he has assimilated. It’s not madness that makes him lose the moral, but overcoming the latter to make him insane: Kurtz is the son of the horror of war and his response to it is the lucid madness he manifests. The madness of the Colonel comes from his being beyond morality and represents its consequence. Kurtz is impervious to morality and this brings him closer to a God. His soul, however, is split and seems to move in two different directions, like that wave that splits into two different directions in a scene on the movie. Not simply dying (he is seriously ill), but being killed. His death is the confirmation: Kurtz wants to be killed. In this existential contradiction, in the dissolution of the moral law in favor of an individual and omnipotent ego, Colonel Kurtz abandons the earthly order and reaches out towards the divine, sure to be beyond good and evil. Kurtz’s mission and death coincide: his soul imploded but, as in a lucid delirium, reason still works according to logical laws. Everywhere corpses are piled up: amputees, ripped, hanged. His reign is the theater of atrocious misdeeds, his land a sort of Dante’s circle. Kurtz, like a pagan king, tyrannizes hie people, idolized by the savages. We know that the latter has read Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a text which highlights the importance of the ritual sacrifice of the King-Priest, a figure halfway between a man and a god, in the economy of the pagan world.
The images of the slaughter of an ox alternate with those of Kurtz’s “slaughter” the “damned” subjects drop the machete on the beast, Willard drops the machete on the Colonel. His death has the solemnity, the sacredness of a pagan sacrifice. Butchered in the temple by Captain Willard, he is actually the victim of a higher will. These are the words spoken gasping by Colonel Kurtz on his deathbed.