Charles Marlow
Marlow's name may be inspired by the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Conrad's father was a translator of William Shakespeare who doubtless would have known of Marlowe's work as well. Some intertextual interpretations of "Heart of Darkness" have suggested that Marlowe's "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus" may have influenced Conrad. Charles Marlow describes a character as a "papier-mache Mephistopheles", a reference to the Faust legend. Marlow's and Kurtz's journey up the Congo River in "Heart of Darkness" also has similarities to another work by Marlowe, "Dido, Queen of Carthage", in which Aeneas is stranded on the shore of Libya and meets the African queen Dido.
Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death
The film ends happily for the trio of main characters: Bunny and Jim are to be married, and Jean-Pierre has enrolled at Dr. Hunt's university as a feminist studies major, becoming in the process the ideal companion for Hunt.The film's plot loosely parallels that of novel "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad, as well as "Apocalypse Now", which was also partly based on "Heart of Darkness". Both "Heart of Darkness" and "Apocalypse Now" feature a character named Kurtz who has gone deep into the jungle to become the deranged leader of a group of "savages"; these peoples engage in barbaric rites as an alternative to the rigid and restrictive values of the outside world. The name of the character Ford Maddox, one of the men who recruits Margo to enter the jungle, refers to author Ford Madox Ford, who collaborated on three novels with Conrad (though not on "Heart of Darkness"). When Kurtz and Hunt battle with fencing swords, Kurtz is stabbed, and her dying words are: "You don't know what it's like, trying to face David Letterman with a book on male insensitivity ... All right, I was exploiting the Piranha women. You don't know what it was like. David Letterman, God, the horror ... the horror of that show ... the horror." In "Heart of Darkness", Kurtz's dying words are: "The horror! The horror!"