I realize you're just sharing a creative fan theory, but they're two separate movies with zero connection story-wise. Photos of Brando from Reflections in a Golden Eye were used simply because the script required younger pics of Kurtz in the military for Willard's dossier.
There's zero evidence in Apocalypse Now that Kurtz is a repressed homosexual, not to mention in Conrad's novel.
He's even crazier now than he was in the era of RiaGE and he goes rogue... creates his own rebel army
Except that Kurtz isn't crazy in Apocalypse Now. The scene where Kurtz reads TIME articles to Willard in full daylight shows that he isn't insane at all, just depressed due to being trapped in the remote jungle with no place to go after getting "off the boat" -- the "boat" being a respected officer in the US military and therefore never being able to go home again. The Brass
slanders Kurtz as insane in order to convince Willard and previous agents that executing a decorated, kick-axx American officer is justified.
The bulk of Apocalypse Now paints Kurtz as a military genius who refused to play the game of war, like the Brass back at Nha Trang and Col. Kilgore. Rather, Kurtz efficiently and effectively got the job done (actually winning the war in his area), discerning double agents and boldly executing them without the approval of superiors, etc.
Kurtz was the type of warrior that he insisted was required to quickly win the war: "men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling... without passion... without judgment." He "had the strength... the strength... to do that." This can be seen in his savage slaying of Chef, which he did personally rather than allowing one of his minions to do the grisly deed.
Willard showed he had the same mettle in his decisive slaying of the wounded Vietnamese woman on the boat, which explains why he increasingly identifies with Kurtz. Before his mercy-killing of Kurtz, he says: “They were going to make me a major for this, and I wasn't even in their f***ing army anymore.” So, like Kurtz, he was departing the game of war because he smelled the "stench of lies." Unlike Kurtz, he wasn’t going to futilely stay in Southeast Asia and try to accomplish America’s mission by himself along with whatever motley paramilitarists he could assemble in the jungle. He had a home to go back to.
Yet neither Kurtz nor Willard were crazy. Kurtz was depressed because he had no where else to go beyond his quasi-family of Montagnard natives & American outcasts in the remote jungles of SE Asia. Willard was depressed in the Saigon hotel because he needed a mission to keep focused & active.
So Col. Kurtz is an amazing character in Apocalypse Now, a military genius with the gonads to do what was necessary to win the war without the sanction of the Brass, not the pitiful perv in Reflections in a Golden Eye.
Captain Willard stated at the outset: "There is no way to tell his story [Kurtz] without telling my own. And if his story really is a confession, then so is mine." Thus the movie is a
confession of two likeminded warriors and there's not even a hint of homosexuality. Kurtz was married with a son while Willard was formerly married and makes love with Roxanne Sarrault at the French plantation.
A better association of two separate films is to interpret Duvall's Bull Meechum in "The Great Santini" (which was released 2.5 months later in 1979) as Col. Kilgore
before the Vietnam War in the early 60s, stationed in South Carolina. If you disregard the date of events in the story, you could view it as Kilgore
after the Vietnam War in the late 70s.
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