The novelist whose Heart of Darkness Cameron invokes in dialogue 24 to weigh against a too-easy idea of the "nothing." When Bob asks whether a killer forcing people to face death (as in Silence of the Lambs) is just another route into the nothing, Cameron reaches for "Conrad's Africa" and "the horror, the horror" — history as "a confrontation with death on a mass scale" — to insist that the terrible is not an "exemplary introduction" to be treated lightly but a serious matter to be interrogated at the end of the cul-de-sac.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the check on flippancy — "the horror, the horror" is the seriousness against which Cameron rejects the idea that terror is a casual initiation into the nothing
Conrad supplies the archive its image of unbearable seriousness — McLuhan's recurring touchstone "the horror" marks the mass confrontation with death that, for Cameron, forbids treating terror as a flippant "initiation into the nothing."
"What happens in Conrad's Africa is the horror, the horror."
Connections
Conrad's "the horror" is Cameron's figure for the mass confrontation with death that the end of the cul-de-sac demands be interrogated.