We just got back from the new Legend of Tarzan. It was a mistake to go. It was a mistake to make this movie. Please, Hollywood, next time someone proposes to make a Tarzan movie, haul out the original source books and slap someone with them hard. You simply can not make a movie from them anymore.
I say this as someone who grew up on the Tarzan novels — my father had first edition hardcover copies of these things (which, as a child, I ruined by scrawling all over them in crayon), and I read them and enjoyed them. It was only as I got old enough to actually think about the content that I became uncomfortable.
They are irredeemably racist. They are built on a foundation of racist theories, and they openly revel in racist stereotypes. I could find them entertaining as an oblivious white kid, but once you grow up, you have to wake up to the context. And the context is intolerable.
Consider the stories. “Tarzan” is a word in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fictitious ape language that means…”white skin”. The apes in the story knew of humans, but only black humans — and being white was the singular remarkable feature of the foundling child who was raised by the apes. This whiteness — and the fact that he was the child of an English lord — bestowed upon him remarkable physical and mental abilities, so that he was able to teach himself both French and English from primers that his deceased parents had rescued from the shipwreck that stranded them on the savage coast of Africa.
Note that Tarzan’s parents died almost immediately after he was born, so he had no knowledge of language or writing, but could bootstrap himself into literacy from moldering books in his parents’ cabin. I know, it’s a fantasy story, but this is a genuinely superhuman feat by a baby who was being fed on grubs and fruit by a family of apes.
A frequently ignored element of the books is the nearby African village, which is inhabited by classic stereotypes. The black people living there are cruel, superstitious, and stupid; many of the early stories are about how Tarzan gleefully torments and steals from the village, which he’s able to do because, well, he’s a white man, and they’re mere simple-minded negroes. This is treated as entirely natural and appropriate for an English lord to do. This feature is not in this current movie, but take a look at the portrayal of Africans in the old movies. You should cringe.
There are odious assumptions galore here. Burroughs wasn’t particularly original in his best-selling novel — the story used implicit prejudices common in Western culture at the time. For instance, take a look at the swamping argument of Fleeming Jenkin against evolution — doesn’t this sound very familiar?
Suppose a white man to have been wrecked on an island inhabited by negroes, and to have established himself in friendly relations with a powerful tribe, whose customs he has learnt. Suppose him to possess the physical strength, energy, and ability of a dominant white race, and let the food and climate of the island suit his constitution; grant him every advantage which we can conceive a white to possess over the native; concede that in the struggle for existence his chance of a long life will be much superior to that of the native chiefs; yet from all these admissions, there does not follow the conclusion that, after a limited or unlimited number of generations, the inhabitants of the island will be white. Our shipwrecked hero would probably become king; he would kill a great many blacks in the struggle for existence; he would have a great many wives and children, while many of his subjects would live and die as bachelors; an insurance company would accept his life at perhaps one-tenth of the premium which they would exact from the most favoured of the negroes. Our white’s qualities would certainly tend very much to preserve him to good old age, and yet he would not suffice in any number of generations to turn his subjects’ descendants white. It may be said that the white colour is not the cause of the superiority. True, but it may be used simply to bring before the senses the way in which qualities belonging to one individual in a large number must be gradually obliterated. In the first generation there will be some dozens of intelligent young mulattoes, much superior in average intelligence to the negroes. We might expect the throne for some generations to be occupied by a more or less yellow king; but can any one believe that the whole island will gradually acquire a white, or even a yellow population, or that the islanders would acquire the energy, courage, ingenuity, patience, self-control, endurance, in virtue of which qualities our hero killed so many of their ancestors, and begot so many children; those qualities, in fact, which the struggle for existence would select, if it could select anything?
Everyone took for granted the natural “physical strength, energy, and ability of a dominant white race”, and that it was only to be expected that “he would kill a great many blacks in the struggle for existence” and that he would rule over the inferior inhabitants of Africa. Burroughs took this presumption and combined it with a feral child story, and voila, Tarzan.
The new movie struggles to overcome the racist subtext of the story, but fails. It’s implicit. In this case, the writers have made some heroic black characters, and rather than robbing and tormenting the black tribes, White Skin has now arrived to save them from colonial marauders.
I shouldn’t have to spell out the problem with that.
Note also that — SPOILER ALERT, I’m about to tell you the end of the movie, but really, you should not care —
In this movie, Tarzan single-handedly prevents the invasion of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium, the Butcher of the Congo, to the cheers of the grateful black natives, who were mostly oblivious to the threat.
Jesus.
In real history, Belgian colonialism killed ten million people and maimed uncounted millions more — they casually lopped off a hand or a foot for minor offenses. You can read a contemporary account of the horrors of the Congo in Twain’s King Leopold’s Soliloquy (pdf). If only a lone self-taught English member of Parliament had been there!
So really, Hollywood, this is not a story that can be salvaged at all. It’s the product of a pre-WWII mentality in which eugenics seemed reasonable, most of the world was thought to be inhabited by sub-human races with limited intelligence, and the white man was the crown of creation who, if only justice were done, would rule over the brown and yellow people with a benevolence that they could not possibly appreciate. Set it aside. Find a story that isn’t tainted with casual bigotry, if you can.
Not that I expect anyone in Hollywood to see it. They advertised the movie with that poster, showing the lovely tall Aryan couple surrounded by gorillas, and don’t seem to have considered the optics of the image at all.
I agree with you in that the books are racist. But they still have intrinsic value. If nothing else, as an example past error and injustice.
In the same sense, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion have . Shall we spend $180 million (the budget for Legend of Tarzan) to make an educational and entertaining movie from them?
Sheesh, 100+ year old books about a child abandoned in a forest and raised by animals sure has problems with racism, huh, Tarzan and the Jungle Book?? Tell you what, it’s the 21st century, I’ll fix this. I’ll write a totally new story about a child abandoned in a jungle. The story will go that the child dies pretty much within a few days, and then the rest of the story focuses on some village, and I’ll turn the rest of the story over to Salman Rushdie or somebody.
No, nothing like that, as they are neither educational, nor entertaining. They should be left alone to speak for themselves. There is a real danger in forgetting who we once were.
I tried to think of ways you could radically re-jig the story to make it an interesting commentary on racism or challenge to it, rather than just the product of racist ideas. Not all that easy.
I mean, the whole Belgian colonial bit would have to go. Find something else for our Tarzan to do.
First I thought that we might be able to make some progress if we made Tarzan non-white. I remembered the internet hoo-ha about a possible Idris Elba James Bond and thought, why not here too? A black Tarzan would carry a very different message. He could still be an orphaned English child (if you wanted to keep it 19th century then probably not the son of an aristocrat – maybe of a merchant?), but event that might still convey the idea that there’s something intrinsic about Englishness that makes you better than other people, and so an English black person is necessarily more capable than an African black person. Also, having a black man living in the forests and talking to apes and other animals opens up the doors for some very unfortunate stereotyping.
Then I thought, what about making him an albino black person? That way the name “Tarzan” could be both accurate and ironic in the context, and we could have some clever commentary on race, appearance and expectations written into the story. The problem there is that some African cultures see albinos as magically gifted, and traditional medicine people sometimes have them killed for their body parts. The notion that our albino is preternaturally gifted might fit uncomfortably into those kinds of narratives.
I toyed with various mixed race groups of stranded people, making Tarzan an African native rather than a colonial import, moving it out of Africa and all kinds of alternatives. But I always came back to the fact that the whole appeal of the Tarzan story is in its colonial “darkest Africa” setting, and the implied social comparison between the aristocratic lineage and the wild man lifestyle. Without those it’s really not Tarzan at all.
So… yeah. There are plenty of better stories one could tell in a colonial African setting, and plenty of fish out of water stories that don’t rely on an outdated, imperialistic view of the world.
Or you could just stick with the gay porn parody of the film, where all he does is rescue some shipwrecked sailors and… you get the idea.
I just can’t believe they thought anybody would be interested in a Tarzan movie. These are dusty, old books which nobody reads anymore except perhaps people studying the history of racist stereotypes. It just seems that in its obsession with recycling old franchises people in Hollywood aren’t really sorting their recyclables. You’d think the poorly performing and received ‘lone ranger’ would have given them a clue.
They were extremely popular books, were fast-paced with exotic settings and wild animals. It is not surprising at all that somebody thought it would make a good movie (they’ve been thinking that for almost a hundred years). It’s just that once you pick one up and read it today, you ought to immediately hurl it across the room in disgust.
There’s scene in one of the later books, set in WW2, that I rather like. The setup is that Tarzan, as Lord Greystoke, is an RAF officer flying as an observer on a US bomber. The plane crashes on, IIRC, Borneo. At one point one of the Americans asks Tarzan how old he is and he tells the tale of saving the life of a witch doctor who thanked him by doing a ritual to make him immortal. Tarzan didn’t believe it, but went along to humor the man he’d saved. He is then asked when that was. The–apparently 30-something Tarzan–replies. About 50 years ago.
This was the very bestest Tarzan movie. Evaar.
They should have stopped there.
I suppose they *could* mine the “Doc” Savage canon for movies… Though I’d rather see a well done treatment of what George Lucas really wanted to make, the “Doc”Smith _Lensmen_ series.
Disney showed how you could do this, mainly by staying the hell away from any of the “noble savage” stuff and casual racism of the books/early movies and making it basically a fantasy movie set in some ambiguous jungle coastline (it’s Africa, but I can’t even remember them calling it Africa in the movie). Unfortunately, this was made by Warner Bros, so they couldn’t simply remake the animated version as a live-action film the way Disney is doing to their animated classics.
whheydt, a new Doc Savage movie is about to enter production. Dwayne Johnson will be playing the lead role. Sounds like they may be playing it for laughs.
http://variety.com/2016/film/news/dwayne-johnson-doc-savage-1201785289/
This had a Tarzan playing Doc Savage.
Beat that.
The only way to make a decent Tarzan movie is to jettison so much of the original material that it’s not really a Tarzan movie.
I wonder if the “jungle girl” genre is still salvageable. Ignoring the male gaze aspect, generally they go something like this:
1. An anthropologist/doctor/unspecified humanitarian raises his young (4-17) daughter in Africa.
2. Some evil group — poachers more often than hostile tribes — kills the humanitarian.
3. The nearby African village raises the future Jungle Girl.
4. She displays both a preternatural ability for fighting and survival — call it Batman-like determination and not white superiority in this day and age — and thanks to her father’s library at least a passing knowledge of European languages and culture.
5. Like most superheroes, the Jungle Girl rights wrongs on behalf of her home village, surrounding tribes, and wildlife in general.
There are variations, such as Princess Pantha, an American stuntwoman who took to jungle life like a duck takes to something a duck takes to, or the infamously omnipotent and vengeful Fantomah and her subsequent retcons by less disturbed authors. But, coming well after Tarzan — 1920s? to 1940s and beyond — they seem to have avoided the most egregiously racist elements.
But then, we all know Hollywood can’t make money on movies with a female lead.
@ PZ #7
I wouldn’t say immediately. I haven’t read the Tarzan books, but I have read another book from the era, though I can’t remember the title. It wasn’t too horrible for the first quarter of the book, until they English hunters killed a whole herd of elephants. They went on to find a “lost village” in Africa and it became even more racist than it already was. I should have thrown the book away at that point, if not before, but I wanted to finish it for the historic aspect.
It was a good book to finish, in that I don’t know that I’ll ever read another book by and English author written in the 1800s and set in Africa.
Much though I loved the film Greystoke in the early 1980s, I agree with your assessment of the Tarzan story as fatally flawed by its racist assumptions. What I think would be cool, though, is a version of the story starring a Babendzele hunter gather who has an affinity for the forest creatures, has lived with a group of apes, and now leads the elephants, gorillas, buffaloes etc in a battle against, say, a logging company or palm oil factory destroying the forest.
The problem is that this would be presented as “noble savage brings their simple wisdom to the western world that has forgotten it.”
I would love to see a twist on the story where a black baby is abandoned in the wilds of Mormon Utah. Named “Mark Caine” by the locals, because of his black skin, he grew strong in his rage at his tormentors, and fathered hundreds of children off of neglected sister wives. The story climaxes in hand to hand combat with Bloody Brigham Young, where Caine pulls Young’s magic underwear over his head and gives him the swirly of death in the Great Salt Lake. He then moves to Minnesota.
Chris Whitehouse #19
I’d read that.
fmitchell@15: Perhaps she could have a sidekick who is an upper middle class US-American or European of African descent who comes to the jungle to get in touch with his roots and learn the ways of nature (he’s a bit of a romantic environmentalist who has more love of nature than knowledge of nature.) Initially, he asks her to teach him her ways. She shrugs and says she’s the action type, not the didactic type and passes him on to the people of her village who actually are teachers and they gradually teach him the realities of nature. His arc is growing from the well meaning but clueless outsider here to admire nature and save the simple people to a knowledgeable and respectful ally in the fight against the forces that really are destroying nature and local culture. Occasionally, he gets into trouble and has to be saved by Jungle Girl. His shirt is usually ripped when that occurs and he’s, of course, wearing tight shorts because it’s hot in the jungle, displaying his well muscled body…oh, sorry, the female gaze thing got going there.
I don’t remember if I had The Rock specifically in mind when it was occurring to me, reflecting on the pulp novel or two I read as a teenager, that reimagining Doc Savage as a person of recent African descent would be pretty awesome. (Except, you know, the name x.x)
That’s…unfortunate with regard to stereotypes about black men. >.>
Youngish European descended female human ends up lost in the rain forest, taken in by an indigenous tribe. With long practice, she eventually becomes marginally competent at their life skills, and is able to make a few useful contributions with things she studied from a young age. It could be dramatic with the right writing…
That could actually be more dramatic with the right writing, since the “superhero” type story always has the risk of “superman phenomenon” where there is no drama because the hero can’t possibly ever be in any real danger. However, I don’t see why, apart from the risk of health issues from minor mutations that are not adapted to the local region, she shouldn’t become reasonably competent at their life skills, having been brought up there from a young age and had essentially as much practice at them as anyone.
dianne @23: That basically describes Crocodile Dundee’s backstory- raised by natives and shown to be as skilled in the wilderness as they are but never actually does anything that they can’t.
whheydt@10: I don’t know about that. Lensman is one of my favourite series, but it’s got its own problems. The Kinnisons and the Samms line are unapologetically Aryan, and it’s certainly not immune to accusations of sexism. Plus, the general rule that there can be no quarter asked or given, such that the heroes routinely slaughter Boskonians to the last man (with a few exceptions, but those are rare) is also somewhat problematic, though I suppose not out of place in many action movies. You could certainly go with colour blind casting without affecting the story, but you’d really want to try and create more female roles, and the whole “Clarissa is the first female Lensman” makes that somewhat tricky (unless you go the pure fanservice route and heavily feature Lyranians – but that is hardly an improvement).
The main problem is the sheer length. You could skip Triplanetary and First Lensman, I suppose, but you’d have to squeeze bits of it in later if you did. A miniseries would doubtless be a better format.
@ Chris Whitehouse #19
In the back of my head I have a story about a Kenyan expedition into darkest Sweden, in which they discover an isolated village where they worship an immortal black woman as a goddess.
I downloaded Twain’s pamphlet–19.6 MB? Here it is at the Internet Archive in a 2.1 MB pdf. And Here’s the much preferable DjVu format at 1.3.
While we’re on childhood literary idols, we mustn’t forget Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Crime of the Congo.
I’m a couple of years older than PZ but I did the same thing he did, reading all the Tarzan books (and Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series) with great interest and enjoyment. About five years ago I saw one somewhere and picked it up to leaf through it, hoping to revive some old memories. It was awful! Not only racist but just terrible writing. I was shocked that I had actually liked it when I was a kid. I guess that shows one of the main differences between pre-adults and grownups. Come to think of it, I went to church as a kid too . . .
Ironically, Tarzan would die sooner of skin cancer
I’d imagine theres some room for a Tarzan movie where Tarzan is a sort of Clouseau who unknowingly bumbles his way to some form of success. I’d imagine he’d be orange and not white and have a comb over.
Sounds like if they insist on making Tarzan movies, they should follow the common trend here and race-swap the protagonist. If they can change the story so easily, this is a case where it might actually benefit.
So simply make Tarzan an abandoned African child. Or if you MUST make him a non-African, then make him something other than white…there are thousands to choose from. Maybe born in India, or a lost Brazilian child, or even Egyptian for that matter. Simply leave white out of the equation completely. It’s his HERITAGE from lord to tribal that’s the crux of the character anyway…so make him from royalty anyway. (India looks more and more promising as an origin)
Call it “brownwashing” if you must, and you’ll still insult people as people WANT to be insulted by race and sex in movies, but as soon as race in introduced into any conversation someone will be offended so who cares, just do the right thing.
Someone mentioned The Jungle Book earlier, and I wanted to point out that it lacks most of these problems. The child in the forest is specifically native Indian, and there are no European characters in the novel at all. Even Disney grudgingly had him brown-skinned.
Now, if you want to accuse it of anthropocentrism — I’m not even sure about that, though. Mowgli is made fun of by all the other animals for being weaker in every way than they are. His sole saving grace is that he isn’t afraid of fire — that’s how he messes them up.
mamba@31: If you make Tarzan an African child you lose the “he’s different” aspect of the story. However, I like the idea of an Asian or South American child. India does make sense. That also takes care of the problem of explaining how he manages to avoid dying of chronic sun damage to his skin. Heck, you can also claim he’s got AS beta-globin to explain how he avoided dying of malaria as well if he’s from India.
You all have TOTALLY not mentioned “The Emerald Forest” …
Actually, maybe I’m over-thinking this.
Perhaps you could have the traditional Tarzan after all – English aristocrat’s son turned forest dweller – but instead of having him come out of the forest and use his forest-based skills to help an African agricultural village, have him encounter a tribe of forest-dwelling African hunter-gatherers and realise that they developed the same skills he did in that enviroment (probably to a greater degree, since they’ve been doing this a lot longer). Then have them help him to re-integrate into society (becoming a valued member of the tribe, but not effortlessly superior to the others on account of his whiteness). In a nice twist, have one of the tribe’s elders teach Tarzan English. Maybe introduce some tension in the form of Europeans – are they colonists? Soldiers? Turns out they’re just a scientific survey expedition a la Livingstone and Stanley – and end up with them trying to bring Tarzan back to “civilization” and him refusing. Or going back but hating it and soon returning to what he knows. Overall message, culture is something we’re raised with, not in our genes, accomplishments are not limited to one race or group, the traditional idea of the heroic saviour character, racist overtones or not, is overblown and silly. You can then load up on exotic landscapes, wild animals, nearly-naked muscular men, danger, action, suspense, nearly-naked muscular men and whatever else you want to your heart’s content.
Or just do the gay porn parody again. Someone needs to wave the flag for that.
There is a fascinating literary history of boys (yes, they are always boys) being orphaned and raised by animals. Generally they explore the question of how much our lives are shaped by a soul, or by our animal natures. One of the earlier novels was by Ibn Tufayl, and titled Hayy Ibn Yaqzan. Hayy Ibn Yaqzan experiences various human emotions, from love to grief, and the novel has him coming to the conclusion that there can be only a single deity. It was written sometime in the 12th century. The man raised by animals literary genre is also, in my opinion, linked to the Frankenstein Monster genre. Both are trying to explore the nature of mankind. Burroughs invoked a very racist version of this, missing much of the literary history, to create an adventure tale for boys.
Of course, Philip J. Farmer wrote a series including Tarzan (and Doc Savage) which portrayed native societies in a far more enlightened fashion (not perfect, but at least the natives were human), but those novels would probably have to be incredibly bowdlerized if they were filmed. Graphic depictions of bestiality and genital mutilation being something which can written about, but wouldn’t get filmed even with the abandonment of the Hays code.
Could a story of a white child (female or male) raised in a black community and becoming a savior of that community be filmed today without promoting racial stereotypes? I think it could, but the twist would have to be that the child doesn’t think they are any different than the community which raised them. The invaders (whether militarily, or commercial) would have to be shown as racist bigots who do not comprehend that the white child has understood and internalized that his black parents are human, even if the invaders don’t. (I hate that last sentence, I’m trying to convey the idea that the white child has never thought that his black parents are different than he is. A different skin color is not a difference. No soul-searching is necessary because it is an intrinsic part of their identity.) It would have to be carefully handled to ensure that the audience also sees the black people as human, and just as (or more) intelligent and thoughtful than the white child without invoking stereotypes. But I think it could be done.
Forget Tarzan, Go read “King Leopold’s Ghost”
https://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/dp/0618001905
Way better book about colonialism in Africa. In the Congo especially, the European’s made no pretense of being there as some sort of benevolent foreign benefactors. They were just there to exploit the land and people until they had wrung as much as they could out of each.
I mean, I joke about the gay porn parody, but I think there is a serious point to be made about the sexualisation of Tarzan in modern media, and what it says about cultural attitudes towards male sexuality and male nudity.
I mean, just look at that poster! The aesthetics of gay porn are just dripping off the central Tarzan character (slightly queasy metaphor very much intended). So much so that they have to put a woman right next to him to cool down audience gaydar, and even that doesn’t really do the trick. Tarzans of previous years were not nearly so overtly sexualised. They seem more to embody ideals of bodybuilding and outdoorsmanship taken from 1950s Americana for the most part, though very early 1920s-30s Tarzan films tend to give him a full leopard-skin Fred Flintstone type singlet thing to wear, rather than having him completely bare-chested. The length of the hair tends to change with the era too – long-haired Tarzans being a comparatively recent (post 80s) phenomenon. Beards are almost entirely absent, for whatever reason. Body hair almost always gone too (which, I suppose, can either sexualise or desexualise depending on the decade’s dominant attitudes to body hair display).
I’m not sure exactly what all this suggests, beyond a commentary on the semiotics of male nakedness over time. Does a sexy Tarzan add to or detract from the themes and aesthetics of the story? Is his glorious muscular physique yet another dazzling piece of natural beauty to set alongside the mighty trees and majestic birds and maginficent sunsets? Or does it make us think too much in terms of lust and sexuality and thus distract from themes of survival, culture and the place of man within nature? Does it take the edge off him and make us see him as lovable and human and part of our world, rather than a rampaging, scary, violent creature?
Ironically, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was a rip-off of an earlier propaganda book aimed at freemasons. No originality here.
Factoid; the idea of “boy adopted by apes” comes from Southern Africa, sometime around the turn of the Century.
A Swede had joined the British army (and changed his name to an E nglish name). He Heard of a small boy that had survived in the wild by being adopted by apes. h e wrote about the incient in a book covering his adventures, and Mr. Burroughs totally stole the idea.
Flex, #36
There is a story in Herodotus (mid 5th century BC) of a Pharaoh of Egypt who wanted to find out how children develop language and what the earliest and most primal human language is. So he has two boys locked away from all human contact, fed by a shepherd instructed never to speak to them, and waits to see what the first words they say are. In the end they ask for bread using the Phrygian word (bekos, probably cognate with our “bake”), and from this the Pharaoh concludes that Phrygian must be the world’s primal language, not Egyptian.
More famous, of course, is the story of Romulus and Remus, who were raised by a she-wolf. The fascination with the fundaments of human culture runs very deep.
Is it true or apocryphal that King James tried to reproduce the experiment (and the infant(s) sadly and unsurprisingly died)?
It’s funny, I never really got into tarzan as a kid(no particular reason, never read the books or watched the shows). It just seemed lame. Now as an adult I see the poster(call me superficial but I quite shamelessly read most books by their covers) and my first thoughts are “two generic white people in what is clearly africa, that god damn name, not a black person to be seen, and just something about the whole vibe. I couldn’t articulate it but it jumped out. Not wasting my time.
Another variation, like cartomancer’s… An African, transported to a hostile land where the savage inhabitants openly display their weaknesses in morality and wisdom. Our hero demonstrates his natural superiority in those most admirable traits, uses them to survive and excel and lives happily ever after in that abominable land.
And his name was Frederick Douglass.
Are you saying your childhood is ruined?
Thinking about it, why even set it in Africa at all? Burroughs used Africa because he thought Apes were there, and because it was an exotic locale. You could keep many of the details of Tarzan – orphaned young, raised by apes, etc – by setting it on a fictional “Ape Island” or the like, sort of like how King Kong is going to include “Skull Island”.
cartomancer @ 38
Are you aware that people other than gay men look at, admire, and sexually desire masculine people?
In recent years Captain America and Thor were fawned over by the camera; their bodies, their eyes, their straining arms destroying the laws of physics were all shown in loving detail. Jason Momoa as Khal Drogo was eternally shirtless on Game of Thrones (and I believe once entirely nude from the back), but he gets a similar public swoon as Aquaman, covered head to toe in armor. It seemed like Tom Hiddleston wearing nothing but a strategically placed magazine on High Rise was the internet’s favorite picture for at least a few days there.
The majority of fans of erotic masculine spectacles in the media aren’t men, gay or otherwise. The male gaze (whether straight or not) is not the only one in existence. Catering to a broader spectrum of the audience, going beyond straight male power fantasies and utilizing the potential sex appeal of male actors as well, is quite often lucrative. People other than straight men were very much aware of Tarzan’s sex appeal in the past, but their opinions weren’t being taken into account during film-making. Perhaps we as a society are becoming more comfortable recognizing the erotic appeal of men, but mostly I’d wager this is about the money to be made by opening up to roughly 50% of the movie-going public.
From your description, it sounds like H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, written in 1885. Yes, these suffer the same cultural racism as the Tarzan. Great White Hunter tames or kills the wildlife, awing the natives with his pure, white, goodness and with his technology.
Interestingly, however, the 1950 movie, starring Steward Granger, did show some of the natives with dignity and some respect. Another movie, She, made in 1965 and based on the Haggard book, is incredibly racist, along the same line as the book.
PZ, I think you are more optimistic than I am:
I think they did understand it and also understand that this is the year of Trump. There is enough racism floating around to make this type of movie profitable. This is a story about white males being at the top of society. Seems to be in line with the “Make America Great Again” rhetoric.
Mellow Monkey. #46
I am vaguely aware that other sexualities exist, yes. But I don’t know very much about those. Particularly not female sexualities, since I don’t really know anyone of the female persuasion apart from my mother, and I try not to think about my parents in that capacity. I would no doubt betray this blind spot if I strayed too far from talking about what I know.
Flex, @ 36
There is a series of Swedish graphic novels and young adult novels that would somewhat fit the plot you mentions last in your comment. The series is called “Johan Vilde” and is about a young ship boy on a Swedish merchant ship in the middle of the 17th century. He escapes the ship and is adopted into an African family in what was then Cabo Corso (situated in today’s Ghana).
The books and comics are from the 1970s and 80s and it was a long time ago I read them, but as I remember it, the ships boy (who was badly treated onboard) finds a loving new family who are pictured as real people, and soon adapts to his new life. The books tackles the slave trade, and Sweden’s part in it, as the ship boy and his African family are ravaged by it. He is not portrayed as their savior as I recall it, but they are toghether trying to fight these forces. They do take advantage of the fact his white skin can make him fit in, in certain situations, but they plan and fight together. He as often simply does their bidding, as coming up with his own ideas. At one time, when they are captured by slavers, the Swedes doesn’t recognize him as a white person, but thinks he’s an African with albinism. He gains useful information, used in their escape, by playing into their prejudices and pretending to be an “illiterate savage”. If someone sees him reading imortant documents, he only turns it upside down, and they think it’s hilarious the “savage tries to mimic reading”. The situation is played out not as him being the only one capable of getting them out of the situation, but simply that the Swedes thinks he’s “a freak” and so are letting him move around relatively freely at the slave fort on the premise that he’s odd, entertaining and stupid.
The series might still have flaws and failings, or problematic aspects. As I said it was such a long time ago I read it, I don’t remember all details, and so I certainly can’t promise it doesn’t, but it obviously was on the Africans’ side, tried to honestly show Sweden’s involment in this horrible part of history, did not make the only white protagonist into the Africans’ savior (if anything, they saved him, and he failed anyway in that case, because the story is told from a Swedish prison cell with Johan as an old man, awaiting execution) and tried to depict their culture with respect.
My local library carried these and I read them several times. As a teenager, I had never seen a graphic novel quite like that. In Sweden, the most of Africa you saw in comic books back then was The Phantom in his skull cave, and stuff like that. I don’t know if there is a translated version of it.
Pages 10 and 11 are missing from this scan of the Soliloquy. However, another copy that has those pages is available here: https://archive.org/details/kingleopoldssol00twaigoog .
Stop making Tarzan movies, please
They’ll stop making them when people stop paying to see them.
sounds even WORSE than racism. Not just denigrating the indigenous people, calling them weak and unintelligent, it also has the single British expatriot able to single-handedly defeat the Belgian invading army (who I’ll bet were heavily armed with range weapons). Not just racist but quite nationalistic. The British superiority was a genetic effect and not simply nurture (re nature v nurture).
ugh
sheesh at first, reading this disrecommendation, I was hoping the story was initially trying to be a Swift satire. Deliberately taking racism to absurd extremes. babyTarzan finding a couple random books and with no guidance teaches himself to read and write while all the people around him are ignorant savages, personified as gorillas. ack ack ack then I came to my senses.
gee I wonder why producers would be motivated to make such a racist piece of crap, nobody would go see such crap in our post-racism days… oh wait ugh
@Rob Grigjanis @ 52 – good news on that front:
“The attempt to relaunch Edgar Rice Burroughs’ pulp novels about a man raised by apes has floundered domestically, weighed down by its $185 million price tag. The film’s global total now stands at $260.5 million. That’s a respectable gross, but a film of this size needs to do upwards of $400 million to be considered a success, let alone trigger a sequel, which is basically the point of greenlighting a movie with that kind of budget.”
http://variety.com/2016/film/box-office/legend-of-tarzan-foreign-box-office-1201821861/
@Mellow Monkey @46 – but but, men are more visual than women! It’s SCIENCE that men care more about how women look, that’s just how their brains work due to EVOLUTION!
Seriously, anyone who looks at a tag for Chris Evans on Tumblr for more than 2 minutes can tell you women are just as invested in visuals as men. Men who run media are uncomfortable acknowledging that since they’re used to being catered to by the camera’s gaze but it’s still true.
@cartomancer, if by any chance you happen to have ever watched and been amused by the TV series Due South may I respectfully recommend Speranza’s fics, available on AO3 (I’m no longer in the fandom, but still occasionally re-read some of her work; like all fanfic they are of course predicated to some extent on familiarity with the characters).
With apologies both for the derail and the possibly importunate impudence.
@fmitchell #15: That has unfortunate connotations that problems are native, solutions are colonial. You’d have to add in some later piece where the girl gets back to wherever she came from only to realize that she hasn’t left behind many of the problems that she was solving in her village. The solutions in this case may be inspired by the things she saw in the village.
Something about the Tarzan story resonates deeply within US culture.
I think it involves the combination of a white man raised in a wilderness environment who proves himself superior to both the other whites and everything in the wilderness – a cultural megalomania closely matched to the colonial mythos. microraptor @ # 24 mentioned the parallels with the Crocodile Dundee movies; perhaps moving the backstory to someplace exotic (Africa, Australia) feels necessary to veil the American chauvinism just enough to dodge the question of why all of us can’t do those things.
Those above who mention the similarities with Doc Savage may (or may not) want to track down Philip José Farmer’s A Feast Unknown, in which we learn (among many other hidden secrets) that Tarzan and Doc are half brothers (both sons of Jack the Ripper IIRC) and aspiring agents/leaders of the Illuminati, whose homoerotic struggles leave a trail of mangled corpses across several continents that would be the envy of any modern psychoterrorist (do not expect to enjoy this if you lack a pathological sense of humor). Farmer wrote several re-visions of the Tarzan mythos, but none of the others comes close to the sex’n’violence of this one.
It’s not just racist! It’s a trifecta:
Racist
Sexist
Classist
You can win across the row if your card is the right one!
Because Greystoke is a LORD that makes him extra good. And of course he’s white. And is male.
I read the Tarzan books as a kid (preferred John Carter..) and even then I couldn’t miss the classism inherent in the “blood will tell” way Greystoke comes back to England and immediately drops right into cultured urbanity. I’m sure that Burroughs thought lordliness was in the blood, but what he was really showing is that nobility is usually just a matter of money and the clothes and servants money can bring. I doubt Burroughs realized that his core argument was that you could take an ape and turn them into an English lord remarkably quickly and easily. Well, that is true.
Cartomancer #40 – I have read the Herodotus story before, but as I’m in the middle of studying medieval Arabic literature (for my own amusement, I’m no historian or literary professor), Ibn Tufayl’s novel was the first one to spring to my mind. BTW, it’s a dull book. I thought Robinson Crusoe was dull with all his religious moralizing (most versions appear to be edited), but Hayy Ibn Yaqzan reads more like religious apologetics than like a novel (not surprisingly, that’s what it really is).
Maria #50 – Noted. I’ll look for them. Oddly enough, while there is some casual racism in early nineteenth century boy’s adventure novels, they are not as explicitly racist as the period after eugenics started to capture the public’s attention. I really enjoy Marryat’s novels, and while the racism is there, it is not as overt as in novels from the 1880 to 1940.
re Mellow Monkey
seems to me that the recent occurrences of “female gaze” (ie providing under-dressed male bodies) is a crude attempt by male producers to compensate for the “male gaze” with which they saturated movies previously.
Being such a Dianna Rigg fan (Rigger?) I always amused at her character name of Emma Peel which was a obvious referral to “M(ale) appeal” [to illustrate how long ‘male gaze’ has been a trope]
It’s possible to defend the continued study of Kipling based on literary merit – acknowledging his obvious racism, of course. It’s both quality writing and an insight into the zeitgeist of the colonial era. We can learn from it.
Burroughs? Eh, maybe it’s worth a read to study pacing and exciting action scenes, but really there are a thousand books that are just as good without the antiquated representations.
Not suggesting that the books are burned, obviously, but it’s another thing altogether to spend $100 million promoting those horrible old stories to a new generation in movie format.
My grandson grew up loving Disney’s Jungle Book. He told me this summer that he had picked up the original book, but couldn’t stand it because it was so racist and misogynistic. I was proud to hear this from a 17 year old boy and thought that my daughter is doing a good job of teaching him about these concepts. I know that the Texas schools aren’t doing it.
Tarzan and other popular works from back then can’t help being what they are. Just enjoy the action, ignore the incredible reliance on coincedence, pretend the scientifically ridiculous elements make sense and relax. Social injustice – well, that’s how it was and you can’t change that history.
Now how these works translate in new versions for a modern audience is a whole nother problem, but then again, its not as if they don’t come with a reputation. The characters have a back story and if you mutilate it enough to make it ‘acceptable’ to all then the character isn’t really the same. See the serial retconning of the DC universe – no one knows now what the history of any of the characters really is because all have bben repeatedly changed.
@58 Pierce R. Butler
I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said, but another huge part of its continued existence was its insane popularity among young Boomers. There are so many fucking boomers and their childhood fancies – Cowboys and Indians, Zorro, Tarzan, the Lone Ranger…have been mythologized. Those are the people that run the studios now.
Part of it is that the story has appeal; a whole bunch of it the nostalgia and familiarity power brokers have. This is another excellent example of why diversity for diversity’s sake has merit – a studio run by women and/or non-white folks (or even just including a healthy mixture in decision making positions) would not have the same fetish for those antiquated old white dude fantasy stories.
Zorro is still pretty cool, though…
re Fleeming Jenkin against evolution:
Stereotypically for such an argument, the genetics are also completely wrong. White skin is a genetically dominant characteristic? That a single white skin person amongst a population of darker skins, will after a few generations, turn the population skin color much lighter?
I guess that follows teleological thought, with white skin beaing an aspect of the peak of evolution, and evolution works to achieve the peak, then the least little speck of that aspect will lead the population in the direction of the peak. blecchh.
Our local perennial Congressional Candidate–Art Robinson–is a big fanboy of G.A. Henry, a classic racist.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2012/9/18/115343/926/Front_Page/Slavery_wasn_t_so_bad_says_book_published_by_OR_Republican_Party_Chair
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/terry-krepel/the-question-to-ask-about_b_774457.html
Henty, not Henry. Damn you autocorrect.
(Indirectly Re: martin50 (#51):)
The Soliloquy certainly was a worthwhile read for me and an interesting way to look at a bit of history I had hitherto been unaware of.* I’d recommend it to anyone who skipped over it. In the course of his self-justification, Twain has Leopold read and quote all manner of contemporary sources describing the horrors of his rule over the Congo. It is not a pleasant topic to read about but interesting nonetheless. Do read the ‘supplementary materials’ at the end as well.
Finally, the linked PDF linked by PZ is complete, but the first few pages (ca. 11-16) are not in the correct order, so you have to mind the page numbers when reading through it.
*No history class could possibly accomodate all the atrocities humans have inflicted on one another, it seems.
Glenn Kenny, writing at Roger Ebert’s site, was not too impressed: “Sometimes you have to wonder how certain movies get made. I have no special knowledge of the production of ‘The Legend of Tarzan.’ But I have to imagine that the movie spent such a long time in the development process that no one involved found a moment to look outside the Hollywood bubble and surmise that maybe right now in America isn’t the most opportune time to reboot a pop culture myth involving a quasi-superhero white guy who has dominion over the animals and certain peoples of Africa.”
And the LA Times had a fairly scathing article, Can you make a non-racist Tarzan movie?:
Well, to fuel the fire “can a non-racist Tarzan be told” discussion, I think Pat Murphy came close with Wild Angel, a deliberate and intentional pastish of the Tarzan story about an orphaned girl raised by wolves during the California Gold rush. It was deliberately meant to mirror the plot of Tarzan.
As a companion piece Pat Murphy also wrote a very charming Space Opera hard-science fiction retelling of The Hobbit called “There and Back Again”.
Ah, true, if we assume she was brought up from a young age. I was envisioning more like teen or college-age.
And it might be ultimately responsible for AIDS an a global pandemic. The native population had to resort to hunting apes. Compared with a drastic increase in prostitution (and let’s face it, white men raping black women), a virus could spread far and wide.
cartomancer
Really?
It’s not like straight women are some rare creatures. You being a gay guy does not excuse your erasure.
Wow! 72 comments. #4 Agree Mr. Powers.
Man of the comet (Clemens reference). How could Twain have lived in his time and be so rational.
Any comment on Mad Magazine’s lampoon of Tarzan? I think the racial aspect was ignored.
#19 Splendid plot Mr. Whitehouse.
“King Solomons’ Mines” (splendid title!), well worth seeing for the wild life photography alone.
If you’d asked me, I could have saved you the trouble. ;-)
But sometimes you have to watch a film just to be able to say, “What the fuck were they thinking?”
Even setting aside the problems with the Burroughs origin, it was a bad film. Who climbs a big outcrop of rock only to jump off a cliff into a big tree? Just go around and climb the damn tree. Who boards a train by swinging through the jungle for hundreds of yards, when you’ve stated that the train will be travelling at 40mph? You can’t speed up each swing except by climbing higher. And who can kick a man straight through the side of railway carriage? Bodies squish; timber just creaks a little. Gah.
I can accept the revisionism which makes the basis of the film mostly less racist than the novels, and I can accept the big heroic aim of defeating the bad guy almost unaided, and I can just about grit my teeth and bear the ahistorical role allocated to Samuel L Jackson because the writer and director must have felt the film required a well-known black actor to offset the ‘deepest, darkest Africa with painted and tattoed savages’ vibe, but if, on top of all that, they can’t even manage simple suspension of disbelief then the film deserves to fail by almost any standard.
Hopefully it will stand as a warning to the future, that the Tarzan lode has long since been mined clean, that society has moved on, and that Hollywood should try a bit harder to think up new ideas.
doubtthat @ # 65: … a studio run by women and/or non-white folks (or even just including a healthy mixture in decision making positions) would not have the same fetish for those antiquated old white dude fantasy stories.
Pls let me know if such a studio ever exists.
Zorro is still pretty cool, though…
As a kid, I found that one particularly unbelievable. Sure, Bruce Wayne could park his Batmobile in the cave where nobody would see it – but how could Don Diego keep his identity secret when riding around on a superhorse that everyone in the area would spot and recognize?
I gather the Z movie made a decade or so back flopped.
fmitchell @25:
Someone had a very similar idea back in 1994. https://youtu.be/4_uMDQBJ7k8
@Pierce R Butler
Well, after plowing into Don Diego’s fields, the super-horse used its heat vision to cut up its rocket’s heat shielding, then used that to make blinders. With those on, no one could see the similarity at all.
I do not agree at all with this article. I come from hispanic background, one of the groups that have been attacked constantly by racist and xenophobic comments and attitudes. Yet, I think it is ridiculous to pretend to erase our history and the events that took place. It is called reality and if anything, we must learn from it so that we do not repeat it, not look to the other side and pretend it never happened. Writers like Burroughs, Howard, Lovecraft, Salgari, London, Verne and many others, never even set foot in the places they so eloquently describe, they didn´t know the peoples, the animals, etc., they just wrote from their hearts and drew from their limited knowledge and education. One has to read those works with a higher perspective and enjoy the entertainment. We must not look for everything to be politically correct! It is like a dictatorship of the correctness that doesn´t even allow people to free think, free express and free live! I saw the movie, and I spent good two some hours enjoying it.
I also disagree with one part of PZ’s assessment. I think he was far too generous:
<sarcasm> Those aren’t gorillas. Those are fawning H’wood executives… and paparazzi. It’s actually a recreation of an E! Green Room scene. </sarcasm> The less said about what H’wood marketing dorks think will be successful marketing/advertising material, the better… because the vast majority of them (or at least of the art directors, as distinct from the artists) would be more comfortable meeting Lord Greystoke at a cocktail party, and frankly more likely to do so.
@79
It’s possible to recognize the racism in the past without actively perpetuating those shitty narratives. We can, for example, appreciate the racist minstrelsy of Al Jolson, without having Al Jolson revival concerts.
Appreciate in the “understand” sense, not in the “celebrate” sense.
I can’t get into fiction like Tarzan. Give me something more believable, like the Hardy Boys, two young teens with a car and a boat and who are OK with girls “in their place,” (as I once saw mentioned on the back of one of the books).
José Luis Rojas @79:
The problem isn’t the books themselves–they can be read on their own merit (and demerit) and assessed accordingly, with an eye to the author’s culture. In that way, they serve a purpose, and can even entertain despite the problems.*
But adapting them into a movie is a conscious decision to actually perpetuate those same horrible cultural memes. That is problematic, and will continue to be so. Also, please take the phrase ‘politically correct’ out behind the woodshed and put a bullet in the back of its head. It’s a deliberate attempt to accuse your opponents of dishonesty, without having the guts to do so. We’re not seeking ‘political’ correctness, here; we’re seeking factual correctness–as in, a correct portrayal of the world as it would’ve been at that time and place. And the Tarzan movies can’t provide that, for the very reason you yourself acknowledge–the writers had no knowledge of their subject matter.
*: A few years ago, I picked up some reprints of The Mystery of Fu Manchu (the first in that series) with that very intent. The racism and Orientalism was, of course, as horrific as you’d expect, but having been braced for that, I was kind of impressed by the portrayal of Karamenah, the love interest. She’s not some helpless waif waiting to be rescued. Rather, she’s a subversive in Fu Manchu’s organization, who joined because her brother had been captured and was being held hostage, and her actions in the novel are based entirely on achieving her own agenda. At multiple points in the book, she rescues the two heroes from their own bumbling (often calling them out on their foolishness). I wouldn’t call her portrayal quite feminist, especially by modern standards, but it was actually very easy to accept her as an equal member of the cast.
I, too, grew up with the books, and I have never seen a Tarzan movie worth watching. I usually switch off, swearing, when Tarzan swings on a vine just like it was a free-hanging rope, especially when it’s obviously a rope with a few leaves stuck in.
Another problem with the movies is that Burroughs made up a whole new species of apes, which he called “anthropoid apes”. They were roughly human size. They were not gorillas – gorillas were the bad, killer apes. (Chimps were nowhere.) So a movie has to do some fierce special effects, and justify the species. This movie could have CGI-ed some anthrpoid apes, but it appears to have done gorillas, instead.
I was going to say that at least all the book villains are white, but I realized that’s because the black folks in the books weren’t smart enough to be more than mooks. The racism really reeks. Even the best of the natives, the Waziri, are faithful companions.
Leaving all the racism out, it just looked like a poorly-done movie. With the racism, I can certainly do without it.
“george of the jungle” at least has right attitude it is joke and best played for laughs
the movie is available on you tube but I hesitate to post a link.
uncle frogy
unclefrogy #86
Thanks.
I ♥ George of the Jungle.
Thanks for the review PZ. I’ll take a pass. “Mighty Whitey” movies haven’t appealed to me since I was 14.
As an anti-Tarzan the original “Kim” by Kipling is pretty fair. Kim is a child of poverty abandoned by European culture. Instead he is he is loved and cared for by intelligent and compassionate Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims. When the Regiment steals him away to be educated for a role in espionage that education is funded by Lama whose chela Kim has been.
When he begins his spying career his co-workers are Indians as is his boss (Hurree Chunder Mookherjee). At the end Kim discards the title of “Sahib” (lord) preferring instead to be considered a chela (student)
It is a complex story which admittedly is an apologetic for the Raj but makes no bones about the arrogance of that rule. The important take-away for me is that Kim’s superiority comes from his multicultural background, not any inherent property of his ancestry
Just had that same experience today, with a different book. Travels With Korilu, (it’s in Dutch, but that’s what it translates as) by Thea Beckman, a famous Dutch children’s books writer.
It’s about a Dutch teen, who is tempted by Korilu, some sort of gnome, to travel the world. That bit of the story is fine enough, but every time this lily-white teen encounters people with a darker skin, it’s white men’s burden all over.
I just put it in the trash.
Damn PZ… And right after spending a day at the dentists’… You surely are a masochist!
Menyambal – try Tarzan’s New York Adventure, its a very different look at the character.