Article archive / August 1, 2016
Originally published: . Volume 7, No. 8. Source pages: 14.
The Legend of Tarzan: A Review
As a youngster I enjoyed the Tarzan films starring Johnnie Weissmuller, the Olympic medalist who played him in a series. I also read many of the literary accounts by Edgar Rice Burroughs, who authored the Tarzan book series beginning in 1912 with Tarzan of the Apes and continuing into the 1940s. The Tarzan story has been retold in many formats, testifying to its psychological resonance, so I was eager to see its most recent iteration in this year’s film.
To provide a context for thinking about the story and the film, I re-read the first two Burroughs’ Tarzan books, Tarzan of the Apes and The Return of Tarzan. In these stories, Burroughs taps the psychological concerns around adoption and belonging, concerns about which children and adults brood. These themes arise in the ugly duckling genre from Kipling’s Jungle Book to Rowling’s Harry Potter.
In Tarzan, Burroughs finds a particularly complex case. Tarzan loves his adoptive mother, an ape. He thinks she is beautiful and finds his own human features repellant. He acquires the red in tooth and claw morality of the jungle and he sees the sadism motivating much human behavior as perverse. He has deep doubts about his capacity to be in a relationship with Jane despite his sexual attraction to her when they meet. Jane, too, is conflicted. She is drawn to Tarzan, a hyper-masculine savior, but also to an English nobleman whom the reader, but not the protagonists, know is Tarzan’s younger brother. In the Tarzan books, we see both Tarzan and Jane struggling with these conflicts. In a surprising turn, Tarzan learns that he is the older brother of his rival, and an English peer by heritage. He first decides to conceal this information supporting Jane’s decision to marry his brother, only, in a second surprising turn, to risk marriage with Jane, though it means abandoning the jungle existence that he feels native to.
The film alludes to these complexities, and, highlights some of Burroughs’ Tarzan’s reservations about the benefits of civilization. The movie invents a later involvement of Tarzan in the resistance to Belgian monarch Leopold II raping his Congo colony of its resources, both material and human.
Unfortunately this issue becomes the dramatic focus of the film at the expense of further exploration of the complications of Tarzan’s and Jane’s relationship, which becomes completely unambivalent.
To flesh out the political conflict, new characters are introduced, the king and his minions, and a Black American diplomat, George Washington Williams, who provides comic relief, but in a way that further distracts us from the protagonists and jars with the Victorian times in which the film is placed.
The film also draws our attention to Mbongo, an African chieftain whose son Tarzan slew in the back-story, and who must deal with his thirst for revenge for that slaying and his conflicting need to join in the fight against the Belgians.
The movie further glosses over Tarzan and Jane’s conflicts by ending in their kumbaya decision to raise their new-born son in the jungle, providing the ape man ready opportunity for treetop acrobatics and feral companionship.
Although I was much impressed with the cinematic artistry with which the jungle and its inhabitants are captured by the film and by the opportunity to reflect further on the problems of a continent emerging from colonization, I thought more was lost than gained in this latest wrinkle in the legend of Tarzan.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.