Tomgram: Adam Hochschild, Letting Tarzan Swing Through History
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Even TD knows when it’s beat. Thursday is clearly a media day reserved for pure Trumpery. There’s no point in fighting it, so this site is taking it off. The next post will be on Sunday, July 24th. Tom]
At almost 72, I recently went to The Legend of Tarzan, the IMAX version, with a screen so big I almost stepped inside it and a soundscape so all-enveloping that my already pathetic hearing might have been blown away for good. Still, however “immersive” the experience was meant to be, I found it so much less thrilling than the 3-D of my childhood. I’ll never forget watching Fort Ti in 1953 at age nine and hitting the floor the moment the first flaming arrow headed directly for me.
As for Tarzan, what were they thinking in Hollywood? I watched bemused as the Ape Man flexed his creaking joints, swung from vine to vine, and fought all manner of friend and foe in an effort to be up-to-date. If you want to see a white savior film that’s more of our moment, check out The Free State of Jones, set in the “jungles” of southern Mississippi in the Civil War era, with plenty of Tarzan-style vines to go around. All I can say is that, as far as I was concerned, only the animated great apes — Tarzan’s buddies and rivals — showed a spark of real life.
Still, I wouldn’t have missed the film for the world. After all, it’s the first action movie that — as you’ll see from TomDispatch regularAdam Hochschild’s piece today — has ever based itself in any way on a book I edited, in this case his classic King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. As a result, I left the theater filled with wild fantasies. (Even editors can dream, can’t they?) I began to imagine Who Rules the World?, Noam Chomsky’slatest book, absorbed into a future X-Men: Apocalypse America. Or the late Chalmers Johnson’s Dismantling the Empire as the basis for the next Jason Bourne romp. Or Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers at the grim heart of American Sniper: The Next Generation. Or, in Tarzan-style, Andrew Bacevich’s writing on America’s twenty-first-century Middle Eastern wars as part of a reboot of Lawrence of Arabia— perhaps King David of Iraq: The Surge to Nowhere.
Now, let me dream on while you read about Adam Hochschild’s encounter with what might be thought of as the latest version ofPlanet of the Apes. Tom
Me Tarzan, You Adam
How I Met the Ghosts of My Own Work in a Local Multiplex
By Adam HochschildSome time ago I wrote a book about one of the great crimes of the last 150 years: the conquest and exploitation of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium. When King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa was published, I thought I had found all the major characters in that brutal patch of history. But a few weeks ago I realized that I had left one out: Tarzan.
Let me explain. Although a documentary film based on my book did appear, I often imagined what Hollywood might do with such a story. It would, of course, have featured the avaricious King Leopold, who imposed a slave labor system on his colony to extract its vast wealth in ivory and wild rubber, with millions dying in the process. And it would surely have included the remarkable array of heroic figures who resisted or exposed his misdeeds. Among them were African rebel leaders like Chief Mulume Niama, who fought to the death trying to preserve the independence of his Sanga people; an Irishman, Roger Casement, whose exposure to the Congo made him realize that his own country was an exploited colony and who was later hanged by the British; two black Americans who courageously managed to get information to the outside world; and the Nigerian-born Hezekiah Andrew Shanu, a small businessman who secretly leaked documents to a British journalist and was hounded to death for doing so. Into the middle of this horror show, traveling up the Congo River as a steamboat officer in training, came a young seaman profoundly shocked by what he saw. When he finally got his impressions onto the page, he would produce the most widely read short novel in English, Heart of Darkness.
How could all of this not make a great film?
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