Originally posted at TomDispatch.
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
regular Adam 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’s latest
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 of Planet of the Apes.
~ Tom
Me Tarzan, You Adam
How I Met the Ghosts of My Own Work in a Local Multiplex
By Adam Hochschild
Some 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…