Reading Tarzan, part one
by zunguzungu
I am working my way through Tarzan, and so, a propos of the whole “don’t you want to be an indian boy” business in Avatar (a movie I predict we will all have forgotten about before too long), I offer you the following passage from the “White Ape” chapter:
As Tarzan grew he made more rapid strides, so that by the time he was ten years old he was an excellent climber, and on the ground could do many wonderful things which were beyond the powers of his little brothers and sisters.
In many ways did he differ from them, and they often marveled at his superior cunning, but in strength and size he was deficient; for at ten the great anthropoids were fully grown, some of them towering over six feet in height, while little Tarzan was still but a half-grown boy.
Yet such a boy!
From early childhood he had used his hands to swing from branch to branch after the manner of his giant mother, and as he grew older he spent hour upon hour daily speeding through the tree tops with his brothers and sisters.
He could spring twenty feet across space at the dizzy heights of the forest top, and grasp with unerring precision, and without apparent jar, a limb waving wildly in the path of an approaching tornado.
He could drop twenty feet at a stretch from limb to limb in rapid descent to the ground, or he could gain the utmost pinnacle of the loftiest tropical giant with the ease and swiftness of a squirrel.
Though but ten years old he was fully as strong as the average man of thirty, and far more agile than the most practiced athlete ever becomes. And day by day his strength was increasing.
His life among these fierce apes had been happy; for his recollection held no other life, nor did he know that there existed within the universe aught else than his little forest and the wild jungle animals with which he was familiar.
As has been widely observed, Avatar is a mishmash of all sorts of things, and one of them is certainly Tarzan (why on earth else would it have been so important that Jake Sully learn how to quasi-fly through the jungle canopy?). But observe some of the differences between these accounts of man-animal hybridity, the difference between a time when devolution and atavistic reversion was something that our fear was to make titillating for us, exciting, and the present when we are expected to be warmly receptive to the idea of shedding the discontents of civilization. And while Tarzan will eventually be expected to grow up, his empty-headed happiness only transitory, Cameron embeds his kung-fu training montage within a desire to never have to grow up at all.
zunguzungu 
I couldn’t remember the title of this book, but all the keywords I tried sent Google to this post, Seal’s place or the Valve, so we must be doing something right (or wrong). Anyway, I was looking for that book because it points out just how quaint the Tarzan mythos actually is, which dovetails nicely with the criticisms of Avatar. What I mean is — sorry, my head’s not made of words at the moment, been watching Mad Men all morning — the white fantasy at play in the film is so utterly tame as to be the worst form of escapism: the kind you watch and either 1) forget about it (at least until its next pop cultural iteration) or 2) sit about in your backyard while sipping sweet tea and watching your 2.5 children cavort on their new swing set.
Ahem, like I said, problems with words. That should read: “sit thinking about,” &c.
Yes, yes, yes! Which is one of those things about Avatar that ticks me off the most; people talk about it as an “immersive” experience, but just don’t get that; while watching a noir, a romcom, a thriller, a farce, etc, will each place your mind in a particular head-state when you exit the theatre, and cinematographers have developed particular modes of visuality to provoke those particular states (such that you can tell what genre of movie you’re watching in about a minute, if you look at how the mise en scene is constructed, color schemes, film stock, camera angles, etc), Avatar’s visuality was just blandly “realistic,” or at most, the cover of a Yes or Genesis album. There just wasn’t any there there; the technology was impressive but all it was used to do was channel technology, rather than any particualr ethos or effect. Others disagree with me on this point, but I really think that if you forget that it’s animation and look at it alongside any other movie, you’ll really be struck by what a dull looking film it is (a formal complement to what you said).
I’m beginning to think that Tarzan might be just the thing to fill the Conan-shaped hole in my literary life; it sounds like these guys have a few symptoms in common. On that note, the distinction you have drawn here between the modernist fear of devolution and the contemporary vogue for fantasies of redemptive nature (as seen in Avatar, 2012, Pandorum, Wall-E, Battlestar Galactica, etc.) seems like the right way to talk about the original Conan stories. Howard’s flat refusal of civilization (usually as a hypocritical repetition of the crimes it constituitively excludes) leaves him to explore the tenuous distinction between human barbarism with bestial violence, most often by pitting Conan against nearly human abominations. So…cool.
Meanwhile, I think that the focus on immersion makes it more or less impossible to separate Avatar’s formal qualities from the elements of wish-fulfillment in its plot. Cameron has always thematized technology, but this may be the first time he has also sentimentalized it. I was disappointed to see Cameron indulge in the kind of point-and-gawk rubbish I expect from Steven Spielberg, who frequently has his characters model widened eyes and dropped jaws for the audience. Still, despite my congenital inability to embrace the New Age tone of the imagery, I was impressed with the obsessive background detail of the film’s environments and the cleverness of the 3D effects. I was irrationally delighted to see the heat-wake of engines hovering in the air and to see beams of light at different depths.
Yes!
Dan C’s assertion of Howard’s “refusal” of civilization is a gross simplification. Howard was ambivalent in his regards to both civilization and barbarism, much like everything in his work: he only sympathised with barbarism more because it seemed more brutally honest than decadent civilization.
Howard was well aware of the savagery, cruelty and ruthlessness of barbarism. He didn’t have any delusions of “noble savagery” like has been levelled at Burroughs. It’s only when civilization has given way to decadence that Howard openly refuses it. True, Conan is often used to contrast with the civilized, but in nearly every example, those civilizations are corrupt and twisted by complacency. When Conan is in a virile, healthy civilization like Aquilonia, the differences are less pronounced.
Well, to the extent that civilization only seems to work in Howard’s stories when a barbarian is in charge, whether as king or captain of the guard, I think my simplification qualifies for non-grossness. To my eye, at least, the decadence and corruption Howard regularly derides seem less like a disease of civilization than an expression of its inevitable logic. It can’t be coincidence that so many of the Conan stories take place within the ancient ruins of superhuman cultures that somehow self-destructed. Meanwhile, I wouldn’t dream of suggested that Conan’s savagery were anything other than ignoble, albeit vitally and delightfully so. My point was that Howard seems ambivalent about whether uncivilized humanity is still different from the violence of the natural world, an ambivalence that emerges through COnan’s confrontations with devolved creatures and cultures.
So, Howard is safe from me. I’m not enough of a barbarian in my own right to slaughter a sacred cow.
Well, as you may have gathered, Tarzan is going to be a feature at this here blog, so I’ll echo Seafan’s chry of glee, if that was indeed what he was gleeful about. As for the visual effects, I might be the only viewer so determined to occupy the moral highground as to be unable to see down far enough to enjoy them. The vent is strong in my spleen.