It is this: Tarzan is hiding from his past because he is ashamed of being Tarzan. And if you don’t watch the film closely - if you let the special effects and spectacle distract you from the (admittedly convoluted) plot - you might not notice what it was they were leaving unsaid. We get hints: Jane mentions that “you’ve not said his name in years,” though neither wants to discuss what they’re not discussing. Not only is he a celebrity in the movie, he is already an object of pop culture: When we see him pick up and consider a comic book of himself, his deep, seething unease is palpable.Īt the start of the movie, of course, it’s not yet clear where this discomfort comes from. A self-conscious and buttoned-down recluse - married but unhappily childless, as we learn - Lord Greystoke insists on the name “John Clayton” and (fittingly) only seems comfortable as Tarzan in front of children. When we first meet Tarzan, for example, he is anything but the blithely naked and uninhibited Tarzan of legend. It could be a self-conscious metaphor for the very making of the film: A famous but basically retired Tarzan gets called back into service, forcing him to face, for the first time, a shameful past from which he has been hiding. Thus, the title: Tarzan comes with such baggage that his legend itself turns out to be what the film is about. Indeed, you could call it the first post-Tarzan Tarzan: Instead of reviving or rebooting the franchise, it’s the first iteration that begins by attempting to reckon with the franchise’s anachronisms head-on. But this, in a nutshell, was the conundrum confronting would-be Tarzan revivalists: To seem harmless, the character must be airbrushed into a cartoon for children the more seriously you take him, the more impossible it becomes to ignore the fundamental racism and sexism of the story.ĭirector David Yates’ new Legend of Tarzan is not a cartoon, and it doesn’t try to gloss over the character’s unsavory past. There have also been a few amazing and unwatchable failures: see, for example, the Christopher Lambert and Bo Derek Tarzans from the early ’80s, which are awe-inspiring in their grim and unrelenting need to take the character seriously. There have been some moderately successful one-offs, like the Disney version, which cleans him up and re-packages him for children. It’s not surprising, then, that the character has aged badly, and that attempts to revive him have failed. In the original books, the name “Tarzan” literally means “White Skin,” and the zest and righteousness with which he kills Africans is such an organic part of the character that, if you took the racism away, there wouldn’t be much left. To call the character “racist” is to state the painfully obvious: In the original books, the name “Tarzan” literally means “White Skin,” and the zest and righteousness with which he kills Africans is such an organic part of the character that, if you took the racism away, there wouldn’t be much left. And as popular and as profitable as the character was for domestic markets, Tarzan was also a global phenomenon: Because of the very limited dialogue - and the broad international appeal of African wildlife, scenery, and special effects - the franchise was particularly well-suited for foreign distribution, and, for decades, it was Hollywood’s biggest foreign export.Īnd then, of course, the bottom dropped out, for obvious reasons: Tarzan was such a racist product of such a racist time, that after the civil rights movement and the breakdown of the British empire, it became harder for mass audiences to enjoy the kind of deeply un-reflexive white supremacy that the character represented.
![disney tarzan disney tarzan](https://i.etsystatic.com/19546546/r/il/5f7161/2217522926/il_fullxfull.2217522926_ltin.jpg)
Until the 1960s or so, the character was such a reliable money-maker that there were often multiple versions of the character in the theaters at any one time he could be found in comic books, pulp fiction, cartoons, and on television, radio, and a truly awe-inspiring array of merchandising. It’s easy to understand why people keep trying. Over the last 50 years, there have been many attempts to revive the most popular, profitable, and internationally known character in 20th-century American pop culture.
#Disney tarzan movie
This is a shame: The Legend of Tarzan is the best Tarzan movie I’ve ever seen. Serious fans of Tarzan don’t seem to like what it does to the character while non-fans don’t seem to understand what it has done. To be blunt, it’s unclear who this movie is supposed to be for.
![disney tarzan disney tarzan](https://parentpreviews.com/images/made/legacy-pics/tarzan-disney_668_330_80_int_s_c1.jpg)
The Legend of Tarzan has not done well so far, and I suspect that it will not be successful in re-booting the franchise.