Tarzan of the Apes

It's a strange thing, reading a book when you know the story so well.  A quick Google reveals that I would have been nine when the Disney version was released (thank you internet for being far more precise than memory).  I do remember seeing it at the cinema, though.  I think it turned me off Phil Collins for life.  In all seriousness, though, the story of Tarzan was one that I thought I was completely familiar with.  Naturally I expected Disney to have left out some bits, but Tarzan of the Apes is actually a pretty different story and what was more shocking were the bits that were left in.

First of all, the obvious.  In Edgar Rice Burroughs's book Tarzan really likes to kill things.  He only does it to hunt or in self-defense; he's not a savage, but he does it with a smile (according to Burroughs this accounts for his lack of frown lines).   Most problematically for a kids' film of the Nineties, Tarzan kills people.  Granted, they're cannibals but nonetheless he kills them and then precedes to basically just fuck with them.  He steals their arrows moves their stuff around unseen, eventually managing to convince them that he's a god for no other reason than to alleviate his boredom.  There's not much of the early 20th Century racism in the book, considering it's all about Africa but this is where it comes out.  Tarzan, the natural superior to the cannibalistic tribe balks at the thought of eating human meat despite never having been made aware that this is a cultural taboo.  He instinctively knows it to be wrong due to his breeding.

The ape society is also pretty different from the Disney version.  It's really brutal in the book.  Again, Disney clearly needed to cut a lot of this stuff out but Tarzan kills at least three of his ape family.  Including Kerchak.  For me, it completely threw a spanner in the works of what I was expecting.  Disney shows an acceptance of Tarzan by the Apes but in Tarzan of the Apes they can't stand him and he's not all that keen on them, eventually abandoning the tribe because he educates himself from books in his dead parents' cabin until he outstrips them intellectually and doesn't have any ties to bind him.  Most shockingly, Tarzan's ape-mother Kala dies in the book.  I have no idea why Disney dropped that element, they murder parents all over the shop.  It's not really a heart breaking moment in the book, but with a healthy dose of Phil Collins it could have been Mufasa all over again.

There's also quite a lot of sexual energy in the book.  This is carried over into the Disney version, undeniably, but it's much more obvious in the novel.   Until he manages to steal some pants, Tarzan struts around in the buff having his body described as hard and lithe and tanned.  Jane (surprisingly American in the book) stands no chance against his raw masculinity and is drooling over him from the first time she sees him killing an ape to save her.  She's obsessed with his muscles and handsomeness and power until she sees him in clothes.  As soon as Jane encounters Tarzan dressed like a gentleman, the spark goes out.  It's basically just a story about female lust, which is fairly remarkable for 1914.  Jane herself is the sort of useless that one expects from books of the time.  She screams and gets herself kidnapped by an ape and we're meant to believe her strong because she doesn't bend to every whim of every man.  Minnie Driver's version could have kicked her arse. 

I feel like I should address the book away from the film, but the truth is that my perception of the book was completely coloured by my experiences of the film.   This is why I prefer to read the books first; even if you spend an entire film crying, "it's not like that in the book," it's over a hell of a lot more quickly than reading a book.  I sped through in Tarzan of the Apes about four or five hours but even so, it was a touch jarring.  I won't give away too many spoilers, but the ending's so different that I just wanted to shake Jane Porter and ask her what the hell she was thinking.  

My next read (and actual last of the Christmas books) is Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates.