Movie Versus Book Character: Tarzan

Tarzan is a good example of how the movie version may be more appealing that the book version.

Frankly, I consider Tarzan of the book something of a disappointment. He fits the genre and the time period but still--

He is brought up by apes, yes, and he retains some of those superhuman-animal qualities. But when he is discovered, his lordly, aristocratic nature shines through, especially once he dons his Western clothing. By the end of the book, he struck me as a kind of James Bond character with a somewhat unusual past. 

However kitschy, George from the Jungle is closer to what I hoped to get with Tarzan: a guy who is still more at home in the jungle than on city streets and who will interpret those city streets in terms of his extant knowledge. 

Burroughs and Jay Ward and Bill Scott are both right and wrong. (1) People do adjust quite rapidly to new cultural surroundings; (2) feral children do not.

That is, most feral children who are supposedly raised by wild animals or (more likely) locked up/neglected to the point of having almost no physical contact with other humans, have little capacity for speech, little capacity for touch, little capacity for bonding. 

Interestingly enough, if the feral state comes AFTER the age of four to five, the child may recover to the point of being able to live successfully among humans.

In sum, unless Tarzan's parents died when he was about three (at the earliest), he would have little to no chance of interacting with any human with any degree of success--much less behaving like a master-of-the-universe. Even if they died later, when he was, say, closer to seven, he would have difficulty readjusting to human society.

Consequently, I consider Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan to be a decent compromise. As John Taliaferro points out in his biography of Edgar Rice Burroughs, "Americans...viewed Johnny Weissmuller as the least inhibited man alive...Weissmuller...was clean-limbed in every sense. He gave the impression that he could have sold Bibles door to door wearing nothing but a G-string. Like Adam himself, he was naturally ideal and ideally natural. There was no hint of either embarrassment or braggadocio in his comportment." 

That is, Weissmuller plays Tarzan as the ultimate innocent--hot but, you know, not aware of it. Unlike George of the Jungle, who winks at the camera, Weissmuller's Tarzan seems honestly perplexed by how upset people get about things that are not that upsetting. 

He prefers nature. He doesn't command anyone. He is sweet-natured and impressively competent. He stays mostly unclothed.

That is, I think the Weissmuller movies capture what it is we viewers truly want. We don't want the aristocrat. We want the feral boy--only not a feral boy we have to feel bad about.