A Film Canon

 

 

The strongest installment in the Weissmuller-O'Sullivan cycle, Tarzan And His Mate clarifies the adventure film as semi-anthropological collision of primivitism and modernism, presenting a classic quest narrative, replete with ritualistic thresholds (the edge of the sacred valley, the entrance to the elephant graveyard), as well as a panoply of exotic gore and expendable bodies. That said, the latter quickly gives way to a different kind of visceral focus - the sexually charged relationship between Tarzan and Jane, evident in his one-word demands for sex, as well as an extended nude sequence, which would only have escaped being classified as pornographic by virtue of occurring underwater, thereby achieving a baroque classicism or, at the very least, some residue of decadent artistry. This is mainly due to the litheness of the duo's movements, part of an acrobatic aesthetic that finds clearest expression in their fluid movement through the canopy - a poetic counterpoint to the hacking and beating that occurs at ground level - but also informs the considerable animal choreography; a spectacular co-ordination of trained and wild chimps, lions, leopards, rhinos, hippos and elephants that creates a subsidiary, zoological drama in counterpoint to the human one, with Tarzan and Jane as the two common denominators.