FILM IN REVIEW: SWINGERS AND SURFERS

1 7 6 Y F I L M I N R E V I E W C H A R L E S T A Y L O R When Tom Ewell invites Marilyn Monroe to ‘‘an air-cooled movie’’ to beat the heat of a brutal New York summer night in The Seven Year Itch, the two of them pass a happy evening at The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Today moviegoers seeking relief in the multiplex iceboxes would be lucky to find anything as casually entertaining. Two of summer 2016’s surprises were, predictably, not among the season’s unceasingly promoted blockbusters. During the zips I lived in a mostly black Brooklyn neighborhood that has since been gentrified and become mostly white. One of my favorite neighbors was a young black woman named Patricia, who before she was thirty had had a series of impressive jobs at several big-name financial institutions. I adored Patricia. One day during one of our sidewalk chats she was telling me about a trip she had taken to Africa a few years previously. ‘‘All I can say,’’ she concluded, ‘‘is thank God for slavery.’’ She was, of course, being provocative, having fun shocking the white liberal. But she wasn’t just kidding. She was letting a wisecrack serve as an instinctive version of what Albert Murray meant in his book The OmniAmericans when he wrote, ‘‘There are white Americans so to 1 7 7 R speak and black Americans. But any fool can see that the white people are not really white, and that black people are not black. They are all interrelated one way or another.’’ Essentially, my friend was rejecting the notion that solely because of her skin color she would be immediately at home in a country thousands of miles away from where she was born and raised, with customs and traditions nothing like the ones she was used to. She was, in essence, asserting her identity as an American, I thought of that conversation with Patricia while watching The Legend of Tarzan, an ambitious, smart, clunky, and goodhearted version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s enduring adventure pulp. At a moment when so many people are primed to feel outrage , and aesthetic responses seem dominated by the lingo of social science and the self-righteousness of social justice, you’d have to be especially foolhardy or especially brave to attempt a new version of a picture in which a white English lord becomes king of the African jungle. But the notion of Tarzan as a particularly racist icon has always depended far more on the ideological capital to be made out of the image of a white man triumphing over the jungle than on the particulars of Burroughs’s wonderful novel and the various film versions of it that have followed. Tarzan doesn’t master the jungle because he’s white but because he’s raised by apes. Being white sure didn’t help his mother and father master the wild (put ashore by mutineering sailors, they succumbed to the jungle, leaving their infant son an orphan). And it’s a little odd to try to make a case for white supremacy using material whose romantic appeal lies in an implicit rejection of white civilization. Burroughs’s hero is caught in a precarious balance , torn between his instinctive identity (as Tarzan) and the expectations later forced on him as a member of the aristocracy. By the time the movies took over Tarzan, there was no contest. On the big screen, a lush jungle that promises adventure and romance looks a hell of a lot better than Victorians standing around in suits saying ‘‘Pip, pip.’’ If anyone needs proof of that, just look at the six charming MGM movies starring Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan and Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane. Tarzan’s origins are never alluded to in these films, and the white hunters who turn up are always the villains. More significant, Jane turns down every chance to return to her pampered Mayfair life. Even a trip to New York 1 7 8 T A Y L O R Y (to rescue their son, kidnapped by an...