After all the furor, kerfufflry, and general hullaballoo surrounding the anti-gay views of Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card, it’s interesting that no one’s saying anything about the upcoming adaptation of Tarzan, which was basically a eugenics parable. It was reported just this week that the David Yates-directed Warner Bros production has cast Wolf of Wall Street‘s Margot Robbie as Jane opposite Alexander Skarsgard’s Tarzan. Perfect casting, given that Skarsgard and Robbie are the two actors I imagine would be Hitler’s first choices to carry on the master race if he was alive today (he lives on in Tila Tequila’s heart).
Robbie plans to shoot “Zachariah” before taking on Warner Bros’ big-budget remake of the classic “Tarzan,” which is slated to star Alexander Skarsgard, Christoph Waltz and Samuel L. Jackson, according to individuals with knowledge of her schedule.
Warner’s go-to “Harry Potter” filmmaker Yates is directing the adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ series of novels about the King of the Jungle, with Skarsgard in the title role. [TheWrap]
As for the source material, the fact that Edgar Rice Burroughs, writing in the 1920s and 30s, was a bit, shall we say, Hitler-esque in his views on eugenics, is already well-documented. But I thought this passage from Bill Bryson’s One Summer: America, 1927 was nonetheless interesting:
All [Burroughs’] efforts were characterized by exhilarating action, lightly-clad females, and an unwavering attachment to eugenic ideals.
Tarzan himself could’ve been the poster boy for the eugenics movement. Tarzan, as many readers will surely know already, is the story of an aristocratic English infant who is left orphaned in the African jungle and is brought up by apes. Fortunately, because he is white, and Anglo-Saxon, he is innately brave, strong, decisive, and kind. Instinctively ethical, and clever enough to solve any problem. He even teaches himself to read, quite a feat, considering he speaks no human language, and doesn’t know what a book is when he first sees one. Thank goodness for racial superiority. […]
The creation and maintenance of superior beings is something that occupied Burroughs throughout his career. Nearly all his outer space books are concerned with the breeding of master races on Mars or Venus. […]
In Lost on Venus, he writes admiringly of a society in which “no defective infant was allowed to live. And citizens who were physically, morally, or mentally defective were rendered incapable of bringing their like into the world.”
Of course, Edgar Rice Burroughs also wrote the books on which John Carter was based, and I will go to my grave screaming about that movie being underrated. Does enjoying a work of fantasy excuse the author’s views? I don’t know. But at least they’re staying true to the source material. If you’re going to make a eugenics parable, you might as well cast a hot blonde in it and make it homoerotic as hell.
[Sorry, post wouldn’t have been complete without the picture of Alexander Skarsgard pooping in Antarctica]