Autopsia CFP: Insignificance
Wild SoundTarzan’s Sonic Palindrome
René Thoreau Bruckner
In his 1862 essay, “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau famously declares, “in Wildness is the preservation of the World” (Thoreau, 22-3). Such a formulation bears obvious relevance for ecocritical thinking and environmentalist pursuits. Thoreau frequently stresses the importance of spending time in wild spaces and keeping the wilderness close to home (or keeping home close to the wilderness), and “Walking” mourns the disappearance of the natural environment.
However, Thoreau’s central concern has more to do with culture than conservation. What motivates his grievance is Western civilization’s increasing insistence on distancing itself from the natural world, on distinguishing nature from culture, wild from cultivated. The products of high culture, especially literature and poetry, suffer a profound impoverishment because they enforce such a distinction: “You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age—which no culture, in short, can give” (31).
Stepping effortlessly into the role of cultural critic, Thoreau pines for a degree of “wildness,” and thus a form of truth that he cannot find in even the most lauded written works. Almost by definition, culture represses wildness, but Thoreau does catch a hint of the wild in some other forms of expression, such as mythology (the more primitive, the better) and sound:
There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice — take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance, — which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. (32-3)
Where words fail, certain sounds can carry wildness. The human voice is one such sound, insofar as it produces sounds comparable to animal cries and trumpet calls. It seems that sound floats free of the repressively civilizing forces Thoreau associates with human culture; the wildness of sound promises a productive and nurturing connection to “the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.” (33)
Sound cinema has a built-in propensity for just the type of expression Thoreau seeks. And yet, film sound rarely is heard for its wildness, or for what it can express beyond the limits of language. The human voice holds a uniquely privileged place among sounds in film, but this status has almost entirely to do with its application as speech. It would be a gross understatement to say that spoken words have been a dominant means of expression in the movies and other cinematic arts. Like any other sound in film, voice is mediated sound: vibrations originally produced by a body (lungs, a throat, a tongue, lips), recorded and then technically reproduced and manipulated for volume, timbre, tone, reverberation, and so on.
It speaks volumes that the lingo of film and media studies, like that of media production, generally distinguishes voice from other sounds (the three standard categories are sound effects, music, and dialogue).
The persistence of this convention points to an impoverishment, or perhaps an integral repression: on the one hand, it is plainly obvious that voice is sound first, and semantic transmission device second; on the other hand, the voice’s affective, qualitative, non-linguistic attributes tend to go unattended, lost underneath all of the words. This wild dimension of sound film is left screaming for attention.
A few stellar studies of cinematic voice have been published. Donald Crafton’s careful history of early sound film in the U.S. includes a keenly relevant chapter, “The Voice Squad,” which traces a history of social anxieties drummed up by the “out-of-control voice” blaring from loudspeakers across America (Crafton, 445-79). The coming of sound spawned early critical debates over the prospect of “preserving the voice as the property of a cultural elite,” inspired the short-lived popularity of diction coaching for film actors, and influenced the development of censorship policies through the 1930s (448-54).
What this history illustrates, most centrally, is the very fact that language enters a sensitive, vulnerable territory when spoken aloud, opening up to possible corruption and dangerous elements like bad words, foreign accents, and even, as feared by one contemporary critic quoted by Crafton, pre-linguistic inhumanity itself: “What wonder that we degenerate into monosyllabic grunts! Our priceless inheritance, the thing which might save us most surely from bestial oblivion, we have sold for a mess of machinery.” (Crafton, 448).
Like these early expressions of concern, Crafton’s study only gets so far as a discourse on the voice as sound—audible voice as the crux of all the trouble—slipping very quickly back into the terrain of discourse on language—voice as a carrier for speech, something that can be subjected to censorship.
Other valuable studies of the cinematic voice include Mary Ann Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space”; Kaja Silverman’s The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema; Amy Lawrence’s Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema; and a good deal of inspired work by Michel Chion—most notably, The Voice in Cinema and Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. In these studies, the voice’s power of speech tends to remain privileged (always with good reason). Only Chion gives sustained attention to the voice as aural expression, before language. The present essay aspires to follow Chion’s audio-visualist impulse a bit deeper into the wild.
Why not lend an ear to nonverbal voice? That is, to filmic instances in which the voice does not speak at all, and thus relinquishes the listener from the distraction of words? A history of the movie scream cries out to be written, as does an account of the utterances of animals and “monosyllabic grunts” that have contributed to the “language” of film. Of what have we been persuaded by MGM’s many famous lions, not to mention other roars, growls, grunts, chirps, squeaks, and squeals? And what of the vocalizations of monsters, half-humans, and wild men?
As a first step into the wilderness of nonverbal vocal sound, it will prove instructive to heed one famous wild man’s famous voice—or more specifically, one oft-repeated sound byte, a nonverbal vocalization that provided a forcefully ambiguous (i.e., wild) voice for sound film in its formative years.
“That was a human cry!”
Out of the African jungle emerges a small expedition led by two white men—British ivory traders James Parker (played by C. Aubrey Smith) and Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton) — accompanied by Parker’s daughter, Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan) and a safari of African guides, translators, and porters.
The group has just finished a long climb into uncharted country. Taking a seat on a fallen tree, Jane asks, “Darling, do you mind if I flop for a little while?”
“It’d do us all good to flop for a little while,” replies her father. He takes a seat also.
Harry, would-be suitor of Jane, extends a gentlemanly offer to the lady despite being visibly and audibly fatigued: “Anything you want?”
Gauging by Jane’s penchant for snappy talk, her response to Harry is bound to be urbane. She begins, “Yes, a nice hot bath—” but cuts off there, interrupted by a distant, high-pitched sound, perhaps a vocalization, from an unseen source in the jungle. The three Brits stop and listen intently to the sustained, yodel-like sound (a sequence of close-ups shows each of them listening, glancing from side to side at the opaque jungle).
The sound stops. “What was that?” asks Jane, but no one has an answer. Whatever “that” was, Jane’s choice of words is instructive—“what” and not “who.”
The source behind the sound remains radically indeterminate; it could be an animal, but it could be something else. For the moment, it is simply sound; that is, until it repeats itself: after some discussion about what “that” was—“maybe Hyena,” suggests the lead guide, Riano (Ivory Williams)—the sound rings out once more. Halted again in mid-conversation, the visitors hold their words and listen; that is, are shown listening in another sequence of shots. Jane’s father, for one, has heard enough to surmise: “That was a human cry!”
René Thoreau Bruckner
In his 1862 essay, “Walking,” Henry David Thoreau famously declares, “in Wildness is the preservation of the World” (Thoreau, 22-3). Such a formulation bears obvious relevance for ecocritical thinking and environmentalist pursuits. Thoreau frequently stresses the importance of spending time in wild spaces and keeping the wilderness close to home (or keeping home close to the wilderness), and “Walking” mourns the disappearance of the natural environment.
However, Thoreau’s central concern has more to do with culture than conservation. What motivates his grievance is Western civilization’s increasing insistence on distancing itself from the natural world, on distinguishing nature from culture, wild from cultivated. The products of high culture, especially literature and poetry, suffer a profound impoverishment because they enforce such a distinction: “You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan nor Elizabethan age—which no culture, in short, can give” (31).
Stepping effortlessly into the role of cultural critic, Thoreau pines for a degree of “wildness,” and thus a form of truth that he cannot find in even the most lauded written works. Almost by definition, culture represses wildness, but Thoreau does catch a hint of the wild in some other forms of expression, such as mythology (the more primitive, the better) and sound:
There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice — take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance, — which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. (32-3)
Where words fail, certain sounds can carry wildness. The human voice is one such sound, insofar as it produces sounds comparable to animal cries and trumpet calls. It seems that sound floats free of the repressively civilizing forces Thoreau associates with human culture; the wildness of sound promises a productive and nurturing connection to “the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.” (33)
Sound cinema has a built-in propensity for just the type of expression Thoreau seeks. And yet, film sound rarely is heard for its wildness, or for what it can express beyond the limits of language. The human voice holds a uniquely privileged place among sounds in film, but this status has almost entirely to do with its application as speech. It would be a gross understatement to say that spoken words have been a dominant means of expression in the movies and other cinematic arts. Like any other sound in film, voice is mediated sound: vibrations originally produced by a body (lungs, a throat, a tongue, lips), recorded and then technically reproduced and manipulated for volume, timbre, tone, reverberation, and so on.
It speaks volumes that the lingo of film and media studies, like that of media production, generally distinguishes voice from other sounds (the three standard categories are sound effects, music, and dialogue).
The persistence of this convention points to an impoverishment, or perhaps an integral repression: on the one hand, it is plainly obvious that voice is sound first, and semantic transmission device second; on the other hand, the voice’s affective, qualitative, non-linguistic attributes tend to go unattended, lost underneath all of the words. This wild dimension of sound film is left screaming for attention.
A few stellar studies of cinematic voice have been published. Donald Crafton’s careful history of early sound film in the U.S. includes a keenly relevant chapter, “The Voice Squad,” which traces a history of social anxieties drummed up by the “out-of-control voice” blaring from loudspeakers across America (Crafton, 445-79). The coming of sound spawned early critical debates over the prospect of “preserving the voice as the property of a cultural elite,” inspired the short-lived popularity of diction coaching for film actors, and influenced the development of censorship policies through the 1930s (448-54).
What this history illustrates, most centrally, is the very fact that language enters a sensitive, vulnerable territory when spoken aloud, opening up to possible corruption and dangerous elements like bad words, foreign accents, and even, as feared by one contemporary critic quoted by Crafton, pre-linguistic inhumanity itself: “What wonder that we degenerate into monosyllabic grunts! Our priceless inheritance, the thing which might save us most surely from bestial oblivion, we have sold for a mess of machinery.” (Crafton, 448).
Like these early expressions of concern, Crafton’s study only gets so far as a discourse on the voice as sound—audible voice as the crux of all the trouble—slipping very quickly back into the terrain of discourse on language—voice as a carrier for speech, something that can be subjected to censorship.
Other valuable studies of the cinematic voice include Mary Ann Doane’s “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space”; Kaja Silverman’s The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema; Amy Lawrence’s Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema; and a good deal of inspired work by Michel Chion—most notably, The Voice in Cinema and Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. In these studies, the voice’s power of speech tends to remain privileged (always with good reason). Only Chion gives sustained attention to the voice as aural expression, before language. The present essay aspires to follow Chion’s audio-visualist impulse a bit deeper into the wild.
Why not lend an ear to nonverbal voice? That is, to filmic instances in which the voice does not speak at all, and thus relinquishes the listener from the distraction of words? A history of the movie scream cries out to be written, as does an account of the utterances of animals and “monosyllabic grunts” that have contributed to the “language” of film. Of what have we been persuaded by MGM’s many famous lions, not to mention other roars, growls, grunts, chirps, squeaks, and squeals? And what of the vocalizations of monsters, half-humans, and wild men?
As a first step into the wilderness of nonverbal vocal sound, it will prove instructive to heed one famous wild man’s famous voice—or more specifically, one oft-repeated sound byte, a nonverbal vocalization that provided a forcefully ambiguous (i.e., wild) voice for sound film in its formative years.
“That was a human cry!”
Out of the African jungle emerges a small expedition led by two white men—British ivory traders James Parker (played by C. Aubrey Smith) and Harry Holt (Neil Hamilton) — accompanied by Parker’s daughter, Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan) and a safari of African guides, translators, and porters.
The group has just finished a long climb into uncharted country. Taking a seat on a fallen tree, Jane asks, “Darling, do you mind if I flop for a little while?”
“It’d do us all good to flop for a little while,” replies her father. He takes a seat also.
Harry, would-be suitor of Jane, extends a gentlemanly offer to the lady despite being visibly and audibly fatigued: “Anything you want?”
Gauging by Jane’s penchant for snappy talk, her response to Harry is bound to be urbane. She begins, “Yes, a nice hot bath—” but cuts off there, interrupted by a distant, high-pitched sound, perhaps a vocalization, from an unseen source in the jungle. The three Brits stop and listen intently to the sustained, yodel-like sound (a sequence of close-ups shows each of them listening, glancing from side to side at the opaque jungle).
The sound stops. “What was that?” asks Jane, but no one has an answer. Whatever “that” was, Jane’s choice of words is instructive—“what” and not “who.”
The source behind the sound remains radically indeterminate; it could be an animal, but it could be something else. For the moment, it is simply sound; that is, until it repeats itself: after some discussion about what “that” was—“maybe Hyena,” suggests the lead guide, Riano (Ivory Williams)—the sound rings out once more. Halted again in mid-conversation, the visitors hold their words and listen; that is, are shown listening in another sequence of shots. Jane’s father, for one, has heard enough to surmise: “That was a human cry!”
Soon, it will become clear that the cry belongs to the human named Tarzan. The film is Metro Goldwyn Mayer’s first Tarzan adaptation, Tarzan the Ape Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1932). The cry, heard for the first time in this scene,twenty-three minutes and forty seconds into the film, will become the most famous and familiar of Tarzan’s yells. This same piece of audio will be frequently replayed time and again, with only minor alterations, in all six of the Tarzan features made by MGM between 1932 and 1942, with Johnny Weissmuller in the title role.[iii]
MGM hired Weissmuller to showcase his Olympic gold medalist body, but in this film his body will not appear for another nine minutes; by the time Tarzan first swings into view (with one more yell), his shrill cry has been heard four times already. Thus, in this Tarzan film—the first installment in the most successful and well-known series of films in the prolific Tarzan franchise—sound precedes image; Tarzan’s voice comes before Weissmuller’s body (whether or not Weissmuller’s body can be said to have produced Tarzan’s yell introduces a complicated question, to be addressed shortly). The delayed moment when Weissmuller will appear on screen, barely clothed, gains a certain force of anticipation from this technique, part and parcel of what made this role an immediate star turn for Weissmuller.
As a narrative technique, pre-introducing Tarzan by his voice rather than his image invests the elusive ape man with an edge: the advantage enjoyed by a predatory animal in its wild habitat, as well as the mysterious power given to what Chion terms an “acousmatic” voice. Until he finally appears, Tarzan is fully vested with the powers of the “complete acousmêtre, the one who is not-yet-seen, but who remains liable to appear in the visual field at any moment.” (Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 21).
Coming right where it does in this scene, Tarzan’s acousmatic yell initiates a contest between two different kinds of man: the ape man cannot abide the civilized, European form of masculinity proffered by Jane’s comrades. In general, Tarzan poses an explicit threat to proper civilized white manliness.[i] His yell, a call of untamed male desire, manifests that threat audibly. As interpreted by the civilized white male characters in this scene, the yell marks a territory—after hearing it the second time, James and Harry both suggest turning back, having presumed that it can only spell danger for Jane, that she will be sexually targeted, stolen away, perhaps even allured by the source of the yell.
Tarzan’s first yell seems to challenge Holt’s out-of-breath proposition to Jane—“Anything you want?”—with a response of his own. Indeed, Jane will want Tarzan; she will choose a life in the jungle with the aggressively nonverbal wild man over the more sensible, and more talkie, alternative.
A somewhat “improper question”[ii]comes to mind: Could it be Jane’s own desire (that is, the desire that the audience is supposed to desire of her) that produces this hysterical cry from the jungle? Does Tarzan’s yell amount to an unconscious drive turned audible, a shriek from Jane’s interior, screaming from outside of her in answer to her own desire? During this fleeting exchange that introduces the Tarzan yell, the wild man’s voice takes the place of Jane’s response, improperly: it originates inside her, but from the outside, simultaneously her own and not hers. It is both proper to her and improper. As soon as the sound begins to become legible, “a human cry,” Jane responds to it (and to her male protectors’ concern for her safety) with brash defiance, and a renewed interest in going deeper into the jungle: “I’m not frightened of a few weird cries. Now let’s get that ivory.” When Weissmuller’s Tarzan, the source of the sound, finally shows up in fully visible, bodily form, he will simultaneously rescue and abduct her, swooping in to save Jane from an onslaught of freak “savages” (a tribe of cannibalistic dwarves). It is an instance of classic rape fears/fantasies in the jungle: the wild man whisks the white woman away to his treetop bed, against her will, and love soon follows. Tarzan will soon be Jane’s, and she will be his, in a form of wild matrimony that is not proper for civilized people, but also seems to trump proper, legal marriage because it is more “natural.”
As a properly improper sound, the MGM/Weissmuller yell is not only primary, but also primal; it serves not only as a first marker of Tarzan’s presence, a pre-lingusitic, pre-corporeal introduction, but also as an expression of primitive, beastlike wildness as such. It lets loose a well of uninhibited interiority aligned with the extreme exteriority of the exotic African jungle—itself so often imagined as a deep interior, the heart of darkness. It bears noting that, in colonial British terminology, the uncharted African wild goes by the name of the Interior. AsTarzan’s form of identification, the yell implies a connection or continuity between inside and out, between his untamed self and the wild outdoor space he calls home, between Jane’s parched desire and the wildness she has sought ought by insisting on accompanying her father out into the Interior. Tarzan has no problem accessing this wildness within because he has not yet learned to repress it. He has not yet left the wild (grown up) and joined the world of humans (entered the social/symbolic order).
Even if it does not speak, properly speaking, the yell most certainly gives voice to something. It comes from an uncharted, inside/out place—within Tarzan, within the jungle—and accosts these visitors from another world. Whether one names this other world England, Europe/America, modern civilization, or the developed world, the Tarzan yell originates in its extreme opposite, the wild, and directs its expression toward that civilized world, as if to remind it of a forgotten, more “natural” way to be (to be a man). Tarzan has lived free from language and society, and thus free from the pressures and crutches of late-colonial, industrial age modernity that his inventor, Edgar Rice Burroughs, felt as an emasculating force,[iii] and which, from an earlier period in American letters, must have fed Thoreau’s yearning for wildness. Tarzan raises his voice to issue an urgent—and urgently nonverbal—call to modern man (to white men).
But Tarzan seems to be yelling back the other way, too. Of noble Anglo-Saxon heredity, the literary Tarzan was placed in the jungle to play out Burroughs’ argument about racial superiority and the naturalness of class difference. The Tarzan yell emanates from Tarzan’s white body: not only as an animal-like, primal cry from inside Tarzan inside the jungle, yelling at those of us who are looking in from without, but also as a broadcast from Burroughs’ world, from MGM’s world: a call directed from the present to the past, from the modern West to the “primitive” places, cultures, readers, and spectators of the world. In other words, Tarzan yells in opposing directions at the same time.
Analyses of the Tarzan novels and films have tended to observe this central trait: the character is an expression of forceful ambiguity, a figure whose ability to teeter between (potentially paradoxical) positions has the effect of preempting any logic that might undermine his indomitable powers. Reading the Burroughs novels, Gail Bederman explains that Tarzan “is the most resourceful, powerful, courageous man imaginable. Combining the ultimate in Anglo-Saxon manliness with the most primal masculinity, Tarzan is violent yet chivalrous; moral yet passionate.” (Bederman, 221)
This characterization depends upon a highly phantasmatic combination of civility and wildness (also formulated quite often as a combination of humanity and animality, or brains and brawn). Alex Vernon has posed the question of Tarzan’s ambiguity as such: “Is Tarzan the transitional link on the way from savage blackness to civilized whiteness, or is he the white male ideal to which civilized boys aspire?” (Vernon, 33). Of course, the answer to both questions is yes. Tarzan has it both ways, and the famous, globally recognized, and infinitely repeatable Tarzan yell would come to be the most effective and economical expression of the wild hero’s stubborn ambiguity.
It should be noted, however, that Burroughs did not invent anything quite like the MGM/Weissmuller Tarzan yell. This yell was something new, produced in MGM’s sound department and put to use in ways that were the invention of the 1932 film.
The Tarzan Yell Before MGM
Burroughs does write of a jungle cry used by Tarzan. An orphan, he is raised by a tribe of great apes (not a real species, but one made up by the author) who speak an invented ape language, much of which Burroughs translates fluidly into English. However, he describes Tarzan’s yell only vaguely, never phonetically, as a “victory cry,” and it is never translated. The first time Tarzan issues it comes just after he kills his elder, Tublat, who has always hated him:
As the body rolled to the ground Tarzan of the Apes placed his foot upon the neck of his lifelong enemy and, raising his eyes to the full moon, threw back his fierce young head and voiced the wild and terrible cry of his people.
One by one the tribe swung down from their arboreal retreats and formed a circle about Tarzan and his vanquished foe. When they had all come Tarzan turned toward them.
“I am Tarzan,” he cried. “I am a great killer. Let all respect Tarzan of the Apes and Kala, his mother. There be none among you as mighty as Tarzan. Let his enemies beware.”
Looking full into the wicked, red eyes of Kerchak, the young Lord Greystoke beat upon his mighty breast and screamed out once more his shrill cry of defiance. (Burroughs, 57-8)
For Burroughs, this “wild and terrible” but also “shrill” vocalization does some sort of signifying, in that it indicates dominance, but its precise meaning is untranslatable.
To be sure, this cry is ecstatic. The scene above follows one in which the apes have just engaged in Tarzan’s rite of passage: the ecstasy-inducing ritual of “the Dum-Dum,” a cultural practice among Tarzan’s ape tribe that, for Burroughs, represents the origin of human culture.
Although Burroughs never extends the function of Tarzan’s yell beyond that of a boastful victory cry, it does add valence to his central contention that too much talk, and all of the repression that civilized people perform through language, undermines manliness. The yell, as a pure expression of violent aggression and (male) power, serves to define Tarzan’s ambiguity with a crisp eloquence.
Even the earliest Tarzan films—though silent—found the yell to be a useful device. Elmo Lincoln, one of D.W. Griffith’s regular heavies, embodied Tarzan on screen first, in two silent Tarzan features in 1918: Tarzan of the Apes and The Romance of Tarzan, and in a subsequent serial, The Adventures of Tarzan (1921). On occasion, Lincoln’s Tarzan can be seen issuing his jungle cry. It is reserved for moments of triumph (over lions and villains), which is in line with Burroughs’ use of the yell. Of course, Lincoln’s yell is a silent film utterance, which means it is inaudible, pantomimed with hands cupped around a wide open mouth, tongue ululating rapidly, and followed by a beating of the chest. Lincoln quit acting after his co-star Gordon Standing was mauled by a lion during the shooting of King of the Jungle in 1927 (not a Tarzan film), which means that his voice, as Tarzan, was never heard. Tarzan remained mute.[iv]
There is, however, one audible Tarzan yell that predates the MGM/Weissmuller version. In Tarzan the Tiger, a part-sound serial from 1929, the title role went to Frank Merrill: gymnast, stunt man, and star of one previous silent Tarzan film. The film is truly transitional, between silent and sound: dialogue is delivered by intertitles rather than sync sound—language has not yet fully penetrated this jungle—but many sequences incorporate sync sound effects, including certain animal vocalizations (lions, tigers, chimps), Jane’s screams, gunshots, and Tarzan’s victory cry. This Tarzan’s version of the wild yell comes out as a strained but vigorous “Yeeaw! Yeeaw!”[v]
The version of the yell bears no resemblance to the familiar, yodel-like MGM Weissmuller yell and, apparently, it did not prove worthy of repeating in subsequent productions; Merrill would not play Tarzan again.
As a narrative technique, pre-introducing Tarzan by his voice rather than his image invests the elusive ape man with an edge: the advantage enjoyed by a predatory animal in its wild habitat, as well as the mysterious power given to what Chion terms an “acousmatic” voice. Until he finally appears, Tarzan is fully vested with the powers of the “complete acousmêtre, the one who is not-yet-seen, but who remains liable to appear in the visual field at any moment.” (Chion, The Voice in Cinema, 21).
Coming right where it does in this scene, Tarzan’s acousmatic yell initiates a contest between two different kinds of man: the ape man cannot abide the civilized, European form of masculinity proffered by Jane’s comrades. In general, Tarzan poses an explicit threat to proper civilized white manliness.[i] His yell, a call of untamed male desire, manifests that threat audibly. As interpreted by the civilized white male characters in this scene, the yell marks a territory—after hearing it the second time, James and Harry both suggest turning back, having presumed that it can only spell danger for Jane, that she will be sexually targeted, stolen away, perhaps even allured by the source of the yell.
Tarzan’s first yell seems to challenge Holt’s out-of-breath proposition to Jane—“Anything you want?”—with a response of his own. Indeed, Jane will want Tarzan; she will choose a life in the jungle with the aggressively nonverbal wild man over the more sensible, and more talkie, alternative.
A somewhat “improper question”[ii]comes to mind: Could it be Jane’s own desire (that is, the desire that the audience is supposed to desire of her) that produces this hysterical cry from the jungle? Does Tarzan’s yell amount to an unconscious drive turned audible, a shriek from Jane’s interior, screaming from outside of her in answer to her own desire? During this fleeting exchange that introduces the Tarzan yell, the wild man’s voice takes the place of Jane’s response, improperly: it originates inside her, but from the outside, simultaneously her own and not hers. It is both proper to her and improper. As soon as the sound begins to become legible, “a human cry,” Jane responds to it (and to her male protectors’ concern for her safety) with brash defiance, and a renewed interest in going deeper into the jungle: “I’m not frightened of a few weird cries. Now let’s get that ivory.” When Weissmuller’s Tarzan, the source of the sound, finally shows up in fully visible, bodily form, he will simultaneously rescue and abduct her, swooping in to save Jane from an onslaught of freak “savages” (a tribe of cannibalistic dwarves). It is an instance of classic rape fears/fantasies in the jungle: the wild man whisks the white woman away to his treetop bed, against her will, and love soon follows. Tarzan will soon be Jane’s, and she will be his, in a form of wild matrimony that is not proper for civilized people, but also seems to trump proper, legal marriage because it is more “natural.”
As a properly improper sound, the MGM/Weissmuller yell is not only primary, but also primal; it serves not only as a first marker of Tarzan’s presence, a pre-lingusitic, pre-corporeal introduction, but also as an expression of primitive, beastlike wildness as such. It lets loose a well of uninhibited interiority aligned with the extreme exteriority of the exotic African jungle—itself so often imagined as a deep interior, the heart of darkness. It bears noting that, in colonial British terminology, the uncharted African wild goes by the name of the Interior. AsTarzan’s form of identification, the yell implies a connection or continuity between inside and out, between his untamed self and the wild outdoor space he calls home, between Jane’s parched desire and the wildness she has sought ought by insisting on accompanying her father out into the Interior. Tarzan has no problem accessing this wildness within because he has not yet learned to repress it. He has not yet left the wild (grown up) and joined the world of humans (entered the social/symbolic order).
Even if it does not speak, properly speaking, the yell most certainly gives voice to something. It comes from an uncharted, inside/out place—within Tarzan, within the jungle—and accosts these visitors from another world. Whether one names this other world England, Europe/America, modern civilization, or the developed world, the Tarzan yell originates in its extreme opposite, the wild, and directs its expression toward that civilized world, as if to remind it of a forgotten, more “natural” way to be (to be a man). Tarzan has lived free from language and society, and thus free from the pressures and crutches of late-colonial, industrial age modernity that his inventor, Edgar Rice Burroughs, felt as an emasculating force,[iii] and which, from an earlier period in American letters, must have fed Thoreau’s yearning for wildness. Tarzan raises his voice to issue an urgent—and urgently nonverbal—call to modern man (to white men).
But Tarzan seems to be yelling back the other way, too. Of noble Anglo-Saxon heredity, the literary Tarzan was placed in the jungle to play out Burroughs’ argument about racial superiority and the naturalness of class difference. The Tarzan yell emanates from Tarzan’s white body: not only as an animal-like, primal cry from inside Tarzan inside the jungle, yelling at those of us who are looking in from without, but also as a broadcast from Burroughs’ world, from MGM’s world: a call directed from the present to the past, from the modern West to the “primitive” places, cultures, readers, and spectators of the world. In other words, Tarzan yells in opposing directions at the same time.
Analyses of the Tarzan novels and films have tended to observe this central trait: the character is an expression of forceful ambiguity, a figure whose ability to teeter between (potentially paradoxical) positions has the effect of preempting any logic that might undermine his indomitable powers. Reading the Burroughs novels, Gail Bederman explains that Tarzan “is the most resourceful, powerful, courageous man imaginable. Combining the ultimate in Anglo-Saxon manliness with the most primal masculinity, Tarzan is violent yet chivalrous; moral yet passionate.” (Bederman, 221)
This characterization depends upon a highly phantasmatic combination of civility and wildness (also formulated quite often as a combination of humanity and animality, or brains and brawn). Alex Vernon has posed the question of Tarzan’s ambiguity as such: “Is Tarzan the transitional link on the way from savage blackness to civilized whiteness, or is he the white male ideal to which civilized boys aspire?” (Vernon, 33). Of course, the answer to both questions is yes. Tarzan has it both ways, and the famous, globally recognized, and infinitely repeatable Tarzan yell would come to be the most effective and economical expression of the wild hero’s stubborn ambiguity.
It should be noted, however, that Burroughs did not invent anything quite like the MGM/Weissmuller Tarzan yell. This yell was something new, produced in MGM’s sound department and put to use in ways that were the invention of the 1932 film.
The Tarzan Yell Before MGM
Burroughs does write of a jungle cry used by Tarzan. An orphan, he is raised by a tribe of great apes (not a real species, but one made up by the author) who speak an invented ape language, much of which Burroughs translates fluidly into English. However, he describes Tarzan’s yell only vaguely, never phonetically, as a “victory cry,” and it is never translated. The first time Tarzan issues it comes just after he kills his elder, Tublat, who has always hated him:
As the body rolled to the ground Tarzan of the Apes placed his foot upon the neck of his lifelong enemy and, raising his eyes to the full moon, threw back his fierce young head and voiced the wild and terrible cry of his people.
One by one the tribe swung down from their arboreal retreats and formed a circle about Tarzan and his vanquished foe. When they had all come Tarzan turned toward them.
“I am Tarzan,” he cried. “I am a great killer. Let all respect Tarzan of the Apes and Kala, his mother. There be none among you as mighty as Tarzan. Let his enemies beware.”
Looking full into the wicked, red eyes of Kerchak, the young Lord Greystoke beat upon his mighty breast and screamed out once more his shrill cry of defiance. (Burroughs, 57-8)
For Burroughs, this “wild and terrible” but also “shrill” vocalization does some sort of signifying, in that it indicates dominance, but its precise meaning is untranslatable.
To be sure, this cry is ecstatic. The scene above follows one in which the apes have just engaged in Tarzan’s rite of passage: the ecstasy-inducing ritual of “the Dum-Dum,” a cultural practice among Tarzan’s ape tribe that, for Burroughs, represents the origin of human culture.
Although Burroughs never extends the function of Tarzan’s yell beyond that of a boastful victory cry, it does add valence to his central contention that too much talk, and all of the repression that civilized people perform through language, undermines manliness. The yell, as a pure expression of violent aggression and (male) power, serves to define Tarzan’s ambiguity with a crisp eloquence.
Even the earliest Tarzan films—though silent—found the yell to be a useful device. Elmo Lincoln, one of D.W. Griffith’s regular heavies, embodied Tarzan on screen first, in two silent Tarzan features in 1918: Tarzan of the Apes and The Romance of Tarzan, and in a subsequent serial, The Adventures of Tarzan (1921). On occasion, Lincoln’s Tarzan can be seen issuing his jungle cry. It is reserved for moments of triumph (over lions and villains), which is in line with Burroughs’ use of the yell. Of course, Lincoln’s yell is a silent film utterance, which means it is inaudible, pantomimed with hands cupped around a wide open mouth, tongue ululating rapidly, and followed by a beating of the chest. Lincoln quit acting after his co-star Gordon Standing was mauled by a lion during the shooting of King of the Jungle in 1927 (not a Tarzan film), which means that his voice, as Tarzan, was never heard. Tarzan remained mute.[iv]
There is, however, one audible Tarzan yell that predates the MGM/Weissmuller version. In Tarzan the Tiger, a part-sound serial from 1929, the title role went to Frank Merrill: gymnast, stunt man, and star of one previous silent Tarzan film. The film is truly transitional, between silent and sound: dialogue is delivered by intertitles rather than sync sound—language has not yet fully penetrated this jungle—but many sequences incorporate sync sound effects, including certain animal vocalizations (lions, tigers, chimps), Jane’s screams, gunshots, and Tarzan’s victory cry. This Tarzan’s version of the wild yell comes out as a strained but vigorous “Yeeaw! Yeeaw!”[v]
The version of the yell bears no resemblance to the familiar, yodel-like MGM Weissmuller yell and, apparently, it did not prove worthy of repeating in subsequent productions; Merrill would not play Tarzan again.
In the silent and part-sound Tarzan films, the yell functions quite simply as a boastful victory cry, just as it had in Burroughs’ novels. But the violent process of adaptation from literature to film engendered significant changes, most of which the author famously disliked. One such alteration involves the decision to embody the title role with bulked up bodybuilders like Lincoln and Merrill; Burroughs conceived Tarzan as lithe and lean, sinewy and flexible, but the codes of silent film, with a mandate to show rather than tell, would dictate that the hero have an unambiguously muscular body. The silent movie Tarzan derives his power from his physique, his visible form.
In any Tarzan tale—literary, cinematic, or otherwise—the contradictions that define Tarzan are played out and resolved in his body, precisely because, despite all of Tarzan’s definitive ambiguities, his body is unambiguously powerful, dominant. Bederman explains:
Above all, [Tarzan] has a superb body. If manhood is a historical process that constructs the male body as a metonym for power and identity, Tarzan’s cultural work was to proclaim that “the white man’s” potential for power and mastery was as limitless as the masculine perfection of Tarzan’s body. (221)
Even those attributes that do not boil down to brute physical strength are, in the logic that rules Tarzan’s world, matters of the body; heredity determines superiority. Tarzan’s body wins because it is the product of the best genes, whose full potential is brought out by its immersion in the wild. His hardened muscles signify his innate dominance, but at the same time, they mark him as somehow technological, enhanced.
As Richard Dyer has it, white muscle-bound movie heroes like Tarzan send an implicit colonial message when they show up in the exotic jungle because they are “built”—that is, man-made rather than purely natural. The built body is technological—produced by the discipline and technique of bodybuilding, rather than genetically inherited. Nonetheless, it is “the sense of the mind at work behind the production of this body that most defines its whiteness.” (Dyer, 165)
Tarzan’s body, “built to do the job of colonial world improvement,” (164) speaks of his fortitude of spirit, because it takes inner strength and will to sculpt one’s muscles, which is supposed to mark him as inherently (genetically) superior. Tarzan’s built body indicates his technological nature—his inborn propensity to develop techniques that transform thoughts and desires into practical reality. As an image, Tarzan’s visible body inscribes a white or Euro-American presence in the jungle; significantly, Dyer explains, his power derives from the fact that he is not a visitor to the jungle, not an outsider, but a white man who is “already there.” (268)
The MGM/Weissmuller Yell: a human cry?
The addition of a full-fledged voice in 1932 helped to revive Tarzan’s popularity during the tail end of Hollywood’s transition from silent to sound cinema, and also updated the cultural work performed by the ape man. Now the owner of a voice, his audible body acts as a sort of loudspeaker system, redoubling the effect that this body is more than just a body: something built, like a machine. Weissmuller’s body is much more lean and soft-looking than those of the Tarzans who preceded him and followed him, but this softening is more than made up for by his new ability to emit sound.
Again, the yell originates in the jungle, is “already there,” but seems to work the other way at the same time: in fact, it quite literally comes from America, blaring forth from Hollywood, out to the rest of the world. Tarzan the Ape Man’s director, W.S. Van Dyke, and MGM head of sound, Douglas Shearer, reconceived the yell—not only the way it sounds, but its purpose as well. In a significant way, this Tarzan yell functions much like the audio technologies that were used to make it audible. The yell comes to function primarily as Tarzan’s own private broadcast service or public address system. He employs it sometimes as a call to arms and sometimes to muster help. Variety’s original review of the film makes reference to this function, recalling how Tarzan garnered “the friendly help of an elephant summoned by a call of distress in jungle language.”
To be more precise, because it never changes from one iteration to the next, and because it is singularly idiomatic—because no one but Tarzan utters it—the yell does not sit comfortably in the category of language. Its functionality goes unchanged even after Tarzan has been indoctrinated into the world of human language. He picks up English vocabulary begrudgingly (arguably, only because it gets him somewhere with Jane).
On this point, the movies differ greatly from the novels, in which Tarzan has an intense drive to acquire English and becomes distinctly erudite in the end. The MGM/Weissmuller Tarzan, like most movie Tarzans after him, uses language in a stubbornly simple, bare-bones manner. His essence emerges from this positioning up against speech and language: he is not talkie, and neither is this early sound film. Even when Tarzan spends time with Jane, long periods elapse without words. Language is communal; Tarzan is solitary, private.
As Alex Vernon has argued, as soon as Tarzan and Jane become a couple, they epitomize the American ideals of domestic privacy and private property.[i] His yell, more than anything else, is his own. The elephants who Tarzan hails do not respond to him in kind; nor do any of the other animals who seem to understand what their Lord is saying when the narrative requires it. Only members of Tarzan’s immediate family, Jane and their son, Boy, are allowed comparable cries later in the series—personalized jungle yells that amount to a familial share of Tarzan’s private property. These related yells differ from Tarzan’s—Jane’s is much faster, more melodic, and even more impossibly warbly than Tarzan’s, while Boy’s sounds like a child’s practiced imitation of his father—but both Jane’s and Boy’s yells were created using the same clever technique that was used to manufacture Tarzan’s.
How to describe the MGM/ Weissmuller yell? Perhaps the most official description comes from the files of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which granted a trademark to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. for the MGM Tarzan yell in 1996, specifically for use in Tarzan action figures that emit the sound of the yell. The trademark description reads as follows:
The mark consists of the sound of the famous Tarzan yell. The mark is a yell consisting of a series of approximately ten sounds, alternating between the chest and falsetto registers of the voice, as follow - 1) a semi-long sound in the chest register, 2) a short sound up an interval of one octave plus a fifth from the preceding sound, 3) a short sound down a Major 3rd from the preceding sound, 4) a short sound up a Major 3rd from the preceding sound, 5) a long sound down one octave plus a Major 3rd from the preceding sound, 6) a short sound up one octave from the preceding sound, 7) a short sound up a Major 3rd from the preceding sound, 8) a short sound down a Major 3rd from the preceding sound, 9) a short sound up a Major 3rd from the preceding sound, 10) a long sound down an octave plus a fifth from the preceding sound.[ii]
Since sounds are invisible and thus tricky to represent graphically, the U.S.P.T.O. only requires that a sound be adequately described in order to receive a trademark. The highly technical description used to trademark the Tarzan yell passes for a legal approximation, then, of something that is very difficult, if not impossible, to put into words (its very difficulty, its awkwardness, should reinforce this essay’s contention that there is a need for better developed language about sound).
However, the yell’s most definitive trait is left unaddressed by ERB Inc.’s trademark description: its curiously inhuman, audibly constructed quality. Given a repeated and attentive listen, it becomes clear that the sound seeming to come from Weissmuller/Tarzan’s mouth has in fact made its way through a highly mediated doctoring process.
The exact process Shearer used remains veiled in mystery, the subject of legend. One prevailing rumor, supported in Gabe Essoe’s pictorial history of Tarzan movies, has it that the yell was pieced together from various tracks of recorded animal sounds (camel, hyena, and dog) and a violin underneath Weissmuller’s voice. (Essoe, 62) Records supporting this story have yet to surface. Johnny Weissmuller always claimed it was made of his own recorded voice, doctored in the sound studio.
While it lies outside the scope of this essay to determine what source sounds were used, suffice it to say, it could go either way: while animal voices cannot be ruled out, the yell certainly does not sound like its raw material need be anything more than a recorded human voice. This indeterminability between human and animal only serves to bolster the yell’s central strength: its ambiguity. More to the point, whatever the original source(s) may have been, the MGM/ Weissmuller yell most certainly endured some post-recording manipulation.
During the two sequences of “short sounds” listed in the trademark language (segments 2-3-4, and 6-7-8-9), the yell alternates impossibly quickly “between the chest and falsetto registers of the voice.” This jumping up and down happens instantaneously enough to suggest some form of post-recording work: most likely, a simple cutting and splicing of vocal recordings, between high and low, to create what sounds like a very fast yodel. It is difficult to imagine that a human could perform these two yodeling portions “live.”
As such, Tarzan sounds neither human nor animal, but rather like something mechanically produced, or at least enhanced by sound engineers. Moreover, it seems that this degree of doctoring was not enough to achieve the desired effect, for Shearer used another, even more remarkable mechanical manipulation to create the yell. A little experiment makes this additional doctoring plainly apparent: when played in reverse, the Tarzan yell sounds exactly the same as it does when played forward.
This is because the second half of the yell is a symmetrical “mirror image” of the first half, which is to say, the yell amounts to a sonic palindrome. At precisely the halfway point of the yell (midway through the “long note” listed as the fifth part in the trademark description), a subtle but clear break can be heard, after which the second half of the yell begins, and this second half is nothing more than the first half, re-recorded backwards. The two halves blend together almost seamlessly because they are spliced in the middle of the long, sustained note, which sounds the same forwards and backwards. The rapid yodeling portion near the end of the yell resembles the first yodeling portion, but sounds even less humanly possible, since it is backwards.
What kind of body could produce such a sound? As a sonic palindrome, the MGM/ Weissmuller yell does something sound cannot do “naturally.” It unrolls to a certain point and then reverses and rolls itself back up. A sort of sonic palindrome can be built into a musical composition,[iii] but Tarzan’s palindrome is of a sort that can only be produced with the aid of sound reproduction technology, the ability to play and record backwards.
It goes without saying that all film sound is constructed sound, that all voices in film are disembodied, only tenuously married to the image—imbued with the cues and codes that allow audiences to “read” the voice properly.[iv] But when Weissmuller’s Tarzan yells, it has the effect of exaggerating its own status as constructed, mechanically reproduced.
Keeping in mind the illegibility of the MGM Tarzan’s first few acousmatic yells—the difficulty which Jane and her cohort have in putting a name to those cries from Tarzan’s still-invisible body—this vocalization has a way of calling into question the very notion of sound’s readability as such. This “human cry” is not only non-live, but is audibly non-live; not only nonverbal, but prosthetic, instrumental, bugle-like. The wild man’s built body transforms into a sound system and replays the yell rather than yelling.
Added to Tarzan’s body, with its status as the ultimate natural body, unambiguously strong, this particular piece of reproduced sound provides an immeasurable kind of ambiguity, a forceful ambiguity (and given its high pitch, a degree of surprising androgyny, too) for Tarzan in the sound film era.
There is technique in this white man’s wildness—technology implanted in his wild body—and it blares out of his mouth in much the same way as the sound that blares out of a cinema’s sound system. What better expression for the profound ambiguities that define the Tarzan character? Not only does this voice speak of its own technological origins, it does so in palindromic form: always forwards and backwards at the same time, flowing in two directions at once.
Taking film industry developments into consideration, Tarzan’s wild two-way yell amounts to a technological show of force, an arrogant and boastful blast from America/Hollywood. It emanates from the jungle and broadcasts its primal expression toward the modern, the civilized, the human, but it also emanates from Hollywood and yells back into the wild, i.e., the foreign market: trumpet call of an American film industry flush with the promise of continued global dominance after its uneasy transition to sound. In 1932, it had been scarcely two or three years since America had “colonized” the African continent by outfitting its cinema theaters with film sound technologies.
As argued by Emily Thompson, companies such as AT&T subsidiary Electrical Research Products, Inc. (ERPI) were created first to wire America for sound, but soon moved on to install their equipment in theaters around the world (including not only Europe, but also Australia, India, the West Indies, Brazil, Japan, China, and eventually, Africa). “By wiring the world for sound,” Thompson says, “[ERPI engineers] believed they were installing a conduit to modernization that would soon enable these seemingly backward peoples to become more like themselves” (Thompson, 201).
For some time already, the Tarzan character had been making readers and moviegoers (American and otherwise) want to look and act and think more like him; after Tarzan’s 1932 reincarnation in the form of Johnny Weissmuller, becoming more like Tarzan meant yelling like him, too.
Becoming Tarzan
The MGM/Weissmuller Tarzan yell begs to be aped. This has been one of its defining qualities, and a built-in facet of its continued appeal in the U.S. and elsewhere. A recent case in point: in 2007, Spanish television talk show host Andreu Buenafuente held an on-air contest to name “El Campeonato de España de gritos de Tarzan,” in which members of the audience competed by imitating the Tarzan yell on stage: an exercise in institutionally sanctioned screaming. The most successful contestants were those who seemed the least inhibited, capable of enjoying the yell rather than performing it. No one can replicate it, but everyone wants to.
Even Weissmuller, to whom this voice ostensibly belongs, found himself having to imitate it. His son recounts:
I said, “Dad, I read somewhere that the sound experts in the film studio took your yodel and reworked it and put a lot of other sounds in there to make the Tarzan yell.”
He answered, “Well, yeah, that’s what they did at first, but then I just practiced it and learned how to imitate it. Like this…”
I cringed.
How much of the on-screen yodel was really Dad’s voice and how much was the sound mixing of Hollywood technicians we will probably never know, but I do know that he could perform one hell of a Tarzan yell with his own pipes, especially after he’d had a few drinks. (Weissmuller, 31-2)
Weissmuller’s own pipes had to be trained retroactively to simulate the sound that blares so effortlessly from his mouth on the screen.
A little intoxication helps, too, to liberate the uninhibited wildness that the civilized adult hopes to glean from the ape man. Weissmuller’s young fans, and children who admire the ape man in general, have been especially noted for their willingness to channel the yell’s wildness, or really, to assimilate it (presumably without recourse to controlled substances). In a 1963 essay, Gore Vidal testifies:
There is hardly an American male of my generation who had not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape […] or bellowed forth from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, while a thousand arms and legs were broken by attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the republic. (Vidal, 192)
Whether in backyards or on movie and TV screens, it is safe to say that copying Tarzan has been a popular pastime. In addition to the many post-Weissmuller Tarzans who began voicing their own yells immediately after the first MGM production,[v] imitations abound.
The all-out spoof, George of the Jungle,[vi] invents a version of the yell that communicates less a wild masculinity than a hysterical panic; the yell of Disney’s animated Tarzan (1999) hits a decidedly more melodic note, in tune with the film’s musical-theater mode and Phil Collins soundtrack;[vii] in Star Wars episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983), a loving recreation of the palindromic yell comes in the wookie voice of the character, Chewbacca, as he swings Tarzan-style from redwood trees.
In any Tarzan tale—literary, cinematic, or otherwise—the contradictions that define Tarzan are played out and resolved in his body, precisely because, despite all of Tarzan’s definitive ambiguities, his body is unambiguously powerful, dominant. Bederman explains:
Above all, [Tarzan] has a superb body. If manhood is a historical process that constructs the male body as a metonym for power and identity, Tarzan’s cultural work was to proclaim that “the white man’s” potential for power and mastery was as limitless as the masculine perfection of Tarzan’s body. (221)
Even those attributes that do not boil down to brute physical strength are, in the logic that rules Tarzan’s world, matters of the body; heredity determines superiority. Tarzan’s body wins because it is the product of the best genes, whose full potential is brought out by its immersion in the wild. His hardened muscles signify his innate dominance, but at the same time, they mark him as somehow technological, enhanced.
As Richard Dyer has it, white muscle-bound movie heroes like Tarzan send an implicit colonial message when they show up in the exotic jungle because they are “built”—that is, man-made rather than purely natural. The built body is technological—produced by the discipline and technique of bodybuilding, rather than genetically inherited. Nonetheless, it is “the sense of the mind at work behind the production of this body that most defines its whiteness.” (Dyer, 165)
Tarzan’s body, “built to do the job of colonial world improvement,” (164) speaks of his fortitude of spirit, because it takes inner strength and will to sculpt one’s muscles, which is supposed to mark him as inherently (genetically) superior. Tarzan’s built body indicates his technological nature—his inborn propensity to develop techniques that transform thoughts and desires into practical reality. As an image, Tarzan’s visible body inscribes a white or Euro-American presence in the jungle; significantly, Dyer explains, his power derives from the fact that he is not a visitor to the jungle, not an outsider, but a white man who is “already there.” (268)
The MGM/Weissmuller Yell: a human cry?
The addition of a full-fledged voice in 1932 helped to revive Tarzan’s popularity during the tail end of Hollywood’s transition from silent to sound cinema, and also updated the cultural work performed by the ape man. Now the owner of a voice, his audible body acts as a sort of loudspeaker system, redoubling the effect that this body is more than just a body: something built, like a machine. Weissmuller’s body is much more lean and soft-looking than those of the Tarzans who preceded him and followed him, but this softening is more than made up for by his new ability to emit sound.
Again, the yell originates in the jungle, is “already there,” but seems to work the other way at the same time: in fact, it quite literally comes from America, blaring forth from Hollywood, out to the rest of the world. Tarzan the Ape Man’s director, W.S. Van Dyke, and MGM head of sound, Douglas Shearer, reconceived the yell—not only the way it sounds, but its purpose as well. In a significant way, this Tarzan yell functions much like the audio technologies that were used to make it audible. The yell comes to function primarily as Tarzan’s own private broadcast service or public address system. He employs it sometimes as a call to arms and sometimes to muster help. Variety’s original review of the film makes reference to this function, recalling how Tarzan garnered “the friendly help of an elephant summoned by a call of distress in jungle language.”
To be more precise, because it never changes from one iteration to the next, and because it is singularly idiomatic—because no one but Tarzan utters it—the yell does not sit comfortably in the category of language. Its functionality goes unchanged even after Tarzan has been indoctrinated into the world of human language. He picks up English vocabulary begrudgingly (arguably, only because it gets him somewhere with Jane).
On this point, the movies differ greatly from the novels, in which Tarzan has an intense drive to acquire English and becomes distinctly erudite in the end. The MGM/Weissmuller Tarzan, like most movie Tarzans after him, uses language in a stubbornly simple, bare-bones manner. His essence emerges from this positioning up against speech and language: he is not talkie, and neither is this early sound film. Even when Tarzan spends time with Jane, long periods elapse without words. Language is communal; Tarzan is solitary, private.
As Alex Vernon has argued, as soon as Tarzan and Jane become a couple, they epitomize the American ideals of domestic privacy and private property.[i] His yell, more than anything else, is his own. The elephants who Tarzan hails do not respond to him in kind; nor do any of the other animals who seem to understand what their Lord is saying when the narrative requires it. Only members of Tarzan’s immediate family, Jane and their son, Boy, are allowed comparable cries later in the series—personalized jungle yells that amount to a familial share of Tarzan’s private property. These related yells differ from Tarzan’s—Jane’s is much faster, more melodic, and even more impossibly warbly than Tarzan’s, while Boy’s sounds like a child’s practiced imitation of his father—but both Jane’s and Boy’s yells were created using the same clever technique that was used to manufacture Tarzan’s.
How to describe the MGM/ Weissmuller yell? Perhaps the most official description comes from the files of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which granted a trademark to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. for the MGM Tarzan yell in 1996, specifically for use in Tarzan action figures that emit the sound of the yell. The trademark description reads as follows:
The mark consists of the sound of the famous Tarzan yell. The mark is a yell consisting of a series of approximately ten sounds, alternating between the chest and falsetto registers of the voice, as follow - 1) a semi-long sound in the chest register, 2) a short sound up an interval of one octave plus a fifth from the preceding sound, 3) a short sound down a Major 3rd from the preceding sound, 4) a short sound up a Major 3rd from the preceding sound, 5) a long sound down one octave plus a Major 3rd from the preceding sound, 6) a short sound up one octave from the preceding sound, 7) a short sound up a Major 3rd from the preceding sound, 8) a short sound down a Major 3rd from the preceding sound, 9) a short sound up a Major 3rd from the preceding sound, 10) a long sound down an octave plus a fifth from the preceding sound.[ii]
Since sounds are invisible and thus tricky to represent graphically, the U.S.P.T.O. only requires that a sound be adequately described in order to receive a trademark. The highly technical description used to trademark the Tarzan yell passes for a legal approximation, then, of something that is very difficult, if not impossible, to put into words (its very difficulty, its awkwardness, should reinforce this essay’s contention that there is a need for better developed language about sound).
However, the yell’s most definitive trait is left unaddressed by ERB Inc.’s trademark description: its curiously inhuman, audibly constructed quality. Given a repeated and attentive listen, it becomes clear that the sound seeming to come from Weissmuller/Tarzan’s mouth has in fact made its way through a highly mediated doctoring process.
The exact process Shearer used remains veiled in mystery, the subject of legend. One prevailing rumor, supported in Gabe Essoe’s pictorial history of Tarzan movies, has it that the yell was pieced together from various tracks of recorded animal sounds (camel, hyena, and dog) and a violin underneath Weissmuller’s voice. (Essoe, 62) Records supporting this story have yet to surface. Johnny Weissmuller always claimed it was made of his own recorded voice, doctored in the sound studio.
While it lies outside the scope of this essay to determine what source sounds were used, suffice it to say, it could go either way: while animal voices cannot be ruled out, the yell certainly does not sound like its raw material need be anything more than a recorded human voice. This indeterminability between human and animal only serves to bolster the yell’s central strength: its ambiguity. More to the point, whatever the original source(s) may have been, the MGM/ Weissmuller yell most certainly endured some post-recording manipulation.
During the two sequences of “short sounds” listed in the trademark language (segments 2-3-4, and 6-7-8-9), the yell alternates impossibly quickly “between the chest and falsetto registers of the voice.” This jumping up and down happens instantaneously enough to suggest some form of post-recording work: most likely, a simple cutting and splicing of vocal recordings, between high and low, to create what sounds like a very fast yodel. It is difficult to imagine that a human could perform these two yodeling portions “live.”
As such, Tarzan sounds neither human nor animal, but rather like something mechanically produced, or at least enhanced by sound engineers. Moreover, it seems that this degree of doctoring was not enough to achieve the desired effect, for Shearer used another, even more remarkable mechanical manipulation to create the yell. A little experiment makes this additional doctoring plainly apparent: when played in reverse, the Tarzan yell sounds exactly the same as it does when played forward.
This is because the second half of the yell is a symmetrical “mirror image” of the first half, which is to say, the yell amounts to a sonic palindrome. At precisely the halfway point of the yell (midway through the “long note” listed as the fifth part in the trademark description), a subtle but clear break can be heard, after which the second half of the yell begins, and this second half is nothing more than the first half, re-recorded backwards. The two halves blend together almost seamlessly because they are spliced in the middle of the long, sustained note, which sounds the same forwards and backwards. The rapid yodeling portion near the end of the yell resembles the first yodeling portion, but sounds even less humanly possible, since it is backwards.
What kind of body could produce such a sound? As a sonic palindrome, the MGM/ Weissmuller yell does something sound cannot do “naturally.” It unrolls to a certain point and then reverses and rolls itself back up. A sort of sonic palindrome can be built into a musical composition,[iii] but Tarzan’s palindrome is of a sort that can only be produced with the aid of sound reproduction technology, the ability to play and record backwards.
It goes without saying that all film sound is constructed sound, that all voices in film are disembodied, only tenuously married to the image—imbued with the cues and codes that allow audiences to “read” the voice properly.[iv] But when Weissmuller’s Tarzan yells, it has the effect of exaggerating its own status as constructed, mechanically reproduced.
Keeping in mind the illegibility of the MGM Tarzan’s first few acousmatic yells—the difficulty which Jane and her cohort have in putting a name to those cries from Tarzan’s still-invisible body—this vocalization has a way of calling into question the very notion of sound’s readability as such. This “human cry” is not only non-live, but is audibly non-live; not only nonverbal, but prosthetic, instrumental, bugle-like. The wild man’s built body transforms into a sound system and replays the yell rather than yelling.
Added to Tarzan’s body, with its status as the ultimate natural body, unambiguously strong, this particular piece of reproduced sound provides an immeasurable kind of ambiguity, a forceful ambiguity (and given its high pitch, a degree of surprising androgyny, too) for Tarzan in the sound film era.
There is technique in this white man’s wildness—technology implanted in his wild body—and it blares out of his mouth in much the same way as the sound that blares out of a cinema’s sound system. What better expression for the profound ambiguities that define the Tarzan character? Not only does this voice speak of its own technological origins, it does so in palindromic form: always forwards and backwards at the same time, flowing in two directions at once.
Taking film industry developments into consideration, Tarzan’s wild two-way yell amounts to a technological show of force, an arrogant and boastful blast from America/Hollywood. It emanates from the jungle and broadcasts its primal expression toward the modern, the civilized, the human, but it also emanates from Hollywood and yells back into the wild, i.e., the foreign market: trumpet call of an American film industry flush with the promise of continued global dominance after its uneasy transition to sound. In 1932, it had been scarcely two or three years since America had “colonized” the African continent by outfitting its cinema theaters with film sound technologies.
As argued by Emily Thompson, companies such as AT&T subsidiary Electrical Research Products, Inc. (ERPI) were created first to wire America for sound, but soon moved on to install their equipment in theaters around the world (including not only Europe, but also Australia, India, the West Indies, Brazil, Japan, China, and eventually, Africa). “By wiring the world for sound,” Thompson says, “[ERPI engineers] believed they were installing a conduit to modernization that would soon enable these seemingly backward peoples to become more like themselves” (Thompson, 201).
For some time already, the Tarzan character had been making readers and moviegoers (American and otherwise) want to look and act and think more like him; after Tarzan’s 1932 reincarnation in the form of Johnny Weissmuller, becoming more like Tarzan meant yelling like him, too.
Becoming Tarzan
The MGM/Weissmuller Tarzan yell begs to be aped. This has been one of its defining qualities, and a built-in facet of its continued appeal in the U.S. and elsewhere. A recent case in point: in 2007, Spanish television talk show host Andreu Buenafuente held an on-air contest to name “El Campeonato de España de gritos de Tarzan,” in which members of the audience competed by imitating the Tarzan yell on stage: an exercise in institutionally sanctioned screaming. The most successful contestants were those who seemed the least inhibited, capable of enjoying the yell rather than performing it. No one can replicate it, but everyone wants to.
Even Weissmuller, to whom this voice ostensibly belongs, found himself having to imitate it. His son recounts:
I said, “Dad, I read somewhere that the sound experts in the film studio took your yodel and reworked it and put a lot of other sounds in there to make the Tarzan yell.”
He answered, “Well, yeah, that’s what they did at first, but then I just practiced it and learned how to imitate it. Like this…”
I cringed.
How much of the on-screen yodel was really Dad’s voice and how much was the sound mixing of Hollywood technicians we will probably never know, but I do know that he could perform one hell of a Tarzan yell with his own pipes, especially after he’d had a few drinks. (Weissmuller, 31-2)
Weissmuller’s own pipes had to be trained retroactively to simulate the sound that blares so effortlessly from his mouth on the screen.
A little intoxication helps, too, to liberate the uninhibited wildness that the civilized adult hopes to glean from the ape man. Weissmuller’s young fans, and children who admire the ape man in general, have been especially noted for their willingness to channel the yell’s wildness, or really, to assimilate it (presumably without recourse to controlled substances). In a 1963 essay, Gore Vidal testifies:
There is hardly an American male of my generation who had not at one time or another tried to master the victory cry of the great ape […] or bellowed forth from the androgynous chest of Johnny Weissmuller, while a thousand arms and legs were broken by attempts to swing from tree to tree in the backyards of the republic. (Vidal, 192)
Whether in backyards or on movie and TV screens, it is safe to say that copying Tarzan has been a popular pastime. In addition to the many post-Weissmuller Tarzans who began voicing their own yells immediately after the first MGM production,[v] imitations abound.
The all-out spoof, George of the Jungle,[vi] invents a version of the yell that communicates less a wild masculinity than a hysterical panic; the yell of Disney’s animated Tarzan (1999) hits a decidedly more melodic note, in tune with the film’s musical-theater mode and Phil Collins soundtrack;[vii] in Star Wars episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983), a loving recreation of the palindromic yell comes in the wookie voice of the character, Chewbacca, as he swings Tarzan-style from redwood trees.
There are international knockoffs, such as the Hindi musical, Adventures of Tarzan (Babbar Subhash, 1985), for which an echo effect serves as the yell’s technological embellishment.[i]
There is the literal repetition performed in the Bo Derek vehicle, Tarzan, the Ape Man (John Derek, 1981), an MGM-produced remake in which the same old MGM/Weissmuller yell blares anachronistically from the hunky body of Michael O’Keefe.[i]
Uncannier still, the very same sound comes out of the mouth of actress Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, Paramount, 1971), when her character, Maude, feels like letting loose during a picnic.[i]
American comedienne Carol Burnett also assimilated the Tarzan yell, cultivating her own wild rendition, often performed during the audience interaction segments of her long-running live television show (The Carol Burnett Show, CBS, 1967-78); this was so popular that, in a self-reflexive song written later, Burnett laments being associated with something so indelible: “When I’m remembered—if I’m remembered—I’ll be remembered for my Tarzan yell.”[i]
This cursory list of imitations and reincarnations considered, perhaps the most brilliant spoof of the Tarzan yell comes just two years after the first MGM/Weissmuller film, in MGM’s own all-star comedy, Hollywood Party (1934).
The loose narrative of this film revolves around a fictional film franchise starring the character of “Schnarzan,” played by Jimmy Durante (starring as himself). In a trailer for the latest Schnarzan installment, called Schnarzan the Conqueror, Durante’s wild man swings through some familiar trees (recycling some of the very same tree-swinging footage that first usher in Weissmuller’s body in Tarzan the Ape Man), lands on the familiar MGM jungle set, and beats his hair-slathered chest with one fist. He opens his mouth to yell and, instead of Tarzan’s voice, out blares a sustained, jazzy trumpet riff.[ii]
This cursory list of imitations and reincarnations considered, perhaps the most brilliant spoof of the Tarzan yell comes just two years after the first MGM/Weissmuller film, in MGM’s own all-star comedy, Hollywood Party (1934).
The loose narrative of this film revolves around a fictional film franchise starring the character of “Schnarzan,” played by Jimmy Durante (starring as himself). In a trailer for the latest Schnarzan installment, called Schnarzan the Conqueror, Durante’s wild man swings through some familiar trees (recycling some of the very same tree-swinging footage that first usher in Weissmuller’s body in Tarzan the Ape Man), lands on the familiar MGM jungle set, and beats his hair-slathered chest with one fist. He opens his mouth to yell and, instead of Tarzan’s voice, out blares a sustained, jazzy trumpet riff.[ii]
The disembodied sound stops as Durante closes his mouth and slaps his thighs with both hands. There is no mistaking Schnarzan’s “yell” for recorded human voice: it is a messily played, non-melodic series of notes which are pieced-together from different audio samples; the sound splices are clearly audible. Like the MGM/Weissmuller yell, it is both instrumental (prosthetic rather than purely human) and reproduced in the first place.
Given how strongly Schnarzan’s trumpet-voice recalls the wildness Thoreau yearned to hear in “the sound of a bugle in a summer night,” this audio gag speaks volumes, without speaking at all, about the wildness of Tarzan—his mechanically reproduced interiority. What becomes perceptible, in particular, is the inherent disconnect between voice and body, almost identical to the disconnect between sound and image, but not quite; a complex and charged mismatch which provides the famous Tarzan yell its vaguely absurd allure, its unshakeable, ubiquitous repeatability—and defines sound film in general.
Inhearing (Notes Toward Future Work)
This essay has endeavored to lay a small patch of the groundwork for a study of the cinematic voice—specifically, by unpacking the myriad implications embedded in Thoreau’s claim that sound preserves an element of Wildness.
In sound film, a number of factors serve to complicate and threaten that Wildness. It is complicated, for instance, by the fact that film sound is technically reproduced rather than live; and threatened, for instance, by the way in which Hollywood productions like Tarzan the Ape Man employ techniques of narrative style designed to elide the mismatch between sound and image, and to maintain the illusion of a seamless unity of voice and language when it comes to vocal sound. Such factors have a taming effect, so to speak. But so do our listening habits. Much more work will have to be done toward this study’s ultimate goal, to shed the impulse to repress sound’s Wildness.
As will be obvious by now, I hope, the Tarzan franchise presents a particularly strong case for the merits of listening to the nonverbal voice. What has been covered here, however, only scratches the surface of that vast franchise. Still missing, for example, is an extensive analysis of the many post-Weissmuller Tarzan yells, starting with Buster Crabbe’s 1933 rendition. Beyond that, this study will require a closer engagement with the stakes of technically reproducing/simulating the “voices” of Tarzan’s community of animals. There is, for instance, one persistent audio clip of an elephant call that gets replayed many times over in Tarzan the Ape Man, and which has all the repeatability, the sustained urgency, of Tarzan’s own yell.
More broadly, this study of nonverbal voice will have to venture out of Tarzan’s world, out of the jungle, and into other territories where nonverbal voice produces its pre-linguistic effects, including: other narrative films that play with the wild voice and its repression (to name but one very nearby example, King Kong’s famous roar and Fay Wray’s famous scream come only a year after Weissmuller’s yell); the realm of non-narrative and non-fiction films, wherein lies a vast treasure chest of experimentation with the aesthetics of voice, and with its forceful form of indexicality; likewise, much can be learned in the related realms of music, sound art, and performance, and from the scholarship devoted to listening in those realms.
This study would be remiss not to address, to name one rousing example, the final work of Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done With the Judgement of God.” In this 1948 vocal recording intended for radio broadcast, Artaud gestures toward a goal he had expressed a decade earlier, “to turn against language and its basely utilitarian, one could say alimentary, sources, its trapped-beast origins” (Artaud, 46).
“To Have Done With the Judgement of God” amounts to a raving monologue that progressively degenerates into a mode of astonishing nonverbal resistance: word-like nonsense, shrieks, grunts, convulsions of voice, all in service of a profound de-civilization, or dehumanization, of that voice. This anti-Church, anti-American, anti-institution, and most importantly, anti-language rant might resonate strongly with Thoreau and Tarzan (though probably not with Edgar Rice Burroughs).
Beyond audio artifacts such as Artaud’s recordings, it is difficult to say where this study will have to proceed next (the psychoanalytic study of voice? the science of animal languages?). I can only speculate that eventually it will be possible to re-enter the realm of language with renewed insight, or more precisely, inhearing: the capacity to listen to spoken language with the untamed ear of a wild beast, and so in some measure, to hear and understand the sound of the voice.
Acknowledgement
Numerous segments of this essay benefited greatly from the generous reading and productive input of James Leo Cahill.
Given how strongly Schnarzan’s trumpet-voice recalls the wildness Thoreau yearned to hear in “the sound of a bugle in a summer night,” this audio gag speaks volumes, without speaking at all, about the wildness of Tarzan—his mechanically reproduced interiority. What becomes perceptible, in particular, is the inherent disconnect between voice and body, almost identical to the disconnect between sound and image, but not quite; a complex and charged mismatch which provides the famous Tarzan yell its vaguely absurd allure, its unshakeable, ubiquitous repeatability—and defines sound film in general.
Inhearing (Notes Toward Future Work)
This essay has endeavored to lay a small patch of the groundwork for a study of the cinematic voice—specifically, by unpacking the myriad implications embedded in Thoreau’s claim that sound preserves an element of Wildness.
In sound film, a number of factors serve to complicate and threaten that Wildness. It is complicated, for instance, by the fact that film sound is technically reproduced rather than live; and threatened, for instance, by the way in which Hollywood productions like Tarzan the Ape Man employ techniques of narrative style designed to elide the mismatch between sound and image, and to maintain the illusion of a seamless unity of voice and language when it comes to vocal sound. Such factors have a taming effect, so to speak. But so do our listening habits. Much more work will have to be done toward this study’s ultimate goal, to shed the impulse to repress sound’s Wildness.
As will be obvious by now, I hope, the Tarzan franchise presents a particularly strong case for the merits of listening to the nonverbal voice. What has been covered here, however, only scratches the surface of that vast franchise. Still missing, for example, is an extensive analysis of the many post-Weissmuller Tarzan yells, starting with Buster Crabbe’s 1933 rendition. Beyond that, this study will require a closer engagement with the stakes of technically reproducing/simulating the “voices” of Tarzan’s community of animals. There is, for instance, one persistent audio clip of an elephant call that gets replayed many times over in Tarzan the Ape Man, and which has all the repeatability, the sustained urgency, of Tarzan’s own yell.
More broadly, this study of nonverbal voice will have to venture out of Tarzan’s world, out of the jungle, and into other territories where nonverbal voice produces its pre-linguistic effects, including: other narrative films that play with the wild voice and its repression (to name but one very nearby example, King Kong’s famous roar and Fay Wray’s famous scream come only a year after Weissmuller’s yell); the realm of non-narrative and non-fiction films, wherein lies a vast treasure chest of experimentation with the aesthetics of voice, and with its forceful form of indexicality; likewise, much can be learned in the related realms of music, sound art, and performance, and from the scholarship devoted to listening in those realms.
This study would be remiss not to address, to name one rousing example, the final work of Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done With the Judgement of God.” In this 1948 vocal recording intended for radio broadcast, Artaud gestures toward a goal he had expressed a decade earlier, “to turn against language and its basely utilitarian, one could say alimentary, sources, its trapped-beast origins” (Artaud, 46).
“To Have Done With the Judgement of God” amounts to a raving monologue that progressively degenerates into a mode of astonishing nonverbal resistance: word-like nonsense, shrieks, grunts, convulsions of voice, all in service of a profound de-civilization, or dehumanization, of that voice. This anti-Church, anti-American, anti-institution, and most importantly, anti-language rant might resonate strongly with Thoreau and Tarzan (though probably not with Edgar Rice Burroughs).
Beyond audio artifacts such as Artaud’s recordings, it is difficult to say where this study will have to proceed next (the psychoanalytic study of voice? the science of animal languages?). I can only speculate that eventually it will be possible to re-enter the realm of language with renewed insight, or more precisely, inhearing: the capacity to listen to spoken language with the untamed ear of a wild beast, and so in some measure, to hear and understand the sound of the voice.
Acknowledgement
Numerous segments of this essay benefited greatly from the generous reading and productive input of James Leo Cahill.
Works cited
Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double (1938), trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958).
Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan of the Apes (1914) (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984).
Chion, Michel. The Voice In Cinema (1982), ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
---. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Crafton, Donald. The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
Doane, Mary Ann. “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. John Belton and Elisabeth Weis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985): 162-176.
Dyer, Richard. White (New York and London: Routledge, 1997).
Thompson, Emily. “Wiring the World: Acoustical Engineers and the Empire of Sound in the Motion Picture Industry, 1927-1930,” in Erlmann, Veit, ed. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004), 191-209.
Essoe, Gabe. Tarzan of the Movies: A Pictorial History of More Than Fifty Years of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Legendary Hero (New Jersey: Citadel, 1968).
Lastra, James. “Reading, Writing, and Representing Sound,” in Rick Altman, ed. Sound Theory/Sound Practice (New York/London: Routledge, 1992), 65-86.
Lawrence, Amy. Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Pres, 1991).
Ray, Robert B. How a Film Theory Got Lost, and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988).
Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking” (1862) (Fairfield, IA: 1st World Library, 2003).
Torgovnick, Marianna Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Vernon, Alex. On Tarzan (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008).
Weissmuller, Johnny, jr., with William Reed and W. Craig Reed. Tarzan, My Father (Toronto: ECW Press, 2002)
Works consulted
Lastra, James. Sound Technology and the American Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
Thompson, Kristin. Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907-1934 (London: British Film Institute, 1986).
Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double (1938), trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958).
Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan of the Apes (1914) (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984).
Chion, Michel. The Voice In Cinema (1982), ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
---. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Crafton, Donald. The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
Doane, Mary Ann. “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, ed. John Belton and Elisabeth Weis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985): 162-176.
Dyer, Richard. White (New York and London: Routledge, 1997).
Thompson, Emily. “Wiring the World: Acoustical Engineers and the Empire of Sound in the Motion Picture Industry, 1927-1930,” in Erlmann, Veit, ed. Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004), 191-209.
Essoe, Gabe. Tarzan of the Movies: A Pictorial History of More Than Fifty Years of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Legendary Hero (New Jersey: Citadel, 1968).
Lastra, James. “Reading, Writing, and Representing Sound,” in Rick Altman, ed. Sound Theory/Sound Practice (New York/London: Routledge, 1992), 65-86.
Lawrence, Amy. Echo and Narcissus: Women’s Voices in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Pres, 1991).
Ray, Robert B. How a Film Theory Got Lost, and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).
Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988).
Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking” (1862) (Fairfield, IA: 1st World Library, 2003).
Torgovnick, Marianna Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Vernon, Alex. On Tarzan (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2008).
Weissmuller, Johnny, jr., with William Reed and W. Craig Reed. Tarzan, My Father (Toronto: ECW Press, 2002)
Works consulted
Lastra, James. Sound Technology and the American Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
Thompson, Kristin. Exporting Entertainment: America in the World Film Market, 1907-1934 (London: British Film Institute, 1986).
[1] http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=CpVvv9O1yWI
[1] After his sixth Tarzan film for MGM, Weissmuller moved to RKO and continued starring as Tarzan, but with a new yell—similar, but newly created.
[1] For detailed analyses of Tarzan’s brand masculinity, traced back through Burroughs’ novels, see Torgovnick, “Taking Tarzan Seriously,” 42-70; and Bederman, “Tarzan and After,” 217-39.
[1] On the usefulness of “improper questions,” see Robert B. Ray, How a Film Theory Got Lost. Citing Jonathan Culler’s use of the term, Ray asserts that asking improper questions “enable[s] us to jump tracks worn out from overuse.” (56) Here, in reference to Jane, the term is used in the same spirit, with the hope of “jumping tracks” (in the discipline of film/sound studies), while also suggesting that there is something properly “improper” going on in the initial acousmatic encounter between Jane and the Tarzan.
[1] Both Bederman and Dyer make the case that Burroughs’ conception of Tarzan was in direct response to the “softening” of men as a result of modern, industrialized life.
[1] Lincoln did return to the movie business in 1939, and played bit parts in two later Tarzan films: he appears as the “Circus Roustabout” in Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942, with Weissmuller as Tarzan), and then as a fisherman in Tarzan’s Magic Fountain (1949, with Lex Barker as Tarzan).
[1] http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=OvEPfFnp0Wo
[1] For a persuasive account of Tarzan’s espousal of American values to foreign audiences, see Vernon, 33-57.
[1] Trademark Applications and Registrations Retrieval (TARR), a service of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, <http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=75326989&action=Request+Status> (Accessed 25 May, 2010).
[1] Some musical compositions that employ palindromes include Bach’s Minuet in C, Schubert’s Die Zauberharfe 1820, and Haydn’s Symphony no. 47. See Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 08 May, 2010), <http://www.grovemusic.com>
[1] On the legibility of sound in film and of sound in general, see James Lastra, “Reading, Writing, and Representing Sound,” in Altman, 65-86.
[1] See, for example, the Sol Lesser-produced adaptations with Tarzan played by Buster Crabbe, Herman Brix, Bruce Bennett, and Gordon Scott.
[1] The George of the Jungle franchise includes a first animated series that ran on ABC from 1967-70; a 1997 live-action feature film of the same title (Gerard Baldwin and Frank Braxton, 1997); and newer animated series that ran on Teletoon (Canada) and Cartoon Network (U.S.) in 2007-08. Weird Al Yankovich redid the song and imitated its yell for the eponymous 1997 feature film adaptation (dir. Sam Weisman).
[1] http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=r0M_rPcD4EY
[1] http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=xUBK8gOHN-Y
[1] http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=rvZMXZ2s07Q
[1] http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=gbW2RQh6gSQ
[1] TV special, Carol Burnett: Show Stoppers (CBS, aired on 26 November, 2001).
[1] http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=z6x8r1WXbcM
