Why Doesn’t Tarzan Have a Beard?

Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan

Somebody presented this to me as a head-scratcher recently: why is Tarzan, who lives in the jungle and has never encountered a razor, clean-shaven? In saying “Tarzan,” of course, the asker meant Johnny Weissmuller, the gold medal-winning Olympic swimmer who played Tarzan in twelve feature films from 1932 to 1948. But seriously, the same applies to Buster Crabbe, Gordon Scott, and Alexander Skarsgård: Tarzan is portrayed without facial or body hair.

Weissmuller’s Tarzan remains the character’s iconic depiction, with the curved muscles and sleek skin of somebody who trained his body to resist water drag. But checking photos, I realize Weissmuller wasn’t just clean-shaven. His hair is also neatly barbered, slicked back in the “RKO Pictures Means Business” style that might, maybe, have reflected jungle sweat, but is clearly Brylcreem. Sure, apes groom one another, but it doesn’t look like that!

My immediate response was: same reason Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra has a fashionable bob. Because these movies are never really about what they’re about; they’re about the people who make and watch them. This stock answer could apply to countless historical or mythological epochs. Cinematic depictions of Hercules, Abraham Lincoln, Gandalf, or King Richard III always say more about us than about the characters.

Thinking about that answer, however, I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with it. Weissmuller’s moderately muscled, glossy Tarzan isn’t a statement about the people who make or consume those movies, any more than the more absurdly muscled depictions of Hugh Jackman as Wolverine or Chris Hemsworth as Thor really reflect us. These characters aren’t who we, the audience, are; they’re lectures about who we, the audience, should be.

Abandoned from infancy, Tarzan grows to adulthood in an Edenic jungle politely untainted by ordinary old Black Africans. He innately understands Euro-American standards of personal grooming, fitness, and hygiene, which travel hand-in-glove with his instinctive ability to fashion tools and shelter. His ability to command animals is interesting, but incidental. His real accomplishment is bending the “wilderness” to suit his distinctly industrial-era demands.

Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra

Tarzan is the perfect colonial agent. He shapes nature to his expectations, but he also, on first encountering White people, recognizes their superiority, and longs for assimilation. Sure, in the movies he always returns to Africa, because if he ever permanently leaves, the franchise ends and RKO loses money. But once there, he consistently aids White imperialists and never once sullies himself with boring old Africans.

(I know, the movie with Alexander Skarsgård attempted to subvert this and make Tarzan more inclusive. That movie also tanked. All the perfumes of Arabia can’t wash the stink of colonialism off the franchise.)

Taylor’s Cleopatra tells a very different story. Released as the post-WWII generation hit adulthood, with the industrial excesses and pop-culture liberation that 1963 entailed, Cleopatra was no less a moralistic lecture. Surrounded by riches, adoration, and power, Cleopatra represented postwar American splendor. But she also represented deep distrust of powerful women. The movie repeatedly moralizes about how destructive imperial power becomes in feminine hands.

In 1963, women like Wanda Jackson, Lesley Gore, and even Elizabeth Taylor herself stopped accepting men’s shit. They demanded autonomy, which they weren’t always willing to state as explicitly sexual, though Taylor was already on her fourth marriage, age 31. Meanwhile, Cleopatra hit cinemas the same year Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique dropped, pushing second-wave feminism into America’s mainstream. This wasn’t coincidental.

Cleopatra is presented as commanding, imperial, regal, but also doomed. The movie depicts her openly consuming male adoration, setting her own sexual terms, and demanding recognition. But we, the audience, know she’s already doomed. She’s going to embrace the wrong war, backed by the wrong allies, and will eventually choose suicide to avoid the ignominy of capture. We already know this, and implicitly, so does she.

Both movies arise from cultural contexts. Tarzan appeared, first in Burroughs’ short novels, then onscreen, as European empires in Africa and India were disintegrating, but America was establishing colonies in the Asian Pacific. Tarzan’s African jungle was transferable to American soldiers in the Philippine rainforests. Cleopatra subsequently emerged as women began challenging a male-dominated social order.

So no, I realize, these characters don’t really reflect us. Rather, they establish moralistic models for how we should or shouldn’t behave. Tarzan bespeaks the values of White empire, while Cleopatra warns about the perils of female ambition. Both characters serve a White male power hierarchy. One buys in, and is rewarded; the other rebels, and is punished. They aren’t us; they’re who Hollywood’s elite wants us to be.