A Hollywood company travels into Africa to make a Tarzan-like jungle film, bringing trucks, cameras, actors and studio assumptions into terrain they do not understand. The expedition encounters violence and a bizarre hidden society, while a look-alike named Stanley Obroski complicates Tarzan’s identity.
The expedition reflects the international film culture of the 1930s, with cameras, vehicles, actors and studio ambition transported into the African interior. Burroughs uses the film crew both for adventure and satire, contrasting Hollywood's manufactured jungle heroics with Tarzan's very real struggle against danger, deception and a strange hidden society.
The film crew brings a manufactured version of jungle adventure into a landscape where the dangers are not staged. Burroughs uses the collision to parody Hollywood assumptions about Tarzan-like heroism while placing the real Tarzan beside actors who imitate an image resembling him. The result is both adventure and satire, contrasting commercial spectacle with the unpredictable world it tries to reproduce.
Louis L’Amour
97 books
Christopher Nicole
49 books
Colin Falconer
22 books