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When Tarzan yells – On the nature and culture of screaming (Part 1/4)
We have little sympathy for a potato or an oyster. Samuel Butler once observed this and also proposed a reason for it: “Since, then,” he writes, “they do not annoy us by any expression of pain we call them emotionless; and so qua mankind they are; but mankind is not everybody.” Thus on hearing a scream, culture and civilization – or rather, their human representatives – reflect on precisely what is part of them and what is to be disregarded. And that is still interesting today. When regarding the economics of attention, for instance, or media, advertising and politics as realms of the “shout or die” principle. Even Sir Peter Ustinov once quipped, “When someone yells it no longer matters what he wants to say.”
But what is a scream? – They say that screaming is the opposite of culture. In a scream, life is condensed into a single utterance. Belted out with maximum force, it is the sum of all possible sentiments. We scream in rage and desire, in happiness and pain, in fear and exertion, in protest and warning. That said, raising our voice so that people can hear us who are further away or did not hear the first time is a communicative exception. For screams are “loud” and “shrill”, “desperate” or “piercing”, rarely “meaningful”, never “eloquent”.
Midday in the jungle: Water gurgles, birds chirp, and then Tarzan yells. He is asking nature for help; elephants and monkeys hurry past and even lions make an appearance. Tarzan roars and intimidates his enemies. And at the end of the movie, too: Tarzan yells. For ever since 1912, when author Edgar Rice Burroughs dreamt him up, that is how he has been letting all know that, once again, he has tri- umphed. Consequently, American soldiers asked the most famous of all those who played Tarzan, namely Johnny Weissmuller, actor and top swimmer, for permission to sound his yell on the battlefields of World War II.
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