gallery

GALLERY EDITOR'S NOTE

In this issue's Gallery essay, Kelly Enright takes us deep into the jungle, or at least deep into the changing idea of the jungle in the American psyche. She also journeys across time. By comparing and contrasting two popular images—one a movie poster from the Great Depression and the other a magazine illustration from the late 1950s—Enright traces a transformation in American culture after World War II. What was the jungle, these images suggest, has become the rain forest.

NEIL M. MAHER

Kelly Enright
On the Jungle

AS SOMEONE WHO became environmentally aware in the 1980s, I was surrounded with images of and information about an extremely fragile and endangered place called the rain forest. Within its dense vegetation roads were being built, trees were being cut, undiscovered animals were vanishing, all while doctors were searching its depths for the cure to fatal diseases. I collected spare change as a volunteer for the Rainforest Alliance in a plastic jar colored with cartoon images of monkeys, toucans, palm trees, vines, and elephants.	1
I did not know then that the image of the "rain forest" was the product of a century of tropical forest representation, whose origins lay in a much different landscape. Although also representing tropical forests, the "jungle" was a very different place. Americans of the early and mid-twentieth century knew not the benevolent diversity of the rain forest, but a dark and dangerous landscape called the jungle. It was the realm of human-like apes, or humans reverting to a primal nature. It was filled with violent peoples, disease-bearing insects, and bloodthirsty carnivores. The same landscapes that to me were fragile and threatened were, some fifty years earlier, vicious and threatening. What accounts for this change in imagery?	2
Figure 1. The Dangerous Jungle. Congorilla poster image courtesy of the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum, Chanute, Kansas. Images of the jungle centered on action and adventure. Gorillas represented the forest's many dangers, exaggerated here for the silver screen.
One answer is suggested by comparing the images seen here.1 The first is an advertisement for Congorilla, a 1932 documentary made by respected explorer-filmmakers Martin and Osa Johnson.2 In this poster for the film the gorilla's wide, angry eyes, his menacingly jagged teeth, and his out-stretched arms all suggest the wild dangers of the forest. This danger even threatens intruders, including the lion at whom the gorilla's rage is directed. This film advertisement appealed to the public by portraying the jungle as a dangerous place, both for the animals therein as well as for humans like the Johnsons who chose to enter it.	3
A central component of the jungle's danger was its darkness. The background of the Congorilla poster shows little definition. It is colored in deep shades of green, brown, and black (see the color image on the cover of this issue). The gorilla, too, is shaded; his fingers, brown like branches and pliable like leaves, blend in with the surrounding foliage. The poster thus depicts the gorilla as not just from the jungle, but as part of it. He is not only a lurking danger within the forest, but an elemental part of that landscape. As the title of the Johnsons' film suggests, landscape and animal—Congo and gorilla—are intertwined in the jungle.	. . .