A Barsoomian Man Never Lies
But What Happens When You Neutralize an Honest Man?
I love the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I’ve read the entirety of the series, plus I’m almost done with the Pellucidar books and plan to finish the Pirates of Venus series as well. I may one day work my way through Tarzan, which was my father’s favorite Burroughs character. But none of them can compare to my great affection for John Carter, Dejah Thoris, and the rest of that Martian crew.
My two oldest boys have now read the first seven or eight books. And they desperately wanted to see the Disney adaptation, John Carter of Mars (2011). I warned them that the film was seen as a complete flop and that it performed so poorly that the two planned sequels were cancelled. But still, they insisted. So, we gave ourselves an afternoon to watch it. And while both noted significant departures, they came away saying they enjoyed it. After it was over, my youngest son and my 7-year-old daughter both asked when they would be able to read the John Carter books. To quote my little girl, “I was surprised at how much I liked that.” Indeed.
That same sentiment is how I would describe my own viewing. Specifically, the film by Disney surprised me in two ways. First, I was surprised at how good the movie is in terms of quality. Considering the film is one of Disney’s biggest disasters, and even cost the CEO at the time his job, the film works remarkably well. Second, the performances are quite stellar overall (I’ll get to the problem of Taylor Kitsch later). I mean, Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris is a stroke of brilliance, and if you don’t believe me, watch her Portia in The Merchant of Venice. She’s great.
And this same sentiment could be said of every performance. Willem Defoe as Tars Tarkas? It works! Mark Strong as Matai Shan the holy Thern? Again, it somehow works. It is as though the film had every piece it needed to be a complete success. And yet, it failed. And I mean, a $200 million dollar failure. Disney has dealt with bad situations before. Treasure Planet (2002), The Alamo (2004), and Around the World in 80 Days (2004) all flopped close together. And let’s not forget Mars Needs Moms (2011) before John Carter and the horrendous The Lone Ranger (2012) after it. Okay, so maybe it was a rough time for Disney, repeating the 2004 debacle and foreshadowing 2023. Regardless, why pull the plug on a trilogy that had some real potential? Much of this is blamed on the marketing campaign, which a decade later was still recalled as “one of the worst marketing campaigns in movie history.” But I don’t think that’s the whole story.
The primary writer Michael Chabon talked at length about some of the changes he felt were necessary to the character of John Carter. In the original novel, Carter is a proud Confederate soldier, but not the kind of cruel Southerner that has become the standard trope in Hollywood (like in Cold Mountain). Carter was a man of honor. Of course, this was seen as “problematic.”
“I wanted to not absolve him of that, but also not make him pro the side he was on. The best I could do was neutralize him and just make him disillusioned by everything he had chosen to do, war in general, let alone the wrong side. And so that was conscious at the time.”
This is why Kitsch was cast for the role, despite immense interest from other actors. Kitsch could play angry and disillusioned, something he’d done well as a brooding teenage character in Friday Night Lights. It’s like no one in Hollywood has learned the real lesson from Emo Peter Parker. Change a character’s ethos for convenient reasons and you will lose the audience who loves him.
What really makes the Barsoom story work is the character of John Carter. I mean, his ethical character. He is a man who will do what is right, consequences upon himself be damned. He is virtuous to a fault. And Burroughs, knowing in the 1910s and 1920s that not everyone in the Confederacy (nor the Union) was like that, spent a lot of time developing Carter’s relationship with the many different races on Mars. From Burroughs’s perspective, choosing which side of the Civil War to fight in did not mean you saw the world only in terms of skin color. And his “fighting man of Mars” proved over and over again that it is the metal of a man’s heart that defines him. It might even be fair to say that the author’s affinity for “conversions of character” might rival that of Dickens himself.
I think this is why the movie failed. When you neutralize a character in this way, make him “complicated” because of an unfashionable opinion, you tinker with those things that make him great. The Barsoom series confronts racism head on in a lot of places, while the Disney film completely misses this because they didn’t like having a Confederate act heroically. This is what Disney is still reckoning with 20 years later, and why so many of the recent Marvel and Star Wars films have tanked. All the material needed to tell a delightful story is right at their fingertips, but they are so consumed by what Pascal and Rousseau called amour-propre, the unflinching desire to say and do what will win the approval of society. Pascal is worth quoting at length, as his sentiments perfectly describe the shift I’m describing:
This embarrassment in which he finds himself produces in him the most unrighteous and criminal passion that can be imagined; for he conceives a mortal enmity against that truth which reproves him and which convinces him of his faults. He would annihilate it, but, unable to destroy it in its essence, he destroys it as far as possible in his own knowledge and in that of others; that is to say, he devotes all his attention to hiding his faults both from others and from himself, and he cannot endure either that others should point them out to him, or that they should see them.
Disney films for the last twenty years have been far too worried about amour-propre. It’s possible that has always been the case, though I think the original Walt Disney struggled with this in a different way. And so, the world of Baroom remains without its breakthrough moment, when a brilliant adaptation brings new readers to a world full of characters and virtue. There is a certain irony about the whole thing. For John Carter does not suffer from amour-propre, telling Dejah Thoris that “a gentleman does not lie to save himself.” Dejah Thoris cheekily responds that “I do not know what a ‘gentleman’ is, nor have I ever heard before of Virginia; but on Barsoom no man lies.” Maybe one day we’ll have the joy of seeing such a world brought to life on the silver screen. Until then, we still have the wonderful novels.