Brunelleschi's Dome

human extremes to which she would
go to protect the great apes—and in
the fact that she was murdered by unknown
assailants.
Fossey's hatred of African tribesmen
of the Congo and Rwanda who make
their living capturing gorillas ultimately
became an obsession. She resorts to
magic ritual, torture, violence, and, in
real life, perhaps homicide. Her closest
relations in the film (and in fact)
are with the gorillas: Her outstanding
"love" in life is the silver-back male
gorilla troop leader Digit. Fossey, in
the end, is buried by his side.
Human Disgrace
How does such a woman—vile in
behavior, inhuman in action, and perhaps
even a disgrace to the rather
more gentle and understandable creature
she claims to protect—become a
heroine?
Fossey was chosen by British Empire
operative Louis Leakey as part of a female
crew of amateurs to study man's
"closest relatives" the chimpanzee,
the gorilla, and the orangutan.
The assumption stated in the film is
that to know man one must study his
ape predecessors and relatives. That
which makes man unique is left out.
Although Leakey is an expert on
stone tool-making, he ascribes the beginning
of humanity to magic. He, like
others of his Darwinian bent, sought
to prove that man could never be better
than his presumed animal "heritage."
Leakey's rejection of the rational is
also seen in his reason for choosing
amateur women to sponsor. These
women, he argued, could get "closer"
to the animals. Such "closeness," of
course, led to the highly objectionable
practice of altering and anthropomorphizing
the animal behavior.
Fossey herself, unstable and obsessive,
was perhaps as much a victim of
this ghoulish exercise by Leakey as the
gorillas.
But perhaps the greatest irony in
these animal studies was the shock of
another Leakey protege, Jane Goodall,
in observing the chimpanzees of the
Gombe river preserve. After some 18
years of gushing over these chimps,
Goodall was appalled to witness cannibalism
and murder, even warlike raids
between troops.
The movie, flawed in execution,
cold in its treatment of Africans, fails
in its efforts at glorification. Sigourney
Weaver, the star, bears some resemblance
to Fossey but suffers from a lack
of human spark. We can be sure, however,
that there will be more such efforts
by those who not only deny the
divinity of man, but insist on proving
it by being worse than the beast.
—Judah Philip
Rubinstein
21 st CENTURY
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