John Carter reminds us how to deal with death cults.
By Lee Russell Wilkes
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ pulp fantasy John Carter series influenced everything from Crabbe’s Flash Gordon to Cameron’s Avatar and Herbert’s Dune – every chapter reveals a new world of wonder, kept moving with unending shameless cliffhangers. The story is told in a solipsistic first person and filled with boo-hiss villainy. Anyone scoffing at the basic style misses the point entirely. Burroughs was chasing the audience, not high-minded literary critics.
Burroughs’ Mars is Schiaparelli’s vision of canals on a dying world – fantasy science, flying sailboats, ballistic weapons and sharp swords. The world the natives call ‘Barsoom’ is tribalistic, and only as technologically advanced as the plot demands.
While Burroughs wrote eleven books, Carter’s story is mostly wrapped up in the first three. In book one, the post-civil war Virginian awakens on Mars and casually slaughters his way across it – possessed of superhuman advantage due to weaker gravity. He chases the MacGuffin Dejah Thoris – imagine From Dusk Till Dawn era Salma Hayek in a G-string – across the dying planet. Who wouldn’t? He spends time in everybody’s dungeon, and for narrative convenience, makes lifelong friends of all the right people.
In book two, he pursues Dejah Thoris down the holy river Iss, encountering a sadistic religion of slavery, torture and cannibalism. No deconstructivist sympathy for the devil here. No PTSD either. In book three, Burroughs reminds us some people can’t be reasoned with – Carter’s solution to entrenched death cults is to form a coalition of the willing and mercilessly eradicate the believers. He’s big on regime change.
Reviewers blither on about the books not being PC. Well, modern literature is, yet nothing has left the slightest cultural footprint for decades. Want to see how it’s done? Read Burroughs. This is refreshingly archaic storytelling – black hats vs white. Sure, it has its problems – the near-naked women serve only as lovestruck plot devices. Imagine the modern audience, if you can find it, writing an auto-ethnographic rebuttal: “Just like Margaret Mead, Burroughs misunderstood the natives.” What’s left to enjoy if every story is dragged before the court of colonialism, patriarchy, and white saviourism? Some bastards are just plain evil. Making them cannibals just signposts it for those who need it spelling out.
Burroughs’ influence extends into the language too. It is but the work of a moment to realise Carter shares a turn of phrase with Bertie Wooster. ‘Sith’ (a giant wasp-like creature) is owed to Burroughs. Game of Thrones’ ‘Tarth’ has ancestry in Barsoom’s ‘Ptarth’.
Burroughs’ work was blockbuster material long before that term existed. Forget all those rubber-monster Doug McClure movies – Burroughs was the James Cameron of his day. Now Jennifer Salke’s fourth-wave agenda has exited Amazon Studios, it’s time for a gritty HBO-style adaptation. Put Dejah Thoris on screen as written and you have a winner. A no-nonsense John Carter is what the 2020s need. Or perhaps, it’s about an expat chasing skirt?
Lee Russell Wilkes 