Dragon Ball Z Uncensored

[L Ron Butterfly]

Congo

Michael Crichton's Congo is the heartwarming tale of three white people who successfully rob Africa's natural resources, destroying a large section of rainforest in the process. Our three white protagonists are accompanied by their pet gorilla and a few African men who get killed off one by one before ever uttering a line of dialogue or contributing anything meaningful to the plot. Fortunately, all of our three white protagonists (and the gorilla) survive.

To be fair to Mr. Crichton, it's not as if every single African character in this 350 page novel about Africa is a dimensionless insult to the entire continent. I mean, just because the pet gorilla has at least ten times more dialogue than all of them combined, that doesn't mean anything. Crichton often depicts African characters laughing and smiling knowingly to each other. So they are probably just as intelligent as the white characters.

And that's pretty impressive because the white characters are all geniuses.

Literally:

Karen Ross is a a 24 year old computer expert looking for special diamonds whose perfect conductivity will usher in the next technological boom. Peter Elliott is an animal psychologist who trained his gorilla Amy to speak sign language. The duo is led by Munro, a career criminal who takes time off from trafficking guns to discover a diamond mine and an unknown species of ape. I mean, you didn't think they'd get an actual African to guide their expedition, did you? Of course not. They found a Scottish badass who knows the area because he sells illegal firearms to the locals.

Which brings us to the turning point, and the point at which Africans actually become the most vital part of the story. You see, the diamond mine in question is guarded by evil, skull-crushing apes. If any of the three white people in this novel were to die, it would be totally depressing. So each African is nice enough to get his skull crushed approximately seventy pages after introducing himself in his first and only line of dialogue. This is essential because

a) the book would be boring if nobody got killed, and

b) the white people we come to know and love simply have to get out alive.

And we really do get to love this fantastic group of white pioneers. The only flaw we can detect in computer whiz Karen Ross is that she's just too determined and ambitious. She tediously and meticulously works her way toward a goal, and then when she's almost there, she gets too excited and acts without thinking. That's why she accidentally destroys a two mile section of rain forest. She's just got too much gumption! What's two square miles in the grand scheme of things, right?

Then there's Munro, the gangster. He's not a parasite who pushes weapons on developing nations and encourages the natives to wipe each other out while he pillages the entire continent for its natural resources. He's just a pragmatic, street smart survivor who knows how to get the job done.

And Elliott, the gorilla fucker. He's practically a saint. His relationship with Amy is charming and not the least bit inappropriate. None of the characters are creeped out by this middle aged, unmarried man who spends all his time with a female gorilla and shows no sexual interest whatsoever in Karen, that 24 year old hottie parading around in her tank top and cargo shorts, all while tinkering with the sexiest, most sophisticated technology on earth. Elliott swears Amy can talk to him with sign language, and neither Karen nor Munro ever expresses more than a second of brief, fleeting doubt about this claim. They almost always take his supposed gorilla translations at face value. I mean, what do a couple of international thieves/terrorists have to be suspicious about, anyway? You'd think a best-selling author could make his crack team of scientists at least as skeptical as the cast of Mr. Ed.


To be fair, Elliott is viewed by the other two important characters as the weak link of the group. That is, until he validates himself by shooting and killing two African protestors. I mean, he feels guilty about it afterward, so you can't really dislike him for it. And it's good to see him finally prove he has a set of balls. Before that, he's always just prancing around with his gorilla-bride (no, really, it's not like that). Throughout the novel, both before and after he officially becomes a murderer, Elliott's gorilla reassures him that he is a good person. "Elliott good human. Amy like Elliott. Elliott good human man" she signs to him repeatedly throughout, lest the reader get the idea that Elliott might be a deranged asshole. Crichton skillfully avoids nuanced emotional detail in his work, but it still might have been nice to get at least one scene like this:

"After killing two men, Peter Elliot sat in his chair with Amy in his lap, dangerously close to his genitals. Sweating profusely, he pet her with rapid, mechanical strokes to the back of her neck, stared wildly into space and repeated, 'It's OK. Amy signed to me that it's OK. She says Peter good human. It's OK. She still loves me. It's all going to be OK.'

Karen and Munro observed him silently, with a combination of pity and disbelief."

(And yes, compared to the rest of this book, that passage would stand out as nuanced emotional detail, had it been included)

Now, when one is confronted with this information about Crichton's Congo-- that its plot celebrates three white people stealing from an African diamond mine and accidentally blowing up that diamond mine and a good chunk of rain forest in the process while both directly and indirectly killing numerous Africans along the way-- one might get the impression that this book is a little culturally insensitive. Maybe a little xenophobic or ethnocentric. Maybe even a little racist.

Rest assured, this couldn't be further from the truth. You see, the central theme of Congo is equality. Not just racial equality. It goes deeper than that. Michael Crichton, through his artful story-telling and vast scientific knowledge, illustrates not only equality among men, but equality between man and the greater animal kingdom. Crichton goes through great lengths to realize this theme. Before the novel even begins we get this quote from Henry Morton Stanley:

"The more experience and insight I obtain into
human nature, the more convinced do I become
that the greater portion of a man is purely animal."


Crichton pounds this message home harder than Sammy Sosa sweating pure synthetic adrenaline. The book is filled with anecdotes about gorillas fashioning twigs into daggers, using them to catch termites, and teaching the practice to other gorillas. It seems not only the use of tools but also higher communication and even culture are not the sole domain of man. Amy, the gorilla, is said to possess an IQ of around 90, slightly below the human average. Watch as your concept of human exceptionalism dissolves before your eyes!

The ironic part is, in his rush to humanize gorillas, Crichton forgets to humanize the actual humans in his own story. There is not a single African person in this book with more personality than cardboard. They literally show up, state their name, and then wait around in the background to die in horrible ways. What kind of message does this give about the author's perception of Africans? He unselfconsciously reinforces a badly mistaken Western stereotype that Africans are dumb, homogenous, and negligible.

It forces me to wonder how Crichton developed his "monkeys are people too" obsession. Could it be a disturbing, defensive reaction to the civil rights movement? When Crichton heard black people demand to be recognized as equals, did he (perhaps subconsciously) think, "Sure, black people are equal to me. In the same way that gorillas and chimps are because they can eat termites off a piece of wood they jam into the ground"?

It's not really that far-fetched. I mean, when the three protagonists figure out that ancient Africans trained the original gorillas to guard the diamond mine, their amazement with the the natives' progress in animal training is described in the same tone as their amazement at gorillas using tools and learning language. It's not that they can't believe SOMEBODY could train apes so well. Elliott, after all, devotes his entire life to it. It's that they couldn't believe THESE PEOPLE could do it.
Also, the blood-thirsty, smarter-than-your-average-gorrillas do manage to kill every African on the expedition, but the three white people always manage to narrowly escape. I guess the gorillas can outsmart the Africans but not the Americans or the Scott.


The main characters also speculate that the super gorillas may have interbred with humans. At this point, I can only think, "Yeah, they interbred with Africans cause their genes are so similar. They probably couldn't have done that with white people, though." The ignorant, infantile tone of this book forces the reader to think in these terms.

The thinly-veiled parallels between black people and apes in this book are staggering. It's highly offensive, and more so because the author seems to actually believe he's conveying a positive message. He's like a blind orchestra leader who doesn't realize his wands are actually knives and he's slicing up kittens to the cheery waltz of the concerto. He just stands there-- eyes shut tight with dew dripping from the corners, a dumb smile affixed to his increasingly blood-stained face-- trudging along with this boorish tale that exposes so many terrible things about his psyche.

Now, in case anybody reading this thinks it's a big troll, or I'm just trying to get a laugh out of some old science fiction book, I'm serious about this. I'm not just taking plot details out of context. There is what seems to be an unintentionally malicious impulse powering this work of literature.

It's an issue of tone and the assumed opinion of the objective narrator/writer. For example, there is an incredible novel by the German author Patrick Suskind entitled Perfume. It is the fantastical story of Grenouille, a boy born without any body odor and with an extremely heightened sense of smell. Offended by the smell of other people, he retreats from human company, until he discovers perfume. Perfume becomes his reason for living, and he becomes a hot shot perfumer's star apprentice. When he first catches the smell of a sexually ripening young girl, he identifies it as the smell that can finally make him acceptable to other humans. So he goes on a killing spree, murdering over twenty young girls and soaking their body parts in alcohol to preserve the sent.

The main character of Perfume is a disgusting monster and is presented as such throughout. Suskind uses a rather common narrative trick, presenting an extremely disagreeable protagonist (or antihero) and "selling" him to the reader. By the end of the book, you know Grenouille is a monster, but you're still rooting for him. It is intentionally subversive, and yet it actually reinforces the idea that mass murdering fifteen year olds is wrong because the novel's entertainment value relies on the reader feeling guilty for cheering on a serial killer.

None of this awareness is present in Crichton's voice. We are presented with three characters committing unthinkable atrocities against an entire continent and an entire race. They are presented to us as stubborn and foolhardy, yes. Narrow-minded and impulsive, yes. Overaggressive and overambitious, yes. But unthinkably destructive and genocidal? Not really. And it's largely because the people on the receiving end of these atrocities are depicted as wall paper.

Never in the book does the narrator acknowledge the basic evil of his character's actions. In fact, the narrator does the opposite, focusing on their bonding with each other and their supposedly good-natured outlooks. The book even ends with a hallmark moment of amy, Peter's gorilla, choosing to go back into the wild to live among other gorillas, only to meet up with him years later and, to his astonishment, sign "I love you."

With cheesy "awwww, get a tissue" moments such as this one, there is no way the narrator is aware of how fucked up his characters are behaving.

The complete failure to include any substantial African dialogue, and Crichton's insistence that cannibalism, sex-with-monkeys, bizarre superstition, and primitive aggression are standard fare for "African culture" (as if, for starters, a continent as large and diverse as Africa has only one accepted culture) only reinforce the unintentional bigotry displayed throughout this work.

It makes the book, at best, trite and condescending. At worst, a totally surreal experience, where you can't believe somebody this insane actually wrote an entire novel and got a respected publisher to publish it and convinced legions of fans that his basic worldview wasn't repugnant.



All the people who think this novel's central theme of equality and understanding is in any way genuine-- in spite of the massive incongruities between that greater theme and the finer details of the narrative-- should stop reading altogether and adopt a past time more suited to their own intellectual capacity. Like, I don't know, shooting ping pong balls out their assholes or something.

[YES]

I know its anal but you do come across as pretty retarded not putting this in the other foru


That said I am glad I read this post, but will never read it again

[Derek Payne]

Michael Crichton was a shit writer.

[SuperPsaturn]

Hey Punkasss, if you ever decide to move to africa and be with the people you love and defend so much be sure to give them a translated to clicks version of your posts. I'm sure they'll smile knowingly to each other before macheteing your face off and selling your skeleton at a souvenir stand as a pygmy doorstop.

[Fagzilla]

Thank God PunkAsss is back.

[Theldorrin]

It's not surprising that Punkasss is sexist as well as racist.
_________________
@}-,-'- *~*~* Member of the FTU Elegant Tea Party Society *~*~* -'-,-{@

[Sporkism]

Wait, so did punkasss write that? I thought he just copied and pasted from somewhere else.

Not that I'd read it either way.
_________________


@}-,-'- *~*~* Member of the FTU Elegant Tea Party Society *~*~* -'-,-{@

[Derek Payne]

Michael Crichton is very sexist and generally writes very whiney and weak female characters.

[Big Fagot]

Hey, I wonder what else Derek thinks about Michael Crichton.

Meanwhile, in the real world ...!

[Big Fagot]

Derek, I'm sorry. I just wanted to use punctuation in that way. You can say whatever you want about Michael Crichton.

[FancyMichael]

His first name is the same as mine.

[L Ron Butterfly]

I wrote that as a Christmas present to my mom. She read Congo and thinks it's amazing.

Next time I see her, I'm going to give her all kinds of shit about calling Breakfast of Champions retarded and actually liking that garbage.

[FancyMichael]

I have a hard time finding something like Jurassic Park suspenseful at all, because even a weakling like Yamucha could have wiped out all of the aggressive dinosaurs on the island without breaking a sweat.

[L Ron Butterfly]

Chris, did you even actually read my rant, or are you just happy because I might get into another debacle with My Head Hurts?

[johnbuisthegreat]

I read up to the part about A and B

Punkassss did you ever think they used a Scottish guide because none of the locals knew English?

[Big Fagot]

Leonard Susskind is a string theorist.

[Theldorrin]

Oh, he plays make believe professionally?
_________________
@}-,-'- *~*~* Member of the FTU Elegant Tea Party Society *~*~* -'-,-{@

[johnbuisthegreat]

http://www.creasedcomics.com/video_page.php?id=39