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Conference Paper
Title: 'Let’s Drink to Monkey Business': Eugenics, Race, and Simian Sexuality in the Captive Wild Woman Trilogy
Conference: Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference
Date: April 2006
Author(s): Jeannette Eileen Jones (Author)
Abstract: This paper explores the themes of race, eugenics, sexuality, and “missing link” discourses in the horror classic film trilogy, Wild Captive Woman (1943), Jungle Woman (1944), and Jungle Captive (1944). The films offer a critique of eugenics—specifically the proverbial “mad (white) scientists’” attempts to create a race of super-humans—by presenting a scenario wherein scientist, Dr. Walters transforms an female gorilla/ape into an “exotic” racially ambiguous woman, Paula Dupree. In the sequels, other “mad scientists” Drs. Fletcher and Stendahl revive the corpse of the ape-woman who embarks “on a savage path of fiendish murder” and “a relentless rampage,” respectively. This paper argues that although the filmmakers attempted to expose the dangers and fallacies of eugenicist experimentation and dogma (not coincidentally during the time of Nazi racial experiments), they did so by employing established racialized discourses on sexuality and simians, and using “blackness” as a signifier of atavistic retrogression from human to ape. The manuscript reveals this dialectic evident by analyzing the following: (1) the filmmakers’ decision to cast actresses Acquanetta (and later) Vicky Lane in the starring role; (2) the writer’s decision to make “overwhelming passion” and jealousy—that is, the ape-woman’s desire for a white male mate and envy of the archetypal white woman—the triggering mechanism for the horrible transformation to the “monstrous creature”; and (3) the use of black hand and face makeup on the actresses to visibly mark (and alert the audience) to the metamorphoses from ape to human. Ultimately the film serves as a window into 1940s concerns with “race science,” evolutionary discourse, sexuality, and racial hierarchy—wherein black women’s bodies served as spectacle and locus of the missing link between humanity and apes.