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Historically a western construction, "nature" has become complexly global in its significance. In the late twentieth century, nature must be lucrative to endure. The survival of primates, people and animals, depends on a dialectic of love and money, both of which have been built into global scientific and popular primatology.
-Donna Haraway, Primate Visions (1989)
In 1988 the film Gorillas in the Mist, borrowing the title of a memoir by the recently murdered, world-renowned primatologist Dian Fossey, premiered in movie theaters across the United States. The film popularized Fossey's unflagging, almost fanatical, commitment to saving the dwindling population of wild mountain gorillas living in the Virunga Mountains in central Africa, capitalizing on more than a decade of American media fascination with Fossey and her work.1 Staged as a fraught African romance, which pits Fossey's love affair with National Geographic wildlife photographer Robert Campbell against her devotion to the mountain gorillas she has been studying and protecting for over two decades, the film sentimentalizes global wildlife conservation. In this environmental tragedy there are no winners. Following a gendered formula, the film portrays Fossey as a hysterical fanatic choosing her commitment to the gorillas over marriage and a "civilized" life; her "beloved friend" Digit, the gorilla star in the film, is hacked to death by African poachers; and in the end Fossey too is murdered for her descent into madness in the African jungle as she fights to protect the gorillas at any cost. From the film's logic, the American devotion to saving the gorillas is undone by African savagery, ineptitude, and corruption facilitated by European profiteers, and American film viewers are left to internalize and enact their commitment to gorilla conservation and sustain Fossey's work as consumer voyeurs.
Although the film serves up a formulaic Hollywood melodrama standing in for the complexities of transnational wildlife conservation in postcolonial Africa, the sentimental wildlife dramas it depicts offer some insight into the cultural politics of popular environmentalism as it spread from the United States to a global stage. Despite its misrepresentations, Gorillas in the Mist did play a small role in the battle to protect and promote the mountain gorilla, and it reflects the tangled connections between American audiences, popular media, and the development of environmental policies and...