Of monsters and mysteries
Rare footage tells a powerful story of Dian Fossey’s work – and death – among gorillas while killing of a different kind gets the demythologising treatment, writes James Belfield.
King Kong’s image of Fay Wray clutched by a monstrous gorilla was still the cliched perception of these great apes when Dian Fossey created Karisoke Research Centre in Rwanda in 1967.
By the time of her brutal death on December 27, 1985, she’d helped the world understand these giants as rare, gentle, family-oriented creatures – and revealed the real monsters to be the humans who schemed and poached and sought to make money out of turning gorilla hands into ashtrays, their heads into souvenirs and their social groups into tawdry tourist attractions.
The National Geographic brand is forever linked to Fossey’s work through the magazine’s January 1970 cover shot by Bob Campbell and Fossey’s own article Making Friends with Mountain Gorillas. Her words then were immediately evocative (she told of rescuing two orphaned baby gorillas from a packing crate destined for a zoo in Germany, and of communicating through croaks and mutual grooming) but, half a century on, and spoken from beyond the grave in a new documentary Dian Fossey: Secrets in the Mist, her words carry added poignancy.
Mystery has always surrounded Fossey’s death aged just 53 – and this doco launches immediately into the suspense through archival images of the murder scene and a voice-over detailing how she had been “hacked to death” with machetes. The series relies on more than 40 hours of rare, incredible footage of Fossey’s work alongside the gorillas for its power, but its intent is to unravel the causes behind her death. More often than not the interviews and diary extracts (voiced by Sigourney Weaver, who played Fossey in the 1988 awardwinning film Gorillas in the Mist) deal directly with her relationships with humans rather than the apes.
What emerges is the story of a headstrong loner who learnt scientific rigour despite no formal training and coped with isolation and discomfort to feed her obsession. Friends and colleagues describe her as cautious about trusting people and, after an aborted relationship with the married Bob Campbell who had taken that famous cover photo, as choosing her friendships with gorillas over those with humans. Talking about playing with one specially favoured gorilla called Digit, her diary entry reads
“at such times I feel my scientific detachment dissolves”.
It’s also clear she attracted many enemies through her work. She taunted poachers – at times overstepping the legal mark by whipping them with stinging nettles and dancing around in Halloween masks pretending to be a witch in order to spook them – uncovered gold smugglers and rowed openly with authorities she (rightly) feared were working alongside the poachers or who were risking the gorillas’ safety by increasing tourism.
By taking the format of a true crime doco, this three-part series focuses directly with the people best placed to talk about her still unsolved murder – and even deals with the impact of the Rwandan genocide in the mid 90s, which means it’s highly unlikely the true culprits will ever be discovered.
Against this background of monstrous behaviour, Fossey and the objects of her studies shine as the most humane characters in this tragic but wonderfully told story.
There’s also the slight air of demythologising of a monster about the two-part series Dark Angel on Prime this week when Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt swaps her Edwardian lady’s maid uniform for the Victorian threads of Mary Ann Cotton, who was hanged in 1873 and is renowned as Britain’s first female serial killer.
Based on a book by David Wilson that points to her having poisoned three husbands, 11 children, a lover, three step-children, a friend and her mother, you’d be forgiven for thinking Dark Angel might favour the underlit, brooding scenes of similar Jack the Ripper and Sweeney Todd series.
Instead, as we follow Cotton’s trail of arsenic-induced mayhem, the script favours a plot peppered with glimpses of post-natal depression, weak and useless men (who probably get just about what they deserve), and a fever-ridden brutal world in the north-east of England in which a child’s death can be seen as blessed relief.
As Cotton puts it as she pours a cuppa from her arsenic-laced pot: “Things always seem better after a nice cup of tea.”
Dian Fossey: Secrets in the Mist.