10
Popular Culture Review
southern accent), to kill the beasts, but these lions exhibit a supernatural knack for
knowing what is coming. Actually, the same man-eating lion incident was the
basis for Bwana Devil, a 1952 inept action film starring Robert Stack, notable
only as the first film in 3-D advertised with the slogan, “A lion in your lap.”
Again, in this primitive test, these two men have to discover the basic truth of
their souls. But in the more enlightened era of Hollywood’s exploitation of
Kenya, movies have centered not on the power of the primitive but on the beauty
of endangered wildlife. The 1988 film Gorillas in the Mist used the lush forests
of Kenya’s Aberdare mountains as a stand-in for Rwanda and told the story of
primate researcher and crusader Dian Fossey (Sigourney Weaver), who fought to
save the mountain gorillas and was murdered for her efforts. And finally there is
the ne plus ultra of Hollywood Kenya: Out o f Africa, the sweepingly beautiful
and romantic 1986 Oscar-winning Best Picture starring Meryl Streep and Robert
Redford. David Watkin’s cinematography to this day has fixed our most
passionate notions of the African landscape. “The air of the African highlands
went to my head like wine. I was all the time slightly drunk with it,” wrote Karen
Blixen (who used the pseudonym Isak Dineson), whose memoir of her farm in
Kenya inspired the film. This Hollywood epic was enormously influential in
several areas, as Christine Pittel has observed: “Images of Streep and Redford on
safari slow dancing under a blanket of stars or sailing above wild herds in a
biplane turned the film into a massive hit, launched fashion trends and singlehandedly transformed tourism into Kenya’s top industry.”6
Out o f Africa was well strafed by critics who saw the film as visually
gorgeous but ideological vicious, creating a misty-eyed, nostalgic Banana
Republic Travel and Safari Company/Ralph Lauren Safari Clothing image of
white colonial Kenya.7 Yet Hollywood continues to be hooked on the
hallucinatory power of Kenya, producing I Dreamed o f Africa (2000) fourteen
years after Streep and Redford buzzed Kenyan wildlife in a biplane. It is
definitely not revisionist cinema, for it purports to tell the story of Kuki Gallmann
(Kim Basinger), a young divorcee who attempts to find a “different rhythm of
life” (in fact that phrase is repeated at least three times in the film, something
even the most comatose moviegoer would notice) when she and her husband
Paolo (Vincent Perez) move to a ranch in Kenya. The screenplay by Paula Milne
and Susan Shilliday is based upon the biographical novel by Euro-Africanist
preservationist Kuki Gallmann. The story begins in Venice when Kuki and her
rich and snobby friends are coming back from a late-night party and are run off by
road by an oil tanker truck. Confined to her hospital bed for weeks with a
severely crushed leg, we learn, through Kuki’s frequent voice-overs, that she feels
unfulfilled in her idle and routine life with her mother and son. “I’ve stopped
growing,” she tells her mother (Eve Marie Saint). This sentiment is temporarily
alleviated by the attention of the handsome driver of the car that night, Paolo, who
indicates that the truck was responsible for the accident. But whose idea was it to