The Missing Link

(Le Chaînon manquant, Jean-Paul “Picha” Walravens, Belgium/France, 1980)

Tales from the Anus (Part 2)*

Belgian animator-cartoonist Jean-Paul “Picha” Walravens’ animated feature The Missing Link – later retitled and extensively reworked as B.C. Rock for USA release (minus most of the Leo Sayer songs!) – is less coherent than Blake Edwards’ S.O.B. (1981) as a raging “tale from the anus”, but just as fascinating and symptomatic.

A bizarre mix of contradictory political ideologies – from a spot-on parody of Walt Disney liberalism to the offensive privileging of heterosexual intercourse over all other sexual practices – it shares the prevalent concern in current popular cinema with pre-history, primitive societies and the birth of civilisation. Cavemen (Carl Gottlieb, 1981), Tarzan the Ape Man (John Derek, 1981) and (in a different way) Excalibur (John Boorman, 1981) are all part of this trend.

Picha himself characteristically helped kickstart the fad in 1975 with Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle, another of his “adult” or X-rated animations. Although firmly pledged to the outrageous and disrespectable, Picha’s effort, in the case of The Missing Link, won him an official berth at the Cannes Film Festival.

What motivates these various films (or similar trends in music, such as the so-called Tribal Revival) is not any interest in researching actual, historical facts but, rather, a massive investment in fantasy and mythmaking. What they play on, with varying degrees of political awareness, is the idea that to show history is to forcibly rewrite history, give it a meaning, and locate back then the origin of problems and anxieties that beset us now.

At its worst, this is a too-neat way of sidestepping an analysis of contemporary situations. You want to understand Fascism? Well, how about this for an explanation: you see, back in the dawn of time, there was this idiot-brother of the First Man and he persuaded the mass of people to follow him in an orgy of primitive destruction ...

This kind of mythmaking (doubtless indebted to the Dawn of Man prologue in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 [1968]) does not take us very far. The Missing Link is full of it, as it rewrites the birth of the work ethic, of feminism, of homosexuality – all divorced from their present-day, political struggles.

But something intriguing also comes from this rewriting of history. For Picha’s humour is basically nihilistic; he views the birth of civilisation as something pathetic and disgusting – most of the gags show man as second-best to animals or the environment. (Intriguingly, his regular script collaborator for the English-dubbed versions of his work is Tony Hendra, whose mainly UK-based career spans early ‘60s work with Monty Python fellows, a role in This is Spinal Tap [1984], and co-writing The Great White Hype [1996] with Ron Shelton.)

Quite literally in The Missing Link, Man is a turd that emerges from the asshole of a giant, bloated fish. Remember, man, that you are shit and unto shit you shall return! Picha seems attracted and repulsed in equal parts by the thought of the anus: he associates it with blockage, death and idiocy – but keeps coming back to reconsider it with a real fascination.

History for Picha is almost solely the history of the anus. This is a notion worth considering! Norman O. Brown certainly gave the idea a whirl in his monumental philosophical tome with the immortal title of Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959) – which I highly recommend.

Finally, I salute The Missing Link for its stylistic and technical interest as an animated film. Sadly, the meticulous animation procedures of the Disney or Warner Brothers studios in the 1930s and ‘40s seem to constitute an irretrievably lost art. Picha, at least, brings us closer to this once-upon-a-time standard of excellence than the second-rate, corner-cutting doodlings of the dreadful Alex Stitt in his Flintstones-style Grendel, Grendel (1981).

Animation was once a delirious and unbounded space of fantasy and invention; The Missing Link reminds us at moments of what that was like and what it could still mean.

*Note: This review (coupled with that of S.O.B., under the essay title “Tales From the Anus”) was written for the short-lived, early 1980s Australian music newspaper Vox but, oddly enough, never appeared in print there.

© Adrian Martin September 1981