The Black Informant

While I may have been just a glimmer in my mother’s eye when the movie “Planet of the Apes” first came out it theaters, I do remember all the reruns of the entire series that came on television throughout the 70’s as well as the cartoon and the miniseries. I even had the lunchbox ;).

When one watches this movie while keeping the time period the movie was produced in mind, it is not hard to see that the apes actually represented Black Americans who were now in a position to give Whitey what he has deserved for a very long time: retribution. This “Black” allegory becomes even more obvious when the 4th installment “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” dealt with an all-out race ape riot between man and apes (the Watts riots took place in 1965–7 years earlier).

I guess what inspired me to do this post was a very paternalistic White man I saw on television the other day. To him, most, if not all Black women were overweight simply because Blacks were simply too poor to make wise choices when it comes down to food. In the same breath he expressed his love for “big Burtha” Black women over “plastic’ White women “who have a tendency of treating men as either a cash register or a parking meter”. I am not making this up.

What really got me about this individual was the fact that he thought he was actually doing Black folks a favor by trashing his own while patting an entire race of people on the back for at least trying—as in trying to be ‘human’.

Planet of the Apes is not the first time Hollywood has used non-humans to portray the Black experience. Recently “Cavemen” (an ABC sitcom) is also trying to tackle the issue of race in America by using beings that are not quite human to address a human issue. Of course the creators of this show are in denial that race has nothing to do with the plot, so I will let you decide on that one. Another movie that comes to mine is the 1985 film “Enemy Mine” starring Louis Gossett Jr.

In any event, here is an interesting article by a Jamie Russell who talks a little bit about the racial and political undertones of the Planet of the Apes series.

P.S. This is actually one of my favorite movie series. I am a big fan of cheesy 1950–70’s movie faire.

====

Monkey Business

Few people reading Pierre Boulle’s 1963 novel La planète des singes (translated as Monkey Planet) could have predicted the impact that it would have on the English speaking world. An amateurish piece of science fiction from a novelist who remains best known for his more serious work-such as The Bridge on the River Kwai - Monkey Planet is a Swiftian satire in the vein of Gulliver’s Travels in which intrepid adventurer Ulysse Mérou (note the classical reference) finds himself stranded on a technically advanced planet ruled by apes. The novel came and went without causing much of a stir.

When Hollywood producer Arthur P. Jacobs was searching for a new project in 1963, he asked friends and colleagues to find him ’something like King Kong.’ Most of Jacobs’ acquaintances assumed that he wanted a project with the same kind of box office appeal as the Fay Wray monster movie, but Boulle’s literally minded Parisian agent took Jacobs at his word and offered him Monkey Planet. Jacobs read it and was impressed, but it took him four long years of negotiating to convince Twentieth Century Fox to fund the project since the studio executives were convinced that humans dressed as apes wouldn’t be taken seriously by audiences. After a test film was shot with Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson (the latter in ape makeup), Jacobs got the green light.

No one could have predicted the box-office success of the feature when it was released in 1968, least of all the nervous studio executives who were desperate for a commercial hit after a long string of flops. Expanding on Boulle’s ironic vision of a world turned upside down, the screenplay simultaneously pared down the novel’s more comic moments in favour of a heavier satirical punch. While Boulle had been writing in the misanthropic tradition of Voltaire and Swift, the Hollywood version of Planet of the Apes focussed its sights on a very American target, the white male ego.

Unlike his fellow crewmembers, Heston’s character-American astronaut Taylor-joins the expedition out of a cynical disenchantment with humanity and progress. The film opens with a monologue from Taylor, recording his last entry in the ship’s computer before they enter deep space. Lamenting humanity’s propensity for violence and war, Taylor hopes to find ’something better than man.’ After the spaceship crashes, Taylor’s cynicism comes to the fore. He’s so gleeful that their noble mission has been reduced to nothing that one of his fellow crewmembers angrily calls him ‘a negative. You despise people. You thought life on Earth was meaningless.’ But not even Taylor’s cynicism is prepared for what they find - a society ruled by apes in which Man is no more than a dumb animal. As Taylor first lays eyes on the walking, talking, horse riding apes, the camera focuses on Heston’s face. Cynicism gives way to abject horror.

Much of the entertainment value of Planet of the Apes is in watching the apes mistreat Heston’s character. There’s a masochistic enjoyment in seeing Heston, the All-American hero, discover that the wages of hubris are humiliation. Heston himself was quite aware about the iniquities that he had to face on and off the screen. Writing in his journals during the shoot, he acknowledged that ‘there’s hardly been a scene in the bloody film in which I’ve not been dragged, choked, netted, chased, doused, whipped, poked, shot, gagged, stoned, leaped on, or generally mistreated.’ Commenting on the scene in which Taylor is captured by the apes, Heston claimed: ‘It’s surprising the perspective an experience like this gives you. Upside down in a net, a man isn’t worth much.’ Such was the extent of his humiliation that one crewmember commented ‘You know, Chuck, I remember when we used to win these things.’ (more…)