Dirty Apes to Human Bastards
Knowledge, Truth, and Time Travel on the Planet of the Apes
Written for Uncanny Valley Archive 001 (kickstarter)
In the first Planet of the Apes film, everyone is wrong about what is going on, but everyone has good reason to be convinced that they are right. They know what they know and draw conclusions based on that. But their knowledge is limited by the paths they have walked. But they still must cling to their perspectives, else they will have nothing left.
Taylor, the human astronaut played by Charlton Heston, knows that he and his crew left Earth in 1972 to explore the nearest habitable planet. He knows by the nature of the kind of space travel his ship used, and by the instruments on that ship, that he has travelled over 2000 years into the future. He tells his crewmate Landon, “time has wiped out everyone and everything you cared for -- they're dust. [...] It's a fact, Landon. Buy it. You'll sleep better.” He knows that he is on another planet, far removed, in both time and space, from anything he knew. This knowledge is the only thing he has.
Cornelius and Zira, two Chimpanzee scientists (one an archaeologist, played by Roddy McDowall, the other an animal psychologist and vet played by Kim Hunter), have found evidence that apes may not have been the first intelligent society on their planet, and that, contrary to religious teaching, apes themselves may have evolved from some other form of primate, perhaps the dumb, mute humans that their apes society hunts for sport and experiments on for science. Finding Taylor, the first talking human they’ve seen, appears to be proof of their theory: a missing link.
Dr Zaius is a little different; he holds more cards and has more understanding. As Chief Defender of the Faith and Minister of Science, he has access to information beyond the other characters. His knowledge is the closest to the truth: he is aware that there used to be intelligent humans, and that there could be more. His sacred scrolls warn of humans and when Taylor leaves the apes at the end of the film, riding horseback along the jagged coast towards the iconic twist revealing the partially destroyed Statue of Liberty and that this is Earth’s future, Dr Zaius says that Taylor will find “his destiny,” and that he has “always known about man. From the evidence, I believe his wisdom must walk hand in hand with his idiocy.” This is a different knowledge to what he espouses publicly, in an attempt to maintain the power he holds. In Taylor’s mock trial, Dr Zaius and the other ruling Orangutans maintain that man could never hold true intelligence, a convenient line that keeps them as the only legitimate authority.
These entrenched pieces of knowledge are all true before the film begins, what the plot of the film does is repeatedly push them against each other until something starts to crack. Taylor’s knowledge gets pushed throughout as he is continually told that he is of this world, as a missing link, as a strange mutation, or a trick by heretics. But he knows that this is not where he is from. Until the end when he sees that half statue in the sand and falls to his knees, everything he knew is not dust on a distant planet, but recognisable rubble in front of him. This new world exists as a consequence of his old one. In the cave at the climax of the film, where Cornelius once led an archeology expedition into the Forbidden Zone, we see the crying human doll, dentures, and a pacemaker, Twentieth Century items identified by Taylor, dating back to before the records of ape society began. Both confirming and challenging Cornelius and Zira’s theory of ape’s evolution from man, we see evidence of a pre-ape society, but not a primitive primate one that gradually shifted into contemporary ape life, rather an even more sophisticated but long-fallen society of Taylor-like intelligent humans. The façade of Dr Zaius’s peels away to reveal his true knowledge, though he remains stringent in his beliefs, “I found nothing in the cave to alter [the ape religion’s] conception of man. And I still live by its injunction.” His fear of intelligent humans, telegraphed in the religious texts he defends, has only been strengthened by his time with Taylor, a living manifestation of his fears.
The challenge to these beliefs throughout the five film series comes from another time. Taylor travels to the future in the first film, presenting a challenge to ape society’s ideologies. He’s followed by Brent in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, who ends up discovering a race of atomic bomb worshipping mutant humans deep in the Forbidden Zone’s underground ruins of New York. Adding another wrinkle of knowledge, we find a further layer of power, another society manipulating the perceptions of them. Rather than using religious dogma, they use telepathic powers to scare off strangers, keeping themselves inclosed and pure. Only revealing their true, deformed selves to their doomsday bomb god, they hide behind masks and illusions. When the apes find them, war ensues. A violent skirmish is only broken when Taylor is shot and falls onto the bomb’s switch, ending the war while destroying the whole planet. It takes an outsider from the past to kill the future. If the future exists as a consequence of the past, then when the past comes forward, that future must stop.
But that stopping isn’t an ending. Off-screen, Cornelius, Zira, and a new, quickly killed character named Milo flee in Brent’s repaired spaceship. Escape From the Planet of the Apes, the third film, is an inversion of the first film, as our apes end up in 1973 as outsiders representing a threat to dominant ideologies at the intersections of politics and science. They are a vision of a future where man is no longer dominant. The film ends in tragedy as the state hunts them, but not before their child is born and saved by Ricardo Montalban’s Armando, a kind circus owner. The altering of linear time, this backwards movement, brings prophecies of tomorrows and yesterdays that remind the powerful of the precarity of their positions, that the culture that gave them power is not all there is or will be, it will fall, and often resisting that fall causes it to come quicker.
In Escape, like the original, a scientist with an influential government position, Dr Hesslein (Eric Braeden), is an antagonist terrified of what our protagonists represent. Like in the original, ideology is used to justify this fear, to manipulate the characters, and the population’s perception of them. There’s a sham trial that would inevitably result in what the state wants, just like Taylor’s in the original. What is different between ape society’s defence of ideology and human’s is the media, where religious diktact ruled the apes, in 70’s public opinion had to be manipulated through spectacle. Cornelius and Zira become stars, they get taken on tours of cultural spaces, free tailored suits, and a penthouse hotel suite to live in. When Dr. Hesslein believes that it has become necessary to kill their unborn child, the narrative changes: they go from innocent, affable curiosities to harbingers of death, hiding secrets about our future from us. Rather than Dr. Zaius’s obsessive suppression and control, in Escape we see a much more developed ideological machine, one that pretends not to hide anything from the population, but instead uses knowledge to its own end. Entrenching certain parts of knowledge in the population’s minds in order to create consent for the state’s callous actions.
This grows further in the following film, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, where human callousness towards apes is a fact of life, because it more overtly serves the daily interests of the human middle class population. Where the callous ending of Escape was driven by fear of potential futures, here the violence and coercion serves a desire for convenience, as apes become trained for menial jobs, enslaved as household servants, monitored and controlled by a quickly-built massive state apparatus. Caesar, the fully grown son of Cornelius and Zira played again by Roddy McDowall, is captured by Ape Management when Ricardo Montalban’s Armando, the circus owner who raised him, takes him into the city. In a mirroring of the original’s famous “damn dirty apes” line that reveals Taylor’s intelligence, after seeing police beat an ape, Caesar yells “lousy human bastards,” despite knowing that he must remain silent to blend in. This moment of passion takes Caesar into the depths of a repressive machine that he has been shielded from his whole life, where apes are tortured to condition them to respond to human demands, where they are selectively bred, and where they are bought and sold at humiliating public auctions. Seeing this leads Caesar to revolution.
He creates a political and class consciousness within the ape underclass. The riot, destroy ape management, refuse their shackles. As the descendant of time travel, conceived in the future, born and raised in the past, Caesar must create the future. This is the only one of the films with no input from other times, we just have the perspectives of now to deal with, responding to the immediate realities of this culture. As someone coming from a sheltered life, privileged in comparison to the tortured apes, outside of the oppressive system, Caesar has the perspective needed to cut through, to give the apes a hint of a better life, and to scare the humans into violent reactions that contribute to tearing their own system down.
But after the tearing down, a new system must come. But how new can it be when we’ve seen the future? Battle for the Planet of the Apes jumps forward another few decades, human society has fallen to nuclear war and Caesar leads a commune of apes and humans, living tensely side by side, though with apes as superiors. Caesar discovers that there is a recording of his parents in the nearby destroyed city, as he journeys to find it a power vacuum is left, which the militaristic and staunchly anti-human gorilla, Aldo (Claude Akins), attempts to fill, rounding up the humans and caging them. Under the city, the remaining mutant humans see Caesar's search as an act of aggression, they launch an attack on Ape City, furthering Aldo’s anti-human case as he attempts a coup. Caesar’s young son, Cornelius overhears Aldo planning his coup and is killed by Aldo chopping down the branch he is hiding in, violating the first principle of ape society; Ape shall never kill Ape.
Ultimately this ends the ape supremacy that Aldo sought, as it proves to Caesar that apes are no better than man. Caesar’s quest for insight into the future from his parent’s past words leads to personal and social changes, intrinsically linked as the leader of a newly built society. In Escape, the elder Cornelius describes his society’s origin myth involving Aldo as the first ape to say ‘no’ to humans, and as the founder of their society, this is in the recording that Caesar goes to find. This future is a memory yet to be written, though, by defeating Aldo, Caesar may have changed the future. At the end of the film, we see the ape Law Giver reading the newly written Sacred Scrolls to a mixed group of ape and human children.
This is a change to the future that was caused by actions in the future. Taylor, in the first film, went looking something better, saying in the first film, “I can't get rid of the idea that somewhere in the Universe there must be a creature superior to man.” What he found was the consequences of man’s inferiority. A continuation of discrimination and idelogy. But his presence in a time he should not be in led to that continuation’s destruction. The reverse happens with Cornelius and Zira travelling back in time, which allows for something new to be built, both as response to the present and the future. In Escape, the dead future becomes history, a narrative told by Cornelius and Zira, and then retold by the state, folded into the ideologies of the present. Just like in the beginning of the series, characters held seemingly defensible positions based on the information they had, what they were taught, and what they knew. By the final film, Caesar can be informed by knowledge of future and past. Both histories are at least partly known to him, and the guiding ideas of his new society are not yet set in stone. He has the most power of any character in any of the films; he has the most knowledge and the most capacity to use it.
Taylor, the human astronaut played by Charlton Heston, knows that he and his crew left Earth in 1972 to explore the nearest habitable planet. He knows by the nature of the kind of space travel his ship used, and by the instruments on that ship, that he has travelled over 2000 years into the future. He tells his crewmate Landon, “time has wiped out everyone and everything you cared for -- they're dust. [...] It's a fact, Landon. Buy it. You'll sleep better.” He knows that he is on another planet, far removed, in both time and space, from anything he knew. This knowledge is the only thing he has.
Cornelius and Zira, two Chimpanzee scientists (one an archaeologist, played by Roddy McDowall, the other an animal psychologist and vet played by Kim Hunter), have found evidence that apes may not have been the first intelligent society on their planet, and that, contrary to religious teaching, apes themselves may have evolved from some other form of primate, perhaps the dumb, mute humans that their apes society hunts for sport and experiments on for science. Finding Taylor, the first talking human they’ve seen, appears to be proof of their theory: a missing link.
Dr Zaius is a little different; he holds more cards and has more understanding. As Chief Defender of the Faith and Minister of Science, he has access to information beyond the other characters. His knowledge is the closest to the truth: he is aware that there used to be intelligent humans, and that there could be more. His sacred scrolls warn of humans and when Taylor leaves the apes at the end of the film, riding horseback along the jagged coast towards the iconic twist revealing the partially destroyed Statue of Liberty and that this is Earth’s future, Dr Zaius says that Taylor will find “his destiny,” and that he has “always known about man. From the evidence, I believe his wisdom must walk hand in hand with his idiocy.” This is a different knowledge to what he espouses publicly, in an attempt to maintain the power he holds. In Taylor’s mock trial, Dr Zaius and the other ruling Orangutans maintain that man could never hold true intelligence, a convenient line that keeps them as the only legitimate authority.
These entrenched pieces of knowledge are all true before the film begins, what the plot of the film does is repeatedly push them against each other until something starts to crack. Taylor’s knowledge gets pushed throughout as he is continually told that he is of this world, as a missing link, as a strange mutation, or a trick by heretics. But he knows that this is not where he is from. Until the end when he sees that half statue in the sand and falls to his knees, everything he knew is not dust on a distant planet, but recognisable rubble in front of him. This new world exists as a consequence of his old one. In the cave at the climax of the film, where Cornelius once led an archeology expedition into the Forbidden Zone, we see the crying human doll, dentures, and a pacemaker, Twentieth Century items identified by Taylor, dating back to before the records of ape society began. Both confirming and challenging Cornelius and Zira’s theory of ape’s evolution from man, we see evidence of a pre-ape society, but not a primitive primate one that gradually shifted into contemporary ape life, rather an even more sophisticated but long-fallen society of Taylor-like intelligent humans. The façade of Dr Zaius’s peels away to reveal his true knowledge, though he remains stringent in his beliefs, “I found nothing in the cave to alter [the ape religion’s] conception of man. And I still live by its injunction.” His fear of intelligent humans, telegraphed in the religious texts he defends, has only been strengthened by his time with Taylor, a living manifestation of his fears.
The challenge to these beliefs throughout the five film series comes from another time. Taylor travels to the future in the first film, presenting a challenge to ape society’s ideologies. He’s followed by Brent in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, who ends up discovering a race of atomic bomb worshipping mutant humans deep in the Forbidden Zone’s underground ruins of New York. Adding another wrinkle of knowledge, we find a further layer of power, another society manipulating the perceptions of them. Rather than using religious dogma, they use telepathic powers to scare off strangers, keeping themselves inclosed and pure. Only revealing their true, deformed selves to their doomsday bomb god, they hide behind masks and illusions. When the apes find them, war ensues. A violent skirmish is only broken when Taylor is shot and falls onto the bomb’s switch, ending the war while destroying the whole planet. It takes an outsider from the past to kill the future. If the future exists as a consequence of the past, then when the past comes forward, that future must stop.
But that stopping isn’t an ending. Off-screen, Cornelius, Zira, and a new, quickly killed character named Milo flee in Brent’s repaired spaceship. Escape From the Planet of the Apes, the third film, is an inversion of the first film, as our apes end up in 1973 as outsiders representing a threat to dominant ideologies at the intersections of politics and science. They are a vision of a future where man is no longer dominant. The film ends in tragedy as the state hunts them, but not before their child is born and saved by Ricardo Montalban’s Armando, a kind circus owner. The altering of linear time, this backwards movement, brings prophecies of tomorrows and yesterdays that remind the powerful of the precarity of their positions, that the culture that gave them power is not all there is or will be, it will fall, and often resisting that fall causes it to come quicker.
In Escape, like the original, a scientist with an influential government position, Dr Hesslein (Eric Braeden), is an antagonist terrified of what our protagonists represent. Like in the original, ideology is used to justify this fear, to manipulate the characters, and the population’s perception of them. There’s a sham trial that would inevitably result in what the state wants, just like Taylor’s in the original. What is different between ape society’s defence of ideology and human’s is the media, where religious diktact ruled the apes, in 70’s public opinion had to be manipulated through spectacle. Cornelius and Zira become stars, they get taken on tours of cultural spaces, free tailored suits, and a penthouse hotel suite to live in. When Dr. Hesslein believes that it has become necessary to kill their unborn child, the narrative changes: they go from innocent, affable curiosities to harbingers of death, hiding secrets about our future from us. Rather than Dr. Zaius’s obsessive suppression and control, in Escape we see a much more developed ideological machine, one that pretends not to hide anything from the population, but instead uses knowledge to its own end. Entrenching certain parts of knowledge in the population’s minds in order to create consent for the state’s callous actions.
This grows further in the following film, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, where human callousness towards apes is a fact of life, because it more overtly serves the daily interests of the human middle class population. Where the callous ending of Escape was driven by fear of potential futures, here the violence and coercion serves a desire for convenience, as apes become trained for menial jobs, enslaved as household servants, monitored and controlled by a quickly-built massive state apparatus. Caesar, the fully grown son of Cornelius and Zira played again by Roddy McDowall, is captured by Ape Management when Ricardo Montalban’s Armando, the circus owner who raised him, takes him into the city. In a mirroring of the original’s famous “damn dirty apes” line that reveals Taylor’s intelligence, after seeing police beat an ape, Caesar yells “lousy human bastards,” despite knowing that he must remain silent to blend in. This moment of passion takes Caesar into the depths of a repressive machine that he has been shielded from his whole life, where apes are tortured to condition them to respond to human demands, where they are selectively bred, and where they are bought and sold at humiliating public auctions. Seeing this leads Caesar to revolution.
He creates a political and class consciousness within the ape underclass. The riot, destroy ape management, refuse their shackles. As the descendant of time travel, conceived in the future, born and raised in the past, Caesar must create the future. This is the only one of the films with no input from other times, we just have the perspectives of now to deal with, responding to the immediate realities of this culture. As someone coming from a sheltered life, privileged in comparison to the tortured apes, outside of the oppressive system, Caesar has the perspective needed to cut through, to give the apes a hint of a better life, and to scare the humans into violent reactions that contribute to tearing their own system down.
But after the tearing down, a new system must come. But how new can it be when we’ve seen the future? Battle for the Planet of the Apes jumps forward another few decades, human society has fallen to nuclear war and Caesar leads a commune of apes and humans, living tensely side by side, though with apes as superiors. Caesar discovers that there is a recording of his parents in the nearby destroyed city, as he journeys to find it a power vacuum is left, which the militaristic and staunchly anti-human gorilla, Aldo (Claude Akins), attempts to fill, rounding up the humans and caging them. Under the city, the remaining mutant humans see Caesar's search as an act of aggression, they launch an attack on Ape City, furthering Aldo’s anti-human case as he attempts a coup. Caesar’s young son, Cornelius overhears Aldo planning his coup and is killed by Aldo chopping down the branch he is hiding in, violating the first principle of ape society; Ape shall never kill Ape.
Ultimately this ends the ape supremacy that Aldo sought, as it proves to Caesar that apes are no better than man. Caesar’s quest for insight into the future from his parent’s past words leads to personal and social changes, intrinsically linked as the leader of a newly built society. In Escape, the elder Cornelius describes his society’s origin myth involving Aldo as the first ape to say ‘no’ to humans, and as the founder of their society, this is in the recording that Caesar goes to find. This future is a memory yet to be written, though, by defeating Aldo, Caesar may have changed the future. At the end of the film, we see the ape Law Giver reading the newly written Sacred Scrolls to a mixed group of ape and human children.
This is a change to the future that was caused by actions in the future. Taylor, in the first film, went looking something better, saying in the first film, “I can't get rid of the idea that somewhere in the Universe there must be a creature superior to man.” What he found was the consequences of man’s inferiority. A continuation of discrimination and idelogy. But his presence in a time he should not be in led to that continuation’s destruction. The reverse happens with Cornelius and Zira travelling back in time, which allows for something new to be built, both as response to the present and the future. In Escape, the dead future becomes history, a narrative told by Cornelius and Zira, and then retold by the state, folded into the ideologies of the present. Just like in the beginning of the series, characters held seemingly defensible positions based on the information they had, what they were taught, and what they knew. By the final film, Caesar can be informed by knowledge of future and past. Both histories are at least partly known to him, and the guiding ideas of his new society are not yet set in stone. He has the most power of any character in any of the films; he has the most knowledge and the most capacity to use it.
