Planet of the Apes: Metaphor in Science Fiction
What you have to understand about the original Planet of the
Apes movies is that is was an A-List movie. It had a respectable
budget, a respectable director, and stars that been in major
motion pictures in the past - Charlton Heston (no slouch) Roddy
McDowell (also no slouch) and almost Edward G. Robinson. I'll
explain what happened, later, but he started filming and left.
And most of all the first draft of the script was authored by
none other than master story teller Rod Serling.
It had a lot going for it. There was a special on the series
that I watched that detailed all of these things, and as these
'making of' specials tend to it made every decision look like it
was inspired genius. What the special glossed over was the
central metaphor of the movie. The special said that it wasn't
clear what the metaphor was, though unfortunately, it was and
looking back from the twenty first century the metaphor was
clearly racism. On the Planet of the Apes the monkeys were once
the slaves of the humans but they rose up and became their own
masters. The reason that no one wants to touch this one is
because monkeys can be equated with former African slaves and
that is an ugly and insensitive connection. It's also almost
certainly the one that was intended.
My favorite show, Star Trek, often used metaphor and often
painfully obvious metaphor. They tackled racism once in the
guise of two aliens from a planet that had been racked with
civil strife. These aliens were portrayed with black grease
paint on one side of their face and white grease paint on the
other, but they hated each other because of the side that was
black and white, which happened to be opposite. See, there's the
irony. To the human eyes the difference of the sides was silly,
but to them it was critically important - so that means that our
racism (it was the sixties) is silly also.
For the time, I guess that was a daring statement, though these
days it seems quaint and prosaic. Anyways, to get back to the
Planet of the Apes - for it's time it also was a powerful
message. When Charlton Heston sees the remains of the Statue of
Liberty in the foreground and does his marvelous bellowing
speech about the maniacs blowing it all up damn them, damn them
all to hell! What he is clearly showing is that racism was
destroying the promise of the United States - freedom and
equality and all that. Sure it seems trite today, but the first
time it wasn't.
Slavery we all know now is wrong. What I have trouble getting my
brain around is that for human history it wasn't considered so.
How could human beings have believed in and practiced this sort
of abomination for - basically for ever except the slim era of
present history? Currently slavery is legal nowhere and it is
also currently more prevalent than any other time. Most of the
slaves who have ever been alive are alive right now.
This statistic I got from a Dateline NBC Special. In this
special the correspondent went undercover to an Eastern European
country and bought himself a sex slave, who of course, he freed
right afterwards. He paid eighteen hundred dollars. The woman's
story - his slave - was sad beyond belief. She grew up in an
orphanage, was developmentally disabled, and at the age of
fourteen she was thrown out of the orphanage where she lived in
the sewers for two years before being enslaved and forced to
earn her keep by having sex dozens of times per night while
being fed beans and beans only.
Back to Plantet of the Apes: The Tim Burton version was one that
I looked forward to eagerly, and which I was therefore
disappointed in when I finally saw it. His version was a mess.
Not the visuals, mind you, Burton is a master at putting out
visually stunning movies that are an absolute confused mish
mash. This was definitely one of them. Tim Burton's Planet of
the Apes meant basically nothing and the contrived ending was
obviously something that the studio insisted that he put in so
he would have some sort of an ending comparable to the
origninal. It wasn't. It was stupid.
Please take my advice and see the original, or own the original
since its now out on DVD. It's the whole series I think.