Welcome to The Movie Shelf, an ongoing series that compares the films on our dvd shelves to the novels on our bookcases.

We at the 'Smoke have always been fascinated by screenplay adaptation: what a script writer takes from the source material, what gets discarded, how the two works differ from each other and what the existence of the movie itself says about the book (and vice versa.) It's "book versus movie" time, compadres.

{the MOViE SHELF index}

~ by john cribbs ~

I think I'm so educated and I'm so civilized 'cause I'm a strict vegetarian
And with the over-population, and inflation and starvation, and the crazy politicians
I don't feel safe in this world no more, I don't want to die in a nuclear war
I want to sail away to a distant shore, and make like an apeman.

~ The Kinks, "Apeman."

Kim Novak did not write the script for The Bridge on the River Kwai.

That's hardly a disputed fact, yet it was Novak who trotted up on stage at the 30th Annual Academy Awards to accept the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay from a shiny Clark Gable and glowing Doris Day. Nobody in the audience could have been too surprised - Bridge was the evening's juggernaut, winning in 7 of its 8 nominated categories (Sessue Hayakawa was the only shutout, saying "sayonara" to a statuette that went to Red Buttons). But they were probably wondering when Pierre Boulle, a gaunt Frenchman with a receding hairline, had transformed into the perky blonde in opulent form-fitting sequin gown and high heels who had most recently appeared as arm candy for Frank Sinatra's Pal Joey. Who knows why Novak of all people was entrusted with the Oscar reception - maybe they wanted to promote the upcoming Vertigo, in which she was shot in profile next to another famous bridge? - but she handled it flawlessly, delivering Boulle's entire acceptance speech from memory:

"Merci."

Funny enough, this modest bit of gratitude consisted of one word more than Boulle had actually contributed to the screenplay he was winning an award for writing. Although David Lean's excellent movie was based on Boulle's best-selling novel, script duties were handled by Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson (sans ampersand). Because both writers were blacklisted, Boulle ended up being solely credited onscreen despite having nothing to do with the production and not even being able to write in English. Wilson would get shafted yet again when it came time to credit the writers of Lean's Lawrence of Arabia,¹ a disservice only recently corrected on subsequent dvd releases. He was posthumously awarded his Oscar for Kwai in 1984, but must not have held a grudge against Boulle in the meantime since, a decade later, he agreed to revise Rod Serling's draft for the adaptation of Boulle's popular work of speculative fiction La Planète des singes. In fact, due to his blacklisting, Wilson lived and worked in France between 1955 and 1964, during which time Lean's film version of Kwai was released and Planète was published. Considering the novel's success, he may very well have been familiar with Boulle's tale of astronaut Ulysse Mérou, who lands on a planet where apes have evolved to become the dominant species over man, years before being approached to work on the film.

It's also possible that, as an expatriate forced out of his own country by ambitious leaders acting under the pretense of patriotism and supported by the testimonies of "friendly witnesses" who cooperated with the national witchhunt to save their own skin, Wilson appreciated Bridge on the River Kwai's focus on the warped ethics of wartime collaboration. Pierre Boulle, a decorated member of de Gaulle's Free French resistance movement in Southeast Asia during the war, had been captured by Vichy France loyalists and subjected to forced labor at a camp in Saigon (after escaping, Boulle joined the British Special Operations Executive, or S.O.E., operating primarily out of Calcutta for the rest of the war). The experience informed Boulle's fictional take on the construction of the Burma Railway over the Mae Klong by British prisoners of war, particularly the characterization of Lt. Colonel Nicholson who, out of a distorted sense of duty and personal integrity, ends up abetting the enemy in the building of their strategically positioned bridge. Nicholson arrives at Prisoner of War Camp 16 with a genteel air of resignation that reads as smug superiority to his Japanese jailers, so that camp commander Colonel Saito takes it upon himself to humble his high-ranking prisoner by ordering that officers must contribute to manual labor on the bridge (a demand restricted by the terms of the Hague Conventions).²

Nicholson becomes a hero to his men by defying the directive under prolonged torture and threat of execution, but satisfaction of wresting control from his captor leads to the miscalculated decision to succeed where the Japanese have failed. Nicholson allocates all available resources towards the building of the bridge, offers up suggestions from the company's expert bridge engineer, discourages acts of sabotage and even eventually commands his officers to join in the grunt work after all. Once the bridge is complete, Nicholson's vindication in accomplishing such an ambitious feat in spite of his status as a defeated detainee is so strong, he actively thwarts an Allied attempt to destroy the bridge with explosives. Boulle's Nicholson is a stubborn, delusional fool of the tallest order, but his actions indicate the author's understanding of the complicated emotions of a pompous man whose power has been taken away: what to the individual seems like patriotism of the highest and most defiant pride is seen as a clear case of cowardice and betrayal to everyone else. (Lt. Colonel Philip Toosey, the real-life template, was actually a much-loved officer who did everything he could to delay and sabotage the bridge's construction; not surprisingly, he and the veterans who served with him weren't big fans of the Kwai book or movie).³

Nicholson chooses to make the best of his situation: if he has to be shackled and humiliated, he figures he'll save face by showing up his incompetent warders and building a superior bridge, thereby proving himself the better man and maybe even carving himself something like a legacy - triumph in oppression! The fact that this tactic results in the exact opposite of Nicholson's intention to stick it to his oppressors - in subversively playing along with the Japanese, Nicholson inadvertently turns against his own people - plays into Boulle's irony of his character's reaction to subjugation under confinement. According to Boulle, a proud man who finds himself marginalized will actively seek to restore his status as an equal among those who would subdue him, even if it means further deprecating himself. Such is the case of Planet of the Apes' astray Earthman Ulysse Mérou who, having just set down on Suror, a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, is hunted down and thrown in a cage by the reigning primate populace along with members of the planet's primitive homosapien species. Determined to distinguish himself from the undeveloped native humans, Ulysse willingly subjects himself to the ape scientists' demeaning behavior experiments, jumping through hoops and solving rudimentary puzzles for a lump of sugar, going along with their degrading examinations, even taking part in a forced mating with Nova, a native woman upon whose first appearance Ulysse declares a "goddess" with "the most perfect body that could be conceived on Earth" (poor bastard!)⁴ Having been knocked down the evolutionary ladder in traveling from Earth to Soror, he's desperate to climb back up. While encaged, Ulysse eventually reckons that the best he can expect is to be considered a more remarkable specimen than the other "animals" around him, yet proves it by allowing himself to be domesticated like a pet:

I must now admit that I adapted myself with remarkable ease to the conditions of life in my cage. From the material point of view, I was living in perfect felicity: during the day the apes attended to my every need; at night I shared my litter with one of the loveliest girls in the cosmos. I even grew so accustomed to this situation that for more than a month, without feeling how outlandish or degrading it was, I made no attempt to put an end to it. I learned hardly any new words of the simian language. I did not continue with my attempts to enter into communication with Zira, so that the latter, if she had once had an inkling as to my spiritual nature, had no doubt since yielded to Zaius' opinion and regarded me as a man of her planet, that is, an animal; an intelligent animal, perhaps, but by no means an intelligent one.

Even after finally learning enough of the apes' language to sway the compassionate Zira to his side, Ulysse decides to reveal himself to a large gathering of scientists by means of a public speech, carried live on all the television stations, that praises his conquerors while humbly acknowledging his own "hideous" appearance and lowly stature, telling his ape audience, "I have learned more things during a few months' captivity among you than in all my previous existence." His sycophantic, self-effacing speech summons to mind, and serves as a reversal of, the one given by intelligent chimp Red Peter in Franz Kafka's "A Report to the Academy." Serving as the narrative text, Red Peter's "report" is also given at a scientific conference (of humans, of course) and details Peter's intense desire to escape captivity by adapting human behaviorisms and, ultimately, imitating human speech. Peter specifies that his motivation for "evolving" has less to do with a desire to become more human than a desperate need to get out of his cage and regain some semblance of the freedom he enjoyed in the open jungle in a world run by his human kidnappers.⁵ Although Peter, who now performs at a music hall, claims to be pleased by his self-initiated integration into human society, there's a hint of sadness at his betrayal of his own nature, something Boulle captures in Ulysse's own performance, during which the crowd responds most strongly to simple "tricks" he does like clapping two chalkboard erasers together. For Ulysse, who performs for apes "with an air of detachment that concealed my pride," and for Peter, concessions that make their captivity more bearable come in the form of stupid tricks performed in the hope that their dominant ape/human observers can accept them as equals, even though the desired respect is as flimsy a pretense as Lt. Colonel Nicholson's specious sense of honor.

American audiences don't characteristically root for characters who sit around in cages trying to figure out ways to please the ones who put them there. Hence the two gung-ho American heroes created for each movie: Charlton Heston's Taylor, the Planet film's version of Ulysse, and William Holden's Lieutenant Commander Shears in Kwai, who has no template in Boulle's novel (which focuses on Nicholson and the bridge rather than the mission to destroy it; the character "Shears" is just another British officer). Rather than accepting their lot, Shears the jaded cad and Taylor the cynical space captain (in the book Ulysse is a journalist who's just along for the ride) are both prompted to action, more out of self-interest than loyalty to nation/species although their final acts may be inspired by a newfound sense of patriotism. The two characters were designed with the intention of adding a little juice to Boulle's narratives, neither of which include daring escape attempts in the middle of the story, and Michael Wilson made both characters really similar. They're each referred to by their last name (Taylor's first name is George but nobody calls him that, Shears' first name - one stolen from another man in any case - is never revealed). They each have a member of their four-man team die upon touchdown at their target; only one of the original team will ultimately survive the mission. Both enjoy gettin' nekkid around waterfalls. Both are terrible at escaping but are aided by "native people" who they can't communicate with, the most beautiful of whom each respective hero forms an intimate relationship. And both men end up "back" at the place where their journey began, writhing on their hands and knees in defeat while being drenched in a large body of water close to wrecked or soon-to-be-wrecked metal monuments.

But mostly these cinematic creations represent the popular American response to captivity: no fuckin' way! For Kwai, it made sense to create a foil to the Nicholson character to ultimately enact the kind of heroism the British officer has only deluded himself into thinking his bridge-building represents (unlike in the book, Shears' sacrifice makes Alec Guinness' Nicholson recognize his folly so that he falls on the plunger, blowing up the bridge and somewhat redeeming himself). For his part, Taylor only puts up with finding a diplomatic solution to his incarceration and indignity for so long, and he's sure not about to cozy up to the monkey menace that netted him and killed his space buddy. Whereas Ulysse is only too happy to let Zira throw a collar around his neck and lead him around on a leash out in public, Taylor is constantly thrashing about helplessly as apes noose him with neck snares or muzzle him like a rabid dog. In fact, perils that are only hinted at in the book - castration, lobotomization, execution - are explicit threats in the movie. Ulysse learns to communicate with his captors and delivers a stirring speech to an enthusiastic ape audience, afterwards becoming a cynosure of the society's attention, gifted his own fancy apartment and clothes. A gagged Taylor, roughly stripped of his rags, can only watch as the speech he wrote to defend himself at his hearing, which his ape attorney Cornelius is tasked to read on his behalf, is declared heresy and stifled by the tribunal before the end of the second sentence. The closest Charlton Heston ever came to delivering a speech beseeching sympathy from his simian captors was the monologue from his SNL appearance.

Throughout the movie Taylor is given the full slavery treatment and responds with appropriate indignation: it's almost shocking to read the book after seeing the film multiple times over the years and find that Ulysee's first address to the ape population is the amiable, flattering "Noble gorillas, learned orangutans, wise chimpanzees," rather than the resentful, defiant "Damn dirty ape!" Once he's finally free, Taylor can't wait to dish out some of the same to those who degraded him, even taking pleasure in hog-tying the esteemed Dr. Zaius once he's taken him hostage:

Zira: Don't treat him that way...It's humiliating!
Taylor: The way you humiliated me? All of you? You led me around on a leash!
Cornelius: That was different - we thought you were inferior!
Taylor: Now you know better.

Even the apes who help him escape are appalled by his behavior! Ulysse wants to prove he's on intellectual footing with his captors; after that approach fails to work for Taylor at his trial he resorts to establishing physical dominance, arming up and informally declaring a one-man war on his ape oppressors. His drop on the evolutionary scale awakens something ugly within him: a natural inclination to rise up violently against the ruling order, not unlike those Taylor left behind in his own timeline to "make war against his brother." For Ulysse, ultimately learning that the downfall of Soror's human population was due to an uneventful widespread surrender of will to the rapidly-evolving apes, in addition to the similarly spontaneous devolution of his learned associate Professor Antelle, brings his own abdication to ape superiority into a new light. The revelation that Ulysse's forebearers (keeping in mind, of course, that Boulle's ape planet is not Earth, more on that later) merely laid down one day and allowed the primates to have the run of the planet runs parallel to Boulle's real-life experience. The war left France to deal with the reality of capitulation - that their own people would become puppets and collaborators to the conquering ruling order - and the shame of submission. France wasn't destroyed in the war, it was overtaken; likewise, humanity on the planet Soror didn't end in fire but in resignation. Like Nicholson unknowingly conforming to his Japanese jailers, humanity essentially slides over the evolutionary chain to let apes take over, in a twisted effort to maintain some sort of dignity. And since subservience isn't something that American audiences could really understand, Michael Wilson transposed Boulle's prominently French anxieties into a very modern American concern over U.S. military incursion into foreign territory, stemming also from WWII (the U.S. role in a potential global nuclear cataclysm in the post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki age) but also political controversies of the late 60's such as the conflict in Vietnam (a clusterfuck of which the French had washed their hands at the 1954 Geneva Conference). The denunciations of Ulysse's lack of retaliation and Taylor's overzealous response epitomize Boulle and Wilson's own agendas and explain why, as with The Bridge on the River Kwai, the American screenwriters added an explosion to Apes that never happened in the book.

"Sometimes I'm overcome with such an aversion to human beings that I can barely refrain from retching... Suppose, for instance, that you were to live continuously with apes, you'd probably have similar attacks..."
~ Kafka, "A Report to the Academy: Two Fragments."

It's incredibly strange that the "It was Earth!" ending is not the ultimate twist of Boulle's novel. Ulysse constantly points out the geographic similarities of Soror to his own world, the characteristics of the ape's culture are entirely modern and Ulysse, like Taylor in the movie, makes a point of mentioning how centuries have passed on Earth since their departure. The character's name even suggests a link to The Odyssey, which is all about the character returning home (Taylor's startled final revelation begins with the exclamation "I'm back - I'm home!") Ulysse does return home, but he and his ape allies have to hatch a convoluted plot to smuggle himself, Nova and their infant son onto a conveniently operable satellite so they can link up with his ship, which has also conveniently been floating around in orbit since the beginning of the book. (Did they knit an adorable tiny space suit for the baby using Sororian bramble leaves and ape berries?) Upon touchdown, Ulysse is aghast to learn that his own planet has also fallen to intelligent apes.⁶

Rod Serling wisely ignored the unnecessary transition by borrowing a twist from the teleplay for his 1960 Twilight Zone first season episode "I Shot An Arrow Into the Air." In the episode (based on an idea industry outsider Madelon Champion pitched to Serling at a dinner party), three astronauts land in the far-stretching desert region of an unknown planet; in the end one survives only to learn it was Earth all along, with a road sign for Reno and askew telephone poles as the telling stand-ins in for the Statue of Liberty (the title came from Longfellow: "I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth I knew not where.") Boulle's story fit naturally between the bookends of the TZ episode, which provided not only the shocking ending but also an answer to producer Arthur Jacobs' insistence to keep the apes behind the curtain until the end of the first act: just let the humans traipse across the desert for 20 minutes. Jacobs always took credit for suggesting the iconic final reveal of the Statue of Liberty to Serling, supposedly inspired by a business lunch with Blake Edwards⁷ where his attention kept wandering to a painting of Lady Liberty on the wall of the delicatessen.⁸ Nobody seems to make the connection that the statue was a logical stand-in for the Eiffel Tower, which a returning Ulysse sees from the window while landing on Earth in the novel, as another world-famous French-built monument (Gustave Eiffel even worked on the Statue of Liberty).

But the real brilliance in applying the "I Shot An Arrow" gimmick to Boulle's story is that it gives Franklin Schaffner time to establish the planet as the Earthmen make their way across the seemingly endless expanse of dry wilderness, plagued by emphatically unearthly electric storms. Having the audience experience this "new" world with the weary astronauts is an inspired sleight of hand: the leveled landscape and indigo-tinted eruptions of weather suggest an alien climate as much a centuries-old post-apocalyptic wasteland. Convinced that they're forging into the former, the spacemen seem like T.E. Lawrence and his ragtag squad suffering through the impassable Nefud Desert, noble in their defiance of obscure terrain that will (in his ignorance) give their leader an adamant impression of unjustified self-importance, a pompous sense of dominance over nature as if survival in an uninhabitable wilderness was the result of material superiority rather than simple fool's luck. Alpha-male outsiders bestowing themselves with a perceived supremacy over native "savages" is a Michael Wilson specialty, and just as Lawrence's self-deification proves delusional, Taylor's belief that he stands above this world's inferior humans and dominant apes comes crashing down when he realizes it's his world after all; the only thing he's done is reintroduce humanity's inherent need for power over lower lifeforms that effectively led to its decline. The beauty of the film's legendary twist is the title itself: we're told this is the planet of the apes and so it is - how many planets do you know with apes on it?

Boulle's apparently aware of another one, an "unnamed planet in orbit around a star in the constellation of Orion," its position possibly inspired by poet Jean Louis De Esque: "And Betelguese, an evil lair / With infernal, warring legions / Careens as stars shed tears of woe." Ulysse is certain of his cosmic bearings from the beginning and has to begrudgingly admire the apes of Soror for building a civilization so close to his own, 1,344 light years away, its only major structural difference from a modern Earth city being overhead passages of metal frame rising over traffic for simian pedestrians to simply climb over cars using all four hands instead of having to wait for a "walk" signal. Serling based his city on Boulle's, even going so far as to include a "gorilla policeman directing traffic," the aesthetic only being modified to a more archaic setting in later drafts. Budgetary concerns were cited, but the decision to create an isolated, obsolete ape city works towards incensing Taylor's stubborn sense of superiority: You're apes! You live in primitive rock houses! You ride horses instead of driving cars! Whether consciously or not, changing the setting from the book's modern city with "buildings several stories high" to an antediluvian village of sagging stone adobes makes it easier for Taylor to write the apes off: why should a man who traveled through time and space be impressed by kangaroo courts held in Fred Flintstone's garage?

Mérou at least has to respect the apes for maintaining a contemporary lifestyle with televisions, cars, newspapers, ritzy nightclubs with dress codes, a giant amphitheater shaped like Dante's conical inferno and even crude airplanes, making them at least somewhat resemble the same technological and philosophical standard as the society he left behind (no talk of barbaric religions or "sacred scrolls" in Boulle's book). Confinement in a stylish lab must at least seem "correct" to Ulysee on some level and he resigns himself to believing that, if he's been placed in a lower order within this recognizably up-to-date civilization, it's not particularly villainous on the apes' part, it just must be the way the wheel turns. For Taylor, it's like being dumped in the stone age only to be told by caveman that he's the uncultured clown - resentment is bound to result (it's an urgent point of the film that Taylor can't get the apes to believe that he hails from another planet, a fact that's more or less immediately accepted by the apes once Ulysee gives his speech). Having been impossibly propelled across the cosmos, it must be ignoble indeed for Taylor to find himself ensnared in a quaint little net and locked up in a dingy zoo.

Moreso, the interior design of the movie's simian city depreciates and antagonizes Taylor with its low, ape-friendly ceilings (the 6'3" Charlton Heston is constantly forced to lower his head as if in humility) and open rooms that further minimize his own confined quarters. There's also an unappreciated culture to the architecture of Ape City, which the film's art director based on Antonio Gaudi's arborial designs at the suggestion of Michael Wilson (who figured apes would naturally incorporate tree-like columns into their homes based on their origins). It's not as simple to mock the deceptively "primitive" structure of a city that recalls the majestic modernist design of one of Earth's most recognized architects, or the otherworldly "fairy chimney" rock formations of Turkey's Göreme Valley. Taking inspiration from these terrestrial, yet vaguely alien-seeming edifices allowed the filmmakers to present a warped mirror of the modern world while sustaining an implication to the more exotic areas of Earth, suggesting that if Taylor were more open-minded he'd see these structures as variations on his home planet and recognize it as such much earlier in the movie. Instead, he's bullyragged by low ceilings and discomfited by what he sees as unsophisticated monkey engineering, all to support his consistent yet unspoken contention, "You're goddamn right I'm better than a baboon!" Whether he, and by extension humanity, really is superior to the dominant apes bewilders Ulysse throughout the book, but Taylor represses this doubt right until he reaches that fateful shoreline (once again used in a film to symbolize the outermost edge of human understanding); amazingly, both heroes, through very different journeys, have come to the same awareness of man's tragic imperfection.

Boulle's idea to remove his hero from humankind and reevaluate his view of the species through contact with a "humanized" variation on a recognizable animal can be traced to the fourth and final section of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. In "A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms," the title surgeon is exiled on an unnamed island west of Madagascar where he finds that intelligent horses, or "Houyhnhnms," are superior to the island's tribe of savage humans. When Gulliver arrives he's mistaken for one of the primitive humans, called "Yahoos," until he proves his intelligence to the ruling elite by learning their language and endearing himself to a fascinated member of their group who sees him as a curious oddity. Boulle, who came up with the concept of Apes during a visit to the zoo where he had the uncomfortable sensation of being on the opposite side of the bars while in the monkey house, was clearly inspired by the surreal nature and social humor of Swift's story, especially the Irish satirist's use of the regressed race of humans who inhabit the Houyhnhnms' island. Gulliver (the story's hero and narrator, just like Ulysse) quickly develops an emphatic antipathy for these mock variations of his own species and sets to assuring his equine hosts that his civility and rationality rank him above the common Yahoo; the same ludicrous urgency motivates Ulysse to satisfy the company of apes as to his own impalpable intelligence. Although Ulysse hasn't had the benefit of being sentenced to be blinded by the Lilliputians, fighting giant wasps in Brobdingnag or witnessing air strikes from the flying island of Laputa, he shares Gulliver's stubborn sense of pride as "a man created in the image of God!"

Gulliver begins the book a devout humanist, and the absurd tragedy of the final chapter is that, as he describes his people to the Houyhnhnms, he begins to turn against his own species. Gulliver decries the military, the legal system (apparently Swift must have unjustly lost a cow in court once based on Gulliver's educated rant on the subject), healthcare - every branch of his society, all of which are parodically paralleled by the behavior of the Yahoos, whose form of justice is to literally shit on the offending party (Gulliver doesn't see this as an improvement). He comes to believe that the frigidly rational Houyhnhnms are the greater culture, not only to the Yahoos but to his own civilized nation. He even becomes hopelessly despondent when they eventually force him to leave the island out of fear that he might one day stir the Yahoos into revolt. Gulliver ends his days back home ignoring friends and family, preferring to converse with two horses from his stable for hours on end rather than the "Yahoos" of his own country.

Like Gulliver, Ulysse is resentful of his association with the primitive humans of Soror ("I was ashamed at the stupidity of these men") and seeks the admiration of the apes. He even admits to being jealous that Zira might show one of Soror's natives the kind of affection she affords him; this affection for Zira, his savior from classification of a lower species, causes him to completely discredit Nova's attempts to get close to him. Gulliver also happens to run into an undeveloped female member of his own species while bathing near a waterfall (which is where Ulysse first spies Nova) who also attempts to "get close" - he responds to her advances as if he's being assaulted. Natural sexual urges suddenly disgust Gulliver, who fails to realize his incessant groveling at the feet of his "master" Houyhnhnm⁹ to be the more bestial act. Zira, after learning of Ulysse's intelligence, is "vexed and shocked" that he carries on his relationship with Nova, not expecting such base impulses of her "exceptional subject." It's surprising that an unrequited romantic interest exists between Ulysse and Zira in the Apes book, and that Kim Hunter's playful line "But you're so ugly!" is one of the few taken directly from the source (the line in the book is, "Darling, it's a shame, but you really are too unattractive!") The exchange occurs right before Ulysse voluntarily leaves the ape world with Nova and his newborn son: unlike Gulliver, he's able to remember his own origins and cast off his need for approval from Zira, for whom he could never be more than a favored pet even if her "obvious admiration went straight to my heart."

Taylor's farewell kiss to Zira, perfectly in keeping with his derisive aggression (See, apes? I can effortlessly seduce your women! Who's inferior now?), similarly marks his departure towards his ultimate "destiny." Wilson casts Taylor as a reversal of Gulliver: the reluctant explorer is introduced as something of a mocking misanthrope of an outcast. The first voice we hear in the film, disembodied over the indifferent expanse of space, is Taylor pondering whether future humans are a "better breed" than those they left behind or still just a pack of warmongering animals. This bitter attitude towards human nature continues after the crew crash lands and Taylor scoffs at Landon's sentimental longing for their home planet and people who've been dead for hundreds of years, launching into deep laughter when his fellow traveler stakes a tiny American flag to the terra firma to mark their meaningless star trek. Taylor quickly abandons any pretense of carrying on the mission: "You're no seeker," Landon informs him. "You're NEGATIVE."

Wilson's irony fits in with the respective fates of Taylor, who wants to forget about Earth and his duty towards humanity, and Landon, who forges ahead in the name of mankind.¹⁰ Landon will end up lobotomized while Taylor will be faced with his ultimate nightmare: the realization that Earth, which he comes to defend as being above mindless barbarism, has been physically obliterated by his own kind. What's all the more ironic is that Taylor's ordeal with the apes have turned him into a champion for mankind, a human-supremacist, making it all the more tragic when he sees what his newly-appreciated species did to itself all those centuries ago, assumedly under the same banner of self-righteous rebellion. Gazing upon the mindlessly gawking human denizens of the planet for the first time, Taylor's mind turns instantly to conquest: "If this is the best they've got around here, in six months we'll be running this planet!" That he's looking at the sad remnants of his own culture is completely lost on him - his earlier comment that he and his shuttle chums would look to future Earth humans like "something that fell out of a tree" turns out to be inadvertently prescient.

The film's savage humans are fairly docile, obliviously munching on fruit as Taylor sizes up the subjects of his future kingdom. They're not as violent as Boulle's troglodytes (who draw first blood, falling upon and butchering the poor monkey Ulysse & co. brought with them from Earth) or animalistic as Swift's feral Yahoos, yet Taylor still distances himself from them. It's already been established that Taylor "despises" people and hopes to find "something in the universe better than man," and it's an elegant cosmic joke that being classified by the apes with these people, secretly HIS people, awakens a newfound pride for the race he'd previously dismissed. While Ulysse is forced to accept his lot on the distant planet of Soror, Taylor finds himself as the last defender of human merit on Earth, fighting unwittingly in his defiance for the very souls of the same kind of distantly-related savages Lemuel Gulliver's self-hating speciest renounced in favor of his beloved Houyhnhnms. Even though he seeks to separate himself from their number - and probably wouldn't lift a finger to rescue any of the homelier ones - he is innately connected to them the minute his new companions strip him of his space finery (Ulysse remains naked throughout his ordeal the book; obviously that wouldn't fly in a widely-released movie in 1968, though to his credit Heston does a tasteful butt shot).

Therefore Taylor begrudgingly stands up for his own species (about 1,000 years too late) whereas Ulysse, like Gulliver, betrays his own, though it shames him when he realizes it:

My superiority over the other prisoners...made me the most brilliant subject in the establishment. This distinction, I am ashamed to admit, sufficed my present ambitions and even filled me with pride... One day, however, after several weeks, I felt a sort of nausea... The fact is that I was shamed by my cowardly resignation.

Both characters' proud recognition of their own humanity, where Boulle and the film both differ from Swift, is directly linked to the fate of a learned companion: Landon for Taylor and Professor Antelle for Ulysse. Landon, the man whose belief in the preservation of humankind was so stubborn that he stuck a little toy flag in the middle of nowhere to the amusement of Taylor the misanthrope, is lobotomized by Dr. Zaius to protect the scheming orangutan's secret, a dastardly act in keeping with the film's focus on dramatic twists and antagonism.¹¹ Less theatrical but just as impactful to our hero is the sad case of Professor Antelle, the book's Landon template, a genius scientist who perfected a new acceleration rocket that can travel at nearly the speed of light. In the book Antelle is the misanthropic one, said to dislike humans and to have developed his radical space vehicle to search for more interesting lifeforms in the far reaches of space. Ulysse, who reveres the professor, is desperate to find him after they're separated (a third crew member, Levain/Dodge, is killed in the hunt) and finally does at the zoo, where Antelle has de-evolved into a being as mindless as Soror's human wretches, "the perfect animal" as Ulysse refers to him.

Again, since the American-made movie is concerned that man's ape-like response to outside threats will ultimately lead to nuking themselves into non-existence and the French-authored novel is concerned that man's own lethargy will lead to a natural resignation that gives into an ape-like controlling power, the fate of these side characters is significant to the story's outcome. Taylor not standing idly by to be humiliated and unmanned by a bunch of monkeys (tellingly, the first thing Zaius threatens him with when the two are on equal footing is emasculation) is only a survival instinct until he sees what they've done to humanitarian Landon, then it becomes a personal philosophy. You dare take away my friend's freedom, Dr. Zaius/Hirohito/Ho Chi Minh? I'm striking back! Ulysse, who's won over a good percentage of the ape population and allowed himself to become domesticated within their society with a wife and kid despite all that's happened, sees in Antelle (who, like Ulysse, has selected a Sororian mate for himself albeit in a caveman-like zoo situation) the ultimate price of resignation: loss of freedom, identity and humanity. Antelle wasn't "dumbed down" by a sinister ape: the cynical scientist somehow allowed himself to fall into a mindless stupor. After being granted his own freedom following his speech and release from captivity, Ulysse is horrified to find that Antelle doesn't seek liberation, preferring to remain in a cage with his savage mate, a surrender of will from which Ulysse realizes his own submission isn't far removed. Taylor, so educated and so civilized, responds to the apes' decimation of Landon's mind by arming up against his enemies. Visiting the long-gone Professor Antelle, Ulysse finally discovers the Red Peter solution: the response to captivity is not to lay down and accept one's fate but to evolve; Boulle's apes, as it turns out, learned the same thing long ago.

"In the long run, mind is able to embody itself in gesture. It has to, in fact; that's the natural course of evolution."
~ Cornelius, La Planète des singes.

The final turning point of La Planète des singes comes via sloppy yet unsettling exposition where native human guinea pigs, their brains stimulated by electrodes, start spewing racial memory of the time when domesticated lab monkeys went bad. As Ulysee and Cornelius observe, a male and female test subject tell the tale of an ancient world where ape was not only inferior but slave to man, exploited for manual labor and tedious housework. Eventually the humans of Soror got so lazy and degenerate that they were overthrown by their ape servants (suggesting that the inevitable insurgency of monkey butlers may not be far away) and rapidly devolved into dull, speechless creatures similar to the fate of Professor Antelle. Boulle presents it as a swapping of roles, man simply handing the keys to the planet to the monkeys before cowering beneath the lowest rung of the evolutionary ladder and the apes using everything they inherited from Homo sapiens to form their own society. It's more than a little Swiftian to have apes literally "ape" their way to a higher level of intelligence; Boulle's twist on evolution could even be described as Lamarckian.

I refer of course to French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a botanist who late in life turned from an ardent essentialist into a radical evolutionist. Lamarck would become the first scientist to publish theories of human evolution from apes and the first to develop a truly coherent evolutionary theory. He was also the first to separate arachnids and crustaceans from insects in classification, coined the terms "biologist" and "invertebrate," and improved on Linnaeus by dividing the original two animal groups into ten. His progessionist beliefs were decidedly French, in other words more intellectual than scientific; coming out of the Revolution and Reign of Terror, progressivism in general was tethered to a stasis of comfortable notions that Lamarck was never entirely able to evade. Frustratingly, he had all the tools for bold new theories of evolution - he even included tree diagrams in his book Philosophie Zoologique, but it was to demonstrate anomalies which Lamarck chalked up to irregularities. His thinking was almost stubbornly teleological, since his studies relied on the established chain of evolution rather than inspiring Lamarck to lay out a new, scientific tracing of evolution based on evidence he had actually discovered (this is no different than Erasmus Darwin, although his theories were considered less systematic than Lamarck's). This is largely why so many of his ideas fall apart under the mildest scrutiny and remain hopelessly dated to the beginning of the 19th century (though fuzzy, his work was hugely influential to future thinkers like Charles Darwin¹² 30 years later, even if his work was cleaned up by geologist Charles Lyell, whose research Darwin held in tremendous esteem).

Most infamously derided is his theory of "soft inheritance," a less-developed appendage of Lamarck's greater work in transmutation and gradation (though often erroneously assigned as the core of Lamarckian thought) that proposed an inheritance of acquired characteristics. The general concept is evolution through causal necessity, shaped by environmental conditions, so that what one member of a group learns (usually by accident) is transferred horizontally to other members of the group. Whereas Darwinian evolution is based on nature and could take hundreds of thousands of years, Lamarck's thinking was based on instinct that could radically effect genetics within a single generation (small-scale change vs the hierarchy of causes, although to his credit Lamarck, like Darwin, championed the uniformity of environmental change). Soft inheritance found itself easily debunked by the example of giraffes being able to grant their offspring longer necks by reaching for high leaves - the food is high in the trees, so the giraffe strained its neck to reach the leaves, and its neck got longer, therefore its offspring were born with longer necks.¹³ This famous model was most likely engineered by Lamarck's enemies,¹⁴ as the idea of ineffable organic will vs. necessity to evolve could easily be misconstrued to mean an individual organism is responsible for its own drastic evolutionary change, and for passing it on to its offspring.

If wince-inducing Lamarkian concepts such as "tendency to progression" are the stuff of pure fantasy, then I'm officially declaring it applicable to the reality of a planet run by apes. Boulle seems to have co-opted the scientist's rejected ideas in his ape evolution, suggesting that mature organisms can change their characteristics permanently (walk upright, speak, invent airplanes) and pass these acquired changes onto their progeny. Cornelius, who in the final third of the book becomes a sounding board to Ulysse's explanation of the human-monkey relationship on Earth, formulates several ideas: "Zira, is it not this sense of aping that characterizes us as well?" "It begins in childhood. All our education is based on imitation." "They force every young monkey to repeat all the errors of his ancestors. That explains the slowness of our progress. For the last 2000 years we have remained similar to ourselves." But isn't this the very flawed foundation of what's thought of as Lamarckism, that acquired changes are passed down to new generations? If there's no need to evolve then why pass it on? Hopefully it at least justifies this lengthy aside beyond the "Boulle and Lamarck: both French guys" connection.

Boulle sets up this paradoxical idea of "aping" as an evolutionary tool, then turns it around for the double irony of it being discredited in the case of a spaceman whose intelligence is incorrectly assumed to be mere mimicry of his simian betters (or as they put it in the film, "Human see, human do.") In Aldous Huxley's Apes and Essence, baboons have come to prominence and threaten nuclear devastation of the planet, emulating what they've seen in Hollywood movies. Having established themselves as the superior species, they use Pavlovian techniques on humans, as in Boulle's book (Zira wants to put the still-mute Taylor through a manual dexterity test). Both Huxley and Boulle acknowledge how simplistic and humiliating these examinations are to human subjects, an irony considering that the administers climbed the evolutionary chain without impartial plasticity or creativity (which is, of course, how Huxley often imagined the downfall of humanity). In both cases, the ape's technology and culture progress slowly through the centuries because each generation, with characteristically ape-like behaviour, imitated those who came before.

It's not reaching too far to suggest Boulle still had the reality of the shifting winds of war on his mind when he came up with this idea: that in order to survive, a subjugated society must adopt the dominant party's values, idealogy, technology and language; deterritorialization naturally leads to the decline of said civilization. Kafka's Red Peter, who "evolves" by imitating human speech and characteristics, finds becoming more like his captors preferable to life in a cage. Ulysse's willingness to walk nude among his ape superiors, forcing himself to learn their language and ultimately setting out to win their respect with a rousing speech puts him squarely in Red Peter's position. Speech itself becomes the most telling sign of equality, so even though Taylor makes no attempt to adapt to ape culture or humble himself towards the goal of acceptance, and his first spoken words are righteous, speciesist indignation, the fact that he speaks awes the surrounding crowd (while it's obviously a convenience of narrative in the film that the apes all speak perfect English, it works thematically that the denizens of Ape City would have adapted human language along with everything else; for his part, Boulle never explains how the apes understand the two human test subjects whose speech is stimulated and one would guess don't speak monkey). Likewise, Landon/Professor Antelle losing the power of speech drop them down the evolutionary ladder - Boulle even has Ulysee draw comparisons to the apes' approach to studying men to Morgan's Canon: "In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development."

Since genetic exposition via brain surgery is not cinematically engaging, Serling and Wilson reworked the second shocking instance of human speech in the scene at the cave filled with artifacts from a pre-Sacred Scoll simian culture, all of which Cornelius is convinced must have been left behind by intelligent humans. The human baby doll, Zaius points out, is not uncommon among the sort of toys that delight their own children - except that it says "mama."¹⁵ Here we have Leroi-Gourhan's chaîne opératoire applied to both an artifact AND language, proof of a past culture due to the simple scientific fact that the representative of a species incapable of vocal expression would not talk.¹⁶ This example of recursion (the doll will only repeat "mama" over and over again) through the simulacrum of an extinct race represents the passing down of speech from parent to progeny, but for Zaius it's a symbol of his people's "aped" evolution passed down from humankind, suggestive that the final borrowed trait will be the inclincation to destroy themselves. And unlike the paper airplane created by Taylor earlier in the film (Schaffner draws attention to small objects that have giant meanings, from the pathetic American flag to the airplane to the doll), he can't simply crush it between his paws.

If Zaius is trying to keep his kind away from the influence of humans in order to avoid the fate of mankind, he's got his work cut out for him. The apes are already progessively war-like: the gorillas are a bunch of redneck hunters and unsympathetic soldiers, there's a race war brewing between the chimps and the orangutans (I guess the gibbons got shafted), there's a lot of religion so you know that ain't gonna help. (And the scroll's warning that "alone among God's primates, [man] kills for sport or lust or greed" is highly questionable, since the apes are introduced killing humans for sport.) The ape-ocalypse that leads us to the planet of Frank Schaffner's film we'll learn in the sequels, is the direct effect of time-traveling apes who end up in Taylor's world and suffer the same probing, proding and suppression by the ruling order. Again, recusion: one power conquers another, the minority hero escapes, a battle ensues after which one side ends up beneath the other. The cosmic irony of the Apes movies (not known for their happy endings) is that one culture imitates another on a course to self-destruction over and again for dominion of the same planet.

For his part, Boulle imitated the adaptation of his own book (just as producer Arthur Jacobs had "aped" King Kong by creating the Apes cinematic universe) by sculpting a screenplay for the sequel titled Planet of the Men, following the logical course that Taylor leads his own uprising against the apes. It was rejected as being "too uncinematic," and Boulle dropped out of the Apes series entirely, although subsequent sequels, remakes and reboots have duly recycled fragments of his original story. And while space-journeying chimps Jinn and Phyllis have yet to turn up in any of the 9 films that have spawned from Boulle's novel, it's incredible that such an oddity - a French science fiction adventure story¹⁷ - has so consistently endured on screen. Boulle was blessed to have both of his biggest novels translated into English by the same man, Xan Fielding,¹ and even moreso to have the same screenwriter, Michael Wilson, bring Bridge on the River Kwai and Planet of the Apes to the big screen. From what I've read I'm inclined to assume Wilson is responsible for pretty much all the character work in the filmed Apes script, working from the basic plot layout of Rod Serling's initial draft. Wilson was an expert clean-up writer,¹⁹ masterful at dialogue: he had followed up Carl Foreman on Kwai and came onto Apes with the same assignment to take Serling's premise and make something out of it. In Serling's own words: "I blew it and Wilson did it."