Movie Shelf: Planet of the Apes, Page 2

MOVIE SHELF: COMPARING FILMS TO THEIR LITERARY COUNTERPARTS

john cribbs

FRANKLIN J. SCHAFFNER'S PLANET OF THE APES

based on La Planète des singes by Pierre Boulle

page 2

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.* 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 original idea by Madelon Champion), 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 Edwards** where his attention kept wandering to a painting of Lady Liberty on the wall of the delicatessen.*** (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.)

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 erruptions 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 sense of unjustified self-importance. Alpha-male outsiders bestowing themselves with a perceived supremacy over native "savages" is a Michael Wilson speciality, 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 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 the "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 change 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 obsolete 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, newspapers, cars, nightclubs, 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 be the 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.

Even 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 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 insightful 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 affection she affords her "exceptional subject"; 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" Houyhnhnm**** 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 Movie Zira'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, which perfectly plays into his derisive aggression (See, apes? I can effortlessly seduce your women! Who's inferior now?), similarly marks his depature towards his ultimate "destiny." Wilson casts Taylor as the opposite 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***** - 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 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 their intelligent 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.****** 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 develop 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. 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...

CONCLUDED NEXT WEEK IN PART III

* As referenced in the "you call that a twist?" belly flop of an ending from Tim Burton's tone deaf remake. Boulle actually provides an additional, disposable "twist" in the guise of a frame narrative in which a couple traveling in space on vacation discover a message in a bottle (just floating around the infinite vacuum of space apparently) through which Ulysse's narrative is related. We come back to these characters at the end, who laugh at the notion of an intelligent human because - get this - they're apes!

** The film's original director (thank god we were spared the sight of Mickey Rooney running around in ape makeup). J. Lee Thompson, who'd end up helming the last two films of the series, was also an early candidate to direct the original.

*** Concept artist Don Peters has also claimed the Statue of Liberty image came from his initial publicity paintings - Edwards is on record as backing up Peters (rather than his alleged lunch partner Jacobs) while Serling occasionally claimed the concept came out of collaboration with Jacobs. I'm sure there's a logical chain of events that led to many good minds coming together to create the iconic shot.

**** The Houyhnhnm section is rarely used in the film adaptations of Gulliver (and you'd think Ray Harryhausen would have had a real interesting take on them), but the remarkably faithful 1996 mini-series with Ted Danson did include it (albeit with a tacked-on "happy" epilogue where Gulliver rejoins his family). The lead Houyhnhnm female is voiced by Isabelle Huppert - why anyone thought it was a good idea to hear Huppert speak English without seeing her at the same time is beyond me.

***** They basically make up the same dichotomy as the astronaut and his solipsistic crewmate in Ray Bradbury's "No Particular Night Or Morning."

****** If Ulysse's submissiveness doesn't come off as particularly spineless, it's because Boulle doesn't present his apes as typical bad guys - Zaius is the most vocal opponent to Ulysse's claims of intelligence, but he doesn't seek to actively discredit and destroy the troublesome spaceman as Maurice Evans' Zaius does in the film. The absence of antagonism in the Apes book wasn't going to fly in the movie, which without man-handling gorillas to chase Charlton Heston would have been like Colonel Nicholson's bad decisions without a Shears there to throw them back in the British officer's stunned face.

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