Planet of the Apes (1968)

Planet of the Apes (1968) is ostensibly a crazy movie about time travel and a world run by another species. But the screenwriters behind the film were clearly using sci-fi as a way to explore a number of themes and ideas.

As a product of the social conditions change, Planet of the Apes (1968) bears a reflection of the shared values and fears of the U.S. society, both challenging some traditional views and beliefs, and reaffirming others. As a science fiction film with its post-apocalyptic narrative, it exhibits racial and hierarchical anxieties and might be regarded as a contemporary myth, lending philosophical meaning to the facts of everyday life and reflecting the weary cynicism of a nation still numbed by the Vietnam War and Civil Rights protests that marked the ‘60ies. As a vehicle for exploring rebellion myths, the film was especially popular during this very decade of social and political breakdown. Released in 1968, Planet of the Apes possesses twofold intertwined thematic strands. First, it exposes evident “political allegories of racial conflict” and class-divided society (Greene, 13) in the world and in particular in the United States. Second, it is a metaphor reflecting the defeated “vision of humanity’s aspirations” (Greene, 54) and manifesting through the sense of despair and loss of identity. According to Greene’s analysis in Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture, the filmmakers of Planet of the Apes “created fictional spaces whose social tensions resembled those then dominating the United States” (Greene, 9) and “envisioned racial politics, [dystopian and apocalyptic] society as a power struggle allowing only” (Greene, 1) for a single winner. At the time of release of Planet of the Apes, America was going through a political and social breakdown, “one month after [the experience] of the Tet offensive [(military campaign launched by the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong threatening to attack the U.S. targets and a few cities in Southern Vietnam)] and just prior to the horror of the Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations” (Greene, 8). The discourse on race and the conflicts caused by the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and “violent encounters involving African-Americans against police and military units” (Greene, 12) leads to the film’s another crucial theme which evolves around dystopian and apocalyptic aspects of humanity.

Planet of the Apes (1968) is a clear allegory about race and post-Cold War society. Its underlying message explores racism by reversing the historical link between whites and African-Americans. White humans are depicted as badly-treated slaves, and apes are the masters. This portrayal embodied an extended and particularly pessimistic image of American racial conflicts during the period of political and social “collapse”, and thus originated the film’s production (“filmmakers lived amidst severe racial conflict and racial violence” (Greene, 1)) and its reception by a large audience. Created within the context of political and societal issues that were in majority caused by racial oppressions, and carried on with extremely violent manifestations of African-American against military forces, the Planet of the Apes feature functioned as a “study” of American racial fears under the appearance of a science-fiction epic. Furthermore, another fascinating aspect within the racial facet of the film is that there is the ape class system; an image of hierarchical stratification of the ape-society is very present and portrayed through their “social structure and work force” (Greene, 36). For instance, the gorillas are placed on the lower rank “serving as the army, police force, and menial labour” (Greene, 37); being “intellectuals who serve as academics, scientists, and doctors” (Greene, 37), chimpanzees stand in the middle; whereas “the top of [the ape society is occupied by orangutans who are depicted as] religious, bureaucratic, and political power elite” (Greene, 37). This social structure draws the parallel between the humans and apes in which one can perceive the reversal of roles, “intended as crude we’ve-seen-the-enemy-and-it’s-us metaphor” (Atkinson, 9).

While the movie was “consumed” on a very large scale and was considered as “the era’s most [hugely popular], complex […] pop cult entity” (Atkinson, 7), “the first filmed science fiction” (Greene, 1) it simultaneously presented an extremely gloomy account of America’s constant failure to solve its issues within the context of “racial [societal and political] apocalypse” (Greene, 48). This despair and instability convey “a sense of profound cultural, [social and political] destabilization and, on even gloomier note, lead “a culturally stable icon” (Greene, 48) — Tylor (Heston — “as the symbol of humanity” (Greene, 49)), with whom audiences most likely identify, towards death, apocalyptic destruction. In his analysis Greene claims that it is the first feature film that depicted in its very end the most impressive and strong dystopian representation in the science fiction genre — the fallen Statue of Liberty — offered further pessimism concerning the possibility of societal stability and racial equality. “You maniacs…you blew it up! Oh, damn you! God-damn you all to hell” moans Taylor, implying that humans destroyed all existing advanced civilization on the planet. In terms of its visuals and intellectual construction, the scene is extremely shocking and allows emphasizing the apocalyptic theme of humanity’s decline. “The loss of Taylor’s identity, the image of him helpless, trapped in a world run by a “lower” order of life, spoke to the anxiety caused by Third World self-assertion and the West’s fear of losing its identity as the dominant force in world affairs” (Greene, 47).

Planet of the Apes explores on the human history, and “once compared […] to a mirror of human society” (Greene, 10) depicting how it is not one of evolution but a degeneration instead, not an increase of achievements and glory but a product of failures. Unlike in Hollywood happy-ending, “the final frontier” (Greene, 54) feature films as Star Trek, Greene underlines that “In Planet of Apes, the voyage into outer space leads […] to a wasteland, a societal graveyard where the wages of the sins committed on the earlier American “frontiers” have been paid in full” (Greene, 54).

Bibliography

Atkinson, Michael. “You May Not Like What You Find: The Planet of the Apes Cycle.” In Ghosts in the Machine: The Dark Heart of Pop Cinema. New York: Limelight Editions, 1999. 7–15.

Greene, Eric. Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan U Press, 1998. 1–54.

Planet of the Apes. Dir. Franklin J. Schaffner. Perf. Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter and Maurice Evans. Twentieth Century Fox, 1968.