Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (32 page)

Planet of the Apes
represents a new type of fiction in which certainty is overturned without necessarily driving us insane. What's the aesthetic appeal of this type of fiction? Does it not reside in the play between logical and empirical propositions, between hinges and doors, or between rivers and riverbeds?

The science-fiction writer Bruce Sterling suggests that there is an emerging genre that is not strictly science fiction or
speculative fiction. He calls it “SF,” and says it is “a contemporary type of writing which sets its face against consensus reality . . . which makes you feel very strange: the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.”

Margaret Atwood has recently published a series of essays on the subject of what she too calls “SF” and also “thought experiment” fiction. She herself prefers to write not about things unlikely to occur, such as an attack by Martian lizard men, but about things more likely to occur, just as Jules Verne did when he wrote about submarines before there were submarines. At another point Atwood calls SF “a controlled form of hallucination.”

A “controlled form of hallucination” means the difference between saying, “I am going to the store to buy a bottled baby” (hallucination without control) and “
Suppose
we could all go the store and buy the bottled baby of our choice” (hallucination under control), as in Aldous Huxley's
Brave New World.

In
Planet of the Apes
we can live in a hallucinatory world and enjoy its freedoms while always feeling secure that we are in control. We can go through crazy doors that nonetheless swing on safe hinges; swim in wild rivers that nonetheless have stable beds. We can be as certain as we want that humankind lost the Earth to simians while being just as certain that they did not, at least not yet. This is a liberating beauty indeed.

W
ILLIAM
L. M
C
G
INNEY

M
ost audiences probably accept that film music can convey meanings about the mood or setting of a movie scene if for no other reason than because film music has been treated this way throughout its history. But where do the meanings brought by the music come from? Are they inherent in the music itself?

If the music has lyrics, we might say that meaning comes from the words. Indeed, as far back as the fifteenth century, the words of vocal music were considered the principal source of meaning in music. But most movie music is instrumental music, with no words to carry meaning. Yet, movies use music, assuming that it brings meaning to the film. Are there inherent meanings in instrumental music that movie music taps into? How and why does music seem to carry meaning, and where do those meanings come from?

There are actually two questions at work here: 1. whether “pure” music (that is, music without words) possesses inherent meanings, and 2. whether pure music can carry meanings, inherent or not. We can explore these questions by considering a highly original musical score such as that for
Planet of the Apes
that doesn't resemble more traditional styles of film music. Because of the score's unique nature, audiences might not expect it to convey meanings normally carried by film music. Despite this, most fans of the movie would probably argue that the score adds meaning to the film, although they may not be able to say what meanings it adds or how it adds them.

We might first confirm our sense that the score for
Planet of the Apes
carries meaning by imagining the movie without its music. We would still have the spectacular performances from Charlton Heston, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, Roddy McDowell, and the other cast members. We would have the dialogue and story, the remarkable prosthetic makeup and the settings that bring the world of the apes to life. But would the alien and desolate landscape of the Forbidden Zone seem quite so desolate without the music? Would the apes seem more or less alien (or human) without the music accompanying their activities? Would the film's pointed social commentary be as biting without the musical score?

Planet of the Apes
was a movie ripe with meaning for audiences in 1968, which allowed for the possibility and even the expectation that the music would carry meanings.
Planet of the Apes
appeared at the beginning of a cycle of science-fiction films that featured a dystopian future as a vehicle for critique of the present. This trend lasted into the mid-1970s and included all the movies in the original
Apes
series.

Planet of the Apes
was also part of a broader movement in American cinema that saw filmmakers experimenting with existing film genres even as they used their films for social criticism. Although initially promoted as an action film,
Planet of the Apes
has since been widely discussed as an allegory for race relations and as a broader commentary on the place of “others” within Western society. It also includes pointed statements on the relationships between science and religion, the distinctions between “primitive” and “advanced” cultures, and the degree to which technology and progress mitigate humanity's own aggressive tendencies.

The meanings carried by
Planet of the Apes
resonated with several cultural currents coming together at the time of the film's release. The Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and environmental concerns all posed challenges to existing social and political values that became the subtexts for films and other artistic works of the period. The newly achieved artistic self-consciousness of American cinema enabled it to
engage these social questions even as it explored and manipulated film conventions in ways that film audiences found meaningful. When considered in this social and cultural context, what would the unique score for
Planet of the Apes
bring to the table? Could it satisfy traditional functions of film music while also reinforcing other ideas?

The ability of instrumental music to convey meaning by itself has been debated since the flowering of instrumental music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although composers and critics acknowledged that instrumental music could suggest emotions, they had greater regard for vocal music and its ability to convey specific ideas through words. In his
Critique of Judgment
, Immanuel Kant summed up this secondary status given to instrumental music when he called it “more pleasure than culture.”

The status of instrumental music rose significantly during the nineteenth century, largely due to the influence of Romanticism, which placed great value on emotional experience. Questions of meaning in music stood at the center of debates between advocates of absolute music, which focused almost exclusively on form and thematic development (such as the instrumental music of Johannes Brahms) and a “poetic music” that sought to create meaning by combining music with poetic subjects (as in the program music of Franz Liszt and the operas of Richard Wagner).

The rise of modernism in the years after World War I saw composers rethinking fundamental attributes of music, especially harmony and form. In his autobiography of 1936, Igor Stravinsky famously wrote that he considered music to be “by its very nature, essentially powerless to
express
anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.” His statement resonated well into the second half of the twentieth century as modernist composers emphasized music's separateness from the idea of expression and celebrated musical works as autonomous aesthetic objects.

The music of
Planet of the Apes
sounds very much like the works of these composers as they explored new ways of creating and organizing music. But if the film's score was modeled on music that is assumed to carry no expressive content or outside meaning, how could the score do its job? Could it still carry meaning anyway, and where would that meaning come from?

The significance of modernism generally lay in its break with the artistic practices of the past and the critique implied by that artistic break. Critics like Theodor W. Adorno frequently wrote about the “stylistic ruptures” at the heart of modernism and how those ruptures brought our attention to conventions, whether artistic or social, that were so common and familiar that they were treated as “natural.” Modernism's advocates praised its austerity and intellectual purity over the commercialism and sentiment of popular culture.

During the Cold War, modernist art, with its implied critical stance, was promoted as an example of the freedom of expression available in the United States and the West. Its abstraction and emphasis on formal organization contrasted sharply with the overt appeals to sentiment and nationalism found in the state-sanctioned socialist realism of the Soviet Union and other communist countries.

As the most prestigious examples of modernist music, the severe and intellectually rigorous works of composers like Milton Babbitt, Roger Sessions, and Pierre Boulez took their places alongside the visual artworks of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning as pillars of high art in the West. But this elevated status also conferred on modernist art and music the very sort of political and social associations that their austerity and abstraction sought to deny. Modernist art and music inadvertently stood for the Western values actively promoted by the United States, with its pervasive mass culture, its economic and military power, and its technological superiority. This music even symbolized the space program that, in the context of
Planet of the Apes
, would send Taylor and his crew on their fateful journey.

Reactions to modernism as part of the broader turmoil of the 1960s brought about a new artistic prestige for cinema that made movies like
Planet of the Apes
possible. Young, up-and-coming directors in the US banded together into a “New Hollywood” and explored familiar movie genres like westerns and science fiction to give critical perspectives on current events and conditions.

These filmmakers took an unfavorable view of Cold War politics and values and the ways that these shaped American society.
By adopting recognizably modernist features into their films, such as the musical style used in
Planet of the Apes
, the filmmakers turned the critical power of modernism back onto the Western culture that was its chief patron and advocate. In the case of
Planet of the Apes
, the score's modernist style implicated Western culture as the cause of human self-destruction even before the movie revealed that Earth is the Planet of the Apes.

By “modernist” music, I mean music that deliberately avoids the traditional practice of consonant functional harmony that informs most film music, popular music, and most familiar classical music. The music of
Planet of the Apes
is marked by unusual and exotic instrumentation, frenetic and relentless rhythms, eerie and off-kilter melodies, and unsettling atonal harmonies, all reminiscent of modernist concert music from the middle third of the twentieth century. These features were comparatively rare in movie music up through the 1960s, which encouraged their associations with that concert music and, by extension, its associated ideas.

Unusual timbres and instrumentation supply some of the most striking qualities of the music for
Planet of the Apes
. In addition to the standard orchestra, the score features a ram's horn, a slide whistle and a variety of exotic percussion instruments including log drums, scraped gongs, metal mixing bowls, and a Brazilian cuíka. Many of these sounds simply contribute to the oddness of certain settings. The agitated rhythms beaten on the mixing bowls create a bizarre sound that underscores the surreal barrenness of the Forbidden Zone as Taylor and his companions hike across it. Likewise, the scraped gongs add to the sense of arid, open space in these scenes. (The struck mixing bowls can be heard beginning at 16:19 and 26:01 on the Fox Home Video DVD. The scraped gong produces “whooshing” sounds that start at 15:42 and can be heard throughout scenes in the Forbidden Zone.)

The slide whistle and cuíka allude to the apes more directly by evoking simian vocalizations. The slide whistle, heard during the main titles and intermittently throughout the score, gives a soft hooting sound. The sounds of the cuíka are more animated, suggesting anything from short squawks to bellows
and whoops. The cuíka's sounds appear during scenes of ape violence and aggression, notably Taylor's first sight of the marauding gorillas during the hunt (32:13 on the DVD), Taylor's escape and capture in the ape city (57:01 and 59:08), and the ape soldiers' ambush of Taylor's party in the Forbidden Zone (1:31:07 on the DVD).

The ram's horn, log drums, and similar instruments carry cultural associations with their striking and distinctive timbres. The log drums and other exotic percussion heard throughout the score sound reminiscent of instruments from non-Western cultures that in the past would have been called “primitive.” Similarly, the rough, shrill timbre of the ram's horn has an almost primal sound that intensifies the war cries it emits during the scenes of the hunt and the ambush at the cave in the Forbidden Zone (33:10, 35:04, and 1:47:06 on the DVD).

Unusual rhythms abound in the score. Many musical passages rely on
ostinati
, or incessantly repeated rhythmic and melodic fragments. Other passages use syncopation, or emphasis of “off-beats,” sometimes to the point where any clear sense of a regular meter or time signature is lost. The hunt and Taylor's first escape both feature rapid ostinati churning under a succession of punctuated chords (31:09 and 54:47 on the DVD).