Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (36 page)

Caesar's identity crisis leads him to construct a fantasy of ape liberation. While fantasizing about taking the apes to the forest he signs to Maurice, the former circus orangutan, “Apes alone weak, together strong.” Maurice's response, “Apes stupid,” encourages Caesar to memorize the door code, escape the facility, and steal the remaining ALZ-113 from Will's refrigerator in order to increase the other apes' intelligence.

While leaving Will's house Caesar stops and looks at himself in the mirror. He doesn't see the same ideal-I that initially formed the core of his sense of self. Instead he sees a new Caesar, redefined in light of his confrontation with the real. His encounter with the absence of a universal self forces him to begin the process of re-establishing an identity he can live with. For Caesar, his new identity is rooted in the fantasy of being free and returning the apes to their home in the forest.
Freedom
becomes the new master signifier tying together Caesar's social reality.

Fantasy is essential in helping us cope with the lack that is a fundamental part of being human, but when fantasy takes the form of an ideology that claims there is some ultimate truth ordering the universe it becomes dangerous. To every ideological fantasy there is a positive and negative component. While our ideological fantasy contains a positive vision for a better world based on our particular viewpoint, it also contains the feeling that there is an
Other
lurking in the shadows plotting to destroy our fantasy. This belief in the evil
Other
can lead to horrific persecutions and atrocities. For example, in a 2001 interview, Žižek describes the way the ideological fantasy of solidarity and community in Nazi Germany led to the Holocaust. According to his argument, “Eichmann himself didn't really have to hate the Jews; he was able to be just an ordinary person. It's the objective ideological machinery that did the hating; the hatred was imported, it was ‘out there.'”

Although freedom in the forest is Caesar's ultimate goal in
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
, the ideological fantasy of ape liberation also includes the underlying belief that the human species is a savage, oppressive
Other
. In later movies in the series the apes eventually take this ideological fantasy to its terrifying conclusion and return the oppressive favor by
capturing, imprisoning, and treating humans as animals in the way apes once were. Just as capitalist, consumerist, or religious ideology forms the symbolic order into which American citizens develop identities, the ideology that humans should be subservient to apes is the ideology that structures the new symbolic order depicted in the 1968 movie
Planet of the Apes.

This, therefore, is the real danger of ideology: it serves to form the symbolic structures that in turn dialectically form our “self.” Society's rules, laws, and expectations play a pivotal role in our identity because when we use language we accept those rules and laws. When those rules and laws are formed by particular ideological understandings our identity gets wrapped up in this ideological fantasy imposed upon us by the symbolic.

Žižek calls for us to work to disrupt the symbolic order and destabilize the ideologies that determine our reality. This destabilization, what Žižek calls traversing the ideological fantasy, involves confronting the void in what he refers to as an Act. As he wrote in 2010, “An act is more than intervention into the domain of the possible—an act changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.” We can do this when we consciously recognize the way ideology tricks us into believing there is a universal reality.

Confronting the real, coming face to face with the illusion of reality, invokes trauma but also has the potential for re-positioning and/or reforming the ideal-I. In seeing how we are being played on the puppet strings of the symbolic through ideology we can restructure or redirect our desire into a new fantasy that is more our own. This is the key: by traversing the ideological fantasy we won't all of a sudden see the Wizard behind the curtain, or reality for what it truly is. As Žižek says in a 2000 essay, “In an authentic act, I do not simply express/actualize my inner nature—rather, I redefine myself, the very core of my identity.”

This is exactly what Caesar does when he confronts the trauma of his own identity crisis. Given that he was not a human being or even an ordinary chimpanzee, but something entirely different, Caesar recognizes that what he thought was
his identity was actually a fiction. He embraces the void and the absence of a universal self and cuts ties with the symbolic order and its oppressive ideological rules of conformity. Thus Caesar completes the Žižekian Act, inhabiting a space in between chimpanzee and human being, and seeks to reformulate the symbolic order free from ideological control. No longer traumatized, Caesar finds peace in this space between spaces, and when approached by Will in the forest who tells him “Come home and I will protect you,” Caesar leans forward and defiantly proclaims “Caesar
is
home.”

J
ASON
D
AVIS

I
t's one of those stories that's the stuff of legend. Soon after
Planet of the Apes
was released, Sammy Davis, Jr., the black entertainer, thanked and congratulated Arthur P. Jacobs and Mort Abrahams, the movie's producer and associate producer, for making the best film he'd ever seen on US black-white race relations. And Jacobs's response? He had no idea what Davis was talking about. End of story.

But the legend also says something about the nature of knowledge of race and race relations. And it's less about what Davis sees in
Planet
than what Jacobs doesn't see. After all, the original movie has a lot to say about race relations in America. A “racial” caste system divides social roles, power, and opportunities. There is a “quota system” for advancement among the ape species, with dark-skinned apes furthest from the fields of science and law, which are dominated by light-skinned orangutans.

So it's not so much whether Davis's take on the movie is merely a personal or subjective view that was never the explicit intention of the white producers. It's more the producers' cluelessness that a black person would see the movie's ape-ing of racial conflict and violence through their own experiences and knowledge of a racist country. The race relations played out in the science-fiction world of
Planet of the Apes
reveal what Planet Hollywood could never say directly—not even to themselves apparently—about the lived reality of black America. In both art and in life, it illustrates how white privilege depends upon a self-sustaining blindness to racism, suffering, and white domination. To put it a bit more strongly, this obliviousness by
white folk to race and racism exemplifies an epistemology of ignorance.

Epistemology is concerned with how humans gain knowledge about themselves and the world. So looking at how ignorance affects knowledge means not just detecting what is lacking in someone's understanding or knowledge. It's also about how ignorance determines the knowledge a dominant group can have about themselves and others. This might sound as if it's describing the orangutan religious/scientific elite of the first two Apes movies, who deny and even destroy evidence and, therefore, knowledge of human civilization, and the human origins of apes. But that kind of ignorance is more a willful suppression born out of fear of humans.

A better example is the human reliance on and enjoyment of the slave labor of apes in
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
. The human benefit, both in terms of pleasure and profit, from ape slavery is facilitated by not knowing the torturous cost of ape “training” provided by the benignly named Ape Management. It's more than just not knowing what it takes to have your non-carcinogenic cigarette lit by Frank or roasted quail flambéed by ape with cognac (or maybe that one-percent burger with Kobe beef braised by the ape bus boy, with foie gras, gold leaf, and Grey Poupon). It's also not knowing the experiences of other humans involved in the daily labor of making apes more servile (obviously other than investors in ape slavery services).

This deliberate ignorance of class distinctions and inhumane treatment and class becomes part of the justification for ape slavery. Practices and beliefs are a ritualized form of willful human ignorance, naturalizing a deficient, even distorted, understanding of the order behind the existing state of things, including the privileged place of humans in such an order. And this ignorance shows up in the need not to know otherwise, not to think beyond what's experienced. What the epistemology of ignorance tells us about a dominant group is that they benefit from seeing the world wrongly.

Aping humans. That's
Planet of the Apes
scholar Eric Greene's take on how apes got their ideas for their own “racially discriminatory society: they copied it—aped it—from human
beings.” There's another way the movies ape human thinking about race, namely our ontology of race: our operative concepts of what race is, and the ways it exists in the world.

To inquire into race is to inquire both into human attitudes and into the makeup of reality. And makeup very much makes up the racial world we see in the
Planet of the Apes
movies. Hair and skin color, facial features, size, and build are physical differences distinguishing the ape castes into species. Likewise, behavior and intelligence reflect what role each subspecies can have in ape society. That's how the movies get us to think about racial identity and discrimination. That's also one of the ways race has been understood in reality, as a visible way of putting people into different groups according to shared physical traits and behavioral characteristics. So in a way, the films are relying on a perceived biological realism about race. To be a biological realist about race is to hold that race exists independently or outside of human minds or consciousness, and that scientifically racial categories are more like natural phenomena, than something socially constructed.

Moreover, with apes and humans perpetually in conflict with each other, and the three ape species displaying characteristics that set each group distinctly apart, there's another aspect or dimension to the apes' world: biological essentialism. For those apes controlling military power and scientific truth, humans are inherently destructive, ruinous, and incapable of civilization. Even chimpanzees see humans as a species uniquely disposed towards violence against each other.

Apes, on the other hand, define themselves as categorically different from humans because of their lack of ape-on-ape violence. Within ape society, the essential differences between the species are played up. Members of each species share intellectual and behavioral qualities that the other species don't. So to be a chimpanzee in the world of the
Planet of the Apes
movies is to be pacifist, open-minded, and book-smart. That such qualities aren't part of the ontological makeup of gorillas ought to be worrying. Is biology destiny for a segregated ape society? Are gorillas literally “being all they can be” in the army? Are chimpanzees destined to be always marginalized and disenfranchised in ape society no matter how many times Cornelius and Zira travel back into ape pre-history and beget the chimpanzee liberator of apes from slavery?

It's the last movie of the original series that suggests some answers. In
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
, the last prequel of the series (and yes, if you think about it, the films after
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
are all prequels), there are changes to the nature of apes and the social order of things—biology is not destiny. A chimpanzee is in power, orangutans work for peaceful co-existence with humans, and friendships exist between the ape species. Go figure. Apes also become “more human.”

The species-defined divide between apes and humans has ended. Unfortunately, so has the innocence of Caesar, with the traumatic breaking of the cultural prohibition against ape killing ape. And ape-human relations are recast, with humans integrated into ape society as servants and workers under “ape management.” So we get a shakeup, but not a complete upending, of both essentialism and biological determinism of apes and humans: for gorillas, the more things change, the more they know their AK-47s better than their ABCs.

Nevertheless,
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
introduces us to social and historical differences in how apes can co-exist with each other as well as with humans. This suggests that not all influences on identity and behavior are biological.

Is race biologically real then? Ironically, just as science is employed in
Planet of the Apes
and
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
to perpetuate the myth of humans as primitive pestilence, science has also been used to make claims about the biological nature of race among humans.

The idea, originating in eighteenth-century Europe, that humans can be classified into distinguishable subgroups that reflect biologically real racial differences based on physically visible traits is about as scientifically valid as Zaius's claim that humans never possessed the capacity for speech. The ‘scientific' claim that physical characteristics, such as the color of human skin, eyes, hair, as well as the size of lips, hair texture, height, and build are the result of naturally occurring racial divisions has been discredited by developments in late-twentieth-century science, such as population genetics and biological anthropology.