Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (39 page)

We've all watched a movie or read a book which doesn't seem to be going anywhere and the whole thing seems a little slapdash. This is kind of what an inauthentic life is like—Bob flits from one thing to the next without ever figuring out what really excites him and, as a result, never pursues it. There isn't really a sense of him doing anything with his life—or at least, nothing that really matters to him—and so when his life ends, rather than the satisfying conclusion of a life well lived, his final days are filled with regret.

On the other hand, Caesar's story is closer to authenticity, in which the person realizes that their story will definitely end some time and tries to ensure that their life is a meaningful whole in which they pursue the things that truly matter to them. Caesar finds himself in a world in which humans (with the exception of the few nice characters that raise him from
birth) treat apes like crap, and the ape uprising is an attempt to change this.

Put another way, the rise of the apes is a movement towards ‘being-in-the-world'—both individually, as Caesar is raised into the human world by Will, and collectively, as the apes stage a revolution which will lead to a whole new type of civilization. Once this happens, the apes' lives are something that they own—they can decide what sort of lives they want to have and, ultimately, what sort of world they want it to be. Will they get it? To find that out we'll have to wait for
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

N
ORVA
Y.S. L
O AND
A
NDREW
B
RENNAN

F
antasies about the sublime uniqueness and special moral status of the human being are neatly undermined by Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel,
The Planet of the Apes
. The story is cunningly framed in a way that shocks readers out of their natural preconceptions. The narrative itself is told in a manuscript found in a bottle by two intrepid space sailors, Jinn and Phyllis. Only at the end is it revealed that the couple reading the story are themselves chimpanzees, who regard the story as a practical joke, declaring that no human would have the wit to write such a tale.

In the first of the movies spawned by Boulle's novel, Franklin Schaffner's
Planet of the Apes
(1968), the shock factor takes a new form. In the memorable closing sequences disoriented, time-travelling astronaut George Taylor (played by Charlton Heston) discovers with sickening certainty that his vessel did not land on some remote planet far from the Earth. Instead, he's home, on Earth, an Earth transformed by nuclear war. It's 2,006 years in the future, and the dominant species is now apes, not humans.

On this future Earth the apes talk and the humans are mute, apes are hunters and humans are game. The apes have technology, including some simple weapons, and their religion identifies humans as the source of wickedness, greed, cruelty, and destruction. The apes' sacred scrolls show that humans are the source of devilry and degeneration: “Beware the beast man, for he is the Devil's spawn”—so says Cornelius the chimpanzee archaeologist reading from the scrolls, going on to intone:
“Alone among God's primates, he kills for sport, for lust, for greed. Yet, he will murder his brother to possess his brother's land.
Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours.
”

From the simian perspective, then, it's as well that apes are in charge. Rebelling against his captivity among the apes, and despite the humane treatment shown by the chimpanzee academics Zira and Cornelius, Taylor escapes from the Ape City into the Forbidden Zone, the zone which was once a paradise before human beings turned it into a desert. There, in the shocking climax to the movie, Taylor discovers the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, convincing proof that he is not on some faraway planet, but back on a frighteningly unfamiliar Earth devastated by nuclear war.

At the time when the
Planet of the Apes
franchise got underway in the late 1960s, the study of primate language learning was already well advanced, very often in ways that look amateurish by modern standards. Prolonged studies were carried out on two signing chimpanzees, who became minor celebrities at the time. Their names were Washoe and Nim, and their stories are compassionately described in
Next of Kin
by Roger Fouts and
Nim Chimpsky
by Elizabeth Hess.

The dominant view in those days was that possession of language is the defining condition of higher intelligence, and hence of reason and self-consciousness. If a creature had language, or could learn it, then it could aspire to the same intellectual and moral status as human beings. The importance of language is neatly reflected in the very first
Planet of the Apes
movie. Early in the film Taylor, being generally disappointed with mankind, declares that there has to be—somewhere in the universe—something better than man. But in the upside down society of Ape City, he finds nothing better, only a repetition—suitably inverted—of the human prejudices of racism, classism, and speciesism. The apes themselves are clearly delineated by species, so that warrior gorillas, bourgeois orangutans, and academic chimpanzees each fulfill different roles in the society. Below all of them are the humans—who, since they are mute, can give at best only the appearance of intelligence. They can mimic ape behavior, but since they cannot use language, they cannot be truly intelligent, hence they are regarded as being of inferior intellectual and moral status.

Taylor seems to go along with the idea that to be mute is to be lacking in reason and intelligence, hence speechless beings are not fit candidates for being treated with the levels of respect and dignity shown to humans. He treats the humans with no language in an arrogant way—even though he falls in love with the mute but physically attractive Nova. When she is killed in the sequel,
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
, Taylor's appetite for destruction is whetted. For the most part, Taylor's conception of value is tied to a theory of intelligence, consciousness, rationality, and mind that is—like that of the chimpanzee scientists—a reflection of the dominant view of the time. While some people nowadays still hold a similar view, a lot has happened in the meantime. Animal rights advocates such as Tom Regan have urged that we owe moral respect at least to some animals, and maybe to the species, ecosystems, and systems of life that make the Earth the only living planet in the solar system, as has been argued by environmental philosopher Holmes Rolston III.

Planet of the Apes
can be said to have paved the way for The Great Ape Project in which a number of scientists, philosophers, and other activists advocated for claims on behalf of the great apes as holders of moral and political rights. Clearly, the original movie and its sequel raise questions about natural value and destruction that were key to the development of the new environmental ethic that was to blossom in the 1970s and 1980s. They also raise a puzzling question about Taylor himself—does he go mad, or is he simply evil?

As if to drive home the points made in the first movie, the sequel,
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
, works up to a provocative climax. In the final scenes Taylor is still struggling with the hostility and anger that typified his character throughout the first film. Right at the end, he is effectively the last conversable human being on Earth since all his fellow talkers have been killed in clashes with the gorilla army. Of course there may well be some surviving mutant and telepathic humans inhabiting the subterranean passages that were once the tunnels of the New York underground. Elsewhere on the planet there are plenty of the voiceless people, but we are already aware that Taylor regards these as of lower status because of their lack of language. He and Dr. Zaius—the orangutan who is both minister of science and defender of the faith
for the apes—play out the final act in the buried remains of St Patrick's cathedral where a nuclear doomsday device has been stored. This cobalt bomb is not only the object of worship for the telepathic mutant humans who live beneath the planet's surface, but is also fully armed and ready to incinerate the entire planet. Mortally wounded, and aware that the simple-minded military gorillas have no comprehension of the evil destructive power of the doomsday device, Taylor begs for help—a plea rejected by Zaius who asks, piously, why he should help Taylor since man is evil and capable of nothing but destruction. In a final act of outrage, Taylor calls out “You bloody bastard” while lunging toward the trigger for the doomsday device. The film ends with his bloody hand clasping and pushing down the lever that condemns him and all other life on Earth to oblivion.

Not long after the appearance of the movie, the Australian logician Richard Routley (later Richard Sylvan), in a landmark paper titled “Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental, Ethic?” put forward a philosophical version of Taylor's final act. Making no reference to the movie, Routley's version is put forward as a philosophical thought experiment imagining that at some time in the future humans are faced with the “collapse of the world system.” We're not told anything about what has caused this situation, but apparently a consequence of the collapse means there is only one human being left—the last man. Routley puts it like this:

           
The last man (or person) surviving the collapse of the world system lays about him, eliminating, as far as he can, every living thing, animal or plant (but painlessly if you like, as at the best abattoirs). What he does is quite permissible according to basic chauvinism, but on environmental grounds what he does is wrong.

What “basic chauvinism” means here is the human-centered thinking inscribed in liberal economic and political theory, which states that each of us is free to do as he or she pleases provided that in the process we do not directly harm other people, or cause serious damage to ourselves. This kind of chauvinism is the sort of human-centered thinking that Routley attacks in his paper. He extends the idea to an imagined last surviving group of people on the planet—the last people, and asks if they do any wrong when they turn all bits of the land
into farming systems, and generally wreck the planet and eliminate most other forms of life. Plainly, such acts would be wrong, he argues, but “chauvinist ethics” has no way of condemning such acts, since no harm is being done to people.

Just as the last man argument can be generalized to the last people, it can be extended to the industrial society as a whole, which continues to increase output and productivity with benefits to people at a terrible environmental cost. The principles of chauvinist ethics, politics and economics, however, provide no basis for protecting nature or saying that industrial society does wrong in changing the environment for the worse. Routley's last man examples are meant to make us rethink human chauvinism, and see our human-centered ways of thinking as a form of human selfishness, which disregards the lives and welfare of other creatures on the planet.

The end of
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
, directed by Ted Post as an explicit political parable, is chilling and unsettling. Taylor has scoured the universe in search of something better than humans, and actually shares to some extent the apes' low opinion of humankind. But in his last act he embodies precisely the destructiveness and disregard for consequences that he himself abhors. On the other hand, in the context of the first two movies, Taylor's behavior seems not entirely out of character. He is a prideful, angry, driven person, deeply cynical about his fellows, and very much a misfit in any group he encounters.

It was rare for a movie of the day to finish with the destruction of all the leading characters, a remarkably nihilist ending, reflecting the director's attempt to satirize the Cold War mentality and the madness of mutually assured destruction, a theme well-known to audiences at the time not just because of the heightened sense of threat in the midst of the Vietnam War but also thanks to Stanley Kubrick's 1964
Dr. Strangelove.

Writer Paul Dehn originally envisaged an optimistic ending in which a reconciliation between human and ape is suggested by the appearance in the final scene of a human-ape hybrid child. Two problems blocked that ending. First, there was an intractable make-up issue, and second it was thought that, as Dehn explained in a 1972 interview in
Cinéfantastique
,
“man-ape miscegenation might lose us our G certificate.” Richard Zanuck, who demanded that the human-ape hybrid idea be dropped, was no doubt well aware of the audience—and censor—psychology of the day, in which crossing the species barrier was a much bigger deal than destroying the whole planet. That's the very idea Routley challenged: that once all humans have gone from the scene then nothing else matters.

While Taylor may not emerge from the
Planet of the Apes
movies as a wicked or evil man, the last man of Routley's story does so, with a vengeance. One reason for the difference is that in Routley's examples we're provided with no context at all in which to understand what leads to the last man and the last people acting as they do. The movie, by contrast, not only provides a narrative in terms of which to make sense of Taylor, it also provides a setting in which to debate his behavior. For some viewers, it will be obvious that Taylor is the kind of person who always wants to be on top. He is a leader rather than a follower. Yet, as we see later, narratives also have their ambiguities and in this way they reflect the moral uncertainties of everyday life. The
Planet of the Apes
movies can lead to different people giving different interpretations of Taylor's behavior.