Planet of the Apes and Philosophy

by Huss, John

  In order to determine the origin of government Thomas Hobbes, a social contract theorist, imagined a so-called state of nature, a time before humans invented government. The purpose of the state of nature concept for the social contract theorists was twofold: to figure out how humans would act if there were no government or man-made laws, and to hypothesize the origin of government which they call the social contract. For instance, if humans were peacemakers and got along well, there would be less need for laws than if they were belligerent, competitive, and acquisitive.

  But Hobbes said that if humans were acquisitive and belligerent in the state of nature then that would demonstrate their need for a government to rein in their belligerent and acquisitive impulses—that is, punish those who commit crimes. As Julius says of humans “they’re natural born thieves, aren’t they?” Dr. Zaius says man “is a warlike creature who gives battle to everything around him” and calls Taylor a killer.

  A naturally born thieving race would require more laws and greater restrictions placed upon it by government than a naturally born altruistic race. As Plato noted in the story of the Ring of Gyges from The Republic: man only does right under compulsion; if two men, the “just” and the “unjust” were given a ring that made them invisible both the “just” and the “unjust” would make nefarious use of it. Therefore, according to Plato and Hobbes there are no “just” men, only those who act on the natural impulses of greed, belligerence, and fear.

  In the Planet of the Apes Taylor and his fellow space-travelers land in a terrain which we can describe as the Hobbesian state of nature—a lawless place where there is complete freedom but also uncertainty as man has no rights under Ape law.

  Human Nature?

  For Rod Serling and the apes in Planet of the Apes, humans exhibit the same belligerent and acquisitive aspects of human nature that Hobbes and Plato described. When the apes conduct an interview with Taylor in a room that looks like it came right out of the Flintstones (particularly note the Flintstones-inspired door) they show him a map which looks like Long Island and the New York City metropolitan area. At the inquest, Taylor says that he is from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Dr. Zaius says that even in Taylor’s lies there is truth: the selection of the name of a town with a Fort reveals Taylor’s—and man’s—belligerent nature.

  Humans fight for three reasons according to Hobbes: competition, fear and glory. This sounds like the Twenty-Ninth Scroll, Sixth Verse of the sacred scrolls recited by Dr. Zaius: “Beware the beast man. . . . alone among God’s primates he kills for sport, or lust or greed.” This belligerence causes the state of nature to be a “war of all against all” which is demonstrated as soon as Taylor and his friends encounter the apes.

  According to “reverse evolution” the apes have taken on these human traits in what Taylor calls an “upside-down civilization.” Taylor competes with the apes, fights with them, accuses them of being afraid of him. He wants to prove the theory of reverse evolution so that he can have glory—the glory that humans were there first and were a superior race to the apes. But were they? Are humans generous to other creatures? Are they generous to other humans? Are they champions of equality? Are they fearless? Are they pacifists? No. Taylor asks fellow astronaut Landon why he signed up for the mission then says “oh, I know. Glory.” This reinforces the Hobbesian characterization of the selfish and self-interested nature of humans.

  The apes have all the negative characteristics of humans including prejudice, competition, and belligerence. The joke is that the apes are no better than the humans—but certainly no worse. Humans treat weaker creatures badly, they make war and compete with each other. For Hobbes, these traits are innate, necessitating the origin of government. Serling suggests the same in Planet of the Apes—the apes did not learn these traits from humans because they did not know humans. Landon says “we got off at the wrong stop” but there is one thing humans do that apes are not shown doing: they kill each other. Planet of the Apes depicts the apes fighting humans, but not other apes.

  In addition to war, discrimination is on display in Planet of the Apes. The Apes wear different color outfits to signify their station and prestige—Dr. Zaius and the established orangutan apes wear orange outfits (possibly to signify orange-utan), Zira and Cornelius wear green outfits, and the military gorillas wear dark purple outfits. Zira and Cornelius mention a quota for lowly chimpanzees who are looked down upon. Other creatures, notably the primitive humans and Taylor, are put in cages, experimented on in labs, shot at, and put in the museum. Man’s inhumanity to man and ape’s inhumanity to man: both bespeak a pessimistic view.

  Human See, Human Do

  Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French observer of America, warned of the dangers of conformity in Democracy in America. He called it the “tyranny of the majority.” Tocqueville said that in America, the majority would act as an invisible force that would compel everyone to agree on political and social issues.

  According to Tocqueville “in America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion” which creates an environment that does not allow independent thinking or real freedom of speech. Tocqueville said “thought is an invisible and subtle power” that mocks all previous attempts of monarchs to suppress ideas—because with tyranny of the majority you can’t have an independent thought.

  This is demonstrated in Planet of the Apes where the evidence of human civilization in the cave discovered by Cornelius is suppressed, because that would prove the theory of reverse evolution—that ape society evolved from a sophisticated human society that existed before them. Out of pride and glory Dr. Zaius doesn’t want this revealed. We see elements of this throughout Planet of the Apes, when Taylor writes a message in the dirt in his cage and Dr. Zaius erases it, and again with Dr. Zaius’s order to blow up the cave that holds the evidence of the earlier human civilization, evidence that would support Cornelius’s hypothesis.

  As Rousseau said “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Rousseau also spoke of the practice of head binding by the Oroonoko Indians which would enable humans to retain some of their original ignorance and happiness. This is what Dr. Zaius attempts to do: keep the apes and the humans ignorant, dramatically demonstrated by Landon’s lobotomy. As Tocqueville says “what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking?” Dr. Zaius is demonstrating his power and using it to stay on top in the belligerent Hobbesian power struggle.

  Zone-isms

  Planet of the Apes includes several notable Serling devices that had been used in The Twilight Zone (1959–64) including the play on beauty and ugliness, the use of the cave as a source of magic, the Adam and Eve theme, and the twist ending that plays on the question “Which planet are we on?” Nuclear war is a political theme that also figures prominently in Planet of the Apes and The Twilight Zone.

  There are frequent references in The Twilight Zone to men blowing themselves up via nuclear war (in episodes like “Time Enough at Last,” “Third from the Sun,” “The Shelter,” and others) and in Planet of the Apes Taylor walks around with a Geiger counter imagining that the stone age world he sees when he lands on the planet of the apes perhaps came out of nuclear war. The Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last” features Burgess Meredith who sits in a pile of rubble at a library after a nuclear war and then breaks his glasses. This scene looks very much like the terrain in the Planet of the Apes.

  Serling was preoccupied with nuclear war in other Twilight Zone episodes like “Third from the Sun” where a nuclear war is about to take place so a family must leave its planet, which we assume to be Earth, and go to another planet—it’s only when they are on the spaceship to the “other” planet that we learn that they are headed to “a place called Earth.” This twist is echoed in the ending to Planet of the Apes when Taylor sees first the crown of the Statue of Liberty, then the rest of the statue, and realizes he is on Earth. There was a foreshadowing of this earlier—where the
map the apes show Taylor looks like Long Island, the Hudson River, and the New York City environs.

  Serling was a member of an anti-nuclear group in Hollywood in the 1950s and “Time Enough at Last” features the bomb exploding on television. Even though you don’t see the actual explosion, you see the result: a pile of rubble of man’s own making. In a speech at Moorpark College in California in 1968, the same year Planet of the Apes was made, Serling said: “I think the destiny of all men is not to sit in the rubble of their own making but to reach out for an ultimate perfection which is to be had. At the moment it is a dream. . . . But we have it within our power to make it a reality.”

  This points to a tension in Serling’s thought. Is he a pessimist or an optimist? It’s hard to tell because he switches gears and just when you think you have him figured out he pulls, as he liked to say, in the parlance of The Twilight Zone, “the old switcheroo.”

  Along with the theme of nuclear apocalypse Serling uses the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve theme in both Planet of the Apes and The Twilight Zone. Two Twilight Zone episodes in particular, “Two” and “Probe 7: Over and Out,” depict Adam and Eve characters who survive nuclear war and who wander off together presumably to repopulate the race. Taylor mentions that Stewart, the female astronaut who does not survive the trip because of an air leak in her protective gear (a technique also used in The Twilight Zone episode “The Rip Van Winkle Caper”) was to be the new Eve. This is also the final scene in Planet of the Apes, where Taylor and Nova (reminiscent of “Norda,” the name of the woman in “Probe 7”) ride off on horseback along the beach. Is this a scene of optimism or pessimism? Let’s think about that. . . .

  The cave as a source of magic and confusion is a theme from Plato’s Republic (see “Banana Republic” in the present volume), where the allegorical cave imprisons the ignorant and fills them with deceptive but entertaining images that distract them from reality. In The Twilight Zone Serling used the cave variously to depict ignorance, as in “On Thursday We Leave for Home,” and wisdom, as in “The Old Man in the Cave.” Similarly, in Planet of the Apes the action culminates in the cave, which contains the proof of previous human civilization (false teeth, eyeglasses) that could exonerate Cornelius (played by Roddy McDowall, a frequent Twilight Zone player) of heresy but Dr. Zaius wants to seal it up to eliminate the proof and keep the society ignorant of the doctrine of reverse evolution.

  Beauty and ugliness are also in the “Eye of the Beholder,” a Twilight Zone episode, and in Planet of the Apes. The “Eye of the Beholder” twists ugliness and beauty with hideous doctors performing plastic surgery on Donna Douglas, the actress who played “Elly May” on The Beverly Hillbillies. Wait a minute—we thought she was beautiful! Remember how Sonny Drysdale looked at her? But not in Serling’s world, where prejudice against others is commonplace, conformity is essential, and beauty is relative. In the Planet of the Apes Zira likes Taylor and calls him Bright Eyes. Taylor says he wants to kiss Zira. She says she’ll do it in spite of the fact that he’s so ugly. But this is Charlton Heston—a movie star! An upside-down world indeed.

  Westward, Ho(mo sapiens)

  The westward escape of Taylor and Nova in covered wagons mimics the American pioneers going west and the theme of the New Frontier. According to Frederick Jackson Turner and the “Frontier thesis” of Manifest Destiny (which he wrote about in his 1893 essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History), Americans would conquer and cultivate the West. Turner said the frontier encouraged American values of independence, hard work, bravery, and common sense.

  In Planet of the Apes Taylor is an American pioneer, re-creating the westward movement of the pioneers when he sets off with Nova on horseback to establish new territory and a new civilization. So the cycle goes: human—ape—human. Or, possibly, the humans and apes can do an “Eastside/Westside” and see who blows whom up first.

  The theme of the New Frontier was popular in the 1960s because of its prominence in John F. Kennedy’s speech on July 15th, 1960, when he accepted the Democratic nomination for president. In the speech JFK called for “new pioneers” on a “new frontier” that included science and technology, particularly space. Speaking in Los Angeles he said “For I stand here tonight facing West on what was once the last frontier. . . . the pioneers gave up their safety, their comfort, and sometimes their lives to build our new West. . . . Some would say that those struggles are all over . . . that there is no longer an American frontier. . . . But . . . we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier . . . the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats . . . the New Frontier.”

  Rod Serling was a Kennedy supporter. In 1963 he served as a “goodwill ambassador” of the Kennedy administration to Australia and the South Pacific and in 1964 was asked by the United States government to make a documentary about the Kennedy assassination. If Kennedy was an optimist (his idea of sending a man to the moon seemed “space-age” at the time) so was Serling—an idealist. Both dreamed of the “new frontier” but both also feared the Hobbesian nuclear war. It was during the Kennedy administration that Americans hunkered down in bomb shelters, echoing the time they sat in front of their TV sets to watch the classic depiction of nuclear war in “Time Enough at Last” on The Twilight Zone.

  The Fellowship of the Holy Fallout

  Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the 1970 sequel to Planet of the Apes, continues the theme of nuclear war with the constant rejoinder that belligerent man makes a desert of a city. Here, James Franciscus stars as the astronaut Brent, who goes to the Planet of the Apes looking for Taylor. This is perfect casting, as James Franciscus looks like Charlton Heston’s younger brother and he maintains a perfect hairdo after crash landing on the planet.

  The apes continue to take on the human traits of belligerence and acquisitiveness while talking about power and invading territory. Peace activists and demonstrators are locked up in jail. The “beneath” in Beneath the Planet of the Apes refers to the New York City subway after the city has been annihilated by nuclear war. Brent echoes Taylor’s line that they “did it” and blew up Earth. But “beneath” also refers to a chapel below ground in the Forbidden Zone where mutant humans worship a nuclear bomb, which they call the weapon of peace or deterrence. Their underground worship of the bomb mimics the Twilight Zone episode “One More Pallbearer” which also combines nuclear war and a cave. This is the “Fellowship of the Holy Fallout” reminiscent of the themes of good and evil played beneath Toyland in Laurel and Hardy’s March of the Wooden Soldiers. And Dr. Zaius is right—the apes don’t press the button, man does.

  Landon says “We got off at the wrong stop” but there’s no right stop because in two thousand years, nothing has changed. The optimism of Taylor and Nova on the horse, the pessimism of the Statue of Liberty—represent the two sides of Serling’s view of human nature. But all is not lost—perhaps in place of the Statue of Liberty there’ll be a “life-size bronze statue” of Taylor and Nova on their horse as the new George and Martha Washington—riding into the sunset to found a new frontier. The statue’s head is still intact symbolizing hope for the future and the creativity to start again—in Tom Paine’s words to “make the world over.”

  12

  The Primate Who Knew Too Much

  MICHAEL RUSE

  You have to feel affection and respect for Planet of the Apes. How else do you regard a movie that takes the superstar Charlton Heston—he of Moses, Ben Hur, Michelangelo—and puts him in the lead role of a swaggering astronaut, and then promises his character castration in the name of scientific research?

  But truly, apart from the chuckle that that always sparks, especially among those of us old enough to remember Heston in his prime, Planet of the Apes is the gift that keeps on giving. I show it almost every year in my Philosophy and Film course that I offer to our honors program students, and at each showing the students enthuse and I get something more to ponder. And this all apart from the fact that it
is a rattling good story, moving to one of the greatest endings in the history of cinema, the discovery—I guess there’s no need for a spoiler alert here—that the spaceship has in fact returned to a future Earth, one made desolate by human power and stupidity.

  I’m a philosopher and as a philosopher I look at movies for what I can extract. Well, not always. I have tried to kid myself and my students that I watch my favorite zombie movie, Shaun of the Dead, for insights into the body-mind problem. But I’m lying really. I look at Shaun of the Dead for the blood and gore and whatever—although come to think of it, isn’t there a philosophical problem about an aging professor like me, who never served in the military or the police, actually enjoying a movie where most of the characters go around covered in tomato ketchup from head to toe?

  However, I do try to look at movies philosophically and not just those movies that cry out for such a treatment—Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal for instance. And I find material in many unexpected places. The cowboy movie Shane seems to me to have the greatest portrayal I have ever seen of a figure faced with an existential crisis—“a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” (Actually the line is: “A man has to be what he is, Joey. You can’t break the mold. I tried it and it didn’t work for me.”). Of course, Shane is helped by the fact that it has the biggest badass in the history of cinema—black-clad Jack Palance brought to town for the ultimate shootout.