Planet of the Apes and Philosophy

by Huss, John

  The Ape Evolved from a Lower Order of Primate

  We’ve already mentioned the evocative timbres in the score that mark the apes as primitive: the cuíka and slide whistle that both produce sounds like ape vocalizations, the ram’s horn that sounds almost like a barbaric war call, and the other exotic percussion that is suggestive of instruments from non-Western “primitive” cultures. Although novel and unique in themselves, these sounds fulfill a traditional function of movie music by using their associations to give the audience information about the setting and characters. They not only mark the apes as “primitive,” but also mark the apes as “others” distinct from Taylor.

  The unusual instruments, timbres, and other devices don’t suggest notions of “primitive” solely from their sonic character. Take the prevalent ostinati and syncopations throughout the score. These features recall Igor Stravinsky’s once-scandalous ballet, The Rite of Spring. Stravinsky’s ballet depicts a human sacrifice conducted by an imagined prehistoric tribe to appease the gods of spring. The music features ostinati and syncopation along with dissonant harmony and fragmented, modal melodies to reinforce the primeval nature of the tribe and its rituals. Goldsmith’s music for Planet of the Apes achieves a similar effect by using similar devices. Its resemblance to Stravinsky’s famous work also highlights the score’s own modernist features and thereby evokes the cultural associations of modernism.

  Part of what makes these characterizations effective is how they interact with the oppositions between “human-ape,” “advanced-primitive,” and “civilized-barbaric” present in the movie. In addition to being very articulate, the apes have power and control, even though the music and visuals mark them as crude and uncivilized. The music becomes an integral part of the film’s deconstruction of the notion of “primitive.”

  Traditional Hollywood movie music practice usually dictates that a film’s protagonist will be accompanied by distinctive music, but as we noted earlier, this isn’t really true of Taylor and his companions. They tend to be accompanied by atonal music that is mildly or moderately dissonant and provides little in the way of traditional cues for mood. Much of this music is either atmospheric or emotionally “flat” and dispassionate, as in the music accompanying the treks across the Forbidden Zone or even Taylor’s pairing with Nova (heard at 42:18 on the DVD).

  As the hero of the movie, Taylor should be the figure that the audience identifies with, but as Eric Greene has noted in his book, Planet of the Apes as American Myth, their identification with Taylor goes beyond just his character and includes the culture and civilization that Taylor represents. Yet, he has no heroic theme, fanfare, or any especially agreeable music. Even though Taylor is the movie’s central character, the music doesn’t perform one of its intended functions here, which is to encourage the audience to develop a strong emotional attachment to him. It’s almost as if Taylor, despite being the protagonist, is somehow not a very likeable figure, and we sense that through the music.

  Greene cites several critics who point out Taylor’s alienated and even misanthropic nature, evident in his disaffected log entry at the movie’s beginning, his goading and needling of his crewmates, his assumption of the inferiority of the apes he encounters despite their articulateness, and his ruthlessness and even brutality in taking Dr. Zaius hostage and tying him up. Much of Taylor’s reaction is a response to his own harsh treatment at the hands of the apes. Still, after having earlier stated his desire to find a species or culture more compassionate than man, Taylor maintains an air of superiority toward Cornelius and Zira even as they help him escape. He seems unable or unwilling to acknowledge the depth of personal and professional sacrifice they have made in recognizing him as essentially an equal.

  Taylor is a classic anti-hero, and the music’s dispassionate and non-heroic nature captures his stance as a cynical outsider. But is that the whole story? What about the cultural meanings behind the twelve-tone methods that Goldsmith used to create this dispassionate music? Could they allude to ideas and values that go beyond Taylor, implicating the Western culture that he inadvertently represents as somehow responsible for bringing about the Planet of the Apes?

  That Was the World We’d Made

  Anti-heroes like Taylor were just the sorts of figures that filmmakers of the New Hollywood used as part of their social commentary. If Taylor is both an anti-hero and a de facto representative of Western culture, it’s not hard to pick up on the commentary implied in this relationship. The music’s style has its own connection to Western culture that strengthens the film’s critique of Western culture through Taylor.

  As an astronaut and scientist, Taylor is among the elite of Western technocratic society. Goldsmith’s music, following the twelve-tone method, reminds us of Taylor’s ties to the contemporary Western culture he shares with the audience by recalling the modernist concert music championed as the high art music of the West at the time. These associations invoked by the movie’s twelve-tone music score are ironic, of course, because, in the story, that contemporary Western society is gone and its last surviving member is regarded as an animal by the newly dominant apes.

  The score’s twelve-tone passages take on a further measure of critique when that musical style’s association with Western values—nominally democracy and freedom—are considered alongside other, less positive attributes of the West that Taylor displays, such as arrogance, aggression, and self-superiority. We could also add other forces shaping the West at this time that would have been fresh in the minds of the film audience: anti-communism, the arms- and space-race, and segregation. The disagreeable surface of the music provides its own commentary on the West’s role in creating the Planet of the Apes.

  Taylor’s aggression and insistence on de facto leadership mirror that of the United States during the 1960s and its tendency to take actions in the Third World that not only contradicted its expressed regard for peace and equality, but also disregarded the wishes of indigenous populations. The war in Vietnam was easily the most visible example at the time. Such actions implied a belief by the West in its superiority over non-Western cultures due to its technological power and political ideology, both of which are evoked by the modernist musical style that the West promoted.

  Taylor laughs at Landon’s gesture of “claiming” the planet by planting an American flag at their landing site. Yet, Taylor’s own thought on first viewing the native humans (“If this is the best they’ve got, we’ll be running this planet in six months”) suggests his own tendency to dominate rather than co-operate, even if his thought was expressed half-seriously. Again, Taylor’s assumption of his superiority reflects that of his culture despite his culture’s professed values of democracy and freedom that are supposed to be symbolized by modernist music.

  Finally, Taylor’s vocation as an astronaut places him at the center of the technological advancement that contributes to his society’s self-destruction. Modernist music resonated with the highly rational, logical and scientific aspects of Western society that allowed technology such as space travel to reach the level of sophistication that it achieved. Modernist music also represented the values of democracy and freedom that, together with its quasi-scientific thinking, led to the West’s cultural, technological, and economic superiority. But, as a product of Western culture, it was also the music of atomic bombs, ICBMs, and brinkmanship that, in the movie, overwhelm all of the positive attributes of Western culture and contribute to the demise of humanity. Despite their scientific advances, humans succumbed to their own primitive impulses and destroyed themselves, making the rise of ape culture possible.

  None of this is inherent in the accompanying music, of course. The score acquired these meanings by evoking the ideas related to modernist concert music that it resembled. Indeed, the modernist concert music that was Goldsmith’s model acquired its own meanings from its cultural reception during the twentieth century, first as an intellectually pure practice, then as an example of elite high culture, and finally as a politica
l symbol. Goldsmith engaged all of these meanings through his use of twelve-tone methods and other modernist devices that permeate the movie’s score. Even though these meanings don’t originate in the music, they strongly affect our experience of Planet of the Apes due to the weight of the associations that they carry.

  The mechanics for carrying these associations are much the same as in any movie music; the musical “adjectives” characterize and modify the filmic “nouns” and “verbs” of Taylor, the apes, and the movie’s plot. The film’s cultural environment allows those associations to point beyond those filmic nouns, however, and emphasize the subtext of Planet of the Apes.

  What About the Future?

  Subsequent movies in the Planet of the Apes series all used newly composed music, but they continued to use the modernist style of the first film. The composer Lalo Schifrin even preserved Goldsmith’s particular modernist idiom in the title theme and underscore for the short-lived television series. The persistent use of this general style throughout all the incarnations of the Planet of the Apes films from the 1970s shows the extent to which it became part of the identity of the Planet of the Apes franchise.

  Other science-fiction films released soon after Planet of the Apes also drew on the critical capacity of modernist music to inform their scores. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey used portions of actual concert works by the contemporary Hungarian composer György Ligeti as part of its score. Over the next eight years, THX-1138, Soylent Green, Zardoz, Rollerball, and Logan’s Run all followed suit, underscoring cautionary stories with modernist music to emphasize the dystopian aspects of their respective visions of the future. As in Planet of the Apes, part of the power of the music for these movies came from its invoking the cultural significance of modernist concert music for contemporary Western society, which was implicated as the source of each movie’s depiction of a future gone wrong.

  In the decades since the first release of Planet of the Apes, the modernist style that the score draws on has lost much of its cultural weight. Like other styles of movie music, it’s become something of a commodity, sometimes accompanying uncanny and terrifying scenes in science-fiction and horror films as it has in the past. With the release of Star Wars in 1977, science-fiction movies became less critical and more escapist. They made little use of modernist music, returning instead to more traditional musical styles or relying on scores made up of pop and rock songs.

  The music from Planet of the Apes may seem noteworthy today only for its uniqueness and the breadth of imagination that it shows. We have to use our own imaginations to reconstruct the associations it could have carried at the time of the movie’s release, to understand how “modern” this music would have sounded to an audience in 1968, and to appreciate what that “modernity” would have meant then.

  VIII

  Ape Identity

  18

  Caesar’s Identity Crisis

  CHAD TIMM

  CAESAR: Am I a pet?

  WILL: Are you a pet? No. You’re not a pet.

  CAESAR: Who is my father?

  WILL: I’m your father.

  CAESAR: What is Caesar?

  “What is Caesar?” With this question begins an identity crisis that sparks a global ape revolution. Throughout the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar, who inherits increased intelligence from his mother’s exposure to the experimental drug ALZ-112, struggles to know himself. Faced with conflicting images and societal expectations he goes from trying to be human to waging war on humans.

  In order to have an identity crisis, however, Caesar first needs to have an identity. But what does it mean to have an identity? How do we come to know who we are in relation to the world around us? And what role does language play in the formation of a person’s identity?

  Rise of the Self

  One approach philosophers have taken in accounting for the self is to establish a subject-object relationship. This approach holds that we essentially control our destinies and exist in an inner world where our thoughts are our own. According to this view our inner world contrasts with the world outside, including those objects that we perceive and come into contact with. René Descartes (1596–1650) went so far as say that everything can be doubted except his own existence when he proclaimed cogito ergo sum—“I think therefore I am.”

  Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) broke from this tradition by contending that we can’t ever fully know ourselves. Lacan claims that a portion of our thought is always occurring somewhere else. This “somewhere else” is the unconscious, which operates parallel to the “self,” or ego, and influences our thoughts, actions, and beliefs without our full awareness. We want to believe that we can fully know who we are, but according to Lacan that’s impossible: a part of our thought is always occurring beyond our awareness.

  The self, according to Lacan, is the result of the interplay of three interconnected “registers,” what he called the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real. Each person’s identity, or sense of self, arises out of the images we see (imaginary), the rules, laws, and expectations of our society (symbolic), and that which we can’t symbolize or represent in words or language (real).

  Think of this in terms of Caesar completing the Lucas’s Tower intelligence test: being images, the shape and color of the disks—they could just as easily be flat squares—represent the imaginary register. The rules of the test, that only one disk may be moved at a time and that no disk can be placed on a smaller disk, represent the symbolic register. All of the unconscious thoughts that have yet to be put into words and all of the factors that are unknowable or unpredictable, like whether a fire alarm will suddenly sound or if a disk might inadvertently slip out of Caesar’s hand, represent the real. The relationship we develop with these three registers dictates our sense of self and determines who we are.

  He’s Not a Monkey! He’s an Ape

  Compared to most other animals, human beings are all born prematurely. As infants we can’t control our bodies, care for ourselves, or survive on our own. It’s during this period of infancy that the child encounters the Lacanian register known as the real. From birth to about six months of age the child experiences life with no beginning and no end in something of a sea of stimuli.

  Imagine all of your visual images blending together in a distortion like when looking into a circus mirror. The infant can’t tell where it ends and the parent begins because there is no reason to believe it is a separate entity. After all, the child is basically attached to the parent, being fed, cleaned, consoled, and played with continually. This is even true of Caesar. During the short time he spends with his mother, Bright Eyes, in her cage in the lab she nurses, cleans, and grooms him as she holds him close to her. In Caesar’s mind he has no individual sense of self, as he and Bright Eyes are one, his existence limited solely to the sea of stimuli in the real.

  It’s during the Mirror Stage, however, between six and eighteen months of age, that a child begins developing a sense of self after seeing its own image for the first time. Lacan describes this experience through the child’s encounter with a mirror, but it could just as easily see itself through a reflection in its mother’s eyes or even by watching other children at play and identifying with them. Through seeing itself in the mirror and encountering the reflected images the child leaves the real and enters the imaginary register. The night Will brings Caesar home, for example, he is confronted with the imaginary as Will rocks him to sleep. Caesar looks at Will, smiles, and we can imagine him seeing his own reflection in Will’s eyes.

  In his Écrits (Writings), Lacan states, “The function of the mirror stage thus turns out . . . to be a particular case of the function of imagos, which is to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality.” These experiences are imaginary because they are comprised of images, what Lacan calls imagos, and these imagos are illusions because they are reflections. My reflection in the mirror isn’t really me; it’s merely a reflection of me, and therefore an illusion. Even
though the images are illusions they are essential to the child’s development as this entry into the imaginary is imperative for the child if it is to acquire a sense of self separate from his primary caregiver. In the domestic scenes in Rise, we see this process unfold with Caesar.

  I’m Looking at the Man (er . . . Chimp) in the Mirror . . .

  When Caesar stares into the lens of the camera as he plays chess with Will or sees his reflection in the attic window while watching children ride their bikes, he’s captivated by what he sees. While Lacan found that normal chimpanzees quickly realize their reflection is an illusion and lose interest, this is not the case for the human child. “What demonstrates the phenomenon of recognition, implying subjectivity, are the signs of triumphant jubilation at the playful image starting in the sixth month.” For Lacan the belief that you are the reflection in the mirror is a sign of a fledgling self-awareness, a quality shared by Caesar, a genetically enhanced chimpanzee.

  The mirror stage is actually a metaphor because the child doesn’t have to be looking at itself to see its reflection. For example, while looking out the attic window and watching children play, Caesar sees himself in them, reflecting back an image that he identifies with. Because he identifies so strongly with the children they are Caesar, and he is them. It’s like an infant who cries when she sees a sibling or other infant injured. Identifying so fully with the mirror image, she struggles to differentiate the reflection from herself.