Planet of the Apes and Philosophy

by Huss, John

  Parents and even grandparents also help give the child their self-image by affirming what the child sees in their reflection. During Caesar’s first night with Will, Charles, Will’s father, makes comments like “He’s a cute little guy, isn’t he?” and, quoting from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “But as for Caesar, Kneel down, kneel down, and wonder.” These comments and others like “That’s my boy” help Caesar internalize the images he sees and form the core around which his whole sense of self develops. According to Lacan, “This form would, moreover, have to be called the ‘ideal-I’.” Lacan calls mirror images “ideal-I” because these are the idealized images that we spend the rest of our life aspiring to be. Because they are imposed from the outside and are never really us, we can’t ever fulfill our drive to be them.

  They’re Not People, You Know

  While these images were necessary for Caesar to begin the process of creating an identity, they were also alienating because they came from outside. Caesar’s budding sense of self, based on the images that represent him and who he will aspire to be, were the images of his own reflection and of children, both of which were not him. According to Lacan “The mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation . . . and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development.” Mirror images are alienating because they are both outside of us and are inevitably inverted. When you look in a mirror your right becomes your left and your left becomes your right. This inversion creates the inevitability of misrecognizing what you see, what Lacan referred to as meconnaissance, which roughly translates as “misrecognition.” Furthermore, the bodily integrity seen in the mirror is an illusion, especially given that the child at this age lacks complete control over motor functions.

  For example, Caesar sees his mirror reflection in the children at play but the fact that he isn’t in control of his body in the way they are and he can’t control his voice the way they can results in tension. Caesar’s mirror images contradict his physical self, a tension that was painfully obvious when he ventured into the neighbor’s garage in an attempt to ride bikes with the children only to be chased out by a bat-wielding Hunsicker. Although there is a definite misrecognition in the images he sees, the mirror image—of being a human child—nonetheless becomes the goal to which he will aspire, but will never achieve.

  The mirror stage is not merely a developmental phase that we grow out of—in fact, it remains a reference point for the self. The image we have of ourselves, our ideal-I, is constantly confronting the image reflected back to us from others. Our identity, therefore, is always in conflict with our notion of how we are perceived. Throughout his life Caesar comes back to this ideal-I as a goal but in order to enter into community and the symbolic order he must break from his sole relationship with the imaginary.

  Your Ape. He Spoke

  While the mirror stage represents the first encounter with the self, we come to know others through the second alienating moment in our lives: our entry into language. Will says “By eighteen months Caesar was signing up to twenty-four words,” and we see Will and Caesar sitting at the dinner table while Will teaches him the sign for “home.” Caesar begins acquiring language and for Lacan accepting language is the way we enter into the rules, laws, and customs of the society in which we live. This usually begins at about eighteen months of age and through language we encounter the third and final Lacanian register making up our reality, the symbolic order. Lacan referred to the symbolic as the Other because it is “Other” than us or outside of us. Whereas the image in the mirror represents our ideal-I, the symbolic represents what we think society expects of us. Our acceptance of language is necessary in order to break with the imaginary but further alienates us because we are never able to fully say what we mean or be what we think the Other wants us to be.

  You Can Sign?

  Lacan’s philosophy of the self is heavily informed by linguistics, or the scientific study of human language. He was especially influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), considered by many to be the father of twentieth-century linguistics. Saussure contended that we don’t simply give names to the objects we encounter in the world. Instead, language is more of a sound and symbol system paired with the concepts they represent. In other words, there is what we mean, called a signified, and what we say or try to communicate, called a signifier.

  For Saussure, what we say and what we mean are two sides of the same coin; they are linked together into what he called a “sign.” The notion of the sign is especially relevant to Caesar and Maurice, given that they communicate signifiers through sign language. In this case hand gestures represent the signifier while their intended meaning represents the signified, as when Maurice signs to Caesar “Hurt bad?” and Caesar, surprised, replies “You can sign?”

  Because we see objects in the world that we don’t have words for, we don’t understand, or that have multiple meanings, Lacan claims it’s too difficult to completely represent them. Language is far too inadequate to fully express meaning, and because of the ambiguity of representing what we are thinking we are never able to fully say what we mean. Instead of a signifier representing a signified as Saussure contends, Lacan argues that signifiers are instead forced to refer to other signifiers in an endless chain of signification called metonymy. Think of it this way: Have you ever looked up a word in the dictionary only to find the word itself in the definition, or reference to another word that you have to look up as well? Looking up the word “tree” in the American Heritage Dictionary, I find: “a usually tall woody plant, distinguished from a shrub by having comparatively greater height and, characteristically, a single trunk rather than several stems.” In other words, we don’t find a real tree; rather, we find other words (signifiers) that describe the tree, some of which, such as shrub, we may even need to look up and whose definition may even contain the word “tree” (in fact it does). Not only that, but each of these words has multiple meanings beyond the “primary” one. Seemingly, we must rely on words to represent other words, never truly getting to the heart of what we actually mean.

  There are a number of examples in Rise of the Planet of the Apes when language fails to help Caesar express what he means. When Will taught Caesar the gesture for “home,” he could be referring to any place of residence, to a specific place of residence for Caesar’s family, or to the process by which an animal instinctively returns to its territory. This metaphorically represents how all of language works: it never fully tells the whole truth.

  In a pivotal moment in the movie Will, Caroline, and Caesar are walking through the park and Caesar is confronted by an aggressive German shepherd dog on a leash. Caesar is visibly upset, realizing he was also on a leash. Distraught, he signs to Will, “Am I a pet?” To this Will responds, “No, you’re not a pet.” In this instance the sign language gesture “pet” is what Lacan calls a signifier over-stuffed with meaning. The signifier “pet” can’t hold all of the meaning being attributed to it. What is a pet? A pet can be an animal I own and care for, it could be someone I am particularly fond of, or it can be an action as well: I can even pet my pet!

  It’s a Madhouse! A Madhouse!

  But what happens to all the meaning we are unable to express? It is forced into our unconscious. While Freud claimed the unconscious was all about biological instincts, Lacan asserts “It is the whole structure of language that psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious.” Because signifieds are over-stuffed with meaning and there is always more to what we say than we can express, the meaning that’s left over is pushed into our unconscious, or repressed, and operates beyond our knowing. The result is a sense of self, an identity, which is split between the conscious, or what we are aware of, and the unconscious which is beyond our knowing. In the unconscious we essentially talk to ourselves without even knowing it!

  The significance of the unconscious from a philosophical perspective is that the uncon
scious guarantees that we can never fully know ourselves. To return to Descartes’s famous cogito, “I think therefore I am,” his claim is that when we think we are, we become fully aware of ourselves. Descartes could doubt everything except his own thinking. For Lacan, the unconscious lies beyond doubt and as a result we can never fully know it. Lacan counters Descartes with “I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking.” To think we must use language. Language is unable to fully convey what we mean. Therefore, the more we think about our self the less we really know. Lacan’s point is that the self exists as much in the unconscious as the conscious and maybe even more!

  Bow Down to the Master Signifier!

  So how does anyone understand anything we say? If meaning completely evaded us we wouldn’t be able to communicate at all. If I say, “That’s a beautiful sunset,” you would understand that I’m expressing a certain feeling about the sunset, even though we may have different ideas about beauty. This is because there are certain signifiers that help to briefly link signifiers to the signified, what Lacan calls points de capiton, or the button-ties in a quilt that keep the stuffing from moving all over. These button ties are master signifiers, or signifiers that help organize and hold together all other signifiers and form meaning. Imagine two strings lying parallel to each other, one representing what we say and the other what we mean. A loop tied around the two strings bringing them closer together at certain points represent a master signifier. All societies have master signifiers that serve to represent a subject for other signifiers, like democracy, gender, or ecology.

  In Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the master signifier that provides coherence to the flood of signification early on for Caesar might be Family. Family links together language, safety, community, play, clothing, and friendship for Caesar in a particular way. Family itself has no universal meaning, which allows it to quilt other signifiers together in much the same way that different people might define a “traditional” family. The clothes Caesar wears, the longing for human companionship, and his play with Will and Caroline in the attic or park reflect meaning that is “buttoned” in place by the signifier Family. Despite master signifiers helping to momentarily hold meaning together, when our idealized image formed in the mirror stage is contradicted by the way we are perceived by the Other, the result can lead to an identity crisis.

  Am I a Pet?

  To exist is to experience a lack, a hole in the center of our “self,” because visual images are projected onto us and our own language can never fully convey what we mean. This lack, therefore, comes from the fact that we know something is missing but we can’t quite put our finger on it because there are always elements of the real that haven’t been symbolized through language. At certain moments in life we are confronted by gaps in the symbolic and we unexpectedly come face to face with bits of the real. For Caesar, an encounter like this begins an identity crisis that threatens his sense of self.

  Seeing the dog in the park and identifying with it as a pet traumatizes Caesar because up to that point his identity has been completely wrapped up in his ideal-I. He’s a chimpanzee that walks upright, wears clothes, and lives with a human family, all of which are in harmony with the idealized image he developed in the mirror stage. When Caesar realizes that to the Other he is merely a pet he is exposed to the real in a way that traumatizes him. When Caesar asks Will “Am I a Pet?” and “What is Caesar?” Will is unable to express through language what Caesar is.

  Even though his sense of self wavers, his former image tries to come back, a flicker of his ideal-I, drawing Caesar back to the mirror. Caesar stands before the mirror shaking his head in disgust and looking at himself in confusion. Although still fascinated by his former self-image and trying to maintain a grip on it another event further compounds his identity crisis. Upon admission to the primate shelter he is confronted and assaulted by other chimpanzees. Not only is he not accepted into the human community, he isn’t accepted by his biological community either. Caesar comes face to face with the void and realizes his entire sense of self is an illusion. As we’ve already learned from Lacan, the self is a void because it is a complete fabrication from the outside, but encountering this void is so traumatizing that Caesar teeters on the verge of a breakdown.

  Apes Alone, Weak. Together, Strong

  Since Lacan was most interested in developing a philosophy of the self to aid in the practice of psychoanalysis, he probably would have sat Caesar down on his couch and tried to help him symbolize some of the elements of the real that were stuck in his unconscious. If our identity, however, is formed through our ideal image interacting with the symbolic order, we also need to question what forms the symbolic order itself. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek (1949), a self-proclaimed Lacanian-Marxist, claims that ideological fantasy forms the symbolic which in turn impacts our sense of self.

  Because language brings us into the symbolic order and can’t say all that we mean, there’s always something left over, like the remainder when you divide an odd number by an even one. The remainder makes us feel as if we’re missing something, and Žižek calls this feeling the traumatic kernel of the real. Typically we cope with this by unconsciously creating fantasies where we try to fill the lack with things we think we want like sports cars, techie gadgets, or even world peace.

  When our fantasies rest on the idea that there is some universal truth that is missing in the world, such as how a traditional family should be defined, whether we support unlimited gun control, or if humans should experiment on animals in order to find a cure for Alzheimer’s, they become ideology. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek tells us, “The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.” So, ideology is a fantasy working through our unconscious that hides the two moments of alienation in the Lacanian subject. Just as the young Caesar mistakes the mirror image for himself, the adult misrecognizes ideological beliefs as the source of some universal truth.

  It’s a Question of Simian Survival

  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 Cae
sar’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.

  What Would Žižek Do?

  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.