by Huss, John
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.”
19
Aping Race, Racing Apes
JASON DAVIS
It’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 the Makeup of Race
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.
Race and the Point Zero One Two Percent
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.
How? Take MacDonald and Governor Jason Breck. Comparing their DNA would show no more than 0.2 percent difference between their individual genetic material. And as for the genetic makeup of the racial differences between them, that only amounts to 6 percent of that 0.2 percent. That means race accounts for about 0.012 percent of all human genetic material. And let’s not forget the genetic comparison that would shock both Breck and Caesar, that ninety-nine percent of a chimpanzee’s functionally important DNA is identical with that of a human. Look who’s occupying the genus Homo now.
From a biological perspective then, racial classification tells us very little about the genetic diversity of humans. As the authors of How Real Is Race? explain about genetics research published the same year as the cinematic release of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the racial categories we’ve inherited based on geographical differences were not only “biologically virtually meaningless” when used for studying human genetic diversity; they also hampered efforts to further understand such variation. Racial categories are made up of recognizable markers that are only a very small part of visible biological variation in humans. And the greatest amount of human genetic variability is invisible to us as it occurs beneath the surface of human bodies. Just as Cornelius challenges the accepted, naturally occurring reality paradigm about humans as the backward, mute creatures the Almighty Ape always intended them to be, the biological reality of race is also something that shouldn’t be taken as a naturally occurring, observable reality.
Not everyone agrees that racial categories have no biological basis. For example, Robin Andreasen has argued that there are breeding populations within the human race, each traceable to a distinct ancestral population, and that these breeding populations are races. One difficulty with this view, besides the fact that lots of interbreeding has gone on and still does, is that the identified breeding populations do not match recognized races. Thus, even if we defined race in this way, it would undermine, not support, our accepted racial categorizations. Moreover, defining race in this way would also undermine any expectation of shared race-wide traits, as each breeding population continued to diverge from its founding population.
Can a Planet Long Endure Half Human and Half Ape?
Depending on which side of the twenty-first century you are on when reading that tagline from a poster for Beneath the Planet of the Apes, you might’ve answered: For as long as there are sequels or prequels and reboots. But it’s also suggestive of something more than a cynical answer.
What if it also means something half-human and half-ape, like a child born of interspecies sex? Would this new species pass for ape, or human, or neither? If you’re a Planet of the Apes fan, you’ll know that an ape-human hybrid character now exists in that universe full of other abandoned and unused ideas for the Planet of the Apes series that never made it into the finished movies. Because of the association of interspecies with interracial sex, the ape-human child was too controversial to risk losing the family film rating the studio wanted for Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
After all, it’d been only three years before, in 1967 that the US Supreme Court had done away with anti-miscegenation laws. These were laws that made marriage illegal between whites and non-whites. That a fictitious, half-ape, half-human child would invoke fears about real interracial coupling and sexual relationships tells us something about the limits of what even the Planet of the Apes movies could show about US race relations. Then there are the ‘what ifs’ had such a character been included. Would a child born of ape and human be ape enough to keep the ‘divine spark’ that separates apes from humans? Or would the child be human enough for Governor Breck to grant it freedom from slavery?
But even without this symbolic child, the ape society of the movies reflects pretty much what anti-miscegenation laws were created to keep in place: a racial caste system. It’s not so much that we don’t get to see the ape version of the protection of ‘racial purity’ with laws that refuse to recognize the legitimacy of children from apes and humans. What’s being played out in the ape societies is a social order, where who gets to do what is based on the visible physical differences between apes. What if chimpanzees and orangutans, or gorillas and orangutans, had children? Would those “interracial” children be enough like one of their parents to be permitted or prevented from entering the National Academy of Science? Deciding how dark or light an ape’s skin or fur color has to be to pass as orangutan or chimpanzee, or determining if an ape of mixed parents is behaviorally more chimpanzee than gorilla to be an officer in the ape military, sound like more “humanizing” twists of ape society’s racial politics.
But these ‘what ifs’ are closer in kind to the questions about changes in ape nature and racial identity that Battle for the Planet of the Apes raises. After all, having brown fur and skin in one ape population could have the same ape regarded as ‘just black enough’, or even as light-colored in another ape community. And even where an ape thought of herself as belonging to one caste, social enforcement of what counts as membership is a reminder that subjective or individual choices about racial identity collide with institutionalized racial categories. To ape race a bit more, apes visually test apes with parents of different ape castes to see who’s more gorilla than chimpanzee. This is a good example of how the ontology of race is made up of social constructs such as laws, practices, and shared beliefs, rather than-biology. As Battle shows, the ontological makeup of race can and has changed for social reasons and will continue to change.
Black, White, and Read All Over
The original movie’s iconic use of the Statue of Liberty brings to mind how racial categories in the US have changed. You might not think twice about Italian- and Irish-Americans today being as white as Charlton Heston, but as nineteenth-century immigrants, Irish and Italians were regarded by many Americans as not white. Likewise, someone categorized as black in the United States might be classified as brown, ‘colored’, or even white in the Caribbean, South Africa, or Latin America, as Charles W. Mills has pointed out.
Philosophically, this gets us away from racial realism, which argues that racial differences reflect natural kinds of human differences, and into metaphysical thinking about race as socially constructed. For philosophers such as Charles W. Mills, Sally Haslanger, and Lucius Outlaw, race, racialism, and racial identity are social phenomena. And arguing that such social phenomena don’t exist independent of human beliefs isn’t denying that race has an objective reality. The social ontology of race is very
much bound up with social institutions, such as political, educational, and legal systems, as well as what has been inherited from human history. The basic social reality of such things, how they endure or get reproduced, challenged, and changed, stems from their objectivity outweighing what individuals think. Social objectivity is a shared or intersubjective construction. Mills sums up the social ontology of race, and some of what Battle tells us too, with three things that race isn’t:
Race is not foundational: in different systems, race could have been constructed differently or indeed never have come into existence in the first place.
Race is not essentialist: the same individuals would be differently raced in different systems.
Race is not ‘metaphysical’ in the deep sense of being eternal, unchanging, necessary, part of the basic furniture of the universe.
But reactions to the Planet of the Apes movies also show other aspects of the social ontology of race. For one thing, Hollywood is part of the social ontology of race. Mort Abrahams and Arthur P. Jacobs’s cluelessness at Sammy Davis, Jr.’s challenging read of a movie where the only black guy doesn’t even survive to buddy-up with the white male lead points to how Hollywood has, and mostly hasn’t, contributed to the wider society’s challenging of social exclusion of non-whites. In the Journal of Personal and Social Psychology, research into mental associations between Blacks and apes has been identified as symptomatic of American society’s “broader inability to accept African Americans as fully human.”
Black comedian Paul Mooney flips white folks’ long-standing racial association of apes with blacks by drawing on the social ontology of race. Mooney notes how the thin lips, straight hair and light skin of the chimpanzees and orangutans of the Apes movies look more like whites’ interpretations of how blacks see them.