by I Walk Like a Panther 

My first movie love was Planet of the Apes. It was telecast one dreary school morning when I was at home (Capetown, circa 1984) and making the most of a cold. When the apes first appeared, caught in that sudden and typically sixties zoom-in of the camera, I nearly fell off the couch, where I was wrapped in a Sotho blanket and eating chicken soup. The planet looked not unlike my own surroundings (in my imagination anyway; then again, snow meant Hoth, the woods were Endor) and for years afterwards I often expected the apes to suddenly emerge from somewhere on their black horses, from behind bushes or hills, complete with fast retro-zoom. That’s a long time ago, though. I live in Holland now.

Recently, about two months ago, Premiere Magazine ranked the film’s ending as one of the 25 Most Shocking Moments in Movie History. A little before that, Charlton Heston’s line “Get your hands off me, you damned dirty ape!” came in at #66 on AFI’s list of 100 movie quotes.

As with so many other pop cultural phenomena, Planet of the Apes has its roots in a darker, more elaborate world. The original novel (circa 45,000 words), by French author Pierre Boulle, is a story of desolation; of survival, in a way. Boulle, somewhat of a war hero in real life, had already published The Bridge on the River Kwai, and if that novel deals with the hardship, the mad logistics and hierarchies of war, then Planet of the Apes deals with the black surrealism of it. It’s a two-faced tale: intimate and terrifying in places, yet oddly farcical too; its topsy-turvy world, where apes talk and drive cars, is that of a Medieval satire. It’s the world as seen through the eyes of a paranoid, a freak.

That freak is Ulysse Mérou (nomen est omen), the protagonist. Unlike Charlton Heston, Mérou is no psychotic action hero; he’s a curious journalist, a lone chess player (a different thing). Thrown into a society ruled by apes, he remains a thinking man: he utters thoughts and hypotheses, he analyses, observes, theorises, fights to protect his reason, he never ceases to be amazed. ‘The monkeys are not divided into nations,’ he explains to the reader, ever the journalist. ‘The whole planet is administered by a council of ministers, at the head of which is a triumvirate consisting of one gorilla, one orang-outang and one chimpanzee. In conjunction with this government, there is also a Parliament composed of three Chambers: the Chamber of Gorillas, of Orang-Outangs and of Chimpanzees, each of which attends to the interests of their respective members.’ Of the three, the gorillas are the most powerful class. They’re hunters, administrators, exploiters. The orang-outangs are scientists and politicians, the chimpanzees writers – researchers. Although the society as a whole lags behind ours (they seem to be somewhere in the 1940s, technologically, and in a period of very early Enlightenment, socially; their Dark Ages lasted for ten thousand years), they recently have disparaged the axioms of an ancient, god-like authority and have entered a period of scientific progress and achievements.

Although Mérou manages to make friends with two apes – Zira and her fiancé Cornelius – he remains a curiosity, an anomaly (and eventually becomes a threat). He’s forever the lone alien: at the beginning of the story, we are informed he has no family, no wife or children. Soon he loses his two only companions, with whom he arrived on the planet: his friend Professor Antelle and a young physician, Arthur Levain. Levain gets shot by a gorilla almost right away, during the pursuit that made me spill my chicken soup all those years ago:

The hunt was ending in an infernal din. The beaters were on our heels. I saw one of them emerge from the foliage. It was an enormous gorilla, laying about him at random with a club and screeching fit to burst his lungs.

I must admit, I laughed when Levain died. An unintentional comic relief – his first line: ‘It’s a woman’s foot,’ his last: ‘Perhaps it’s our clothes that frighten them,’ (he’s wearing what, a negligee?) – he seems to flip out at arguably the worst possible moment in his life:

He had gone completely out of his mind. He got up without taking any precaution, started running off at random and came into the alley in full view of the hunters’ field of fire. He got no further.

Antelle, who together with Mérou gets caught during the chase, pines away in a cage, slowly loses his reason and eventually becomes a savage. ‘Now you see how intelligence can melt away just as it can be acquired,’ is the last thing that is said about him, by Cornelius. (At school, we were taught to underline a sentence like that and write IMPORTANT in the margin, with multiple exclamation marks.)

It’s not a great novel, if you are wondering. As a thought-provoking piece of fiction, it’s inferior to, say, The Sentinel / 2001: A Space Odyssey. With some ill will, it can even be regarded as a glorified one-joke premise. Yet I can’t help but find something interesting in its atmosphere of windswept isolation and loneliness. Mérou, as said, has no family, Antelle is a misanthrope of sorts who is ‘tired of his fellow-men’: the spaceship is big enough to carry several families, yet it’s crammed with plants, flowers, vegetables, butterflies, birds, and even a monkey. Levain is, I don’t know, a transvestite, but they all are disenchanted, cast out. (Hence, perhaps, the voyage to the stars.) When the trio departs, there’s no one to wave them goodbye, no one will miss them. The Earth they leave behind seems barren; it’s a silent, foggy desert. There’s a sense of impending doom, of a holocaust. Antelle tells Mérou he doesn’t expect much from humans anymore; the latter doesn’t disagree. Having read some background information for this short piece, I now believe that’s the author filtering through. The disillusion and misanthropy are his. What he seems to be doing, all throughout the novel, is question the unnatural and undeserved superiority of men over other life forms: who do we think we are, anyway? After years of fighting and spying, helping the resistance movements in China, Burma and Indochina, after having been captured by the Vichy loyalists and put in a Saigonese prison — after having been exposed, in short, to the insanity of war (Major Clipton in The Bridge on the River Kwai: ‘Madness! Madness!’), humanity, to him, seems to have become a hollow shell that exists in direct and painful contrast with the rich and innocent animal kingdom. Our superiority is founded on nothing. All his novels are about war, about surviving; and there’s something noble to be found in nature. Antelle refuses to carry a weapon when they start exploring, perhaps preferring to leave the world in its idyllic state. It’s not that shocking Antelle ultimately becomes a savage: disappointed with the diseased morals and ethics of humanity, he seems to want it that way.

Three people arrived on the planet, and, at the end of the book, three people leave. During his stay, Mérou falls in love with a primitive female he christens ‘Nova’, and together they have a son, Sirius (’the fruit of our interplanetary passion’). The first encounters with Nova, at the very beginning of the book, are really rather charming and peaceful (the scene of a dream). She’s a mute and a killer (she strangles the pet monkey they brought along), but playful and inquisitive, circling around the trio like a curious stray dog. Mérou, fatherly and patiently, even tries to teach her how to smile. It’s when they get captured (along with the others) that things become more clinical and aggressive. Fearing that the scientist apes will harm Nova, Mérou, in his cage (the passage resembles The Bridge on the River Kwai) has to fight his animal instincts: ‘I screamed and yelled in the manner of the men of Soror, I showed my fury as they did, by hurling myself against the bars, biting them, foaming at the mouth, grinding my teeth, behaving in short in a thoroughly bestial fashion.’ His rages startle him; he, ‘one of the kings of creation’, ‘the ultimate achievement of millenary evolution’, and more hyperbolic muscle-flexing, should know better. (It’s the only time his rationalistic mind threatens to fade). He clings to Nova like, well, like a gorilla; he’s protective of her as if she were a child (which, in fact, she is: she has the undiluted mind of a three-year-old). The scientists, ‘gorillas in white jackets’ (yes), mock his behaviour (none can keep a straight face when addressing him), but as time goes on, he becomes the subject of a controversy: how can it be that this human being, this thing, is able to use reason and speak? Then, evidence is uncovered that sheds light on the mystical past of the apes: the planet once was inhabited by humans, until they became indolent (’No more books; even detective novels have now become too great an intellectual effort. No more games; at the most a hand or two of cards. Even the childish cinema does not tempt us any more’) and were succeeded/overtaken by apes. Mérou realises he has to escape; and, assisted by Cornelius, he takes off in a spaceship and heads back to Earth (the entourage is something of a travelling circus: there’s a savage woman, a child, there are rabbits, there’s a poultry run, they grow vegetables, fruits). If surprise twists excite you, it’s bonanza time: I have two. Here’s the first: when the party lands on Earth, in France, Paris (even more specific then: at Orly), 700 years later, he initially finds it to be deserted. Grass grows on the landing strips. Then, an aircraft takes off from somewhere — ‘it resembles in every respect the aircraft of my day and age!’ Finally, a figure approaches him. Nova starts to scream: he is a gorilla. And again they take off.

As you see, the film and the book aren’t exactly marching neatly alongside each other. The story ends with the trio floating in space, aimlessly, in a cold, indifferent universe. There’s no final curse in front of the Statue of Liberty (and let this be the first piece about Planet of the Apes that doesn’t quote it), but instead an exhausted Mérou, feverishly writing down his story in the form of a message to — to anyone who finds it really, which is actually the novel you are reading. (It’s a cry in the dark.) We learn, at the very beginning of the book, that this message is found by a couple called Jinn and Phyllis (it’s priceless: they sometimes even comment on it, in true Waldorf and Statler style), and with them, the tale ends as well — so here, then, is surprise twist number two:

‘A likely story,’ said Jinn at last, forcing a smile to his lips. […]
‘It just shows there are poets everywhere, in every corner of the cosmos, and practical jokers too.’
She pondered over this, but was not so easily convinced as he was. However, she reluctantly agreed.
‘You’re right, Jinn. That’s what I think. … Rational men? Men endowed with a mind? Men inspired by intelligence? No, that’s not possible; there the author has gone too far. But it’s a pity!’
‘I quite agree,’ said Jinn. ‘Now it’s time we started back.’
He let out the sail, exposing it to the combined rays of the three suns. Then he began to manipulate the driving levers, using his four nimble hands, while Phyllis, after dismissing a last shred of doubt with an energetic shake of her velvety ears, took out her compact and, in view of their return to port, touched up her dear little chimpanzee muzzle.

That ending is so fucking corny, I thought to myself, as I put the book away and stared into space for a few minutes. I had been reading in bed but, as I often do, got out and went to make a cup of tea. The thing that surprised me the most, I concluded, looking out over an empty frosty street, was that the novel should come out of early sixties France. ‘France, 1963′ evokes images of polka dot skirts, beehive hairdos, Left Bank chansonniers, sooted historical buildings and nymph-like coquettes (Brigitte Bardot in Le Mépris) and everything else I associate with the time (Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-free / […], Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles’ first LP – Philip Larkin), yet what we have are talking apes, apes in cars, apes living in cities, and, permeating through all that, a mood of bleakness and desolation. If ‘France, 1963′ is Summer, Planet of the Apes is a dark Autumn.

There’s a visual joke in the film, in the inquiry room scene, when one ape puts his hands over his eyes, another puts his over his ears, and a third covers his mouth: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. As it is, I happen to have a small bronze statuette in my kitchen, right above the teapot, of three little monkeys doing the same thing; it adorned my bedroom in South Africa (where they were popular gifts). Now, years later, older, shrewder, and waiting for the water to boil, I suddenly couldn’t help but feel melancholic looking at it, the sole souvenir of my own gloomy, far-away planet.

Posted by Elgar in Commentary • Add to del.icio.us Add to Digg