Civilizational Discontents in “Planet of the Apes” (1968)
Taylor has left Earth behind because, as he tells a crewmate, “somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man.” He finds instead a planet where apes enjoy all the trappings of civilization—along with its superstition, bigotry, caste hierarchy, and appetite for violence—and where he himself is taken for “a missing link between the unevolved primate and the ape.” Are these humanoid apes so uncanny because they mirror back origins we would rather forget, or because they suggest that what ails us is our effort to escape them? Wes & Erin discuss the 1968 film “Planet of the Apes,” and whose stinking paws, exactly, are the problem. Upcoming Episodes: Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: Taylor has left Earth behind because, as he tells his crewmate, somewhere in the universe, there has to be something better than man. He finds instead a planet where apes enjoy all the trappings of civilization, along with its superstition, bigotry, caste hierarchy and appetite for violence, and where he himself is taken for a missing link between the unevolved primate and the ape. Are these humanoid apes so uncanny because they mirror back origins we would rather forget, or because they suggest that what ails us is our effort to escape them? Today we discuss the 1968 film Planet of the Apes, and whose stinking paws exactly are the problems? This is Wes Alwan. And this is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, how long has it been since you've seen this movie? Before preparing for this episode? 1:09 Erin: Decades. I think I saw it when I was a kid. 1:14 Wes: I think I saw it when I was a kid, and then I had some kind of dream related to it. And it's always been this kind of film that's just lodged in my. Deep within my psyche and seems to have some deep meaning for me. And I feel like as an adult, I figured out why maybe a little bit, but I might just be rationalizing it, I guess. When the new Planet of the Apes movies came out, I went and rewatched this 1968 original, and then that became the basis ultimately for a talk that I gave at the Brattle in Cambridge. The person who ran that program was a fan of the Partially Examined Life, and they were having a screening of Planet of the Apes, and she asked me to come give a little talk about it beforehand. And then I also gave a talk at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. I suppose the thing that really grabs me about it is just the effect of having all these actors in these ape costumes, which, you know, they're not the greatest by today's standards, but they're not terrible either. And actually, it took a lot of work, apparently, for them to get them to the point where a studio would greenlight this and say, okay, people are just going to be laughing at all these actors in ape suits. An audience will be able to take this seriously. But there's something. There's some kind of uncanny effect to this reversal of putting apes in the place of human beings and human beings in the place of apes. So when I originally started thinking about this movie, I wanted to understand that. I don't know if you have the same experience or if you're just laughing at the people in the ape suits? 2:55 Erin: No, I was laughing more at the puns and the repurposed cliches, especially the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. There's some interesting things going on with genre in this film, which I was thinking a bit about. I suppose tonally, it's relatively consistent, even though there are these moments that are almost played for slapstick level visual effect, for laughs. I think I. Even when I was a kid and saw this movie for the first time, I knew the twist ending, of course. Right. Everybody knows the image of the Statue of Liberty at the end. Spoiler alert, 3:31 Wes: he's still on Earth. Everybody. 3:34 Erin: What really amazed me this time was when they land in Lake Powell and I'm going, oh, my gosh. I was standing right there. Oh, that's there. Basically every single place I've gone on vacation in the last five years that I've lived in Utah, just fully on display. I know that landscape so, so well now, whereas before it might have worked as another planet. Instead I was thinking of the fact that, oh, there's, you know, the marina isn't there, but otherwise everything is exactly the same. Oh, that's Glen Canyon. I've stood near there. I guess the exact opposite experience that I've supposed to have a feeling that this was an alien landscape in which could reasonably pass as a distant planet. 4:17 Wes: You know, have you read Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian? 4:20 Erin: No. 4:21 Wes: He would love the hyper violent, all the violence, but the way he describes the west, it sounds often very quite alien. I think there's something in the beginning of the movie that's very believable. I don't know how many people figure out that he's on Earth before the end and how quickly they do it. I suspect they don't, because I think that Statue of Liberty scene actually hits hard for people. And there's something about the west that, yeah, it's plausible. That would be the alien landscape. Maybe there's something Mars like about it, but I don't know. What did I make of that? Yeah, if they were thinking more about it, they might have wondered about whether they were back on Earth. Although there were some things that were right. There's no moon. There are some things that had changed enough that they felt confident. I mean, Taylor himself says, you know, we're some light years from Earth on an unnamed planet in orbit around a star in the constellation of Orion. Is that close enough for you? He's responding to Landon. That could be Bellatrix. 5:22 Erin: Taylor's people skills are unmatched we should 5:25 Wes: get to him and his arrogance and what's going on with that. But, yeah, go ahead. 5:29 Erin: I guess for me, the biggest plot hole is, how do you not know you're on Earth when there are apes and humans and horses and also the apes are speaking English? I mean, apparently parallel dimension. I would buy more than another planet. 5:50 Wes: Of course, it occurred to me once again while watching this, but it doesn't. Yeah, a plot hole like that would normally completely make me unable to enjoy a film. And in this case, it's something about which I can suspend disbelief. 6:03 Erin: Well, of course there's something invisible about it. I mean, I wondered at the same time that I was thinking about the silliness of the plot hole, if that very invisibility is part of the point, or that the plot hole works or that it speaks to some sort of perception of. It exposes an invincibility that we feel as Americans with little flags being sent out by NASA to conquer the universe. Right. There's a. There's an invisibility to the fact that they would land on another planet and everybody would be speaking English, because of course they would be. You know what I mean? And so much of the film is also about speech that I started to think about it at a little bit more of a meta level. And maybe we as moviegoers just sort of accepting that these apes speak English, are partially being implicated in some of the messaging of the film itself. I also just want to say that in regard to the Forbidden Zone being a Western landscape, I think this also ties in with my sense of the indeterminate genre of the film or that the film might be coalescing many genres. It not only occurred to me that this is a place where many Westerns were filmed. Lake Powell, which straddles southern Utah and northern Arizona, and the Grand Canyon and Glen Canyon. All these places are themselves obviously sites for filming Western movies at the same time, especially not far from Monument Valley, which I think gets a little bit of a glance, or the area right around Monument Valley is seen on film. But also, of course, it's not that far from where the nuclear tests were made. So in a sense, there's always been. Or at least since the 40s, there's been a strange collision between that Western landscape and something aerial. Something. Something having to do with. 7:54 Wes: If not, Is it Area 51 that they landed in? Is that where they. Is that the Forbidden Zone? 8:00 Erin: Right, right. No, I mean, you know, obviously, beyond the fact that there's this Martian landscape, there's the idea that this has been, because of its desolation, a site to do these nuclear tests. And so the Space Age and the Old west, or whatever we want to call it, the Old west obviously has in it an idea of newness as well. An idea in the popular imagination of an untouched landscape, which we can also say is sort of a silly and laughable idea. Of course, people have been here before. Of course it's Earth. Of course, there's a long history here. But, yeah, I mean, that. That genre collision, and the fact that Planet of the Apes kind of feels at times to me like a Western, not only because of the setting, but because of certain plot conventions within the film. It made me reflect just on larger themes. And those themes of whether or not they're so distant from each other, whether or not they actually have to do with the same. The frontier. Right, the frontier. On multiple levels, whatever. However we might characterize the frontier. Then, of course, later on in the film, you also have kind of a courtroom drama. And then you also have these really comedic moments sprinkled through. So genre wise, it's a strange blend. 9:07 Wes: Well, and the protagonist is arguably a cowboy, although he's a strange sort of cowboy because he has this kind of swashbuckling, arrogant, devil may care demeanor. But at the same time, he has some countercultural critiques. And in particular, he's gone into space because he himself is a misanthrope. You wonder how this guy ever made it through the astronaut screening, Right? So he's a complete misanthrope. And this is the way the movie starts out, interestingly. And then you add the Charlton Heston drawl or whatever it is you want to call it, how he talks on top of all that. And it's quite arresting. So this much is. So this is in his log. This much is probably true. The men who sent us on this journey. I'm sure you can do a Charlton Heston impression. Do you want to read this with your character? 10:06 Erin: I will not. 10:07 Wes: I will not. But you admit that you could do it if you wanted to, right? Erin's nodding for those no comment, she can do it people. So I'm tempted to try, but it would be awful. But anyway, this much is probably true. The men who sent us on this journey are long since dead and gone. You who are reading me now are a different breed. I hope a better one. I leave the 20th century with no regrets. But one more thing, if anybody's listening, that is seen from space, it's, you know, everything squashes man's ego. Because it's boundless. Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother, keeping his neighbor's children starving? He's a humanitarian misanthrope, maybe we could. We could say, and his misanthropy has to do with the way human beings treat each other, which we will find out, he equates with a more primitive right, with our origins in the fact that we're animals, the fact that we have these instinctual impulses, the fact that we've evolved from apes. There's little comments later on we'll get to. And he's hoping that we've evolved more, right? So he'll say at one point that human beings as he knew them on Earth, where a missing link between animals, including, presumably, apes and then some higher being, some higher species that he's out to find. So he's. He's hoping to find something. Something better. And so that's sort of the, I think, the thesis that we get at the beginning of the film, that the film addresses, right, this humanitarian misanthrope who hates human beings because they don't treat each other well enough and is arrogant enough to think that he's better than everyone and should go and find out and find a more advanced species that's just as good as him. 12:07 Erin: I wonder what ultimately, the film wants us to take from Heston's character. Are we supposed to be critical of him, do you think? 12:16 Wes: Yeah, he's quite unlikable through most of the. Even. Even at the end. I mean, he's. He's kind of a prick to the very end, until. Until he gets to the Statue of Liberty. 12:26 Erin: But I wonder how much audiences would register him as a prick, an arrogant. An arrogant because he's Charlton Heston? No, you know, because of the structure of the twist. He never really has to reckon with his own sense of superiority. And even then, maybe he would persist in his arrogance as a human outside of time and thus not guilty of the same sins that he accuses Landon and all of humanity of engaging in. I mean, he gets a comeuppance over the course of the movie, which again, I don't know that an audience, especially a 1968 audience, would register as a comeuppance. Rather, they would see it as an injustice and want to join in with Heston's feelings of, sorry, Taylor Erin, are 13:12 Wes: you siding with the damn dirty apes? Is that what's going on here? 13:15 Erin: Oh, of course I am. Of course I am. He has this claim To a sort of disentanglement from home and family and origin. He, in a way, sees himself as a master of the world and of someone who stands out in his own species, shall we say, to such an extent that he can like get off the ride and go somewhere else. And he just. He leaves. He has no regrets. Obviously, the film returns him to the bottom of the pecking order. And there is an irony about that. And we do see that he does maintain some entanglements. He does have an allegiance to his own species. But because the twist occurs in the last minute of the movie, we never truly see Taylor experience the humility or self awareness that might arise from discovering something like, hey, humanity crashed the car and the apes took away the keys. 14:09 Wes: Yeah. But also the apes. The apes also suck. Right. So we shouldn't forget that. 14:15 Erin: Yeah. 14:16 Wes: I think they're also bigots. I mean, part of the point is they've inherited all of the ills of culture, of course, which is a direct contradiction of Taylor's thesis. Right. It's not the problem of residual animality that plagues us, that we have to evolve beyond with culture. Culture itself is the problem. These, these problems are inherent in civilization and culture. And in a way, the apes have become worse by becoming civilized. Now they can be bigots. There's a whole caste system with the apes. Right. 14:47 Erin: Yes. 14:48 Wes: And that, by the way, there's an interesting effect on all the extras where people who basically, for mealtime and hanging out, people actually ended up segregating themselves by which type of ape that they were playing. 15:04 Erin: I read that. Yeah. 15:05 Wes: Played out psychologically. Yeah. 15:08 Erin: I'm not discounting those obviously negative and sort of parodic elements of ape culture, which Ape. Human culture. I simply mean that insofar as the ape society has established some kind of guardrails so that this kind of destruction couldn't happen again. And they locate what is destructive or what was destructive about human society somehow in things that exist in air or on air. I mean, I have a whole, you know, little chart I sketched out around this. 15:37 Wes: But what do you mean on air, 15:39 Erin: in air, there seems to me to be a connection between the sort of height of civilization or certain advancements with Taylor's age, with 1972, with humanity pre this ape civilization and with the element of air. So air is associated, of course, with the astronauts and covertly with the society that annihilated itself through nuclear bombs dropping from above. Right. I think I'm also tracing this because it exists on air as a case of civilization being Fragile and delicate. You know, we could trace it, say, back to Stewart, the woman in the ship who dies before the movie even begins. Right. The sort of Dresden Doll, fragile blonde beauty who never gets any speaking lines and isn't even awake in the film. And she goes down with the ship. And the ship is futuristic and white and clean and slick and it has, you know, bears a certain resemblance with a paper airplane later in the film. And the apes, on the other hand, are associated with Earth. They don't have flight, and their buildings are constructed in these organic forms. It seems to me that Heston Taylor is associated with this fragile, delicate, dangerous height of civilization and that this is one of the things that the apes are attempting to curtail or critique. And I think this reading. I mean, maybe I'm not reading it properly, but it gets complicated. I mean, when we see this, the new race of humans or hominids or whatever they are, you know, they're up in the trees, some of them. Of course, ordinarily, this would be the domain of the apes as well, but we seem to have the movement of apes in response to this human catastrophe down onto the ground. And humans have taken the place of being the ones who are sort of half on the ground, half in the air. 17:36 Wes: Let's see. I had been talking about Taylor's arrogance and his critique of society. Yeah. The relationship between his critique of society and what Right. Ape culture had, on my view, had inherited all the problems of human culture just because these problems are internal to culture. So that there's. It's a direct. Directly in conflict with the. What I call the misanthropic thesis of Taylor. The. The humanitarian misanthrope. Right. The idea that we just need to evolve more. We just need more culture, that we just need to get away from the animal part of us, and then everything will be okay. I think the. The film kind of challenges that. And early on, just to get at some of this characterization of Taylor. It's pretty. It's pretty strong. You know, they really, really play up what a prick he is, as far as I'm concerned. 18:30 Erin: So, 18:33 Wes: Landon, I was thinking about Stewart. What do you suppose happened? Air leak. She died in her sleep. And then. That's Taylor. Landon, you don't seem very cut up about it. It's Taylor. It's a little too late for awake. She's been dead nearly. Yeah, she's been dead nearly a year. I don't know how Charlton Heston would say it, but everything he sounds. Everything he says sounds like mockery. And then he mocks the person. He's planting the flag and just lets out this maniacal laugh. And actually, right after this point where he's blase about Stuart's death, Landon says something about being away from Earth for X number of months. And then Taylor says, our time, you've gone gray. Apart from that, you look pretty chipper for a man who's 20, 20, 31 years old. We've been away from Earth for 2,000 years, give or take a decade. Still can't accept it. Time's wiped out. You ever knew. It's all dust. So he gets this tremendous gratification out of the idea that everything that he's left has been destroyed and that all of these people that he's. Who have accompanied him, that they're fools for having any sort of attachment to it, attachment to their loved ones, to their planet, to their country. If they want to put an American. The flag on the. On the. This new alien planet, that. That's a foolish way of thinking about the world in general. And it's a part of the mindset that's they're supposed to evolve beyond. Right. And it's very connected to identity and to group membership. Right. Whether it's family or country or whatever, and to, you know, sort of affectionate ties to other human beings. So he's just that kind of narcissist. He's that kind of arrogant guy where everyone is foolish for their silly humanity. And he's evolved beyond it. And he's looking for people who are just as evolved as he is. And what he finds instead is a sort of a perfect complement to his. His own flaws. 20:44 Erin: Yeah, I mean, how. How so? I mean, I'm still stuck on this idea that the ape society has somehow learned a lesson from humanity in a way. Therefore, though they have many of the same flaws that human culture has, they've also, you could say, evolved beyond it by. Beyond some of those flaws, by learning from those mistakes. I mean, it seems silly. I'm like, how? 21:09 Wes: Like Western? 21:11 Erin: But by curtailing those elements of human culture that would lead to this kind of annihilation, by keeping the apes grounded. And, you know, a lot of the movie operates on puns. So we could say if they're associated with the element of Earth keeping them grounded, the humans have evolved not to speak because they see that speaking doesn't do them any good. Speech also is something that exists on air. There's not a tangibility to it. So the apes, though, they're associated obviously at the same time with these ideas. Of religion and religious heresy. And therefore they're not grounded in the sense of being, say, practical, broadly conceived, or only concerning things that they can touch and understand and see and engage with physically. Their culture seems to be a reaction to what happened in human culture. And so I sort of can't get past the fact that there is something that they have over on the humans. I mean, even just from a very basic standpoint, we could say, well, if they survived, they've done something right, you know, and humanity has obviously done something wrong. The evidence is right there. It's a cruel kind of evidence, obviously. It's obviously very Darwinian. But that remains to me a stumbling block, because I think that Taylor does not acknowledge. I mean, he doesn't know it's Earth right Until the last minute. And this is what I'm talking about. Once he knows it's Earth, would he acknowledge that, okay, evolution has produced this result, and I have to at least tip my cap to it, even if I think that it's wrong, how is it wrong? Right. These are a lot of the questions that the film makes us ask by obviously by flipping the power dynamic and by turning the tables on all of us who are watching. 22:45 Wes: But, yeah, I mean, you're reminding me. In the original, the French novel, the apes actually are just as advanced as. As the society that he left. So they're driving around in cars, for instance. I think they thought. The scriptwriters thought that this would be too difficult to replicate on film as part of the reason they went with this more. Right. Technologically primitive society. So the apes, in a way, they're more technologically primitive, although they do have guns and horses and things like that. And they. They're a conservative society. And there's. It's an odd hodgepodge. Right? The science. Science and religion are very closely connected to each other. There's obvious interest in science. You know, you have these two very earnest, scientifically minded young chimpanzee scientists who obviously reflect a genuine scientific impulse in the society. But then you also have this religious impulse which is in conflict with it in the way that we saw historically hundreds of years ago. They're playing out exactly that sort of conflict. And they have a caste system and they pose for photos in front of dead, you know, human beings on a. On a line. And they have lots of things, I think, that are pretty ugly about them. So, yeah, to me, I didn't see much. To me, the ape culture isn't so much. I'm not. Although I might be able to be convinced I'm not sure that there's much to take from it that's positive, except to say that the expectation would be right that the apes would have been improved by culture. And in some ways they have. But there's a lot of drawbacks that have come with it. And again, the problem turns out not to be the instinctual side of us, but the civilized side of us. Because in the wild, animals don't treat each other the way human beings do. They may do some pretty, you know, chimpanzees do pretty messed up stuff eating other monkeys alive and stuff, but it's not done with the same stun for survival. It's not done out of conscious cruelty or sadism. And in particular, it's not done because of these identity and identification and group psychology features that enter in with human beings. So one of the things that leads to human violence predictably is just the concept of offense or insult, narcissistic injury, where we don't get the recognition that we think is due to us, whether on a personal level or a societal level. We're not getting ourselves mirrored back. Our norms, for instance, right? So norms and values are a big source of violent conflict in human history. You have one religion, I have another. Let's kill each other over it. The explanation of that has to do with the fact that we are threatened when others values differ, and we're threatened when those values differ. Because the failure to endorse those values is a threat to our identities. Our identity is predicated on those sorts of values. So we want the right kind of mirror for ourselves because it feels existentially important to have that mirror. And it feels a threat to our very existence if that mirror is not provided to us in the right way. Or even worse, there's the narcissism of minor differences where the mirror approximates but is distorted or cracked in some way. So you are also a Christian, but you're a heretic. So I'm going to burn you at the stake. I might not even do that to someone who just has an entirely different religion, even if I'm willing to go to war with them. So there's something about the being close, close but not close enough that's even worse. And the apes are a lesson in this because their physical appearance, right? He calls them damn dirty apes. When he can finally speak, they can speak, and they're intelligent and have a culture. But to him they're still damn dirty apes. So his bigotry comes across in the fact that their physical form is different from his. That's what makes them inferior. That's what makes them lesser than these. So the concept inferiority is often predicated on these very trivial differences. Some trivial religious difference, some trivial difference in custom or appearance or something like that. He's living out that kind of thing. The apes are as well. Right? The apes are just as bigoted towards human beings and towards each other within their own caste system. But I think my overall point is that the lesson here, he finds out the retort to his misanthropy involves a challenge to his assumptions about problems that arise from being unevolved animals versus evolved higher beings, when, in fact, the problems are a product of evolution, not a product of the lack of evolution. The product, the extra violence and hate and all that stuff comes with morality, not because morality has not evolved enough. 28:07 Erin: Yeah, that makes sense to me. I just. I suppose. I wonder if he ever has that realization. That's kind of what I'm ultimately driving at. I mean, obviously, the part of the point of the film is that it's supposed to mirror our own culture. So we're supposed to get this sense of the arbitrariness of this bigoted relationship on both sides. You know, why is it a damn dirty ape at this stage of the Earth's history? And we have. We have the same points being made back and forth, you know, but you're so damn ugly, Zira says to him at the end when he wants to kiss her. Right. Part of what the film seems to be operating on is this sense of the arbitrariness of these types of differences. And if it is just a mirror, then who's to say that they are more superior or less superior than Taylor himself? As part of my frustration with him, he never gets out of the mindset of damn dirty ape. I mean, he does. I mean, I guess maybe you could say, okay, the kiss with Zira at the end. 29:02 Wes: Yeah, he evolves a little bit, but not a lot. I mean, I think you're completely wrapped myself into it. I think it's an intentional part of the film, though. He does a lot of nasty things at the end of the film towards Zira and Cornelius as well. So he doesn't cooperate with them in various ways, even though they've gone out of their way to help him. He doesn't really express much gratitude. You don't get that? I think it's very intentional. You don't get the sense that he's some sort of reformed, humbled character, even though he's been humiliated. Right. He needs a statue of Liberty sized lesson before he's gonna fall to his knees and cry like that. So it's important that he. I think that the payoff in the end, because his character doesn't change that much is that that Statue of Liberty scene hits harder. Right. Because then it happens all at once. This arrogant guy is really taken down only in that last moment. And it happens all at once in the beginning. Just to give another example of his character. I've told you where you are and when you are. You're 300 light years from your precious planet. Your loved ones are dead and forgotten for 20 centuries. 20 centuries. Even if you could get back, they'd think you were something that fell out of a tree. Right. So this is a point where you have this dreamlike quality, as is typical in these types of movies, where it's almost like he's writing the premise of everything that's about to happen to him. These accusations that human beings are missing links and that there's something more evolved and that the humanity as we knew it is already ape. Like, well, he's going to find out that these evolved beings, that the evolved beings are the, are the apes as well. So. But yeah, I think you're entirely right. Yeah. It's just a matter, I think where we differ maybe you know, is on whether the audience, how much that they would have received him. You know, is he just the cowboy hero? Oh, he's just, you know, he's just a typical self confident cowboy hero. Or would they have had some distaste for him? Which it sounds like you have and I certainly have. Like through the movie. It's an odd sort of protagonist because he's. He's an unlikable protagonist. 31:25 Erin: Yeah, maybe my perceptions are a little off Even of a 1968 audience, though, obviously I suffer from being a little more frozen in amber than the average person when it comes to, you know, I'm thinking a lot about Heston in this particular moment. So one of the things I considered was, well, is it really enough of a comeuppance for his character to have been silenced or even to wear a collar, you know, which is obviously a very provocative image visually. We could argue that's the movie trying to take him down a peg. But we also identify with him as the sole human in this scenario. We're sort of joining with him in this imaginative little exercise that the film is advancing. And then you have added to that the fact that for me, what it really recalls is Heston and Ben Hur. And so you even more identify with this beleaguered, unjustly treated Heston in light of that visual chime. Right. I like what you're saying and how negatively we are supposed to view him. It makes me, I don't know, I guess, consider the film a little bit more kindly. Not that I'm inclined to be unkind about the film. I just had this issue with, okay, what is it really saying about Heston? What is it really doing? And I think maybe we could even say that in light of his losing his voice, which is something I want to talk about more, maybe because so much of the film operates on puns, and puns operate on that kind of flip, which we could call a sort of arbitrariness. You know, he never met an ape he didn't like. Or that's not a pun. Right. It's a rewriting of a cliche. But. But say the puns around the man, you know, capital M, man. And the arbitrariness of authority and various other types of visual puns and jokes and the flexibility of language, let's say, maybe that plays into Taylor's own, say, tone deafness. Something missing in him around language and perception, which has to do with the way that he expresses himself and the arbitrariness of his own expressed superiority. Maybe that plays into his being silenced as well. Even if the moment he gets his voice back, he's immediately putting down all of these animals around him who are clearly in charge of him and, you know. But anyway, maybe there's a reading that could be done around that, which. Which I'm not sophisticated enough in the moment to come up with out of full cloth. But if I thought about it, maybe we could come up with something. But, yeah, right. 33:44 Wes: To the extent that we sympathize with him, it's just, well, he's a human being and so are we. He's not a nice guy. You know, why don't we take the apes side? Well, they look different from us. You know, they're doing some pretty. Pretty mean things as well. Those poor, voiceless, oppressed human beings. 34:03 Erin: Now, but you immediate. Don't you immediately take the ape side like I immediately take Zira's side? 34:09 Wes: Well, yeah, Zira, of course. 34:11 Erin: Yeah. You know, I just. She's a much easier person in air quotes to identify with. 34:17 Wes: Yeah, absolutely. 34:18 Erin: Than Taylor. Yeah. So I think the. 34:20 Wes: Yeah. Zira and Cornelius are more like his fellow companions on the spaceship who are curious and scientific and kind of soft compared to him. Right. You know, so. So when, you know, after Taylor laughs maniacally and I guess makes fun of Landon. Landon. Landon's like, climb off. And then Taylor says something about a bronze sized statue that they're going to make of him. And Landon responds again, climb off, step off it. 34:53 Erin: Gotta bring that back. 34:54 Wes: Seinfeld reference. 34:55 Erin: Yeah. 34:55 Wes: Anyway, so then Taylor gives, you know, another one of his speeches and there's one last item so he won't climb off it, you know, immortality. You wanted to live forever, didn't you? Well, you damn near made it. Except for me and Dodge, you've, you've never lived long. You've lived longer than any anyone ever born. And with our lovely Lieutenant Stewart dead, it looks like you're the last of the line. You got what you wanted, T. How does it taste? So he's not just a prick, he's actively hostile to all these fellow astronauts, which again makes me think, well, how did this ever work? These people have had to have trained together and worked together before all this happened. Is he just coming out of the closet now? They're on a different planet. He's ready to unload on every other human beings and on the human race and in general. But yeah, I think we, you know, in the end we still do, we still are rooting for him. And it is, it is a really. For me it was, it's always been an exciting scene when he finally is able to speak and say, you damn dirty apes. And I'm like, yeah, here you go. Yeah, right, Go humans, let's go humans. 36:07 Erin: Totally. 36:08 Wes: But it's a trivial, you know, our identifications and our loyalties are in some sense arbitrary and trivial, even to our own family. We just have to be raised with that family as a matter of chance. Right. There's a non arbitrary component to that too, which is that family is a formative influence. And so we've become like them. We share familial culture and the same thing with a country, the same thing with other sorts of identifications and groups. So it starts out with arbitrary origins and then it becomes non arbitrary to the extent that it affects our character. And then suddenly we have these loyalties and the question we have to ask our is, how trivial are they? How warranted are they? Is there something deep about them? Taylor himself wants to say, no, it's all bs. All your connection to all your family member, your family members, to your planet, all that stuff, it's nonsense. So Taylor is a huge advocate nominally of this concept of disidentification with any group sort of membership, which of course does reflect the zeitgeist of the time. Right. It does reflect a sort of countercultural progressive zeitgeist where we are supposed to give up those more traditional types of attachments. And so I think we. Yeah, we learned something from this movie about that by the interpolation of people in ape costumes. And then now how do we feel about all of this? But do you want to have a final word for this part and then we'll move on to part two? 37:43 Erin: Yeah, yeah. And then we'll dive into the movie more closely because I do want to talk about that speech that he makes to Landon in more depth. But just to say that there is an important element of the non arbitrariness of our human connections and our familial connections specifically, which you didn't touch, on which I think is crucial, which is that we're also all mutants. We're all. We're all the product of genetic mutations and we share DNA and genetics with our. With our immediate family. Stop it. I don't know whether or not to hit that T too hard or mutants. Or mutants. The way I say it, I say 38:25 Wes: mutants that you weren't really hitting it, that you're doing a glottal. Yeah, that's what I like thing to do. 38:30 Erin: I know, I'm sorry. 38:32 Wes: We're all mutants. 38:34 Erin: Sometimes I think I'm saying it normally and then I hear myself back on this thing and I go, why did I say that word in such a bizarre way? I didn't notice I had a speech impediment around it. Take my face off. It's just like wires and mutant. So you know, where there's one mutant, there's another. And another is what Dr. Zaius says, of course, echoing. I think it's Dodge's word about life. Where there's one, there's another and another and another. The idea, of course, puts one in mind of evolution. The word mutant puts one in mind of evolution. Genetic mutation. Of course, the origin of how we evolve is via genetic mutations, which are rare and in and of themselves. So in a way it's rare to be a mutant, but in another way, we are all the products of inherited genetic mutations which are then passed down through DNA. We have more in common with the people around us in terms of our families than just culture or shared traditions or whatever. We have noses and eyes and personalities and a tendency to prefer certain TV shows over others in common. This is, I think, an important element that. That Taylor is also discounting. And maybe this is what makes part of what makes the apes so distasteful to him, I would guess, if that's. If I could preempt where I think you probably are going to go with the animalistic qualities which the apes perhaps conjure up for him, by which I don't mean anything too suggestive. I just mean the extent to which we can see these types of close resemblances as being evidence of a family structure, evidence of a tie. And maybe Taylor wants to just right what he's done, just float away, just be some sort of free floating, freestanding, disembodied kind of spirit, as much embodied as he obviously is in this film, which I also want to talk about. You know, there's something aspirational about his desire to float up into the clouds and to actually kind of escape the body in a certain sense. And that would also escape all of these genetic qualities that make him the obnoxious human being he is. Anyway. 40:39 Wes: All right, well, on that note. Yeah. Maybe you can say more about this to begin part two, if you. 40:45 Erin: Sure. 40:46 Wes: So. All right, thank you. 40:47 Erin: Thank you.
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