Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture

346 Pages·1998·7.66 MB·English

by  Eric Greene

cover
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title: Planet of the Apes As American Myth : Race, Politics, and
Popular Culture
author: Greene, Eric.; Slotkin, Richard
publisher: Wesleyan University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0819563293
print isbn13: 9780819563293
ebook isbn13: 9780585370521
language: English
subject Planet of the apes films, Planet of the apes (Television
program) , Race relations in motion pictures, Motion
pictures--Catalogs.
publication date: 1998
lcc: PN1995.9G74 1998eb
ddc: 791.43/75
subject: Planet of the apes films, Planet of the apes (Television
program) , Race relations in motion pictures, Motion
pictures--Catalogs.
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Planet of the Apes as American Myth

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Planet of the Apes as American Myth
Race, Politics, and Popular Culture
Eric Greene
With a Foreword by Richard Slotkin

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To Gloria Greene, my mother,
to Jeffrey Greene, my brother,
and in memory of Charles Powell
for his selfless help,
this book is thankfully dedicated
Wesleyan University Press
Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755
Published by special arrangement with McFarland & Company, Inc.,
Publishers, Jefferson, North Carolina
Copyright © 1996 Eric Greene.
This edition © 1998 by Eric Greene
Foreword © Wesleyan University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1

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Contents
Foreword vii
Preface xi
Introduction 1
One
Planet of the Apes 21
Two
Return to the Planet of the Apes 55
Three
Urban Riots and Ape Revolution 78
Four
"Ape Has Killed Ape" 114
Five
Conclusion: Television, Comics, Toys and Comebacks 146
Afterword: Beyond the Planet of the Apes 188
Notes 191
Filmography 215
Bibliography 223
Index 229

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Each of us has within him an "Under-Man," that primitive animality which is the heritage of our human and
even our prehuman past. This Under-Man may be buried deep in the recesses of our being; but he is there. . . .
This primitive animality, potentially present even in the noblest natures, continuously dominates the lower social
strata . . . civilization's "inner barbarians." Now when society's dregs boil to the top, a similar process takes
place in individuals, to whatever social level they belong. In virtually every member of the community there is a
distinct resurgence of the brute and the savage.
Dr. Theodore Lothrop Stoddard
The Revolt Against Civilization, 1922
Man was born of the ape and there's still an ape curled up inside of every man. The beast that must be whipped
into submission. The savage that must be shackled in chains. You are that beast, Caesar. You taint us. You
poison our guts. When we hate you, we're hating the dark side of ourselves.
Governor Jason Breck in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, 1972
The necessity, then, of "those lesser breeds . . . " those wogs, barbarians, niggers is this: one must not become
more free, nor become more base than they: must not be used as they are used, nor yet use them as their
abandonment allows one to use them: therefore they must be civilized. But, when they are civilized, they may
simply "spuriously imitate [the civilizer] back again," leaving the civilizer with "no satisfaction on which to
rest."
James Baldwin
The Devil Finds Work, 1976

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Foreword
Eric Greene's exploration of the Planet of the Apes as an American myth is an extraordinary work of critical
imagination and historical scholarship. Through a close and historically grounded study of the series of films based
on Planet of the Apes, Greene shows how contemporary entertainment genres draw on the deep history of our
culture, and play to the concerns of current politics.
Planet of the Apes was a highly popular science-fiction movie when it was released in 1968. But its popularity had
a sequel that was, at that time, unique: instead of stimulating the production of generic imitations, Planet of the
Apes was followed by a set of systematic sequels and "prequels," which appeared at intervals over the next five
years creating, in the end, a kind of "alternate history" of the transformation of Earth into a "planet of the apes."
The Apes films thus pioneered what was to become the characteristic form of movie-genre making in
Hollywood the production of films in continuous series (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Star Trek, Die Hard, etc.). The
Apes films also spun off a television series, establishing a link with the small screen that would characterize these
later series.
What was it about Planet of the Apes that made it the focus of this sort of intense and sustained interest, for both
audiences and movie producers? Eric Greene's answer is that the original film's fable of species role-reversal
tapped a deep vein of symbolism in American national mythology: the symbolism of race difference and race
conflict, which evokes our history of Indian warfare in the West, slavery in the South, and ghetto conflicts in the
modern city. Appearing as it did in 1968, in the midst of a decade of racial upheaval the culmination of the civil
rights movement, the race riots of 196568, the Vietnam War the film's symbolism also touched a raw nerve.
Through a close critical study of the films themselves, and scholarly investigation of the studio discussions that
shaped the productions, Greene shows how the Apes films became a kind of "public myth": a story structure whose
symbolism seemed to resonate with the current crises in American society. With each successive project, the
filmmakers became more

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self-conscious about the political and social relevance of the series' basic premises, and more sophisticated in
exploiting the symbolism of a planet "half Ape and half human." This tendency culminated in the fourth film of
the series, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), in which the history of the Watts riots (1965) is allegorically
transformed into the mythic terms of the Apes series.
If Greene had done no more than this, his book would be a model for the study of the cultural and political role of
the popular arts. But Greene looks deeper, to explore the historical roots of the symbols, images, and ideas that
shaped the Apes series.
The myths and genres that form the surface of contemporary culture are not overnight inventions, but the end-
products of a long historical process of culture-making. As Greene shows, the images and concepts of the Apes
series draw on myths that are as old as the nation itself. The United States began as a group of European colonial
settlements, which gained power and wealth, and finally a national identity, through the steady conquest and
displacement of Native Americans. During the heyday of our expansion to the West, half of the territory taken
from Native Americans was developed through the use of African slave labor. Thus one of the fundamental
structures of American myth has been the idea that national progress and democracy are achieved through the
conquest of "savage" and "primitive" non-Whites by advanced and civilized Whites. This myth has provided a
pseudo-historical basis for the concepts and practices of white supremacy that prevailed in the United States until
fairly recently and still exercise a powerful influence in our culture.
As Greene shows, racialist thinkers at a very early date used analogies with lower animal species to argue for the
biological or natural inferiority of non-Whites. Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on Virginia (1781), suggested that
Blacks might be, by nature, as close to "the Oran-ootan" as to the white model of human perfection. But the force
of this analogy was not fully developed until the postCivil War period and the triumph of Social Darwinism as a
scientific and political ideology. Using a perverse misreading of Darwinian theory, racial theorists and supporters
of the South's "Jim Crow" laws argued that non-Whites were less highly evolved than Whites, closer in form and
intellect to the ancestor-apes from whom humanity evolved.
There was more to this theory than a mere description of supposed physical and mental difference. At the core of
this racialist ideology was the belief that different races were naturally incapable of sharing the same territory on
terms of equality. Jefferson theorized that the attempt to set Negroes free in the same country as their former
masters would produce a "war of extermination" in which one or the other race would perish. Later apologists for
slavery, and for the post-slavery "Jim Crow" regime, treated Jefferson's speculation as proven fact.

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Thus at the core of racialist ideology was a myth or scenario of inescapable violence. Belief in racialist myth left
Americans with a drastically constricted vocabulary for imagining solutions to the race problem. The myth made
equal sharing of power between the races inconceivable: any attempt to achieve equality would merely incite Black
violence and provoke a genocidal war of races. Hence the only way to preserve society was to subjugate Blacks by
a regime of force: laws excluding them from the exercise of political rights, with violence (both official and lynch-
mob) to discourage resistance. The logic of this belief-system produced the Jim Crow regime of racial exclusion,
discrimination, violence, and intolerance that was challenged and partly overturned by the Civil Rights Movement
of 195070.
It is this myth of racial violence that is the core scenario of the Apes series. Through Greene's lucid and well-
grounded discussion, we see how the makers of the Apes series first used the myth, then became conscious of
it and finally began to explore its political implications and moral consequences in a self-conscious way. His book
offers an invaluable insight into the way mass culture is made; how contemporary popular art-forms actually draw
on the traditional language of myth, symbol, and ideology; and how, through their practical use of myth, they adapt
the mythic language, interrogate it, and transform it.
In a larger sense, his study teaches us how and why we need to study the phenomena of contemporary popular
culture. The images and myths we take for granted as part of the world of entertainment often have deep historical
roots and evoke powerful, persuasive ideological traditions. Only by examining that history, and subjecting those
myths to critical analysis, can we move beyond the moral and conceptual limitations of our mythic traditions and
escape the fatal choices that doom "the planet of the apes."
RICHARD SLOTKIN

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