Show notes
Taylor insists he isn’t running from humanity but seeking something better than man—a “world elsewhere,” like the one Coriolanus finds when he turns his back on Rome, or the heaven Milton’s Satan thinks the mind can make of hell. Can such a world exist, if every psyche carries civilization’s problems along with it? Wes & Erin take up the ape tribunal that tries scientific heresy while denying Taylor any rights under ape law, Rousseau’s case that violence turns moral only once we can take offense, and the imitative roots of culture, from joint attention to a generation gap among the apes. 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: Welcome to part two of our discussion of Planet of the Apes. We spent most of the first part talking about Taylor's misanthropy and the way this little fantasy world that he enters is a counterpoint to his misanthropy and meant to challenge it. But, Erin, you in particular were making a point. Did you want to elaborate on that or say, just remind us of what that is from the end of part one? 0:38 Erin: Yeah, just that Taylor's misanthropy seems to deny, even in a way, his own humanity, any attachments to humanity, including his own history, ancestry, parentage, whatever that may be. And it strikes me in the quote that you mentioned at the end of part one, about when Taylor gives Landon a sort of endless dressing down and says, you wanted to live forever, didn't you? Well, you damn near made it. Except for me and Dodge, you've lived longer than anyone ever born. It just strikes me that this is a really weird idea of immortality. Right? It's immortality in a vacuum. And in a way, Taylor is sort of a man in a vacuum. I mean, he is. He's the last man on Earth. But I don't know, just thinking about it a little bit, one would want immortality for lots of reasons. Maybe acquiring wisdom, experiencing everything that Earth has to offer, not having to face the possibility of death so that in theory, one could continue to learn and create and see, you know, specifically see generations and generations of one's own Family, continue on. And none of these properties of immortality, even just the feeling of being alive for a really long time, apply to Landon. So, yeah, there's something skipped. There's something missing in Taylor. There's something right. This is a conceptual idea of immortality. It's not the, forgive me, the lived experience of immortality. Do you know what I'm saying? Like he's missing something. He doesn't get what it is really to be a human. And part of that, of course, is having human entanglements. 2:12 Wes: Oh, there were women. There was plenty of lovemaking, but not much love. I don't remember how that speech goes. 2:20 Erin: That's probably the most disturbing speech in the film. Yeah. I mean, I'd love to talk about, you know, no woman, like a mute woman, but there's a lot going on there. 2:32 Wes: Yeah. It's funny because Landon says to him, you thought life on Earth was meaningless. You despised people. So what did you do? You ran out. And Taylor responds, no, no, I'm not like that, Landon. I'm a seeker, too, but my dreams aren't like yours. I can't help thinking somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man has to be. Normally, an aspiration like that plays out in political terms in the direction of some imagined utopia. What's got to change? Well, we've got to change our political system. We perhaps have to change our character as human beings. This is a big subject, especially in the wake of the French Revolution, right. Schiller's letters on aesthetic education. The worry was, well, we can't just change the institutions and the political systems. Human character has to be ready for that. There has to be some sort of fertile soil in which to implant those political systems. But someone like Taylor has given up on that possibility at all, Right? The evolution, you know, small E of human character is replaced with something that has to be superhuman. It's a little bit more like Nietzsche. Right? We have to radically change or have to develop into the. Into the Ubermensch, which, of course, in his arrogance, he seems to think he already is that to some extent. But I think Landon's accusation lands because he's fled. And in that sense, this fleeing to other worlds, it reminds me of two characters. One of them is Coriolanus and the other is Milton's Satan. I might be reading a little bit into it because these are just two lines I always remember, but for Coriolanus, right? He's another very arrogant character. There's actually a lot in common with a character like Taylor. But he turns his back right on the Romans when he does that. He says, for you, the city. Thus I turn my back. There is a world elsewhere, and I love that way of putting it. It's not just that he's gonna leave the Romans and go to their enemies. It's a whole world. This isn't my world anymore. There's a new world. Same thing with Satan, right? Space may produce new worlds. Satan himself says, the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven, which Milton is highlighting how comically delusional Satan's state of mind is, which he does in many, many different places, right? There is only one universe, and it's controlled by God. There are no new worlds outside of it. But Taylor, I think, is subject to this kind of illusion that he's going to find some sort of world which he thinks it's just outside of the human psyche. There's something way more advanced than human psyche, but there are no such worlds, because to have a psyche is to have these problems implicit in it and in one's culture and one's civilization. So you dream of a world which cannot possibly exist. So is he fleeing away? You know, is he just running away, as Landon says, Or is he actually a dreamer who's pursuing something? Well, if he is a dreamer, what he's pursuing cannot possibly be. 5:59 Erin: I love this comparison, specifically to Milton's Satan, though I love the Coriolanus reference as well. But the Satanic parallel in particular, I think resonates because, of course, when Taylor and the others come upon the humans, they're eating of the fruit of a tree, right? And Taylor will. Obviously, the others won't be so effective at this, but Taylor will come in and shake things up with a new form of defiant knowledge. An old, new form of defiant knowledge. The thing I really love. I just. I would be remiss if I didn't mention about Taylor's whole superior speechifying is that it's. The entire sequence of this conversation between Taylor and Landon is shot so that their rear ends are right in the center of the screen. It really highlights the visible panty line that Charlton Heston has going on beneath his space suit. 6:51 Wes: Okay, I didn't notice this. 6:54 Erin: You also see him lift his hands over his head at several points and his spacesuit separates. You could see this, like, undershirt or sweatshirt underneath. Just, like, really shoddy construction overall. So I'm like, is this. Is this a joke? Like, are they. You know, are they punking Charlton Heston, Are they highlighting the fact that Heston is an ass? I mean, I don't know what. What that's about, but it really made me. It really made me laugh. I also, you know, I like what you point out about the fact that this kind of dissension between Landon and Taylor doesn't really indicate that they went through training together in a similar way. Their whole sort of plan for populating some new planets, that also betrays, it really betrays a lack of understanding of human reproduction. Like why. Why would they bring one woman for 7:45 Wes: three women and one man? Not. 7:48 Erin: Or at least two and two. 7:50 Wes: Yeah, you know, but. 7:52 Erin: Yeah, just utterly bizarre. 7:54 Wes: We have to accept that none of it makes sense in the end, but. 7:57 Erin: Well, it made me want to. 7:58 Wes: English speaking apes and all that. Or maybe, maybe we could make sense of that. But that he's not, you know, cued in by that, of course, as you pointed out. 8:07 Erin: Right, right. It made me want to place this, whatever, if we want to call, according to the Ubermensch standards, this, this blonde, delicate astronaut as being something like the height of civilization, then, you know, her immediate death obviously is a harbinger of what is to come. And it also seems to me to be highly symbolic. And the death specifically in the spaceship, the sinking of the spaceship, the similarity of the, you know, again, I saw all of these things on a axis plotting out Stewart, the spaceship flight, the paper airplane, the talking doll, and then speech itself, at least human speech. All these things reflecting something like the height of human civilization, which, you know, the film is critiquing. And I don't, you know, it's uncomfortable to say this, but I suppose I'll have to go there because the movie goes there. But it seems to me that part of what the film is saying by the end is, hey, you know, forget Stewart and the refinement or whatever that she represents and go find hardier stock to start over with because he needs some middle way. So this woman halfway, this mute Nova, who is halfway between a cave woman and some kind of a hippie figure like, you know, who doesn't need SPF 1000. She seems like a better deal and won't nag you. And it seems like there's this. The movie is saying something about the need for a vital infusion, a halfway point for Taylor and for humanity to move forward. So in other words, giving some credit to the apes and taking some of humanity with you forward as well. Right. But something a little more down to earth. Something that. Something like the halfway point that the Humans in the tree represent not all the way off the ground, but somewhere close to the ground. I don't know. It seemed to me that this is part of what the film is trying to. I always make much of blondes on film, especially icy blondes, in this case in more ways than one. They always seem to represent something, right. Aristocratic, hyper, civilizational. And the fact that she just doesn't even speak and immediately dies, just that can't not be suggestive to me on some symbolic level. 10:27 Wes: Well, yeah, you said a lot. And I mean, one of the things that you reminded me of was that if there's one benefit to the sort of ape civilization that's developed, it's the fact that there are limits on technology, which kind of gets at. I think your point about a vital infusion, this is a very real problem with civilization is that they. Technological advancements, which can make life so much better, also have social consequences. They can put a barrier in between us and nature and our natural side, between us and reality. Even language as a technology does that. And then of course they can also be used. Technology can also be used very destructively. And we today, of course, are facing that more, more than ever with AI. Our own artifacts could end up swallowing us. Technology could be the end of us. So there might be an argument, and people often make this argument for restraints on this sort of technological advancement or trying to do something to put us more in touch with, to remediate, to undo the alienating consequences of technology, including the ways in which they separate us from attachments to tradition, for instance, or to more down to earth ways of, ways of life. Yeah, so I think I see what you're saying about ape culture being in that position, but it is very creepy. You know, you also reminded me of just that whole doll scene when I was younger. I just think all of it was just so, you know, kind of made my hair stand on end type of thing. Like, you know, especially the Statue of Liberty at the end, but just this kind of post apocalyptic vision looking back on a human society that has to an end, that's been destroyed. And then there's this, what might as well be an alien race of archaeologists looking at us from the distant future. So I don't know what else to say about that, how to describe the creepiness of that. 12:29 Erin: Yeah, I mean, I think the 2000 years is such an interesting and significant stretch of time. Right. Especially because there's obviously been some sort of new prophet figure that the apes are propping up the presentism that we all suffer from. And then the realization that one day, if we're lucky, and any humans survive for another 2,000 years, they're going to look back at us and go, wow, look at these, like, quaint little people. It's creepy. Or we're going to go into a dark age. And then. Yeah. And it's going to be like ancient Greek and Roman civilization, where they're going to be like, wow, they had better than basic cable. Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, the other major plot hole for me is simply the fact that if this society is so effective at quelling uprisings from humanity, at quelling efforts to rise above the ground in any literal or metaphorical sense, then why are scientists allowed in this civilization at all? Why are the chimpanzees allowed to do any sort of experimentation? It all seems to be based around brain surgery, which they're, like, weird. Weirdly into. Maybe not advanced at, though they significantly, successfully lobotomize. Yeah. But I don't know how much skill that takes as a brain surgeon. If we're talking about just, you know, taking a chunk out would pretty much do anybody in. Yeah. So there's an interest in brain surgery other than that, you know, they're shocked by paper airplane. They have this, of course, interesting construction of scientific heresy, dual strand term that comes up again and again in the film, and they have very strict limits on what science one can or cannot engage in. I don't know. It just seems like if the orangutans have this incredible stranglehold on the culture, they wouldn't allow any of these types of experiments to go on at all. And they wouldn't allow Dr. Zira to do her work or anything like that. But then I guess you wouldn't have a film and you wouldn't have some of these. The whole flipping on its head of the monkey lab concept, which is obviously very effective. 14:36 Wes: What do you think of Dr. Zaius and this whole courtroom drama and all that stuff? 14:42 Erin: There was flab to the film for me, watching it as an adult. You know, there's a lot of back and forth that, you know, like I said, it just. It goes in some weird directions, this film. And it's like, okay, so now it's Inherit the Wind. You know, there's just a. 14:56 Wes: Well, the midpoint of the film is him speaking, Taylor speaking for the first time. And it's a climactic moment that's hard to top. And I think that the Statue of Liberty successfully does that at the end. But as usual, I mean, often Things in film start lagging in Act 2. So it's the second part of Act 2, where. Yes. Now it's like, okay, what are we gonna do with the rest of this film after he's spoken, right. Obviously, he's gotta escape, but then where is he gonna escape to? How do you create a…
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