Apish Ramblings

Ever wondered why our zodiac doesn't include an ape as avatar for one of the 12 signs? We have a ram, a bull, a crab, a lion, a centaur, a scorpion, a sea goat and fishes - stayed well away from our nearest ancestors didn't we? Maybe the twins, the virgin and the water-bearer were really apes. The scales? Oddly the only non-living non-breathing avatar, the one without Earth's malignantly infested  astrology and DNA to worry about ?

Apocalyptic and dystopian tales keep on coming. We've been treated to many stories of our ape ancestors/successors since 1968's original movie Planet of the Apes hit the screens. This year we have yet another sequel/prequel/$$$$$$quel in a long line of ape-filled films, spawned from French author Pierre Boulle's original novel, published in 1963.

From the "blurb" on the book's back cover:

It "hurtles the reader into a distant simian world where man is brute and ape intelligent, in a novel as harrowing, hypnotic, and meaningful as any of the great masterpieces of satiric literature."

"This novel is respectfully descended from Swift on one side, and Verne on the other." (The Atlantic Monthly)

"The tale enables Boulle to dissect, with delicate irony, the stupidity of established authority, the vanity of human ambition and the nature of our own society. The novel's surprise ending is singularly horrifying." (Newark News)

"Planet of the Apes is tomorrow's version of Gulliver's Travels." (Louisville Times)

Pierre Boulle (20 February 1912 – 30 January 1994) also wrote Bridge over the River Kwai (adapted, very successfully, to film too).

Apart from a wonderfully memorable scene in the original Planet of the Apes movie (when Charlton Heston finds the Statue of Liberty broken, half-submeged on the sea shore and cries "Damn you all to hell!") the films, or those I've seen, were....well, just alright enough to pass a couple of hours when at a loose end.

It appears the Statue of Liberty ending was dreamed up especially for the original movie; it did not appear in the novel. Pierre Boulle achieved a similar surprise, but in a different way.

Boulle described his novel as fantasy rather than science fiction, with a strong vein of social satire and allegory. The author is said to have used experience as a soldier and prisoner during World War 2 in depicting the relationship between apes and men.

From what I've gleaned online Boulle's novel begins differently from the original movie. The novel's story was framed as a record set out in a manuscript found in a floating bottle, in space, by a couple of wealthy space tourists. The manuscript, they discovered, was a hand-written account by one Ulysse Mérou, a Paris journalist, who tells of his visit (in the year 2500) to Alpha Orionis, a planet entirely controlled by apes.

Mérou's companions were killed, he remained marooned on the planet. After much deprivation and many adventures he escaped to his still orbiting spaceship, travelled back to Earth and Paris through many centuries of relative time. Officials are waiting to meet him; it is around 700 years after his departure. From their back views the welcoming committee appeared normal to Mérou, as they turn around - yep, you guessed: apes. On Earth evolution had slipped into reverse. A final "surprise" takes the reader back to the framing in the first chapter - the two space tourists who found the message in a bottle are revealed to be chimpanzees.

We saw the previous movie in the new Apes sequence, Rise of Planet of the Apes, a prequel to the original 1968 movie. It was a fair enough visualisation of how such a turn around might have come about. This year's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a continuation of that theme, we saw it this week. We enjoyed it. There are messages embedded, which I hope young people who see the film will identify and absorb. This film, more than the "Rise of..." or any of the earlier set I've seen, carries a clear lesson, and unmistakeable allegory. It's not hard to see reflections of all manner of well-known conflicts as the story unfolds: cowboys and "indians", settlers v. indigenous people, Israeli v. Palestinian, left wing v. right wing, protestant v. catholic, Christian v Muslim, capitalist v. communist... the list could go on.

The apes had been educated to live by the creed: "Ape Not Kill Ape". "I always think ape better than humans," the apes' leader, Caesar, says towards the film's conclusion as his dream of peace dies. "I see now how like them we are."

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes shows how violence and war can erupt, despite efforts to compromise, because of crafty manipulations - on both sides of a conflict. A lesson that "rotten apples", rotten humans and rotten apes (and there's always at least one) can infect a group who otherwise might have remained ambivalent and entirely disinclined towards violence. There's a feeling, by the end of the film, that tragically such conflicts, once started, have no solution, all will end in the way we know only to well from world history.

By being aware of the manipulation at source, one day things might change.

War, huh, good God y'all
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing, say it again...........

(From song written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, as sung by Edwin Starr)

Dramatically Speaking.......... of Mad Men, MLK, 1968. & Another Anniversary, A Niner!

Mad Men is the only TV drama we currently follow "live" (as against on DVD). We caught up on the first four seasons via DVD, then went "live" last year, with attendant frustration caused by plentiful commercial breaks. Mad Men, though we're mildly hooked on it, really is no more than a polished time-warp of a soap opera. It does try, and sometimes succeeds, in being a bit of an arty-farty soap opera, using barely hidden metaphor and crafty insider references, which simple-minded dum-dums like me have to discover later from reviews.

Action of classic soap operas, at least those with which I was familiar in the UK (Coronation Street, everyday story of working class folk in the north of England; Eastenders, everyday story of working class folk in London's East End; Emmerdale Farm an everyday story of country folk in Yorkshire for example) took place in the present day. Real world disasters and dramatic events had to be factored in in retrospect, if at all. Mad Men, an everyday story of advertising folk in New York is set in the 1960s. In Season 6, now showing, the year is 1968.....yes THAT dark and dreadful year for the USA! Matthew Wiener and his writers have the luxury of hindsight - long distance hindsight at that. They now are aware of how those dramas and tragedies of 1968 fit in to the pattern of action in ensuing years and decades. That fact is a good thing in some ways because, after all we're watching fiction, not fact; in other ways though, treatment of such events as the murder of Martin Luther King is necessarily going to be affected by "what we know now". It's something akin to revisionist history, I guess. Revisionist historians know how the story ended, those playing their parts during events in question didn't. Key factor!

Sunday's episode of Mad Men had MLK's murder as its set piece. I cannot say how true to life or how skewed the depiction of reactions of the Mad Men gang were. I was living in the UK at the time, in a small apartment, no TV, only a portable radio whose batteries blacked out regularly, and I seldom bought newspapers. My only source of news from the USA was from chat at the office with my boss or visitors from other departments. I have no memory at all of the reporting of MLK's murder, whereas I do still recall where I was when JFK was shot around five years earlier. I asked my husband if he could recall where he was when MLK was shot - he couldn't, but like me he had clear memories of where he was when JFK died.

Now, and for many years, Dr King's death has become such a key event in our consciousness, everyone, not only African Americans have seen and appreciated the full weight and worth of his teachings and speeches. So, if Mad Men did portray its characters' reactions differently from how they would truly have been, or if the writers felt uncertain, then it's easily understandable. In this episode there was hushed shock at a radio announcement during an advertising executives' gala dinner. There were people wondering next day whether offices should be closed as a mark of respect. The couple of fairly newly added African American cast members were shown, accurately I'm sure, in states of numb shock and despair. One secretary responded warmly to her female boss's hug, while another seemed coldly unable to respond to a similar show of condolence. In another scene lead character, Don Draper, took his son to the cinema to see Planet of the Apes as a distraction from the sadness of events that day. The now almost iconic final scene of that movie (y'all know it) added even more pathos for we viewers in 2013 than it would have in 1968: All the time it was... we finally really did it. [screaming] YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! OH, DAMN YOU! GODDAMN YOU ALL TO HELL! (camera pans to reveal the half-destroyed Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand).

What I craved immediately the episode drew to a close was to see Across the Universe again. I remembered the very same day in 1968 being a part of that movie too, but in a different context, and using songs written by those (Lennon, McCartney, Harrison) with personal knowledge of the dramatic 1960s years. So, as husband never refuses a chance to hear Beatles music, we watched our DVD once more. This is one scene from the film and aftermath of that fateful day in 1968:




Actors: Martin Luther (singing) and Jim Sturgess




POSTSCRIPT

Today, 30 April = 9th anniversary of the day Himself and I married in 2004, back in the UK. The civil ceremony was held in a room at the Town Hall of the coastal town where I then lived, and was streamed over the internet. My husband's family members, in the USA, were able to watch the proceedings over breakfast at 8am, in the UK it was 2pm. Just him, me, car driver and photographer who acted as our witnesses, that was the cast. No grand wedding, none of the usual fal-de-ral (never did go for any of that, even in my youth). The music I chose made up for other lack of grandeur:

Thanks for 9 lovely years....and counting, Anyjazz!

Apes Fore and Aft ?

We experienced an odd example of synchronicity this week. One night we watched a DVD my husband bought for my delight: The Quest For Fire - a strange but fascinating (fictional) account of primitive man's adventure during his search for the means to make fire. The movie includes references to the several strands of primates-turning-to-man thought to have existed either concurrently or in succession, from which our human race eventually sprang forth.

The next night, after American Idol (no synchronistic connection there whatever critics might suspect!) HBO presented the re-make by Tim Burton of Planet of the Apes. We'd not seen this re-hashing of the old 1960s tale, so stuck with it more from curiosity than anything else. Its peculiar ending still bugs me, and has had me researching detail of worm holes, time travel, etc. Tim Burton and his movies can be weird at times, but he certainly makes one think.

Anyway, back to Quest For Fire. It struck me after watching this that hardly anything had been made of the Sun, Moon and Stars. Sure, the final scene has a couple gazing up at a full Moon, but apart from that there's no acknowledgement that there's anything up there at all. Even so, if astrology works today (at least in part), it will have worked in exactly the same way thousands of centuries ago, with reflections of Mars or Venus or Saturn and the rest showing up in the developing character traits of primitive beings. Uranian disruption doubtless occurred once in a while too. It can hardly be in doubt that primitive men and women were beings of varying natures: gentle or aggressive; timid, or natural leaders.

Was astrology at work then though?

Did human brain capacity need to develop to a certain level before any planetary influence (or whatever "mechanism" there is within waves of time) began to manifest ?

I know - it's another unanswerable question, similar to the one bugging me about the ending of Planet of the Apes. Can't resist asking though!