Is the Planet of the Apes Closer than We Thought?
Many people forget (assuming they ever bother to inquire) that, like most sci fi movies, the original Planet of the Apes is based on a book, and a French book, at that-- Pierre Boulle's 1963 novel, La Planete des singes. Should they dig a little deeper, they are even more surprised to find that Boulle was not strictly a sci fi author. For example, he penned the volume that inspired another famous film, The Bridge on the River Kwai. What a strange man! To write both sci fi and war stories! Yet, there is nothing at all strange about this when you consider that what really interested Boulle was not a given genre, but the ways he could use it to examine culture. More specifically, the conflict or juxtaposition between competing cultures. In the case of Le Pont de la riviere Kwai, it was Japanese versus British, Colonel Saito's bushido warrior code against the proverbial sang froid, or imperturbable nature of Colonel Nicholson (with a side order of unsophisticated American pragmatism in the form of Commander Spears). The "stronger" culture does not always win, as Nicholson eventually prevails over Saito's Samurai values and drives him to the brink of suicide. In La Planete des singes, it is human presumptuousness against the surprisingly intellectual and spiritual qualities of the apes.
Pursuing the search even further, a fan will find that many of the features of the book were quite different from the Hollywood screenplays it spawned. One of the most astounding departures is that the nuclear holocaust discovered by Charlton Heston's Taylor character never took place in Boulle's
universe. Instead, humans fell victim to a cultural collapse. As Boulle explains, "une paresse cerebrale s'est empare de nous," "a laziness of the brain overtook us." Humans stopped challenging their brains, notably giving up reading. Meantime apes achieved mastery of language and, through solitary meditation, philosophy and the keys to knowledge. They began to subjugate humans through a rather benign process, rising as their former masters declined.
It is perhaps typical of the culturally-obsessed French that human destiny should hinge on processes of learning, adapting and acculturation, rather than on the thermonuclear explosions and apocalyptic thinking that have gripped the American collective mind. True, Hollywood eventually came around to a more Boullean view of things in the more recent ape cycle, accenting the parallel rise and fall of the two cultures. Yet, they could not wean themselves completely from the familiar tropes of apocalyse, using an anti-Alzheimer's experiment gone awry as the agent of human demise rather than a simple reliance on bombs. Perhaps the future will see a return to Boulle's original vision in another series of ape films, as the superb talents of Andy Serkis have revived interest in the cycle, and Americans themselves have become more and more hooked on cycles in any form of media.
To return to Boulle's notion of "mental laziness," an article quoted from the Chronicle of Higher Education drove my imagination back to the theme. It described the assignment of a free lance writer, himself a never-employed English PhD, to cover the annual convention of the Modern Language Association of America in Chicago. The writer found academics who not only acknowledged his personal observations on the withering state of learning in the USA, but also admitted that the crisis had begun even as he and thousands of others were being fed into degree machines that were already privately aware of the futility of their advertising. Nor was the decline limited just to unstudied books in English, like his beloved poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, for the other languages have seen the abolition of over 500 departments in just a decade. He is honest enough to accept that a good share of the blame for this mental laziness lies with academia itself, as it drifted into a habit of obtuse postmodern navel-gazing, instead of establishing intellectual contacts with the "real world." Of course, the woes of the MLA are just part of a much larger process, as traditional universities substitute branding for research and certifiable "knowledge lite" for intensive intellectual inquiry, while ruthless proprietary startups offer degrees online in pay-as-you-go schemes scarcely different from payday loans. Even the distinguished Nobel Prize committees have melted down in a series of embarrassing "me too" firefights and extra-literary adventures. And of course, if we wish to talk of cerebral laziness, we need to go no further than 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW and its attendant sideshows scattered around the District of Columbia. Surely, it's a little early yet to affirm that a full-scale cultural collapse has already taken place, but it's high time to reflect on whether Boulle might not have been just a bit prophetic about humans losing their way as they move into the future.
Pursuing the search even further, a fan will find that many of the features of the book were quite different from the Hollywood screenplays it spawned. One of the most astounding departures is that the nuclear holocaust discovered by Charlton Heston's Taylor character never took place in Boulle's
universe. Instead, humans fell victim to a cultural collapse. As Boulle explains, "une paresse cerebrale s'est empare de nous," "a laziness of the brain overtook us." Humans stopped challenging their brains, notably giving up reading. Meantime apes achieved mastery of language and, through solitary meditation, philosophy and the keys to knowledge. They began to subjugate humans through a rather benign process, rising as their former masters declined.
It is perhaps typical of the culturally-obsessed French that human destiny should hinge on processes of learning, adapting and acculturation, rather than on the thermonuclear explosions and apocalyptic thinking that have gripped the American collective mind. True, Hollywood eventually came around to a more Boullean view of things in the more recent ape cycle, accenting the parallel rise and fall of the two cultures. Yet, they could not wean themselves completely from the familiar tropes of apocalyse, using an anti-Alzheimer's experiment gone awry as the agent of human demise rather than a simple reliance on bombs. Perhaps the future will see a return to Boulle's original vision in another series of ape films, as the superb talents of Andy Serkis have revived interest in the cycle, and Americans themselves have become more and more hooked on cycles in any form of media.
To return to Boulle's notion of "mental laziness," an article quoted from the Chronicle of Higher Education drove my imagination back to the theme. It described the assignment of a free lance writer, himself a never-employed English PhD, to cover the annual convention of the Modern Language Association of America in Chicago. The writer found academics who not only acknowledged his personal observations on the withering state of learning in the USA, but also admitted that the crisis had begun even as he and thousands of others were being fed into degree machines that were already privately aware of the futility of their advertising. Nor was the decline limited just to unstudied books in English, like his beloved poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, for the other languages have seen the abolition of over 500 departments in just a decade. He is honest enough to accept that a good share of the blame for this mental laziness lies with academia itself, as it drifted into a habit of obtuse postmodern navel-gazing, instead of establishing intellectual contacts with the "real world." Of course, the woes of the MLA are just part of a much larger process, as traditional universities substitute branding for research and certifiable "knowledge lite" for intensive intellectual inquiry, while ruthless proprietary startups offer degrees online in pay-as-you-go schemes scarcely different from payday loans. Even the distinguished Nobel Prize committees have melted down in a series of embarrassing "me too" firefights and extra-literary adventures. And of course, if we wish to talk of cerebral laziness, we need to go no further than 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW and its attendant sideshows scattered around the District of Columbia. Surely, it's a little early yet to affirm that a full-scale cultural collapse has already taken place, but it's high time to reflect on whether Boulle might not have been just a bit prophetic about humans losing their way as they move into the future.
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