planet culture
Monday, July 23, 2001

... the production values were comically shoddy but the story lines strikingly mature. Sammy Davis Jr. considered the first film, which premiered in 1968, the best allegory on race relations he'd ever seen. Newsweek's reviewer thought it caught the audience "at a particularly wretched moment in the course of human events, when we are perfectly willing to believe that man is despicable and a good deal lower than the lower animals." Peter Singer aside, humanity has a higher opinion of itself these days, and the old story lines seem so radical it's a wonder the series—which is based loosely on a novel by Pierre Boulle—got made in the first place.
--- Alex Abramowich, "The Apes of Wrath", Slate, July 20, 2001.

I would be truly astonished if the new Planet of the Apes had any social commentary, let alone the hard-edged style of the original series.

Hard-edged commentary -- in fact, commentary of ANY sort -- isn't really a hallmark of Tim Burton's body of work; the closest he comes to any sort of cultural critique is Edward Scissorhands -- and even there, as Ebert points out -- the critique is blunted by the context, and by the ending. Burton's lack of social commentary/critique in his films isn't necessarily a bad thing -- there's nothing wrong with movies as pure entertainment. People may be disappointed that a given film doesn't do more or say more when it could, but it's difficult to fault it for something that the director never intended to exist in the first place.

The types of films and televisions being produced by the studio system today also argue against Planet of the Apes having much to say about our current social condition. Anything with any real cultural critique/commentary is being shunted into sector markets, such as Singleton's new film Baby Boy -- the film isn't being positioned to find a mass market, and was clearly made with its target audience in mind, generalizability of various issues aside. This is true of "issue" films in general; either they're made for sector markets or if for a more general audience, targeted for the end of the year for awards season. The television market is even more diffuse and divided. Compare today's market to the 1970s and early 1980s: All in the Family .... The Jeffersons ... Maude ... MASH. Not one of them could get on the air today. No television network today would take the chance of showing a regular character as out and out bigoted as Archie Bunker and George Jefferson, still less playing him for comedy. In part, that's because we somehow take things more seriously today, whether for good or ill. In these days of fractured audiences, television networks are far less willing to take ANY risks; if they're not reasonably sure of some chance of success -- either with broad appeal or draws for particular demographics -- a show won't generally make it on the air.

This Planet of the Apes is meant to be a Big-Time Box Office Blockbuster -- the original may have been as well, but there's more attention paid to the business of hollywood these days. Even if Burton is willing to stick pointed social commentary and critique in the film, no studio would be willing to allow him to do so. In the studio view, thinking interferes with making lots of money -- the target audience for the 2001 version is teenaged boys, hardly a group known for wanting that sort of intelligence from a film; the target audience for the original was broader, but generally it was considered to be an adult film. The studio will want the 2001 Planet to be entertaining, big, brainless spectacle to keep those boys coming back and paying again and again.

This version seems to be in the "lone hero" archetype -- one man causes a revolution and changes the world. That alone stands the original on its head. To the extent that the original could be said to have a message, it was that humans wouldn't change and were taking the world to its doom; the next civilization to replace us also seemed to replicate our mistakes, and eventually died as well. (Though that had more to do with humans than with the successors.) One man as saviour will, in this day and age, certainly be a more popular message than "we're taking the world to doom", but somehow, I think it's hardly likely to be more accurate.

© 2001 Iain Jackson, after-words.org

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