Lab Hybrids and Planets of the Apes Lab Hybrids and Planets of the ApesLike folkloric horror films about vampires and werewolves, science-fiction movies about animal-human hybrids started early in cinema’s history— reflecting the hyper-theatricality of our ape egos in that new medium, as a monstrous potential for devilish passions and angelic yearnings.1 Recent psychological experiments offer insights about the continued appeal of such films with their various remakes and sequels. Most children have a “natural” (or nature-culture coevolved) tendency to attribute agency, design, and purpose to living things, extending from animal to human to god figures, as created and creators (Barrett). Even 3 to 6-month-old babies pay attention in different ways to discs on a video screen that appear to chase one another or just move randomly, showing that they notice agency (36). This also relates to the Theory of Mind tests mentioned in the last chapter, regarding how humans develop views of the other’s perspective, well beyond that of our ape relatives.
A majority of 3-year-olds tested in various cultures think that an adult or god would know the contents of a mislabeled or darkened box. But 5-year-olds realize that the adult would have a different perspective, not knowing the real contents like they do, without seeing inside. And yet, at that age, children continue to attribute omniscience to god, depending on their religious context (Barrett 88–90, 99–104, 109–10). They also, between the ages of four and nine, tend to view animals as intelligently designed with a purpose given by their creator (46–49). When compared with children in fundamentalist Christian families, children raised by non-fundamentalists favored such “creationist accounts” less, but still more so than their parents (68). “Developmental psychologists continue to find evidence that the godly properties of superknowledge, superperception, creative power, and immortality are quite intuitive, at least for young children” (80). Thus, the continuum from animal to human, in a child’s view and in the intuitions of later life, involves a cosmic theater, extending from the inner performances of one’s own brain, with its creative and destructive potential, to adults’ power over the animal energies of the child, to the projected superpower of Other beings.2
Even without the super-natural powers of a vampire to live beyond the grave, or of a werewolf to transform in the moonlight, other animal-humans express the bestial drives and divine aspirations within us, especially from our early life experiences of a changing body and of big people as role models. From the 1930s to 1970s to 1990s, several movies have been made, based on the H. G. Wells novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau, with a cruel scientist surgically or genetically changing animals into half-human hybrids. These films reflect a child’s fear, even at home, of a godlike parent/ creator exposing and punishing its animal passions—a fear that continues into our adult social lives. Such island movies, like the lab films, The Fly and Splice, explore the Frankenstein trope of the mad scientist reengineering human life, expressing our continued fear of, yet desire for, godlike biotech powers.3 The simian societies of the “planet of the apes” films also show our ape egos redefined, more collectively, in a future dream/nightmare of conflicting ethno-species characteristics, cultural ideals, and charismatic leaders. All of these movies play with fantasies involving primal drives that we inherit from our animal ancestors—survival and reproduction, territoriality and pleasure, dominance, attraction, and trickery. Such drives are extended onscreen toward sci-fi threat rehearsals and morality tales of exotic worlds that fold back uncannily onto our own. How do these films reflect our morphing ape egos, our inner movie-theater elements, and our body-swapping identifications with mass media images? How do they also explore specific concerns of the past, which persist today, as our cinematic awareness continues to shape our bio-cultural evolution—with devilish, animal-human characters onscreen and a godlike role for the audience?
Created just 70 years after the end of slavery in the United States, and soon after the start of “talking” films, The Island of Lost Souls (Erle C. Kenton, 1932) adapted an H.G. Wells novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), which had also been made into a French silent film, Ile d’Epouvante (The Island of Terror, Joe Hamman, 1913). The Island of Lost Souls added Depression Era fears of underclass revolution, and yet sympathy for the oppressed, to the novel’s concerns about Social Darwinist eugenics (Kirby), colonial callousness, and inhuman scientific experimentation. Although similar in many ways to the popular horror and sci-fi films, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, and Frankenstein, which appeared a year earlier, Island of Lost Souls was a box office failure. It was so controversial for its suggestions of human bestiality and surgery without anesthetics that it was banned in parts of the United States and in many other countries, including Germany, where the Nazis would soon implement cruel human experiments in their concentration camps (Dinello 367–68). The film was ahead of its audience’s awareness as a sci-fifantasy, revealing the potential horrors of modern civilization and technology, which the holocaust and World War II would soon bring to reality. Yet it also reflected the cruelties of European colonialism, with out-group racial scapegoating, in the previous 400 years.
Sympathy for the film’s animal-human monsters is evoked early on. The hero of the film, Edward Parker (Richard Arlen), recently saved from a shipwreck, tries to stop the cruelty of his new captain toward a lowly servant, M’ling (Tetsu Komai), on the ship that saved him, which is transporting dogs and wild animals to a mysterious island. Recently restored to life and human companionship, Parker punches the drunken Captain Davies, getting revenge for M’ling who was punched by him for spilling some food meant for the animals. Parker then notices M’ling’s hairy pointed ear and flat nose. Later, after being left on Moreau’s island by the vengeful Davies, Parker sees “natives” that are apparently human but with strange heads and bodies covered with even more hair, like the “wolf man” in the film of that name made almost a decade later. Bela Lugosi, a year after his appearance as Dracula, plays the “Sayer of the Law” in this film, with thick hair all over his face transforming him also into a werewolf-like figure.
The title of the film suggests that the island’s “natives” are humans with souls who have lost their way. But Parker learns that Dr. Moreau and his assistant, Mr. Montgomery (who saved Parker from the sea), have hyper-evolved them from various species of animals. The title thus raises a question that haunted white colonists ever since Columbus: are the strange-looking natives, discovered (and then redesigned) by Europeans, “human” with God-given “souls”? Played as a dapper, yet sinister dandy by the chubby British actor, Charles Laughton, sporting a goatee and a white suit (like Montgomery and Parker), Moreau explains that he first evolved plants into their future monstrosities and then turned to animals. Assuming a godlike role, he has “stripped away 100,000 years of slow evolution,” in order to prove that “all animal life is tending toward the human form.” Focusing the rasas of awe and disgust in movie viewers, Parker is appalled when he sees Moreau’s “vivisection” of a humanoid animal on the operating table, without anesthetic. But Parker also learns that he is the subject of a new experiment, even as a noble American. He is being used in a romantic test of Moreau’s “most perfect creation,” the Panther Woman called “Lota,” who is “the only woman on the island” until Parker’s fiancée, Ruth, arrives with another ship’s captain, Donahue, to save him.4
As Fatimah Tobing Rony points out, some of the animal-human monsters in the film are “coded in racial terms” (168).5 M’ling appears to be a “dog-man, [yet also] is coded as East Asian—servile and bestial—slightly higher in status than some of Moreau’s other beasts who have become his slaves. . . .” Lota (Kathleen Burke), although created from a panther, wears makeup and a costume that make her “a typical ‘South Seas’ siren” (169). She appears to be fully human with sexy, hairless legs and arms. But when she seduces Parker, he finds that her fingernails can turn into claws. This shocks him even more than the vivisection: “an animal with a woman’s emotions,” he says, “it’s criminal. . . . I could have overlooked those others. . . . Now I’ll expose the world to what you really are, Moreau.” Thus, through Parker’s gaze as heroic lens, the movie may elicit from viewers a cross-species (and cross-racial) compassion, involving an ironic mix of rasas: eroticism, disgust, sorrow, fear, anger, and courage. Earlier in the film, too, such rasas are evoked when Parker tries to flee with Lota, but they are surrounded by dozens of hairy animal-human hybrids. Lugosi’s Sayer of the Law leers lustily into the camera then, putting the movie viewer into Lota’s position as object of his bestial male gaze, but also reflecting the viewer’s desire for exotic contact. As Rony puts it, “the viewer is made into a monster as well” (169).
If the monstrous “natives” on Moreau’s island are “lost souls,” were they given that distinctive element of the human spirit by their scientist-creator? He transformed them into humanoid beasts through his hellish “House of Pain.” And he threatens to put them in there again if they break “the Law” while he keeps them on a purgatorial island. Like the slayer to the vampire (in films discussed in Chapter 4), Moreau exemplifies an extreme version of the left-hemisphere critic/scripter, with rationalizing, law-enforcing, language-based functions, while snapping his whip to control his more right-brain oriented, limbic impassioned, and brainstem driven creatures. Yet they seem to have at least partial, paradoxical “souls,” through their bio-cultural evolution, expressing an inner-theater friction between the LPFC character, DMPFC director, VMPFC stage/production manager, and MPFC actor of a mirror-aware, Other-influenced, and Law-guided Self—in their conflicts with Moreau.
Unlike Shakespeare’s Caliban, who curses his master, Prospero, for teaching him language on a magic island in The Tempest, the beast-people of Moreau’s island obediently recite his “Law,” at least initially. When questioned by Moreau and his whip, Lugosi’s hairy-faced Sayer of the Law leads his fellow “natives” in a chant, which restrains their apparent animal drive to devour Parker and Lota. “What is the Law?” Moreau asks. The Sayer replies: “Not to run on all fours, that is the Law. Are we not men?” And the others echo him. He continues to recite the Laws taught by Moreau, which they again repeat: not to eat meat and not to spill blood. Then the Sayer leads the animal-human monsters in a chant of worship and submission toward their creator, Moreau. “His is the hand that makes. . . . His is the hand that heals. . . . His is the House of Pain.” Later, Moreau boasts to Parker that giving his creatures language was a “great achievement, articulate speech controlled by the brain.” He shows Parker his “less successful” creatures, enslaved to turn a large wheel, to power his further experiments. And he asks Parker, “Do you know what it means to feel like God?”
Moreau, as godlike colonial scientist and tyrant, continues to experiment with his animal-human children. It is not enough to hyper-evolve them from beasts to humans, and then teach them speech and the Law, replacing their animal instincts with cultural, superego demands. He also tests the erotic powers of his “most perfect” Lota, wanting to further evolve her mammalian-ape ego by introducing her to Parker. As he admits later, he plans to get her pregnant via Parker and then exhibit her in London. So he spies on them like the movie viewer. Although engaged to Ruth and calling Lota a “child,” Parker succumbs to her simple speech, catlike cuddling, and longing eyes. He embraces and kisses her, and then sees her claws, which disgust him. When Moreau learns of this, he is disgusted, too, by the “stubborn beast flesh creeping back.” But he is reassured about her human soul when she, rejected by Parker, shows tears. She thus represents the paradoxical nature of all human beings, with animal drives and brain structures competing against “higher” orders of mind, involving romantic and divine aspirations—as shown with Moreau and his other offspring, more critically, as the film proceeds.
After Parker’s fiancée Ruth reaches the island (a departure from the original novel), baser passions emerge in Moreau’s creations, reflecting his own. Ruth is shown undressing alone and slipping into bed, evoking the movie viewer’s godlike gaze—akin to Moreau’s with Parker and Lota earlier. Then a hairy, muscular beast-man, Ouran, not only looks through the bars of her bedroom window, like the voyeuristic viewer or Moreau, but also begins to breaks in, like Frankenstein’s monster, causing her to scream. Parker hurries to save her and shoots at the intruding beast-man in the window. Captain Donahue then chases Ouran through the jungle, but gets caught by him and torn apart, in an offscreen sparagmos by the animal-human “natives” (like the Dionysian-possessed women in Euripides’s play, The Bacchae). Ouran brings a bloody shirt to the Sayer of the Law and asks if Moreau is a man and can die, too. The Sayer tells him he broke the Law, but admits that their god is mortal.
This film reflects in various ways our inner theater of animal to human to semidivine networks and the hall of cracked mirrors it sometimes produces between us. Moreau is mortal (and seems hypocritical to the movie viewer), so his island Law is flawed. His “native” children shift from left-cortical obedience to right-cortical rebellion, evoking limbic rage, group-survival, and fight-for-freedom networks. They improvise a new order of collective performing selves, altering their PFC actor/director, character, and stage manager against Moreau as dominant Other. Like the capuchin monkeys in de Waal’s experiment, furious at the experimenter’s unfairness (see Chapter 3), their primate egos rebel against Moreau’s colonial, cultish science. They charge at him, despite his snapping whip, and carry him back to his lab. “You made us things. . . part men, part beasts,” the Sayer leads them in chanting. They corner him, approaching the camera (and movie audience) like determined zombies. Then they put him on the operating table, break the glass cabinet to get his surgical instruments, and alter his godlike position.
When they chase Moreau, the natives hold torches—like the mob chasing Frankenstein’s monster in the famous horror film made by James Whale one year earlier. But in this film, Parker flees, too, drawing more sympathy from the audience, akin to them as a vulnerable visitor to the island lab. He escapes with his fiancée back to a civilized world, for a happy ending to the movie. And yet, Moreau’s monstrosity, like the natives’ final rebellion, casts a shadow on the noble hero and his fiancée as they leave the island. “Don’t look back,” Montgomery tells them, providing another viewpoint for film watchers to consider, as Moreau’s earlier assistant in the experiments who then saved Parker and eventually sided with him against the mad scientist. Can they (Montgomery, Parker, and Ruth) choose not to look back? Or will they be haunted by what Moreau showed them of the godlike potential in human technology—and of “all animal life . . . tending toward the human form”?6
We might look back with a postmodern critique of this film for stereotyping “natives” as monstrous cannibals attacking the colonist at its climax. We do not know if they literally consumed Moreau, breaking his Law against eating flesh and making him an even more ironic god or Christ-figure. But this is also suggested earlier in the film, when Captain Donahue asks, at Moreau’s colonial dinner table, whether the natives are cannibals, not long before the monstrous Ouran, as a lusty native, visits Ruth’s bedroom. On the other hand, the film complicates such simple stereotypes by shifting audience sympathies across the left-cortical binaries of white and dark people, colonists and “natives,” civilized and savage, dominant men and seductive, yet helplessly screaming women. Indeed, Lota, as a Panther Woman, not only gains audience sympathy in her attraction to the handsome hero, Parker, she also gets revenge for his fiancée, leaping on Ouran from a tree and clawing him to death during the rebellion, although she dies as well. She thus prefigures many later heroines with claws and other weapons, whose “murderous animal nature” (as Moreau puts it), with righteous acts of vengeance, as slayers of certain monsters, might horrify us, yet also evoke, with tragicomic twists, a cathartic refinement of various emotions in our inner theaters.
In 1932, moviegoers did not know that Josef Mengele and other Nazis would soon outdo Moreau’s monstrous island lab in real life, with surgical experiments and other tortures performed on concentration-camp prisoners, both adults and children. But perhaps Charles Laughton in the Moreau role, with a sadistic, greedy arrogance, suggested even then a tragic flaw in the left-cortical hubris of colonial European and Anglo-American cultures.7 (Laughton later worked in southern California with German playwright Bertolt Brecht, revising his play about Galileo as a response to scientists creating and the United States deploying atom bombs.) The natives’ dismemberment of Moreau, and yet Parker’s survival beyond the revolution, foreshadows the end of European imperialism after World War II and America taking on some of that mission, in fighting communism around the world, especially in French Indochina. And then, after 45 years of American growth as a world superpower (with Hays Code censorship from 1934 to 1968), Hollywood returned to Wells’s novel in the post-Vietnam era, reflecting again upon the temptation to view certain humans as godlike and others as mere animals.
Genetic engineering experiments at Stanford University in the early 1970s revived popular fears about a Moreau-made world in the future (Kirby 98). Several films were created to capitalize on those fears, including a remake of Wells’s novel, which brought back the original title and was directed by Don Taylor in 1977. Obvious differences from the novel and the 1932 film appear in this version, which focuses more on the island’s visitor as a sympathetic hero and yet potential animal. This reflects increasing concerns about biotechnology and colonization, after American misdeeds in Vietnam.
At the start, Andrew Braddock (instead of “Prendick” or “Parker”) is floating in a small boat at sea, along with a fellow seaman, Charlie, after the wreck of their ship, Lady Vain. (There is a third sailor who dies and they dump him overboard.) While the boat drifts, a musical score stirs the melodramatic tension, which increases when Braddock (Michael York) sees land. Unlike the 1932 film, which had no soundtrack, this one attempts to underscore the emotional participation of the audience and perhaps fails at times—like Moreau trying to conduct the animal passions of his chimeras. This movie cuts the novel’s opening, included in the earlier film, about the hero being on a ship, which had rescued him, and fighting the captain there, before being left on the island. Instead, Braddock finds the island directly, more like a colonist himself. He wakes after 17 days adrift, sees land, rows to it, and then carries his unconscious shipmate to the shore. He leaves Charlie near the beach and goes inland to find water, but his companion is soon dragged away by an offscreen force. As the musical tension builds, Braddock sees mysterious figures in the jungle, runs from them, and falls into an animal trap.
With this change in the plot (by screenwriters John Herman Shaner and Al Ramrus) and an added musical score, the 1977 movie focuses its audience on the hero’s subjective experience of the island, which saves him from death at sea, yet reveals its own dangers. Montgomery (Nigel Davenport) greets the hero when he wakes, restored to health like in the earlier version. But here, he wakes in Moreau’s compound and Montgomery is a “mercenary” who refuses to answer questions about the island’s creatures. Later, he offers Braddock a drink in his room, from his dripping liquor still, while playing opera music (Mozart’s The Magic Flute) on a gramophone, but then he loads his revolver—showing several aspects to his colonial personality. Braddock also meets Moreau (Burt Lancaster) who tries to hide his experiments, but eventually informs Braddock of how he became an outcast, as a “man of vision,” and was “severely criticized by academicians” for his earlier research, before starting his island lab 11 years ago. He shows Braddock dog, mouse, and human embryos in jars, which start out “virtually the same.” And then he asks: “How does a cell become enslaved to a form, a destiny it can never change?” Here, the movie audience is brought into a collegial kinship with Moreau (and with Montgomery later), through Braddock, as colonial explorers not just of the island, but also of the mysteries of Life’s forms and fates. But Moreau also asks: “Can we change that destiny?” And Braddock changes this biotech question into an ethical one: “Should we?”
The American actor, Lancaster, is much more fatherly and charming than Laughton’s Moreau, complimenting Braddock on his intelligence and including him in his secret research. He also introduces Braddock to his adopted daughter, Maria (Nicaraguan actress Barbara Carrera). Moreau says he rescued her at age eleven from Panama City, where “any man could have her for the price of a dozen eggs,” suggesting she was a child prostitute. “She’s a very delicate creature,” he adds, due to her “bad experiences.” There is no suggestion in this film that she was once a panther, but she does have a pet serval (a wild cat) on a leash when Braddock first meets her. She also meets him later while walking her pet on the beach. She hands him the serval, but it leaps out of his arms and escapes into the jungle. They both chase it into the darkness. Braddock loses her, sees M’ling drinking water from a creek like an animal, but then finds Maria’s beautiful form once more—thus mixing the rasas of fear, eroticism, and disgust for the viewer.
Braddock snoops around Moreau’s lab and finds a Bear-Man on the operating table. Moreau then tells him his secret discovery: “a cell particle that controls. . . the shape of life.” He injects a serum into the Bear-Man with “a biological code message, a new set of instructions for erasing the natural instincts of the animal.” He says surgery is also needed to replace some organs, but the injection already “forces a modification of the body” as the animal-human struggles on the table and Moreau holds him down. With such experiments, says Moreau, he wants to “reach for the control of heredity,” in order to “benefit humanity.” He foresees “the pain we can ease, the deformities we can avoid.”
In this scene, Braddock leads the film viewer as voyeur of such research, stressing left-hemisphere rescripting and objectifying of an animal’s genetic body. But in the next scene, Maria visits Braddock’s room, allowing the spectator a direct erotic gaze, involving the right hemisphere’s more subjective mime improviser, tied to mirror neurons and limbic passions. She takes off his shirt and he unties the top of her dress. Only their bare shoulders are shown as their bodies touch. Yet more is implied below, evoking a pleasure drive in movie viewers as well. Such “natural instincts” of the human animal might be “erased” by Moreau’s serum, but not by this film.
Moreau is also shown, through window slats, looking up from below, but not spying directly on them, as in the 1932 film. This allows movie viewers to enjoy an erotic romance without the perverse reflection of their voyeurism in a watching experimenter. And yet, like Ferdinand with Prospero’s daughter, Miranda, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Braddock (played by a British actor) will have to go through various trials, set up by the father-magician-scientist, before he can win Maria as his island prize.
It is unclear whether Moreau sets up the right-cortical mating of Braddock and Maria intentionally, as another experiment, like in the earlier film version (or Shakespeare’s The Tempest). When Braddock discovers a cave on the island with various beast-people, and the Sayer of the Law views him as being like them, Moreau shows up, fires his gun, and tells them that Braddock is superior to them, like himself. And yet, when he finds Braddock packing to leave the island with Maria, Moreau takes him to his lab and injects him with another serum that reverses his humanity, changing him gradually into a beast. Like the Bear-Man, who faced a bear in a cage as his uncanny mirror, Braddock starts to feel his animal heritage come to the surface, while caged by Moreau. He changes from godlike status, when introduced to the beast-people, to becoming a beast-man himself, losing vocabulary and gaining hair. But he resists the brain and body changes, by reciting his name and childhood memories. Braddock’s inner MPFC actor fights against Moreau’s altering of his LPFC character and outward appearance—while his VMPFC moral stage manager rebels further at the scientist’s obsessive pursuit of knowledge and power.
Moreau’s experiments have been failing because his creations revert to bestiality after he makes them almost human. One, a Bull-Man, argues with the Sayer of the Law that animals are better than humans—“strong, proud”—and that the Law is Moreau’s, not theirs. The Bull-Man (looking like an ancient Minotaur or the prehistoric Chauvet image) then goes outside the cave, meets a tiger, attacks it, and kills it. Moreau explains to Braddock (before turning him into a beast) that the beast-people retain a memory of the House of Pain when they devolve again into animals. “In the image of our own species, they become vengeful killers.” The godlike Moreau thus admits that his theater of cruelty creates a tragic flaw in his animal-human subjects, which he made in his own image, evoking rasas of awe, fear, and sympathetic sorrow in the brain theaters of the movie audience.
Ironically, the still-human Braddock kills the Bull-Man, at his request, to prevent him from being punished in the House of Pain for killing the tiger. This triggers a vengeful rebellion by the beast-people. But Moreau faces them down at the gate of his compound and they return to their cave. After that, he catches Braddock trying to escape with Maria and makes him into a new experiment: to explore the “inner battlefield, that war of the cells” between animal and human. This may shift the viewer’s sympathies from Moreau as potential victim of the beast-people, behind his fort-like compound, to Braddock’s brain and body, as inner territories that the scientist colonizes to create an animal-human border war.
The movie shows this by passing through a skylight window in the laboratory hut and then peering into a mirror over the operating table, offering a view of Braddock, his face and chest becoming hairier, as he wakes and screams. Moreau responds with another injection that quiets him. Montgomery sees what is going on and tells Moreau to let Braddock go. But the doctor insists that to study nature, “one must become as remorseless as nature,” showing that the erudite colonial scientist is actually more bestial than his subjects. Montgomery rebels and Moreau kills him with gunshots—while several of the beast-people watch from a hilltop near the compound, like the cinema audience. This tragic twist in their view of Moreau, breaking his own law against killing, leads to the beast-people’s melodramatic vengeance and self-destruction. But it might evoke a cathartic refinement of shared feelings in film spectators, in their PFC networks, especially through Braddock’s new alignment with Moreau’s subhuman, experimental subjects.
As the reversion serum takes effect, Moreau tells Braddock that he is “beginning to think in images, concrete images,” suggesting a shift from left to right hemisphere processes. Then Moreau offers Beast-Braddock, while he is in a cage, a smaller cage of live rats to eat, after starving him for two days, teasing out his “instincts.” This challenges the movie viewer to imagine such a subhuman temptation, involving rasas of sympathetic sorrow, fear, awe, and disgust. Braddock’s deep mammalian emotions emerge as he tries to hang onto his human identity by recalling his family home in Britain and sledding with his brother, before that brother died; then he breaks into tears.
Mammalian rage erupts from the beast-people when they realize their Creator has violated his Law in killing Montgomery. They pull him from his horse (symbolizing his fall from human mastery over animals) and attack him until he lies on the ground, unconscious and bloody. Then the Sayer of the Law looks at his own bloody hands and says they have broken the Law, too. The others argue that there is “no more Law,” but the left-cortical Sayer insists that they need it. The fingernails on his left hand are long and sharp, and covered in blood, but trimmed on his right, suggesting the right and left hemisphere conflict within him.
After Maria frees Braddock from his cage, he tries to use his oppressor’s body, ironically, as a shield against the other rebels. He raises Moreau’s corpse on a rope above the gate, as if it were an immortal, all-seeing icon, and shouts from a tower in the compound: “Creatures of the Law, He is not dead. He sees you now. Yes, you cannot kill Moreau. . . . Fear him. Obey his Law.” But the beast-people soon realize that the corpse is not a god and they burst through the gate of the compound. And yet, without the Law or natural instincts to limit them, their revolution becomes self-destructive. The Sayer of the Law tries to warn them, but the others release Moreau’s wild animals from their cages and the beast-people are mauled to death, while the compound goes up in flames. Here, the audience may sympathize with and yet be shocked by the beast-people’s rebellion against Moreau’s hypocrisy and cruelty, especially when the film first appeared in a post-Vietnam, Civil Rights, and Watergate era (after two assassination attempts on President Ford in 1975). But the film also shows the continued need for cultural evolution, not just genetic success, in nature’s risky experiment of a big-brained, theatrically reflective, and radically innovative species.
In the 1977 film, set at the turn of the century like the novel, brutality emerges in the beast-people when the hypocrisy of Moreau’s Law is revealed. Even the delicate Maria must fight, like the animal-human Braddock, when they escape on a boat and one of the beast-people pursues them. She hits the Beast-Person with a wooden oar, helping Braddock to beat him off the boat. But in the 1996 version, set in 2010, such brutality arises at the start of the film with shipwrecked men on their lifeboat fighting to the death, “like beasts,” for the final canteen of water—as the voiceover of the sole survivor, Edward Douglas, a United Nations diplomat, explains. Two of them, in military fatigues, stab each other with knives and fall into the Java Sea together, spreading blood in the water with a shark below. Then Douglas, played by British actor David Thewlis and dressed in civilian clothes, tells the movie viewer, as his alter ego, “I fought for my life, just as savagely as they did.” We see him hit one of the soldiers with a metal oar (like Braddock and Maria fighting the Beast-Person at the end of the 1977 film). But we also see the oar come at us, stressing the violence of bestial survival instincts in the human being. Directed by John Frankenheimer, this remake focuses more on the beast-people as characters, giving insights about their revolution as it turns from righteous rioting to the wild pleasures of mob rule and reckless slaughter—in a film released two years after the Rwandan genocide and a year after the end of the Bosnian civil war and the Oklahoma City bombing in the United States.
Racial coding becomes even more apparent in this latest remake. Although many of the beast-people get full-body animal characteristics, unlike in the other films, the most rebellious and villainous of those living outside Moreau’s compound, Lo-Mai and Hyena-Swine, are obviously drawn from African prototypes (leopard/cheetah and hyena). The key traitor among his more cultivated “children” living at home with him, Azazello, the Dog-Man, has black skin (as does the actor, Temeura Morrison, a New Zealander of Maori and Scotch-Irish descent). This division also suggests the American South with its plantation-era friction between field slaves and house slaves.
In this version, the white American colonist, Montgomery (Val Kilmer), a “neurosurgeon” by training, is a clever, cynical, drug-using, and drug-dispensing traitor. He is the first to show Douglas a devilish brutality on Moreau’s island. When Montgomery disembarks with supplies from a sailing ship that picked up Douglas, he teases him about the danger of staying with the Javanese sailors onboard, as “real party animals,” convincing him to visit the island where he promises a radio for him to contact the outside world. (Douglas was working for the United Nations on a peace mission before his plane went down.) Montgomery says the island was settled first by the Dutch, then the Americans after World War II, and then the Japanese, who built a tourist hotel, which went “belly up.” He takes a cage of white rabbits, in a jeep, to a larger cage on the island. While Montgomery moves the rabbits between cages, Douglas reminisces about having such an animal as a pet when he was a boy. So Montgomery allows him to kiss one on the head, to wonder at the world inside its skull, and then breaks its neck, handing the limp, dead bunny to Douglas to hold.
This foreshadows how the devilish Montgomery, having worked with Moreau, a Nobel Prize Winner, for 10 years on his experiments to evolve a better human being, will soon sabotage them, apparently out of jealousy and perverse pleasure. While initially hospitable, the effeminate Montgomery mimics Moreau’s voice with a mocking smirk, puts a blue flower in Douglas’s pocket, and then locks him in his room, ostensibly for his “own good.” But Douglas escapes, glimpses Moreau (Marlon Brando) in his den, listening to classical music, and then finds his lab—with animals in cages, deformed creatures in formaldehyde jars, and several men, including Montgomery, helping a Beast-Woman give birth. Like the movie voyeur, Douglas is tempted to view more than is permitted, even if it might be horrifying.
Douglas flees then and is found by Moreau’s daughter, Aissa (Fairuza Balk), whom he had met earlier while she was dancing in a trance. In this version, she is again a Panther Woman, but her sharp teeth and fighting talents only appear later in the film. Here, she leads Douglas to meet a baboon-man, Assassimon, and then through war debris and a village full of beast-people to the tall, blind, and ram-horned Sayer of the Law (Ron Perlman). He holds a staff, looking like an ancient tribal shaman (or the Greek theater character, Tiresias). Soon, Moreau arrives in a shaded carriage on a jeep, waving like the Pope and wearing a white robe, white veiled hat, and white makeup (to protect him from a sun allergy), which makes him appear as a very white imperialist and yet akin to the rabbits seen earlier, some pieces of which were also seen on trees by Douglas en route to the village. Laughton’s perversely divine Moreau in the 1932 film and Lancaster’s robustly earnest scientist in 1977 change to Brando’s clownish benevolent dictator as “Father” here. Yet he demonstrates a calm compassionate ethics, even risking his life by telling Montgomery to give his gun to the “frightened” Douglas, who then aims it at the threatening beast-people and at Moreau. But the godlike scientist shows his power by pressing a device he wears on a necklace, making the beast-people writhe on the ground in pain.
Back at his home, Moreau introduces Douglas to his house-servant “children.” All male except for Aissa, they are M’Ling, Azazello, Waggdi, and a tiny man with a bulging brain case, Majai, who later plays a miniature piano on top of Moreau’s, accompanying him and dressed like him. Moreau is also kind to the mute Majai when Douglass refuses to shake his tiny red hand, insisting that he do so, because the dwarf only wants “to be polite.” At dinner, Moreau praises M’ling at his “beautiful” reading of a Yeats poem (“The Second Coming”). Such scenes evoke an ironic mix of rasas: fear, awe, disgust, humor, and perhaps some degree of peace.
But then, as M’ling, Azazello, and Waggdi serve vegetarian dishes to their Father and fellow children, along with Douglas and Montgomery, Moreau explains his discoveries about evil through genetic research. “The devil is that element in human nature that impels us to destroy and debase.” Moreau says his work on the island strives “to create some measure of refinement in the human species,” by fusing animals with human genes. He has “seen the devil” in his microscope, chained him, and “cut him into pieces,” metaphorically speaking. He says that the devil is “just a tiresome collection of genes” and Lucifer is “no more.” Moreau’s own children represent various stages in “the eradication of destructive elements found in the human psyche.” He claims he has almost achieved “perfection” with the creation of “a divine creature that is pure, harmonious, absolutely incapable of malice.” But Montgomery (betraying his mentor by ordering rabbit for dinner and with the live rabbits as temptations to the outdoor beast-people, plus further disruptive acts), Azazello (betraying his Father later), and the “divine” Aissa (becoming a beast) will increasingly show that the devil of genetic and cultural destructiveness may rise again, despite Moreau’s biotech dismemberment.
When Douglas expresses shock at Moreau’s “Satanic” work, the scientist quotes from the Bible to defend himself: “Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone.” But by 1996 when this film was released, Moreau’s godlike redesigning of natural life had already begun offscreen, Satanic or not. Transgenic mice “fused with human genes” (as Moreau says about his experimental children) were created in 1987. Gene therapy trials started with humans in 1991. Genetically modified tomatoes were available across the United States in 1994. And the first cloned animal, the sheep “Dolly,” was born in 1996.
Yet Moreau is not only a scientist-creator, but also a Father-ruler on his island. He shows kindness to his tamer transgenic children at home, while inflicting painful punishments to control the others outside. When he learns from Aissa that one of his more bestial subjects, Lo-Mai, who looks like a leopard or cheetah in humanoid form, broke the Law by killing a rabbit and eating its flesh, Moreau holds a trial in the village. (Similar events occur with a “Leopard Man” in Wells’s novel, but the creature flees.) Moreau calls Lo-Mai out of the crowd for this “evil.” Lo-Mai charges the podium in a rage and Moreau shocks him with the pain device, forgiving him then as he submits on all fours. But Azazello shoots the submissive Lo-Mai in the head with what looks like a bolt pistol for killing cattle. Moreau is appalled: “Oh my God, what have you done?” Azazello apologizes, hands him the gun, and says, “I thought you wanted me to protect the Law.” Yet this act reveals a tragic flaw in the Law: Moreau gave one of the beast-people the technology to rise above it and violate it, unpunished, which triggers a further rebellion later. In this scene, Azazello seems sincerely apologetic, turning toward Montgomery when Moreau asks where he got the gun. But when Lo-Mai’s body is cremated, Azazello smiles as a colonized subject who has learned to gather power over others like him.
Hyena-Swine finds Lo-Mai’s skull in his cremated ashes and fondles it, like Hamlet with Yorick’s in Shakespeare’s play. Then Hyena-Swine finds the pain implant in the ashes, attached to a rib bone, which gives him the idea to pull out such a device from his own chest. These acts, of mournful awareness with his friend’s skull and of freeing himself from Moreau’s control by piercing his own flesh with his finger nails, might cause many viewers to identify with Hyena-Swine, as oppressed victim and yet courageous rebel—through the rasas of sorrow, disgust, and awe, involving their intuition and motor-mirror neurons. The film also encourages antipathy toward Montgomery, even more than Azazello, through Douglas’s disgust at the doctor’s injection of the beast-people with a drug from Moreau, to lessen their regression, plus his own “contribution” of methamphetamine, morphine, and “shrooms,” which “keeps ‘em mellow . . . [and] keeps ‘em coming back for more.” Some movie viewers today might even relate this to the pharmaceutical industry, pushing its drug therapies to consumers through television ads and clinical samples. Such “direct to consumer” marketing of therapeutic drugs has “expanded exponentially” since a Federal Drug Administration ruling in 1997, a year after this film was released (Huh et al.).
Further identifications are encouraged when Hyena-Swine visits Moreau’s home at night, with several other beast-people. Though they are intruders, Moreau tries soothing their potential savagery by playing Gershwin. Hyena-Swine kneels by the piano and says: “We are not like you. What are we?” Moreau tells them they are his “children,” but he does not give them a meaning and purpose for their lives—even though he evolved them beyond other animals, with the human need to know what they are.
Pleasure and pain are primal systems in the human brain and body, connecting the physical and social in other mammals as well. An experiment with puppies suffering separation distress from their mother showed that a non-sedating dose of an opiate drug alleviated their social pain and panic emotion, just as it would with physical pain (Matthew Lieberman 50). An area in the limbic system that mammals have but reptiles do not, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) has the highest density of opioid receptors in the brain and is active for both social and physical pain in humans also (51–52). But the dACC, along with the anterior insula, tracks the distressing aspect of physical pain, not its sensory component (52). Surgeons have sometimes removed it to treat extreme depression and anxiety, as well as chronic pain (53). Activity in the dACC has been linked to social pain regarding grief at the death of a loved one, a romantic breakup, a negative evaluation, or a disapproving face (64). Another experiment showed that just taking Tylenol lessened the social pain of rejection, as well as physical pain (64–65). Likewise, social and physical rewards trigger activity in the VMPFC (or inner stage/production manager), plus the ventral striatum, especially regarding the feeling of fairness, which therefore “tastes like chocolate” (74–75).
When he takes the bloody implant device out of his chest, Hyena-Swine frees himself from the physical and social pain inflicted by Moreau—as if removing or changing the dACC in his brain. He mourns the death of his friend Lo-Mai, but turns grief into rage at the unfairness of Moreau’s Law, finding a reckless, violent pleasure through the pain of his alienation as a beast-person. When Moreau fails to give his chimera a meaning, beyond being an experimental child, Hyena-Swine finds a new purpose for his pain by leading the others in attacking their “Father.” They sink their claws and teeth into Moreau and tear him apart. This evokes in movie viewers the ironically mixed rasas of sorrow, rage, fear, courage, awe, and disgust.
In real life, Brando also suffered from an island experiment in making an extended family. In 1966, he purchased the Tahitian atoll of Tetiaroa, which he had first visited while working on the film, Mutiny on the Bounty. He built an airstrip there and a vacation home for himself and his third wife, the Polynesian actress, Tarita Teriipaia, whom he had met during the making of that film, and for their children, Simon Teihotu and Tarita Cheyenne. Brando visited his island home often in the 1960s to 1980s. But in 1991 Brando’s son by another marriage, Christian, shot and killed Cheyenne’s Tahitian boyfriend, Dag Drollet, after she told him about being abused by Dag (according to Christian). In 1995, Cheyenne committed suicide at her mother’s home in Tahiti. Thus, by the time he played Moreau, Brando had experienced related tragic twists, involving his own island child and home.8
This makes even more poignant a scene that Brando plays with Fairuza Balk as Aissa. Like a teenage daughter, she first comforts her “Father” by putting ice in his metal hat, his “caloric converter,” and massaging his neck. At first, he tells her to rub “forcefully,” but then it hurts him, and yet he tells her, very kindly, that she has no idea how strong she can be. “You must be very, very careful.” She sits on his lap and expresses her fear at how “hideous” she is—with her teeth becoming pointed. He checks her face gently, spreading her cheeks to see her pointed teeth, and also looks at her ears, which she has covered with her hair. He admits there are “changes,” but calls them “just chemical imbalances”—something that both teens and their parents in the cinema might relate to. He insists that she is “an absolute angel,” beautiful outside and inside, but she wants to look like him. He laughs then and makes her laugh at the idea of how she would really look if she became like him.
This scene mirrors, in a much more positive form, the scene a little later with Hyena-Swine kneeling at the piano, which soon turns into the sparagmos and omophagia of Moreau as godlike, but flawed Father (akin to the Dionysian rite, described in Euripides’s Bacchae, of tearing an animal apart and eating it raw). The oxytocin flow in the father-daughter nurturing between Moreau and Aissa, even as she becomes more panther-like, fails to happen with his hyena-swine son—or it happens between that creature and other beast-people as an in-group, against their creator as scapegoat. Moreau has not made them “beautiful,” like her, and does not give them an alternative symbolic framework for their deeply mammalian passions, yet burgeoning, higher-order awareness. He fails to frame them as angels, or as anything more than his children and colonial subjects, so they become devils.
For the movie viewer, too, it is easier to identify with Aissa’s beautiful face and figure than Hyena-Swine’s carnivorous jaws, clawed hands, and twisted walk (on his toes, suggesting pig’s feet, though he wears boots). And yet, the performance by Daniel Rigney under the animal mask and costume, especially from his mourning at Lo-Mai’s death and removal of the punishment implant to his kneeling beside Moreau, offers many points of sympathetic social and physical pain for the film audience, along with tragic fear at this chimera’s fierceness. To the degree that a movie viewer identifies with Hyena-Swine or Aissa or Azazello or Montgomery or Moreau, a rasa -catharsis of various limbic emotions might occur in the VMPFC/dACC stage manager, MPFC actor, LPFC character, and DMPFC director. Other hubs of the inner theater’s Self-Other networks might be involved, too, through shifts between the left hemisphere’s critic/scripter and right’s mime improviser/scene designer (especially regarding the Law and the beast-people’s revolution)—as the film proceeds toward a catastrophic downfall for each of these characters and for Moreau’s island dream of human perfection.
At the cremation of Moreau’s body, the Sayer of the Law tells the doctor’s loyal children (Aissa, M’ling, and Majai) that there is still the Law, that their Father has not left them, and that “His Spirit” watches over them. But Montgomery does not join them in converting the scientist-ruler into a god. Later, he mocks this idea, teasing Douglas by mimicking Moreau’s voice on a microphone, while dressed like him, with a padded belly and white makeup, and reading from the Bible. Montgomery also dresses like Moreau in the beast-people’s village, sitting in his pope-mobile throne and handing out drugs to them, while again mimicking their creator’s voice: “I give my body.” When Azazello appears with a gun, Montgomery hugs him, asks about dog instincts (to hunt and run with the pack), and jokes with him about wanting to go to “dog heaven.” So Azazello shoots him and then gives his gun to Hyena-Swine. Montgomery suffers a tragicomic death, as sympathetic villain and clown, while the rebellion grows—with plot twists challenging movie viewer’s body-swapping identifications.
Aissa becomes more bestial in fleeing the rebel beast-people and turning, when cornered with Douglas, to attack them, like Lota attacking Ouran in the first film version. In this remake, she also dies, hung from a noose by Azazello and his pack. He enjoys this hunt and kill, becoming more doglike as he joins Hyena-Swine’s rebellion. But when that alpha male takes full power with automatic weapons, which Azazello helped him to find, Hyena-Swine becomes a “Mad Dog” dictator (as defined in Chapter 3). He creates protean uncertainty among his comrades by suddenly killing Azazello, riddling his body with bullets, as a threat to his rule. All three of these beast-people, while showing positive qualities earlier, as angelic daughter, servant cook, and mournful self-experimenter (by taking the implant out), turn tragically monstrous when they indulge fully in their fighting, hunting, and ruling instincts. They exemplify the creative yet dangerous social powers of the human ape and mammalian ego, with sympathetic, genetic, and cultural twists: attractive as catlike angel/beast, tricky as doglike servant/son, and dominating as wild alien/rebel.
Hyena-Swine leads the others in riotous revelry, destroying the dock, lab, and Moreau’s home. He tries to force the Sayer to proclaim that he, Hyena-Swine, is now “the Law,” but the blind ram-man refuses. So Hyena-Swine presses the pain button, making the other beast-people writhe on the ground, while ordering Douglas to tell them that he is a “god” and to obey him “like they did the Father.” Douglas agrees but then tells him that all those who killed the Father and ate his flesh are gods. “So who is the new Father? Who is god number one?” Hyena-Swine then shoots his inner circle of comrade rebels, but is also shot and beaten by others. Wounded and defeated, he walks into the flames of Moreau’s burning colonial compound, crying: “Father, why?” This self-immolation by Hyena-Swine, and tragic questioning of his fate, may evoke sympathy again for the hero-villain, despite his destructive, vengeful leadership and wanton cruelty toward others.
The next morning, while standing on the charred dock with the baboon-man, Assassimon, and the mute Majai, the blind Sayer of the Law holds a staff topped with a human mask and expresses his cathartic awareness, changed from what he felt at Moreau’s cremation. He finds the courage now to reject Douglas’s offer to bring doctors and scientists to help them survive as partial humans. Instead, he will seek a new cultural identity with the remaining beast-people, even as they regress toward animals again. He even suggests that humans might not be at the top of the evolutionary tree. “We have to be what we are, not what the Father tried to make us. To go on two legs, very hard. Perhaps four is better anyway.”
Douglas realizes, too, in a voice-over to the movie audience, while sailing away from the island, that humans are not totally different from the beast-people who initially disgusted him. With documentary footage shown onscreen of people rioting, he says that sometimes his “fellow man” is neither animal nor human, “but an unstable combination of both.” This version of Wells’s story ends not with the island’s melodramatic destruction and Montgomery saying not to look back, nor with the romantic survival of the hero returning to humanness and being saved at sea with his new love. It ends with a tragicomic irony. Cultural revolution, like genetic evolution, risks the emergence of monstrous devils, through the human animal.
Godlike yet flawed scientists sometimes appear in horror movies, from Frankenstein and Moreau onward, raising questions not just about human technology, but also about a divine purpose to life, regarding human awareness and creativity. Did God make humans godlike, in His image, unlike other animals? Or are we evolving such powers and changing the animal world in ways beyond our natural instincts and wisdom—with no greater framework or audience to contain us? Are we creating ourselves as monsters, through the power and curse of science, like older forms of magic?
Magically created, animal-human hybrids often originate in exotic places and invade a more familiar realm, reflecting modern fears of the primal Other among and within us, as with Old World werewolves, or the Transylvanian Dracula and Nosferatu. In Cat People (1942, dir. Jacques Tourneur), the Serbian-American Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) turns into a big black cat when emotionally aroused, as in the tales of witchcraft from her family’s Eastern European village—or like Moreau’s Panther Woman. The legend here involves native villagers with an “evil” magic who turn themselves into animals—a parallel to the mad scientist who makes hybrids. They “worshipped Satan,” Irena says, and fled from the Christian King John (Jovan Nenad) after he “liberated” their village from the Mamluks (or Ottoman Turks). Now, in modern New York City, Irena’s personal mimetic rivalry focuses on Alice, who has fallen in love with her husband, Oliver.
Both women visit a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd. He tells Irena, after hypnotizing her to excavate her childhood memories, that the tragic death of her father before she was born and her being teased by others that her mother was a cat-woman may have corroded her “soul.” He also explains that there is, “in some people, a psychic need to loose evil upon the world.” She later dreams of him as King John with a sword—as Christian or scientific slayer of her black cat magic.
Eventually, the white woman, Irena, turns into a black panther, stalking Alice at a pool and then stalking Alice with Oliver, after he tells Irena that he loves that other woman. Dr. Judd wants to help them commit the jealousy-crazed Irena to an asylum. But instead he kisses her, turning her into a panther. Then he stabs her, a radical alteration of his left-hemisphere’s scientific diagnosis and medical ethics, which leads to his death. It also leads to Irena’s death, after she returns to her kind in the zoo, where Oliver first met her. During World War II, a beautiful European woman with a devilish animal inside might entice and horrify an American movie viewer identifying with the husband and doctor. But sympathy is evoked here, too, for Alice as a morally troubled friend to Oliver and for Irena as not just a femme fatale, but also a victim of her family lineage and mammalian passions, rekindled in the multicultural laboratory of a modern American city.9
In the 1982 remake (dir. Paul Schrader), the setting shifts to New Orleans and the Reagan era with more explicit violence and eroticism, yet again involving folklore magic mixed with modern science, though not with a psychiatrist as keeper or slayer. Irena (Nastassia Kinski) has an older brother, Paul (Malcolm McDowell), a minister, who tells her about their were-panther heritage. He also has a black housekeeper who seems to know his secret. Paul’s human to cat transformation occurs through sexual lust and he can only return to human form if he kills as the panther. In this version, Oliver is a zookeeper who leaves his girlfriend Alice when he falls in love with Irena. And Paul wants to have sex with his virgin sister, as the only way to end the curse, like their parents did. So there is a double triangle of mimetic rivalry: Alice in competition with Irena for Oliver’s love and Paul in competition with Oliver for Irena’s. But Irena rejects Paul, while arousing his lust, thus turning him into a raging panther. He attacks Oliver, but is killed by Alice with a shotgun. Paul then appears to Irena in a dream and shows her their ancestors, black panthers with human souls who “were gods.” She mates with Oliver, turns into a panther, leaves him and kills, returning then to human form. And yet, Oliver saves Irena from her murderous heritage and Panther Woman bloodlust. He ties her to the bedposts, making love with her as she requested (to return her to her “kind”), and puts her in his zoo, as a permanent black panther that he feeds and pets through the bars.
Drawing on the idea of Lota in the original Island film, as well as the werewolf tradition, both versions of Cat People show a beautiful were-panther as femme fatale who cannot be tamed and must be killed or caged. The first film, released during World War II, reflects American (and left hemisphere) fears of the dark side in European civilization (and of one’s own right hemisphere, limbic, and brainstem areas). But the remake may also reflect, in sly, ironic ways, the fears of white Americans about the “Black Panther Party” in the 1970s, with white characters turning into black panthers, and about racial miscegenation, coded here as incest and cannibal bestiality, but cured by the zookeeper’s cage.
More like the Frankenstein and Moreau films, or the various versions of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with a “mad” scientist as origin for the animal-human chimera, The Fly (1958, dir. Kurt Neumann) has its godlike creator turn the experiment on himself, as in the Christian belief in God the Father becoming the man Jesus. But here, two monsters are produced by the super-natural mixture: a fly with a man’s head and a man with a fly’s head and arm. A Montreal scientist, Andre Delambre (David Hedison), working in his lab at home, invents a “disintegrator-integrator” that reduces an object or animal to its “billions of atoms.” It then transports them across the room “at the speed of light” to another part of the machine and reintegrates them as the same thing again, “like a television signal,” as he tells his wife, Helene (Patricia Owens). He boasts that his is the “most important discovery since man sawed off the end of a tree trunk and found the wheel.” With it, there will be no need for cars, trains, airplanes, or “spaceships” in the future and no famine in the world. But when he tries it on himself, a fly joins him and his body is reintegrated with a fly head and arm (with a black claw), while the fly flies away with his “white” head and arm on it.
Shocking as this news is to Helene, she tries to help her husband catch the “white-headed” fly and reintegrate as fully human. She enlists their young son, Phillipe, and their maid in the fly-catching goal, without telling them the reason. But after the fly escapes their home through a broken window, the fly-headed Andre destroys his lab device and notes, realizing that his invention is too dangerous for the world to know. Helene completes his wish by crushing his horrid form in a hydraulic press, killing him. She is considered murderous and insane by others until Andre’s brother, Francois (Vincent Price), who is also in love with Helene, helps the police inspector to find a spider’s web with the human-headed fly trapped in it. The inspector crushes both the spider and scientist-fly with a rock. Thus, a 1950s fear of independent, home-based, Canadian scientists and of television’s new powers is expressed and repressed in this romantic comedy horror film—perhaps as a coded, satirical reference to the McCarthyist fear of communist infiltrators, threatening the American way of life, or to the white racist fear of miscegenation (with the mix of white and black in the new Andre and strange fly). But this film also shows a scientist turning himself into a monster and thus realizing his tragic flaw of experimental hubris, before he inflicts it on others beyond his home. His wife gets a happier ending: absolved of the murder with a story invented by the inspector and Francois, she forms a new family with her son and brother-in-law.10
Here, the inventor’s left-hemisphere, goal-focused critic/scripter is initially contrasted with his wife’s more bicameral homemaking. He disappears for days at a time, obsessed with his scientific work in his basement lab. As the dutiful 1950s wife, she forgives this, though their son suffers the loss of his father. But just when his left-cortical seeking of a great “discovery” starts to pay off, inspired by a right-brain dream of improving the world, the inventor finds that he missed a crucial part of the new global details: a fly in his machine. The scientist’s right-cortical mime improviser/ scene designer must then engage the help of his wife’s more complete brain and body because his left hand (controlled by the right cortex) has turned into a fly’s, as has the outer form of his head. He cannot speak but uses a typewriter with his still-human right hand to communicate with her, although his left cortex also loses its inhibitory strength against his increasing depression and despair. After she fails to catch his fly-double, the scientist types to his wife, “BRAIN SAYS STRANGE THINGS NOW. . . FEEL MY WILL GOING” and, as his fly claw wrestles against his typing right hand, “VERY DIFFICULT THINK STRAIGHT.”
As with the neurological disorder of Alien Hand Syndrome (Feinberg), the scientist’s hand and claw wrestle with each other again after his wife faints at seeing his fly head. He touches her lovingly at first with his right hand, which then struggles to hold back the black fly claw. If people can readily feel that a cross-racial rubber hand is their own, in the experiment mentioned in the last chapter, then perhaps movie viewers might also identify with Andre, to varying degrees, in his cross-species (and black/ white) fate as a tragic hero, not just fear him or laugh at him as a horror monster. Through mirror and intuition neurons, spectators may engage emotionally with the scene onscreen, and then reappraise their feelings and preconceptions—with shifts in their brains’ right and left hemisphere networks, especially between the ventrolateral prefrontal lobes.
This 1958 film was so successful that it spawned two sequels, Return of the Fly (1959, black and white, dir. Edward Bernds), in which Phillipe repeats his father’s experiments, and Curse of the Fly (1965, dir. Don Sharp), in which various people are fused together by the teleportation device. Canadian director David Cronenberg remade the initial film as The Fly, in 1986, with many altered, intriguing plot points, and Chris Walas added a subpar sequel, The Fly II in 1989. In Cronenberg’s version,11 the inventor Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) tries his “telepod” device with a baboon, rather than a cat and guinea pig, and turns the primate inside-out at first. He is not married but in a budding romance with Veronica (Geena Davis), a science journalist covering his work, which encourages the film audience to identify with both of them as active professionals.
At a party, Seth mentions his invention to entice Veronica to his lab. When they arrive, she teases him in return, seductively taking her stocking off when he asks her for something “personal” to teleport. Their subsequent lovemaking inspires him to reprogram his machine and the second teleported baboon comes out unharmed. In this film, the erotic rivalry and passions of the Cat People transformations, involving right-cortex, limbic, and brainstem reproduction drives, are combined with the scientist-inventor’s obsessive, objectifying, left-cortical hubris. Seth Brundle’s rival is Veronica’s editor and former lover (with the same initials) Stathis Borans, who wants to rekindle their old relationship. Suspecting Veronica’s unfaithfulness with Stathis, Seth rushes to experiment with his own body in the telepod—and mixes it with a fly. Thus, the initial sex with Veronica, which boosted Seth’s ape ego, also exposes his tragic flaw.
Seth appears to be unharmed or even improved by the teleportation trip, unlike Andre in the original film. Seth’s gymnastic skill, hyperactive thinking, and animal energies increase, so he views his invention as cathartic, as “purifying” his body and brain. “It’s going to allow me to realize the personal potential I’ve been neglecting all these years as I’ve been obsessively pursuing goal after goal.” At the start of the film, just riding in Veronica’s car gave Seth motion sickness, which he told her he has suffered since childhood. But his teleporting now alters his neural gut to cortical networks much more powerfully. Veronica notices his personality changing and some stiff hairs growing out of a scar on his back. She tries to warn him that something went wrong. But he rejects her then as a mate, accusing her of only knowing “society’s straight line about the flesh, . . . [its] sick, gray fear of the flesh.” Seth’s counter-cultural view then increases his super-natural hubris. “I’m talking about penetration beyond the veil of the flesh, a deep, penetrating dive into the plasma pool.” His de- and re-materializing in the telepod changes Seth’s left-hemisphere focus, on scientific goals and social straight lines, toward alternative right-hemisphere orientations, mammalian status passions, and deep vertebrate or invertebrate drives in his animal ancestry.
On the other side of the sexual revolution, from the original movie in the 1950s, this one in the 1980s has the scientist call his mate a “fucking drag” with her social fear of his transformed flesh. Instead of failing to absorb a normal superego in his VMPFC, like Moreau’s hybrids, or tearing out a pain implant that was its substitute, Seth liberates himself from traditional social mores by unknowingly implanting animal “plasma” in his body and brain. Yet, as both scientist and subject, he has no one overseeing the dark side of his evolutionary experiment, no divine judge, just a journalist who loves him. He tries to subject her to his invention, too, but she refuses to mate with him that way.
This sends Seth on a journey to find a new mate in a redneck bar where he wins a macho arm-wrestling contest, with his super-natural strength, breaking his opponent’s arm and stealing his girlfriend. Seth mates with her in his lab-home but she leaves, like Veronica, refusing to go through his machine. He then finds the skin changing on his face, his fingernails coming off, and his computer telling him that he has fused with the fly “at a molecular genetic level.” When Veronica arrives and sees Seth wearing gloves and using crutches, his face a mass of scarred flesh, he tells her “the computer got confused” with his teleport. This, along with Seth’s initial symptoms, reflects the 1980s horror of AIDS or the so-called “gay cancer” as an aftermath of the American sexual revolution—and a growing fear of computer technology as extending human power, hubris, and lack of wisdom. As Seth dryly jokes: “The computer. . . decided to splice us together. Mated us, me and the fly. We hadn’t even been properly introduced.” Veronica asks what will happen next and he replies: “I think it’s showing itself as a bizarre form of cancer.” Then a white digestive fluid spurts from his mouth, increasing the ironic rasa mix of love/lust, courage, sorrow, fear, humor, awe, and disgust in the inner-theaters of the movie audience.
The next time Veronica visits, Seth can climb the wall and ceiling. He asks her to videotape him demonstrating how he digests food outside his body by emitting a “corrosive enzyme,” like a fly, liquefying it and then sucking it up. Seth retains his wit and wants to share with the world his expansive, right-cortical sense of new possibilities (along with left-cortical optimism) in his “disease with a purpose.” Unlike Moreau’s creatures, Seth’s MPFC actor finds, through his body’s hybridity, a meaning to his life in relation to his DMPFC mentalizing of others’ views. “I’m becoming something that’s never existed before. I’m becoming Brundlefly. Don’t you think that’s worth a Noble Prize or two?” Thus, his LPFC character adjusts to a series of mirror-awareness moments as his face degenerates and body parts fall off (ears, fingers, teeth, etc.), which he keeps behind the bathroom mirror, inside his medicine cabinet, as the “Brundle museum of natural history.”
Veronica also finds a new potential through her prior mating with Brundle: she is pregnant. But that gives her a nightmare about birthing a huge maggot—a radical altering of her MPFC actor-Self through right-cortical mime improviser and scene designer twists. When she visits Seth again, he does not listen to her mammalian concerns. Instead, he tells her: “Insects don’t have politics. They’re very brutal, no compassion. No compromise. . . . I’d like to become the first insect politician.” But then he shudders, looks around him, and says he was “an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it, but now the dream is over and the insect is awake. . . . I’ll hurt you if you stay.” His insect logic, driven by pure survival and reproduction instincts, threatens to overpower any lingering mammalian compassion or primate ethics. Ironically, this also reflects a persistent political fear in the mid-1980s of Cold War enemies, or cold-blooded serial killers, reverting to nature’s inhumane dominance and territorial drives—in a godless world.
Another political issue arises, in this sci-fi horror context, with Veronica’s desire for an abortion because she fears the Brundlefly offspring inside her body. When she is alone in the abortionist’s operating room, Brundlefly breaks in suddenly, through a glass wall, going further than Frankenstein’s monster or Ouran in startling her and the sympathetic movie viewer, yet also reflecting the viewer as a voyeur who grasps vicariously at onscreen beauty objects. Seth grabs Veronica and carries her away from his rival, Stathis, who had been helping her to get the abortion. Seth, as Brundlefly, then asks her: “Why did you want to kill Brundle? The baby might be all that’s left of the real me.” He threatens to control her reproductive body, not just by preventing her abortion, but also by teleporting them together, “you, me, and the baby,” fusing them intentionally and creating a new being through his godlike yet devilish technology. “We’ll be the ultimate family, a family of three joined together in one body, more human than I am alone”—a perverse version of the Christian Trinity.
But Stathis, an earlier villain when he invaded Veronica’s home as an ex-lover with a key and tried to control her as her boss at the science magazine, now takes the hero role. He brings a shotgun into Seth’s lab, in order to save the female victim from the monster. Brundlefly overpowers him at first, but the hero comes back to win, as usually happens in a melodrama. Even with his right foot and left hand melted off by Brundlefly’s corrosive enzyme drool, Stathis uses his phallic shotgun to interrupt the hi-tech sex and Trinitarian rebirth. This switching of roles, with the initial hero as monstrous and the menacing ex-lover as feminist friend and ultimate rescuer, shifts audience perspectives, encouraging VMPFC and right/left LPFC changes in moral and emotional appraisals.
Yet there is another, more tragic twist after Stathis shoots at the cable between telepods and frees Veronica from hers. The computer continues its sequence, as programmed by Seth. Brundlefly is fused with the empty telepod, while teleported from his to a third. He emerges from the metal womb12 as a mix of humanoid insect, broken machine, and thick wiring. Then the jeopardized woman gets the final heroic moment, but again with a tragic twist, similar to the original film. Veronica picks up the shotgun, yet cannot bear to shoot her beloved—until his claw lifts the gun barrel to aim it at his insect head. Sympathetic viewers might identify with all three characters here, body swapping with them imaginatively, beyond the busted teleporter: with Stathis saving his ex-lover while losing a hand and foot, with Veronica having a potentially alien child inside her while mercy killing her ex-lover, and with Seth dying in his second coming as an animal-Christ figure, exemplifying the perverse potential of a godlike yet unwise, highly inventive brain. He may also foreshadow the increasing fusion of our bodies with various technologies today, while we ignore the damage that this causes to, or invokes through, the “wild life” around us and inside us.
Mother Nature experiments with us and has done so with our ancestors for millions of years. But through our species, cultures around the world have altered nature’s long-evolved outcomes, in radically super-natural ways. The 2009 Canadian film, Splice (dir. Vincenzo Natali), explores this continuing conflict between Mother Nature and Father Culture with two scientists, female and male, building a creature through DNA splicing, thus rewriting nature’s scripts. Unlike Moreau, Delambre, and Brundle, this inventive pair creates and raises a new species while also in cooperative conflict as a romantic couple. A century after theater experimenters developed naturalist “slice of life” scenes onstage, to study the human animal in its cultural environment, this film adds a third-wave feminist concern about motherhood for career women to the biotech horror onscreen, reflecting gendered elements in our still evolving nature-culture heritage.
Splice illustrates this tension with an initial view from inside the machine-womb as a blob creature, later named “Fred,” has its umbilical cord cut, is resuscitated when its heartbeat drops, and is pulled out by scientists Elsa and Clive (Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody). Their newly designed species has DNA taken from various life forms: a bird, horse, fish, kangaroo, lizard, and plant (as shown by the scientists in a PowerPoint presentation). First, they made a female named “Ginger” and then the so-called “Fred.” These creatures were vital in developing “medicinal proteins for livestock”—as Clive tells a businesswoman in a meeting. He and Elsa want to splice human DNA into the next version of their designer hybrid, to find cures for human diseases. But the businesswoman tells them that their company will focus instead on “the product stage,” isolating the gene in the scientists’ creations that makes the “magic protein” that already has medicinal value. So the left-cortical focused scientists shift to right-cortical rebellion in their splicing lab before it is shut down by the profit-minded corporation. Together, they express the experimental creativity of Mother Nature against the money making bias of Father Culture.
Working secretly, Elsa and Clive splice human genes into their chimeric formula just to prove to themselves it can be done. Elsa then wants to implant the embryo into an ovum in their metal and glass womb, as a further bioengineering experiment, despite Clive’s moral protestations. He accuses her of “emotional hijacking” and illegality. She replies: “Millions of people are suffering and dying with no hope. We might be sitting on the key to saving them. What are the moral considerations of that?” Thus, these procreative scientists engage the movie viewer’s inner theater, especially its VMPFC moral stage manager, with left-cortical critic and right-cortical improviser twists.
Elsa wins Clive over. He presses the button to insert the redesigned sperm into an ovum. Then the romantic couple, sitting in their living room, discuss moving to a bigger home and planning for a child in their future. Yet the feminist geneticist protests: “I don’t want to bend my life for some third party that doesn’t even exist yet.” Ironically, the film shows that they already have such a third party in their lives. The fetal chimera in its machine-womb grows monstrously fast—with its viewpoint also given to the film audience, from inside “BETI” (the Biomechanical Extrautero Thermal Incubator). So Elsa puts her hand in to help it come out. But it latches onto her, endangering her life as many fetuses have done to their mothers through nature’s own mechanisms. Clive breaks the machine-womb to free Elsa and then gives her a shot to save her body from reactive convulsions. And yet, their redesigned offspring, a squirming blob with a wild tail, escapes his control, flailing on the floor. So he traps it under a plastic container—like an exposed neocortex with its brainstem as animal tail.
Clive tries to play the role of patriarchal, left-cortical limit to Elsa’s right-cortical rebellion and then to the new creature’s limbic-brainstem wildness. But Elsa stops Clive from killing their hybrid offspring, dangerous as it seems to be, with her motherly instinct to nurture it. At this point, it has emerged from a barb-tailed, fleshy cocoon as a kangaroo-legged, rabbit-faced, armless creature on the lab floor. Elsa reaches out with her bare right hand to show the baby chimera that she wants to nurture it, although her left hand was already wounded by it. Her oxytocin feelings of care overpower her adrenalin survival fear. Clive pulls her away from the dangerous chimera, but she insists on gassing it to sleep instead of putting it to death in the lab chamber. Shifting back then to left-cortical scientific mode, Elsa finds that their hybrid creation is aging fast and will die soon of its own accord. She tells Clive they can study “its entire life cycle.”
As with many new parents, the wild child becomes troubling to the biochemists with its screams and tantrums. But they learn how to feed the “H50,” after accidentally spilling some candy pills that it enjoys. It rapidly grows arms and hands, plus a barbed tail like its original cocoon— developing like a prematurely (or normally) born human, “a fetus outside the womb,” as Elsa records in her audio lab notes.13 She names the female hybrid, now in a dress, “Dren,” after it associates the Scrabble letters NERD with those letters on Elsa’s T-shirt, which she sees inverted, looking down at her own breasts. Clive and Elsa hide Dren, as inverse nerd, in the storeroom of the lab building, but cannot keep their forbidden offspring completely hidden. In another scene, Dren leaps onto Clive’s brother, Gavin, a coworker in the building. But Gavin agrees to keep their secret—even as Dren continues to grow, her eyes shifting from the sides of her head to the front, more like a predator or Dren’s left-cortical focused parents.
Meanwhile, the biotech corporation employs Elsa and Clive as performers in a press conference to show their prior project with Fred and Ginger. The company’s funding depends upon a good show, with the eyeless blob animals together onstage in a glass case. But the demands of the film’s horror genre (and choices by the writers and director) shift the subtle interactive communications between the blobs’ nervous systems. Instead of lovely leafy protrusions from their mouths, encircling between them, as shown at the start of the film, barbs protrude and the creatures slash each other to bits, overturning their tank and splashing blood on the front rows of potential investors—and toward the movie audience. Thus, viewers may also feel the violent potential of the more human Dren with her barbed tail—in a subsequent scene of Clive and Elsa making love in the storeroom. Dren watches them through a gauze curtain, seen only by Clive. This reflects, like the press-show bloodbath, the voyeuristic desires of horror movie viewers, involving sadistic drives as well.
The company’s concern about the sudden violence of Fred and Ginger, due to Ginger turning into a male, forces Clive and Elsa to move Dren again, to hide her in a rural barn on a farm formerly owned by Elsa’s “crazy,” dead mother. But then the scientist-parents witness Dren’s predatory instincts. She escapes during the move to the barn and they track her through the snowy woods to find her eating the raw flesh of an animal she hunted (like Moreau’s rebellious beast-people). Clive also sees where Elsa was traumatized as a child by her mother, living in a small room in the farmhouse with just a mattress on the floor, somewhat like Dren. This sequence of scenes may evoke rasas of courage, disgust, fear, sorrow, and awe—at the horrors of our animal ancestry, with predatory instincts persisting and care skills often inadequate, especially when biotechnology objectifies its subjects.
The viewer’s emotional perspective also shifts between (1) the scientist-parents’ shameful failure with the Fred and Ginger show, (2) the onscreen audience’s shock at that bloodbath, (3) the businesswoman’s desperation in a meeting afterward, (4) Elsa and Clive’s further rebellion, (5) Dren’s terror inside a box in their van when moved to the farm, (6) the couple’s fear in tracking her through the snowy woods at night, (7) Dren’s bloody pleasure in eating wildly but then her obedience in returning to captivity, and (8) Clive’s new sense of Elsa’s trauma as a child in relation to their romantic and scientific partnership and her empathy with Dren. These vicarious, body-swapping shifts might engage particular elements of the movie viewer’s inner theater, such as (1) the MPFC actor’s fundamental shame, (2) the temporal lobe and insula audience’s corporal horror, (3) the LPFC character’s loss of status in the socio-economic mirror, (4) the DMPFC director’s struggle with others’ views as the scientists restage their experiment, (5) the limbic/brainstem stagehands’ survival terror, (6) the left-cortical critic/scripter’s seeking to re-contain an escaped hybrid, (7) the right LPFC technical operator’s acceptance of cultural limits to primal pleasures, and (8) the right-cortical improviser/designer’s reimagining of roles, interactive contexts, and parenting ties.
The spectator’s fear of, yet empathy with Dren is also encouraged with a privileged view of her alone, locked in the barn, like a pet left at home or a child in need of care, while the biochemists are at work in the company’s lab. Her pointed tongue, sticking out with delight at water dripping from the roof, suggests the mix within her brain of dangerous animal and cute child. So does her exploration of Elsa’s childhood mementos when opening a box with a mirror inside its lid. Like apes in captivity (discussed in the last chapter), Dren not only recognizes herself but plays with her appearance, adding a crown to her head and showing the human “character” of her inner theater’s LPFC. She also holds a Barbie doll to her cheek and stares at a faded photo of Elsa as a child with her crazy mother. Later in the film, we learn that Elsa gave Dren some of her own DNA while creating her. So Dren is now discovering her family lineage.
Then Dren hears a cat in the barn. Predatory instincts are triggered again in her left hemisphere, limbic, and brainstem networks. She grabs the cat, runs with it, holds it up, and stares at it. But she also shows her human alienation and loneliness—hugging the cat gently, as if commiserating with the trapped pet.
Dren shows her highly developed intelligence when she uses Scrabble tiles to spell “tedious” and “outside.” But she also shows her animal impulsiveness and strength, performing a tantrum for her scientist-parents and wrecking some of the home they are making for her in the barn. She breaks out of it, through a skylight, and when they approach her on the roof, she sprouts wings like a harpy. But Clive says they love her and she returns to his arms, her wings slipping back inside her body. The oxytocin pleasure of human contact becomes more valuable to her than the adrenalin (and noradrenalin) rush of escape and freedom—through her developing DMPFC director and VMPFC stage manager, as the superego networks shaping her plant-animal-humanoid MPFC ego, if her brain is indeed like ours.
Elsa puts makeup and lipstick on Dren, giving her another mirror-stage moment, though with a negative family frame, shaping the hybrid’s LPFC awareness of her own appearance. “My mother wouldn’t let me wear makeup,” Elsa tells Dren. “She said it debased women. But who doesn’t want to be debased every once and a while?” Thus, another cultural twist is given to Dren’s bestial beauty, reflecting the feminist critique of cinema’s male gaze. This may make the movie viewer more aware of his (or her) ghostly voyeurism, or encourage more identification with the females onscreen, in the intimate hall of mirrors between Dren’s inner theater of emerging Self-awareness as animal-human hybrid and Elsa’s as her godlike creator and yet flawed, human mother.
Researchers have found that children progress from the animal state of I know to the human meta-awareness of I know I know around age 2 (Lewis 94–95). Even earlier, by 9 months of age, their brains go through a “socialcognitive revolution,” from interacting dyadically with people or objects to a “reflective triangle of child, adult, and some outside entity to which they share attention” (Tomasello, “Social” 301–2).14 This involves “gaze following” (looking where adults look),15 “social referencing” (using adults as reference points), “imitative learning” (acting on objects the way that adults do), and understanding others as “intentional agents” far beyond other primates—through joint attention with adults, which increases toward age 2 along with emotion regulation (Tomasello, “Social” 302, 310–11; Adamson and Russell 289–91). Even at 6 months, infants show their sense of human action as goal directed, unlike object motion (Poulin-Dubois 266, 275). At around 18 months, they acquire a “naïve psychology” about the people around them having internal experiences, in wanting and requesting certain objects (274). They become “ desire psychologists,” studying other people as mental agents (275). At age two and a half, children move to the metacognitive level of I know you know with an emerging Theory of the Other’s Mind and the possibility of deceiving the Other (Lewis 95). Eventually, children become more adult-like, involved in “the interactive and recursive nature of social cognition” and language, with a sense of I know you know I know. The child can then perceive itself as an actor with others having different perspectives, including “false beliefs” that are different from what the child knows. Thus, the child’s inner theater extends to the outer theatricality of everyday life—taking the position of an actor imagining how the spectator sees the character.
Splice explores such developments in Dren as plant-animal-human hybrid. It shows the external womb of a cultural environment shaping her super-natural progress from I know as animal to I know I know as child, to I know you know as captive teen, to I know you know I know as devilish monster. Thus, her scientist-parents violently contain her, lovingly nurture her, rashly transport her, and harshly reprimand or desperately fight her. Clive is initially more fearful of the creature, wanting to kill it or contain it. Elsa is more nurturing, despite being bitten by it inside the mechanical womb. But she also disciplines the hybrid child, yelling at Dren for running away and later taking the cat away from her in the barn, without giving her sympathy or a substitute, transitional object. She says they cannot risk the germs the cat might give Dren. “It could make you sick. You can’t always get what you want. That’s a part of growing up, too.” Yet this also reflects how Elsa’s “crazy” mother may have infected her parenting impulses, making her repeat the alienating acts she suffered as a child.
Dren shows her gaze following, social referencing, imitative learning, and intentionality understanding as she develops from a child to adolescent with growing sexual desires: from an initial “imprinting” on her mother (as Elsa calls it) to drawing pictures of her father (which Elsa finds) to copying Elsa’s lovemaking with Clive, turning her mother into a rival. Dren’s early lab traumas are also shown, not just her parents’ alienation of her as a grotesque newborn that they trap and almost kill, but also her father’s near drowning of her later as a child. In that scene, she suffers from a fever in the lab storeroom, so Elsa and Clive put her in a metal sink with cold water to bring her body temperature down. Dren starts choking in panic. Against Elsa’s protests, Clive forces Dren underwater (warily holding her barbed tail). This triggers her fish inheritance, her ability to breathe water as well as air, which Clive pretends to have expected, when Elsa later questions him. The scene evokes in viewers both the frantic uncertainty of nurturers with a sick child and the horrific anxiety of one parent suspecting evil in the other. But we also see Dren following her parents’ gazes and using them as reference points during this traumatic episode—from comforting care to apparent violence—setting up her later mysterious mix of good and evil attachments and intentions. (In a parallel scene near the end of the film, the demonic Dren almost drowns Clive. He, too, revives, yet dies in another way.)
After Dren’s death and resurrection as a child, about 40 minutes into the film, the plot jumps to an adolescent Dren, with eyes now in front of her head, being given a Barbie doll by Elsa, from her own childhood keepsake box. A shift in Dren’s identity comes here—and in the viewer’s potential identification with her—as a bare-headed hybrid, now with a more human face, though still with unusually wide-set eyes, holding the blonde doll. The gaze of the movie viewer follows Dren’s gaze from Elsa as social reference to the doll as imitative model for learning humanness (even if “debased” as an object of the male gaze). Dren also shows that she is starting, as a budding “desire psychologist,” to explore the cultural dimensions of her creators’ intentions, and their perverse limits, with her sketches of Clive as father and then her dancing with him as a man in the barn—while Elsa is absent—about an hour into the film.
Clive puts on an old jazz record, sets the needle, and invites Dren to dance. But as he “leads” and she twirls joyfully, he feels something is wrong and suddenly leaves. Dren looks confused and rejected, yet starts to sense a vexed mixture of emotions at the splice of nature and culture— in her and her creator/father/friend. Clive then accuses Elsa of putting her own DNA in Dren, suggesting she wanted more control of the child as an experiment, instead of having a natural child with him. Evoking the left-cortical critic and VMPFC stage manager of movie viewers’ inner theaters, he accuses Elsa of unethical behavior when she did not consider her “family history” in giving her genes to Dren, ironically suggesting his prior doubts, too, about having a natural child with her because of her mother’s craziness.
Elsa tries to make amends with Dren by bringing the cat back to her but Dren kills it suddenly, with her barbed tail, and then threatens Elsa. So the scientist-mother knocks her out, ties her to an operating table, and (like Dr. Moreau in his House of Pain) operates on her, cutting off the barbed tip of her tail. The movie spectator is given Dren’s viewpoint of Elsa as cold-hearted scientist-surgeon, documenting her work with a microphone, and then a view of the naked Dren from above, her arms out, bound at the wrists, with her legs turned to one side, like Christ on the cross. But this female Christ figure, with occasional, identification-inducing moments, also becomes more and more monstrous—due to her super-natural genetics, her cultural shaping by the fearful scientists, and the genre demands of the horror film audience.
During the surgery scene, Elsa tells the microphone (and movie viewer) that the H50 experiment shows “dangerous psychological developments,” which may be caused by “a disproportionate species identification.” With her patriarchal, scientific, left-cortical critic/scripter inhibiting her right-cortical maternal feelings, Elsa removes a necklace from Dren, cuts off her dress, and wipes the lipstick off her face, which she had put on her earlier in the film. “Cosmetically human affectations should be eliminated wherever possible.” Elsa also cuts off the “stinger” at the tip of Dren’s tail. The creator’s objectifying of Dren here, as a dangerous “H50” that requires surgical modification, and the creature’s scream along with a close-up of her tail being sliced, may shift audience sympathy away from the practical, professional experimenter (or mad scientist) toward the monster. Clive is likewise shocked when he arrives at the barn and sees what Elsa has done. But Elsa takes the cut-off tail-tip to the lab, as a fresher sample than the flesh from Fred and Ginger, to find the protein that her corporation needs as a marketable product, to survive and thrive. She thus aspires to a higher ethical and cultural goal: “I’m going to solve this thing. I’m going to make things right.” Yet Elsa’s utilitarian cruelty shapes Dren’s further monstrosity—through Clive’s compassion for their hybrid offspring and then his perverse lust for her naked suffering female body, which might be evoked in movie viewers as well.
While Elsa is working in the lab for the corporation, Clive takes a drink at home and watches Dren swim naked in her tank, through his computer screen and the video cameras he installed in the barn. He reaches to touch the screen, like a Web voyeur, and is startled when Dren reaches toward him with her three-fingered hand, as if seeing her Peeping Tom—and the film spectator. Then Clive sleeps on the couch, perhaps dreaming, and calls out for “Elsa.” He visits the barn, calling again for “Elsa,” but Dren spreads her wings behind him, as if giving him angel/devil/bird hybridity. She also gives him a firm hug and kiss on the lips, her wings retracting into her naked body. At first, he tells her, “No,” but soon he is on the floor with her, lowering his pants—the sex drive of inner limbic/brainstem stagehands overpowering his VMPFC moral stage manager and rVLPFC operator controls. As they make love with Dren on top, her wings spread wide again, showing shared hybridity. But when Clive is on top, the barb reemerges from Dren’s shortened tail, revealing that her sexual drive still bears a deadly sting. She goes from the animal I know to a more human I know you know I know, but also to I know I can deceive you —through your desire for me. This was also shown earlier when Elsa brought back the cat as a loving offering and Dren killed it with her barbed tail.
Elsa interrupts the coitus of Dren and her scientist-father by entering the barn. Later, Clive tries to explain to Elsa what happened: “We crossed a line. Things got confused. . . about right and wrong.” At first, Elsa blames Clive alone. But gradually she admits that they had both tied up Dren, kept her from society, and “maimed” her—a tragically cathartic realization. Despite their “love” for her, they shaped Dren’s monstrosity, physically and culturally. Depending on the movie viewer’s personal sympathies and judgments in prior scenes, involving body-swapping identifications, the moral hybridity here matches the morphing mix of animal and human in Dren, through Elsa’s nurturing yet cruel treatment of her and Clive’s coupling with her, showing culture as well as nature being respliced.
But then the scientists alleviate their shame by shifting toward cold aggression, with left-cortical, critic/scripter narrowness and predatory objectivity, inhibiting right-cortical holistic sensations of a tragic paradox and the VMPFC stage manager’s confusion. They decide, as Clive puts it, that “the experiment is over [and] responsibilities end” to their hybrid creature. They go to the barn to kill it. But they find that Dren is already dying from inner causes, so their sympathies (and perhaps the movie viewer’s) shift again toward right-cortical compassion. Dren dies naturally and they bury her at night near the barn. The film might end here on a tragic note, with further cathartic realizations for the characters and viewers— about the continued “responsibilities” of scientists and the culture at large toward lab creations and test animals, especially those with human attributes, as neuroscientists are discovering in mammals and primates. But the popular horror genre demands more melodramatic spectacle and monstrous reincarnations.
Perhaps representing the irresponsibility of many human cultures toward the earth and its toxic potential for revenge, Dren rises from her grave, zombie and vampire-like, with wings, talons, and a male body and face.16 As a Christ/devil-figure or phallic offspring of Mother Earth, but also like a bird of prey, Dren swoops down and takes, in turn, the scientists’ male boss (who came to the barn after learning about their extended experiment) and Clive’s brother (who came with him), killing each of them. Recent research by archeologists shows that our primate ancestors may have sometimes been killed in a similar way by large birds of prey, as are some primates today, attacked from the sky, giving us a legacy of that horror (“Ohio”).
The male Dren-devil draws Clive into a dark pool. He struggles to return to Elsa at the bank—nearly unconscious, yet alive, like the young female Dren whom he almost drowned in an earlier scene. But then the male Dren emerges from the pool, like a creature from the black lagoon, attacks Elsa, strips her with his barbed tail, and rapes her (perhaps in revenge for her circumcision/castration of Dren earlier). Clive and Elsa manage to kill it, but Clive is stabbed in the heart by Dren’s tail and dies. Sometime later, the pregnant Elsa meets with the businesswoman and signs a contract, turning over the product of her womb and lab work, a multiply hybrid creature, for marketable products. This frames Elsa as heroic survivor, yet with her inner DMPFC director converted from truth-seeking scientist toward the corporation’s profit motives. Thus, her temporal lobe and insula networks may be altered, too, as her inner audience of memories, intuitions, and meanings—in relation to the outer movie audience reimagining her in earlier parts of the film, through their own inner audiences.
Splice depicts Dren’s evolution from plant-animal creature to mammalian child to humanoid adolescent to super-natural monster with various brain, sex, and bodily changes. This evolution is not just genetic, but also cultural. It is radically altered by an external human womb, both technological and familial, in the lab and barn, involving primate social dynamics considered earlier in this book: kinship, territory, attraction, trickery, and domination. The Planet of the Apes film series shows these dimensions of ape egos, superegos, and ids more collectively, in future societies where simians walk upright, wear clothes, ride horses, shoot guns, and live in cave-like buildings, but have premodern technologies. Or, in the two recent versions, it shows them closer to our time, evolving in that direction, within and against human culture.
In the first film (1968, dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, with a screenplay by Michael Wilson and Rod Serling, based on the novel by Pierre Boulle),17 the apes enslave and experiment with humans like the scientists do with their animal-human hybrids in the Moreau, Fly, and Splice films. Of the three astronauts who survive a crash landing on a distant planet, which turns out to be earth 2,000 years in the future, one (Landon) is eventually shown with a scar on his head from a neurosurgical experiment. Another (Dodge), who dies when the gorilla soldiers capture the astronauts along with native humans, is later shown stuffed, as a black man with false white eyes, put on display in a museum, like we do with animals in taxidermy scenes of “natural history.”
The third astronaut (Taylor, played by Charlton Heston) cannot speak initially, after being captured by the apes, because he was shot in the throat. He is kept in a cage like the native humans who also do not speak. But he is seen as different and called “Bright Eyes” by the female chimpanzee psychologist, Zira (Kim Hunter). Treated as a savage by the gorilla workers, yet studied respectfully by Zira and her chimp fiancé, the archeologist Cornelius (Roddy McDowal), Taylor tries to communicate by writing, gradually convincing Zira and Cornelius of his ape-like intelligence, especially when he regains his voice. Fortunately, they speak English exactly as he does from 2,000 years before—even though apes today do not have the vocal chords that allow for human speech (Hu) and our modern English is very different from its medieval roots a thousand years ago. But the social dogmas and religious beliefs of the chimps’ superiors, the orangutan rulers in “Ape City,” and of the gorilla workers and soldiers, continue to suppress Taylor’s name, speech, and individuality.18
This sci-fi film projects the revolutionary changes in American racial awareness and class structures of the 1960s into a parable of the distant future.19 Taylor, the white man, finds himself treated like an enslaved animal along with other, nonspeaking, more primitive-looking, mostly white humans, who were already on the planet. The film’s horrors express white cultural guilt about the colonial treatment of conquered peoples, especially indigenous Americans and black Africans, by inverting the color scheme: (1) the black-haired gorillas capture humans as slaves; (2) the black-haired but lighter-faced chimps study humans in cages, museums, and archeological sites; and (3) the orange-haired orangutans judge humans as having no rights. Racial identifiers are flipped and cultured animals shown as wilder in their cruelty than their “wild” human subjects.20
Early in the film, when the three astronauts first see the native white humans, wearing animal skins and eating crops in a field, Taylor says they will soon “be running this planet.” Yet the ruling orangutans and gorillas view such humans as deserving domination: annoying as pests eating their crops, but useful as slave labor. The gorillas also find sport in hunting them on horseback, shooting at them, and capturing them with nets and poles. The gorillas even take a photo of themselves, standing proudly over some of their dead human victims, like wild game hunters or picnickers at a lynching. Thus, the astronauts, as adventurous colonizers, whose clothes were stolen by the other humans when they swam in a pond, get stereotyped with the colonized slaves, as sub-ape animals, when captured along with them.
Feminist issues arise, too, with Zira’s defiance of a patriarchal tribunal of orang scientists, judging Taylor as a primitive animal. This also involves her orang mentor, Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), who is in favor of “experi-mental brain surgery” on humans and their eventual extermination for the betterment of “simian survival.” Zira argues instead for Taylor’s rights as an intelligent, speaking ape. She gradually persuades Cornelius, but the tribunal rejects her legal argument.21 So she and her fiancé, along with her young nephew, help Taylor to escape from Ape City. But to balance this depiction of an intelligent, stubborn, rebellious female, especially for the traditional male gaze, movie viewers are offered one of the native white humans, a sexily clad, silent “Nova” (Linda Harrison), as a companion and potential mate for Taylor.
Zira uses Nova to give Taylor a blood transfusion when treating his throat wound. The chimp scientist, somewhat bonobo-like here, orders that Nova be put in the cage with Taylor, telling him with a smile that the female is a “present.” Although Nova does not speak and Taylor treats her condescendingly, Nova shows that she remembers the blood connection they had, surprising Zira. Nova is not just eye candy for the male cinematic gaze, but also shows intelligence, beyond the apes’ prejudice. She becomes Zira’s substitute in her physical closeness to Taylor, which the engaged chimp scientist seems to desire, through her rebellious right-cortical improviser. Zira (like ape egos in the movie audience) uses the captive woman as a romantic surrogate due to her socially correct left-cortical critic/scripter and DMFPC stage manager. And yet, Zira’s I know you know studies of Taylor and his I know you know I know reactions betray the potential misrecognitions, too, between genders and individuals, or across species, not to mention the contending animal-human networks of just one person’s inner theater.
Such a 1960s allegory of the outer-space colonizer enslaved and the feminist professional in conflict with herself allows movie viewers to identify with Taylor as ironic hero, fighting for his rights, or with Zira as active ally fighting for scientific truth and legal fairness, while restraining her wayward desires. Heston’s body, like Harrison’s, becomes a potential object of desire for the movie viewer at many points, shown shirtless or fully naked (from behind), or at other erotic moments when covered with the torn animal-skin blanket that the apes give him. For example, after failing to escape from the apes the first time, without Nova, Taylor is put in a cage with her, but held back by a gleeful gorilla with a phallic firehose shooting water at him,22 while other gorillas hold the wet, squirming, human female. And yet, after the gorillas leave, Taylor gives Nova a cynical critique of the 1960s era and its sexual revolution, saying that he left earth because there was too much “lovemaking with no love.” He also wonders aloud whether Nova can ever understand him on his new planet. Toward the end of the film, however, Taylor shows more hope, encouraging Zira’s young nephew, Lucius, to continue rebelling against the older generation of apes.
Taylor also kisses Zira “goodbye” on her chimp lips, before leaving with Nova on a horse, in their escape at the film’s end. She lets him, after saying he is “so damned ugly,” perhaps for the benefit of Cornelius and Nova, as they watch. The physicality of the Taylor-Zira kiss, despite the rubber chimp-mask, may evoke “enfacement” and embodiment signals in the movie viewer (identifying with either or both the human and ape), through mirror and intuition neurons, as with the rubber hand and body swapping experiments discussed in the last chapter. Then there is the sensuality of Taylor and Nova riding away together on the beach, wearing little, with her hugging his back on the same horse, again suggesting a romantic happy ending, for audience embodiment, until the final sci-fi shock.
A new camera angle shows spikes of corroded metal, framing a distant Taylor and Nova. The cinema audience gradually sees that its point of view is actually that of the Statue of Liberty, mostly buried in sand. Then we get Taylor’s view of it and see him get off his horse, kneel, and beat the sand—realizing that he is on earth with humans who have lost their civil liberties and cultural superiority through misrule. This tragic warning at the end of a romantic, sci-fi action movie reflects its Cold War, nuclear threat context, yet also its meta-historical questions about the destiny of our animal-human, bio-cultural evolution—with or without God or Lady Liberty or movie viewers watching.
As Louise Allen has argued, the Taylor–ira––ova erotic triangle, with Cornelius and Dr. Zaius in the patriarchal background, may appeal to a postmodern viewer today as “transgressive,” even beyond its original context (8). Throughout the film there is a “species drag” of human actors in ape costumes, exposing the structures of our current stereotypes, in the performance projections of gender, animality, and humanity (7–9). This climaxes with the Taylor–Zira kiss, which appears stronger than earlier Zira––ornelius pecks and thus “perverts traditional romantic narratives” (6).
But the film also subverts melodramatic movie expectations with Dr. Zaius as not just a villainous ape, cruelly endorsing neurosurgical experiments and the ultimate extermination of humans. He becomes an increasingly sympathetic figure with an inner tragic conflict. As Minister of Science, Zaius sits on the three-orang Tribunal that judges Zira and Cornelius guilty of “heresy” for proposing that Taylor is the “missing link” in primitive human to cultured ape evolution. Privately, Zaius interrogates Taylor for the “truth” of where he comes from, threatening him with “emasculation” and brain surgery, which would result in a “living death,” like he saw with his fellow astronaut, Landon. Zaius rejects Taylor’s answer about traveling through space from a distant planet because that contradicts what most apes believe through their “sacred scrolls,” like Zira’s psychological and Cornelius’s archeological theories. But Zaius also wants greater knowledge about other potential “mutants” like Taylor and fears they have formed a “tribe” in a jungle beyond the “Forbidden Zone” that threatens ape culture. This may evoke viewers’ sympathy for Zaius as he seeks truth and fears outsiders, even while they sympathize with Taylor, mixing the rasas of courage, fear, anger, and awe across species and melodramatic embodiments.
After the chimps help Taylor and Nova to escape captivity, Zaius finds them on the beach near a cave, which is Cornelius’s dig site. The chimp archeologist shows his orang superior the artifacts he found there, including a doll that speaks, which “prove” that humans had an earlier culture, like apes in their time. It is then that Zaius reveals his deeper knowledge and fear, through his belief in the sacred scrolls along with science: human culture is a self-destructive aberration that may reemerge as a danger to simian survival. Or, as Cornelius reads, at Zaius’s urging, from the twenty-ninth Scroll of their Lawgiver, “Beware the beast, man, for he is the devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. . . . Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home and yours.” Zaius admits to Taylor that he always feared him as a man, “a warlike creature who gives battle to everything around him, even himself,” and whose ancestors destroyed a “paradise,” turning it into the Forbidden Zone. Yet the minister calls his soldiers back from chasing Taylor and Nova, letting the astronaut discover “his destiny” and potentially revive a more advanced human species with Nova as his Eve.
Although Taylor and his mate escape from the orang minister of science/ religion and his gorilla soldiers, the astronaut’s discovery that he is actually on a future earth exposes a conflict in the hero’s inner theater that matches his opponent’s. Both Taylor and Zaius are tragically troubled by a potential in the ape ego, id, and superego of becoming too humanlike and therefore super-naturally wild. Kinship bonds, territorial drives, attractive lusts, deceptive greediness, and power politics are limited in the nonhuman ape species of our world by balanced instincts that evolved in millions of years of natural negotiations between genes, changing environments, and small societies. But we humans broke through such limits, as a Pandora’s Box species, with an ever-growing godlike knowledge of good and evil, and with super-natural technologies that far outreach our reflective wisdom, in addictive and destructive ways. The apes in this first film of the series show stable kinship classes (gorilla soldiers, chimp scientists, and orang rulers), territorial respect (such as not entering the Forbidden Zone except with permission as Cornelius has done as an archeologist), sexual restraint (as Zira shows in her loyalty to Cornelius), standards of truth (with the Tribunal following Ape Law even if it denies rights to humans), and generational rivalry without civil war (although Zaius blows up Cornelius’s dig site to repress the human remains). These elements of ape-human ego, id, and superego continue to develop in the film’s several sequels, set on the planet earth in the future and current time.
The nuclear threat allegory becomes the main focus for the second movie, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970, Ted Post). The ape ego of gorilla General Ursus joins forces with Dr. Zauis’s scientific superego—to invade the Forbidden Zone, expanding their territory for food and truth. Meanwhile, Brent (James Franciscus), a human astronaut who somehow followed Taylor’s spaceship with his own and crash landed on the future earth, seeks to find Taylor with the help of Nova, after also meeting Zira and Cornelius. But Brent and Nova, like Zaius and Ursus with their gorilla army, discover an advanced society of mutant humans under the earth’s surface, who use telepathy to project cinematic illusions, bodily pain, and violent impulses into their enemies’ brains. The telepaths also worship a nuclear missile with Christ-like symbols on it, the Greek letters alpha and omega, in an underground cathedral that seems to be St. Patrick’s in New York because the ruins of other such sites are found by Brent and Nova, including the city’s subway and Radio City Music Hall. “Holy Bomb of Peace,” the telepaths call the missile, singing hymns to it and taking off their human-face masks in order to reveal the “inmost self” of radiation disease to their “god.”
Thus, screenwriters Paul Dehn and Mort Abrahams invert the ape masks, introduced in the first film, to show the detached, pseudo-religious savagery of an advanced human culture, which extends the cinematic power of our inner theater’s mirror and intuition neurons toward the direct manipulation of others’ brains—toward fear, rage, and mass suicide. One of the telepaths, explaining that they are people of “peace” and do not kill their enemies, puts Brent in a cage with Taylor, forcing them telepathically (perhaps through DMPFC director and limbic stagehand networks) to fight to the death, like a movie viewer desiring such scenes. To stop the ape army, the telepaths project horrific scenes of fire, crucified gorillas, and a huge statue of their ape Lawgiver bleeding from its face, as virtual 3D images on the earth’s surface. But the apes, led by Zaius, disregard such illusory scare tactics and overrun the underground telepaths’ territory. One of the bomb-worshipping (Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD) peaceniks then commits suicide in the tub, like an ancient Roman. Another starts the arming of their nuclear weapon, which the gorillas aid by pulling down the missile icon. After escaping the telepath’s virtual power and mourning the death of Nova from a gorilla gunshot, Taylor cynically completes their apocalyptic wish, blowing up the planet earth.
Thus, Beneath the Planet of the Apes extends Vietnam-era, Cold War doubts about the sanity of today’s humanity into its depictions of future apes and humans, with pre- and postmodern cultures. Tribal ties turn into territorial battles between the apes with guns and the telepaths with advanced mental technologies. Attractive ideals of a sexual and peaceful revolution appear with Nova again dressed as a cave-woman fantasy for the male gaze, riding on a horse with Brent, and the young chimps with protest signs trying to stop the gorilla army’s march. But these ideals turn into the horrors of underground New York ruins, of the gun-happy gorillas’ persistent drive for dominance, and of the telepaths’ cinematic projection tricks, religious self-deception, and nuclear disease. In a film released just 8 years after the Cuban missile crisis, the plot twist of going beneath the earth’s surface, showing future telepaths’ having rituals within and virtual projections onto (but also outside) the cave walls, suggests a tie to prehistoric cave art as the start of something monstrous in the ape-human id, ego, and superego, which might climax in a real-life nuclear holocaust. We evolved beyond other apes to create super-natural art forms, technologies, and ideologies. Such developments in recent times almost led to a nuclear war in 1962, through Capitalist-Communist territorial conflicts, and did lead to napalm bombing in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, escalating from tens to hundreds of thousands of tons.
Humans are, as Dr. Zaius fears, monstrously creative and destructive. But the film ends with a further tragicomic twist, after the telepaths’ nuclear warhead explodes, destroying earth and turning the movie screen bright white. A voice-over puts the movie audience into the role of observing gods in outer space, telling us that “a green and insignificant planet” of a medium-sized star among the billions in the universe “is now dead.” This encourages rasa engagement and then cathartic distancing of the human-ape’s inner theater, with right-cortical sympathies, involving limbic id passions, altering left-cortical preconceptions of ego and superego, in this reappraising perspective. Perhaps we still have time to transform into wiser apes and telepaths, unlike the creatures onscreen—through our evolving kinship ties, territorial disputes, beauty ideals, Machiavellian deceptions, dominance drives, and hyper-theatrical rites.
The apes refer to their god as the Creator, in relation to their Lawgiver and Sacred Scrolls. But the telepaths extend such Judeo-Christian ironies, singing hymns in cathedral pews, with “Amens” given and a minister leading them, while worshipping nuclear explosive power.
The heavens declare the glory of the Bomb and the firmament showeth His handiwork. . . . And His light unto the end of the world. He descendeth from the outermost part of heaven and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. There is neither speech nor language, yet His voice is heard among them. Praise Him, praise Him, my strength and my redeemer. Glory be to the Bomb and to the Holy Fallout as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
The leader of the communal rite wears a missile-shaped medallion on his chest, instead of a crucifix. Yet he refers to the Bomb as if it were Jesus Christ, connecting heaven and earth through the phallic missile and its sacrificial altar: “Almighty and Everlasting Bomb, who came down among us to make heaven under earth, lighten our darkness. Oh, instrument of God, grant us thy peace.” Then each person unmasks, revealing “the truth that abides in us. . . unto that Maker” and showing grotesque, irradiated faces to the film viewer. But the Big Bang at the end offers a supernatural viewpoint, with a voice-over (of whom?) explaining the death of the planet that ironically caps the telepaths’ prayer. The “world without end” is somewhere beyond earth, and yet also the end of their world. This reframes the film, putting the movie audience in the divine role of creator, lawgiver, and alpha revolutionary power, remaking the world through the brain’s inner theater, as “the truth that abides in us.”
The third film in the series, Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) was directed by Paul Taylor, but again scripted, like the second, by Paul Dehn. The first two films suggested an animal rights issue by flipping the experimental table on humans, making Taylor, Landon, and Brent the subjects of ape control and experimentation. The third develops that issue further, combining it with a question about human destiny and a providential God, again shifting the role of the movie audience.
Cornelius and Zira escape the future earth’s destruction, along with a chimp “genius,” Dr. Milo. He repairs Taylor’s spaceship and pilots them back in time to the current audience era, though the chimps see the nuclear explosion on the future earth while leaving it. Milo is then strangled to death by a gorilla when the three chimps are kept in a cage next to it in a zoo in 1970s Los Angeles. But after humans realize the astronaut apes can speak intelligently, they become celebrities with a luxurious hotel room and fashionable clothes. Cornelius wants to keep some secrets but Zira leaks them, rebelling against him, with her desire to tell the truth, but also by getting drunk. Then the chimps are treated more like enemies, in a CIA interrogation room. A Kissinger-like advisor with a German accent, Dr. Otto Hasslein, warns the president that if the pregnant Zira is allowed to give birth, or Cornelius and Zira are allowed to procreate again, the future earth will end in the nuclear explosion that they saw when they left it.
Ironically, Hasslein’s explanation to a TV audience about multiple universes in the future, branching out from different potential human actions now, belies the error in his overly anxious warnings. He misses or represses the fact that Cornelius and Zira’s traveling back in time could not be the cause of apes acquiring language and a more advanced culture in the future, leading to war and nuclear destruction, because the future they came from could not have included that past branch, prior to their trip. (Indeed, Cornelius gives an alternative, evolutionary explanation, shown in the next film of the series.) And yet, Dr. Hasslein encourages the TV and movie audiences to imagine a godlike perspective—of an artist creating a painting of himself painting himself painting, and so on, like a hall of mirrors showing “infinite regression.” This is his way of rationalizing the killing of Cornelius, Zira, and their baby (even against the president’s order) to assume his own godlike role in stopping the future destruction of the earth.
When initially talking with the president, Dr. Hasslein expresses uncertainty about changing the future by killing the chimps. “Which future has God, if there is a God, chosen for man’s destiny? If I urge the destruction of these apes, am I defying God’s will or obeying it? Am I His enemy or His instrument?” But after Zira and Cornelius escape Hasslein’s custody with their baby, he piles up the problems of the world—pollution, population control, and nuclear weapons—to convince himself and his colleagues to take action against the chimps. “We think we’ve got all the time in the world? How much time has the earth got?” Hasslein draws on his inner theater’s deep survival circuits and limbic fears as stagehands to move his brain’s higher areas, and those in others, to take immediate action against a threat that is 2,000 years in the future. At the film’s end, he kills the speaking chimps, but dies also in the sacrifice for the future. And yet, the baby chimp survives, shown in a cage (and played by a real chimp), apparently saying, “Mama,” not knowing that he will never meet her again.
Through such tragicomic twists, this film, like earlier ones in the series, provokes its audience to question the Judeo-Christian foundation for modern Western science: a belief that humans have “dominion” over the earth and its animals (Genesis 1: 26). Under the influence of sodium pentothal as a truth serum, Zira tells her human interrogators the details of how she vivisected humans in the future, for the benefit of the apes (like Dr. Moreau with his hybrids). This disgusts even her zoo veterinarian friend, Dr. Lewis Dixon—and perhaps the movie viewer—into rethinking what humans do with lab animals.23 Cornelius also reports a common gorilla and orangutan belief, as given by Dr. Zaius earlier in the series, that the Creator made apes “in His own image.” This highlights the human hubris, in the 1970s and our time, of justifying the use of animals in scientific research with the exceptionalism of our species, whether given by God or Mother Nature.
The series shifts the audience’s perspective from godlike, trans-historical, and outer-spatial views, in the first two films, toward questioning such aspirations with the villain of the third, Dr. Hasslein. It evokes sympathy for the intelligent, witty, loyal chimps, Cornelius and Zira, who are “pacifists,” they say, like all chimps in the future. Yet, the third film reveals Cornelius’s attempts to hide the truth from humans and Zira’s memory of surgical experiments with live humans in the future. The fourth film, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972, dir. J. Lee Thompson and again written by Paul Dehn), focuses on the rise of their offspring, Caesar (played by Roddy McDowall, the same actor who portrayed his father), as a Messiah-like communal or communist leader, in the violent rebellion of apes against their fascist human masters, in a future 1991.24
At the start, sympathy is evoked for Caesar, the baby chimp seen at the end of the previous film. He is now an adult being led on a chain, with a metal collar, by his foster father, the animal-loving circus owner, Armando (Ricardo Montalban), who seems to be showing him the rest of the human world for the first time, warning him not to speak. Armando shows Caesar a memorial to the pet cats that died 8 years ago, along with dogs, in 1983, and explains that a virus killed them all, leading to apes becoming pets and then slaves—as Cornelius had told from his future knowledge in the prior film. The viewer and Caesar witness various acts of callousness and cruelty by human owners, trainers, and guards, sometimes dressed in black uniforms, looking like Nazi SS officers. This politicizes Caesar, who yells from the crowd, “human bastards,” at the officers beating a fellow ape for misbehavior. Armando helps Caesar to flee but then turns himself in, bluffing that he yelled during the incident and does not know where his circus chimp is. Yet, when interrogated under a special lamp, Armando cannot continue lying and then jumps out a window to his death—sacrificing his life for the chimp.
Such an opening act of the film draws melodramatic identifications of viewers with the chimp hero, human ally, and ape victims against fascist villains, in the binary operator of the brain’s left parietal lobe (as part of the left-cortical critic/scripter ), involving also the moral VMPFC stage manager and emotional limbic stagehands. But this melodramatic framework is complicated by tragicomic edges in various scenes. When Caesar hides in a cage of newly imported orangutans, the non-chimps crowd around him with territorial aggression, making him hiss to defend himself against what initially seemed to be his fellow victims and potential allies against the humans. Yet when Caesar is led through the training facility, empathy is again evoked from him—and potentially from the movie viewer (through limbic distress circuits of emotional contagion)—for other apes suffering harsh treatment by humans with clubs and flame throwers. They are being “conditioned” to behave and serve, to wash their hands and pour water into a glass, which Caesar performs exceptionally well. He is purchased then at an ape slave auction by the local Governor (Don Murray), who becomes suspicious that Caesar might be the offspring of Zira and Cornelius, previously switched with another baby chimp that died when they were killed. (All the adult apes are played by masked humans, so the viewer can pretend they look similar to real apes even when walking somewhat upright and speaking.)
Governor Breck, a white man dressed in black, develops into the main villain of the film. But his black aide, MacDonald (Hari Rhodes), initially aligned with the dominant humans against the apes, becomes a secret ally to the intelligent, black-haired, chimp slave. After Armando’s suicide raises suspicions, MacDonald helps Caesar to flee. But the chimp is caught and tortured with electrodes attached to his head (perhaps reminding viewers of the brain surgery performed by chimps in the future, according to this film series, or perhaps of brain mapping today). And yet, MacDonald helps Caesar to survive and escape again, despite the governor’s sudden command to execute him. With Latino and black actors cast as Caesar’s only human allies, race issues are clearly emphasized in this 1970s film. Armando and MacDonald are Caesar’s noble allies in his melodramatic fight against a white villain’s cruel regime. However, both sympathy for and fear of the apes may grow in viewers’ inner theaters as Caesar leads them toward revolutionary violence against their oppressors—drawing on tragic associations with Vietnam, Kent State, and Watergate, yet also communist threats, the Black Panthers, Black Muslims,25 and other signs of civil war at home and abroad, then or more recently.
Here, Caesar becomes more central as a tragicomic hero than Zira or Cornelius in the earlier three films. He is shown in alienated mourning, peering into the dark night with tears falling from his eyes, after the death of his foster father Armando, due in part to his own error of shouting at the brutal humans, perhaps also revealing his earlier suffering and alienation after the death of his chimp parents. Yet one of the “primitive apes,” a female chimp that Caesar was apparently bred with by his human captors earlier in the film (like Zira started to do with Nova and Taylor), touches him sympathetically then, connecting the inner theaters of their ape egos, as well as ids, without spoken words. Likewise, Caesar’s vengeful and yet justice-seeking gaze meets the eyes of other apes, in various locations, inspiring their personal rebellions. These feelings (evoking audience rasas of sorrow, anger, and courage) become collective, too, as Caesar gathers the apes in wordless covert meetings, with various stolen knives, forming a terrorist or freedom-fighting organization across species. Caesar also leads them, without their speaking, in protest marches against the state’s security officers. When many of them, just carrying knives and clubs, are gunned down by those authorities, tragic memories of the Kent State shooting by National Guardsmen of unarmed student protestors and bystanders, just two years before this film’s release, might be evoked in viewers’ inner theaters. And yet, as Caesar’s ape militants then overwhelm the human officers, beating and stabbing them to death, the viewers’ visceral sympathies may again shift toward the new victims, through mirror neuron and contagious pain networks, evoking body-swapping identifications and rasa reappraisals.
Such visual, tragicomic twists become verbal when the apes capture MacDonald and Governor Breck. In their collective frenzy, the apes (many in red uniforms, suggesting communist revolutionaries) are about to bludgeon them, but Caesar makes them pause. He questions Breck about why humans turned apes from pets into slaves. The Governor explains that humans feared the savagery of apes as apes themselves. “Man was born of the ape and there’s still an ape curled up inside every man, the beast that must be whipped into submission, the savage that has to be shackled in chains. You are the beast, Caesar. You taint us. You poison our guts. When we hate you, we’re hating the dark side of ourselves.”
Governor Breck thus reveals that his oppressive regime was not simply evil. Like many in the film audience, who enjoy a godlike dominance in watching the film’s mayhem, Breck and his colleagues projected a tragic flaw from their inner theater and in-group, a fear of their own savage evil, onto other types of apes as melodramatic scapegoats. The governor’s tone incenses Caesar to club him with his rifle, as a scapegoat also. But the chimp leader pauses, as his higher brain networks process Breck’s insight, inhibiting primal revenge impulses. Not wanting to indulge in savagery himself, Caesar tells the other apes to take the fallen oppressor away.
MacDonald tries to aid Caesar’s VMPFC superego as stage manager of the revolution’s violence. As the other apes threaten to club Breck, MacDonald says to Caesar, “This is not how it was supposed to be. . . . Violence prolongs hate. Hate prolongs violence. By what right are you spilling blood?” Caesar exults in his current victory, predicting that “apes on five continents” will do likewise and his “people” will rule the earth after humans destroy their own cities in nuclear war. But then he sees the apes with rifle butts raised over Breck. He also sees the female chimp who befriended him, now gazing at him with a “No” to such violence (as one of the first primitive apes to speak). So he tells the apes to put down their weapons. “And we who are not human can afford to be humane. Destiny is the will of God and if it is man’s destiny to be dominated, it is God’s will that he be dominated with compassion and understanding.” Caesar tries to be a better leader or a better god than the humans who had dominion over his fellow animals—maybe like the film’s creators and audience.
The final film of the original series, Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973, dir. J. Lee Thompson, story by Paul Dehn, screenplay by John and Joyce Corrington)26 begins with the orangutan Lawgiver (played by the famous filmmaker John Huston) telling ape and human children in 2670 about the strife between their species more than six centuries before, which the movie viewer sees in scenes from the prior films.
In the beginning, God created beast and man, so that both might live in friendship and share dominion over a world at peace. But in the fullness of time, evil men betrayed God’s trust and, in disobedience to His holy word, waged bloody wars, not only against their own kind, but against the apes whom they reduced to slavery. Then God in His wrath sent the world a savior, miraculously born of two apes, who descended on the earth from its own future.
The film then shows Caesar, as “savior” in that prior time, but through conflicts with gorilla General Aldo and with “mutant” humans who have survived nuclear warfare. They live in the underground remains of their destroyed city, but emerge like a procession of ants to make war against the apes—led by the evil Governor Kolp who wants to exterminate the apes out of boredom underground and greed for new territory.
A few good humans still live and talk with the apes, some as teachers, others as servants. Caesar gets advice from another MacDonald, brother of the one in the previous film, and from a wise orangutan named Virgil. But the gorilla Aldo vies with Caesar for alpha leadership of the apes, disputing whether they should learn from or just control the humans as servants. Caesar then leads the apes in repelling the mutant humans who attack their village with motorbikes, jeeps, a yellow school bus, mortars, and machine guns. Yet Aldo and his soldiers take the violence further, massacring the fleeing mutants. He also orders the death of the local, friendly humans, which he had corralled (like Japanese Americans during World War II), as an evil species. Caesar forbids this, but the gorillas band together to assassinate him—until Virgil declares that Aldo previously killed Caesar’s young son, breaking a sacred law: “Ape does not kill ape.”
The apes then support Caesar’s revenge on Aldo, whom he overpowers while they are both on the branch of a tree, killing him in revenge. But Caesar prevents further vengeance against his human friends, building the basis to renew their shared “dominion” in the Lawgiver’s story. Thus, the original series ends not only with melodramatic, interspecies battles, between gorillas and chimps/orangutans, or between apes and “evil men,” but also with a note of tragicomic hope that they might balance their rivalries in the future—if sci-fi desires of the godlike filmmakers and mass audience allow.
After the original film series, 14 episodes of a live action Planet of the Apes television series were broadcast on CBS in 1974 and 13 episodes of an animated TV series on NBC in 1975. But it took another quarter century for a remake of the initial film27 with a very different plot but still with prosthetic makeup on the actors as humanoid apes, along with highertech visual effects. Created during the late 1990s, in an era of Y2K, end of the millennium, apocalyptic anxieties, the new Planet of the Apes, directed by Tim Burton (with a screenplay by William Broyles Jr., Lawrence Konner, and Mark Rosenthal), was released in July 2001, just a couple months before 9/11. It presents a society of talking apes and enslaved humans on a planet called “Ashlar” in 5021, where the film’s hero, astronaut Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg), finds himself after passing through a time warp, like Taylor on a future earth in the original film.
But here, the primitive humans talk and the apes move in more apelike ways, hunched and swaying when on two feet, running on all fours, and swinging or leaping with super-natural strength.28 Male gorillas and chimps ride horses and fight in armor and helmets, but without guns, like ancient or medieval warriors, more primitive than in the original series. Several female chimps have hair styles (on their heads) and one is shown as the trophy wife of an older pudgy orangutan. A comical, orangutan slave trader, Limbo (Paul Giamatti), extends the egoistic Self-awareness of the real-life orang Chantek (mentioned in the previous chapter) by perfuming himself with rose petals while hanging upside-down and looking in the mirror. The wealthy apes also party together with snobbish attitudes and their children mock the humans, more as a collective class with various ape characteristics than as the species-organized classes in the original. The new Apes film explores “species guilt” more than racial guilt, with Leo’s mention of apes’ survival, on earth in his time, only in zoos and labs, like the one on his space station (O’Hehir 13).29
Initially, too, there are differences from the original film. Leo arrives on the apes’ planet not with fellow astronauts but alone, after disobeying his commander’s order at the start of the film. Stealing a space “pod,” a small travel craft, from their space station in 2029, Leo follows a chimpastronaut friend, Pericles (played by an actual chimp), who was sent into an electromagnetic storm in a similar solo vehicle. Thus, Leo’s crash landing on a strange planet three millennia later, after following Pericles through a time warp, echoes the beginnings of the “space race” in the 1960s, when various animals, including chimps, were sent on experimental vehicles prior to humans, as expendable sacrifices in the conquest of space. 30 It also reflects the 1990s, with a public fear of millennial change, based on the Christian calendar.
Pericles (named perhaps after the ancient Greek democratic leader or Shakespeare’s character) appears again late in the film, touching down on Ashlar in his space vehicle. He is viewed by the apes, at least at first, as their returning god, Semos. Prior to that, Leo finds the ruins of his space station on the planet and learns that it crashed there, too, but three millennia earlier. Its other ape workers, led by the genetically enhanced Semos, overthrew the humans, starting a new culture on the planet. They evolved into the apes and humans that Leo found there. The crashed space station eventually became a holy site to the apes, a temple of their god, Semos. Pericles’ sudden reappearance makes him a deus ex machina in a double sense: a super-natural figure who changes the drama’s ending, actually stepping out of a machine, yet also a resurrecting, godlike, revolutionary leader, akin to Caesar in the earlier films.
Here, movie viewers’ identifications might shift, through such tragicomic twists, from sympathizing with the alienated ape ego of Leo, and fearing (yet enjoying) his initial rebellion on the space station and in various survival dangers on the strange planet, to reflecting on human-animal relations in science and technology today—or within our own brains and bodies. Which leaders of the past and persons in our immediate lives do we project as godlike in our inner theaters and in other, collective media? How is this due to a particular cultural shaping of our super-natural, human-ape departure from preprogramed instincts, with an alienated need for meaning in life? And which alien or idolized projections relate to the territorial race to keep specific spaces around us as our own, or that of our kin, against other groups and races?
Leo, as alien visitor on Ashlar, gets a female chimp ally with hints of cross-species sexual attractions, plus a primitive human female, as his love interest triangle like Taylor’s. This time, however, the primitive human speaks and the chimp female is not a scientist, but an animal and human rights activist named Ari (Helen Bonham Carter). She buys Leo and the human female, Daena (Estella Warren), from the slave trader, Limbo. Ari then helps Leo to free his fellow humans (including a little girl, the caged pet of a young female chimp) and escape from the home of her father, a wealthy senator. Leo’s main opponent among the apes is the sinister General Thade (Tim Roth), a power-hungry chimp and descendent of Semos, who functions mostly as a melodramatic villain here, more like Ursus and Aldo than Zaius as antagonists in the earlier films.31 For example, during a dinner party of upper-class apes, held by Ari’s father, General Thade pries open the mouth of Leo, a house slave at the table, to see whether humans have a “soul” inside, as a brutal joke about Ari’s argument that they do. Thade (who seems to have a humped back, like Shakespeare’s Richard III) is also courting Ari, despite their political differences, as an alignment with her powerful father. But Ari rejects him and he eventually brands her hand with a hot iron, like the humans are branded, as a rebel conspirator with them.
And yet, the viewer is offered a sympathetic scene of the villain Thade with his dying father (played by Charlton Heston, like the ghost of Taylor returning in ape form), who warns him that humans are dangerous, due to their prior civilization with its guns. Thade also has a gorilla ally, Colonel Attar, who leads the marching troops and fights fiercely in the final battle. He kills Ari’s friend, Krull, a former general whose career was ruined by Thade. Although a gorilla warrior, like Attar, Krull is more sympathetic for the movie viewer because he sides with the humans in loyalty to Ari, helping them to escape her house and destroying Leo’s gun to avoid further bloodshed.
However, after Krull’s death in the final battle, tragic sympathy is evoked also for Colonel Attar, a dedicated worshiper of Semos, when the gorilla realizes that Thade is not the noble leader he thought he was, in a divine lineage, but an egoistic trickster. “Everything I have believed is a lie. You and your family have betrayed us.” Even the villainous Thade is given a tragicomic twist at the end. Trapped by Leo in the command module of the ruined space station, Thade shoots a gun (brought by Pericles to the planet) many times at Attar and then at Ari, after each declines to free him. The bullets ricochet off the thick glass door, eventually forcing the power-mad chimp to hide from his own violence under the command console.
In another tragicomic twist at the end of the film, “borrowed from the 1963 satirical novel by Pierre Boulle,” which inspired the original series (O’Hehir 12), Leo returns to earth in Pericles’ solo pod, through a fortuitous, space-storm time-warp, leaving behind his female human and chimpanzee friends on Ashlar. When Leo crash lands on what looks like the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, he finds a statue there of General Thade32 and a modern ape society, suggesting surreal questions about one of America’s greatest political gods. Was it apelike of Lincoln to promote a brutal civil war to hold the United States together, using the antislavery issue as a political tool? Or might such a war have produced, in an alternate universe, a different ape ego as alpha, eventually worshiped like Lincoln in a Greco-Roman temple?
The 2001 remake was profitable at the box office, but not as valuable to many critics as the original film.33 And yet, its ending might be seen as foreshadowing the shift in America’s millennial fears toward a certain dark-skinned race and Abrahamic religion, with the terrorist attacks on capitalist and governmental monuments, in New York and Washington, later in the same year. It also led, after a decade of the “War on Terror,” to the making of a seventh version in 2011. However, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Rupert Wyatt and scripted by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver) focuses more on lab guilt, human aging, ape-ego alienation, socially networked rebellion, and viral contagion. It also uses advanced computer graphics and motion-capture technology to create realistic-looking yet virtual apes performed by humans.34
Based somewhat on the fourth film, and on actual experiments in teaching apes human language, this version starts with a baby chimp, named “Caesar,” whose mother becomes violent while on doses of an experimental, virus-based drug to increase intelligence, ALZ-112, a potential cure for Alzheimer’s disease. After the mother (named “Bright Eyes” like Taylor in Zira’s lab) goes wild at a board meeting and is shot to protect the public, the black biotech boss, Steven Jacobs (David Oyelowo), decides to “put down” all the chimps that the corporation owns. But a scientist working in the lab, Will Rodman (James Franco) takes the baby home, rather than letting it be killed. Will lives with an Alzheimer’s victim, his father Charles (John Lithgow), who names the chimp, “Caesar,” influenced by Shakespeare’s play.35 (It is not clear whether he also saw the original film series.) Thus, the 2011 version adds a lab-hybrid-brought-home motif to the Planet of the Apes precedents, akin to Dren being saved by her scientist parents after the blob creatures go berserk before the public in Splice .
The computer graphic imagery (CGI) in this film may increase spectator identification with the chimp, Caesar, and some of the apes he meets later. Instead of watching human actors walking upright in ape masks, as in the original series, or given super-natural running and leaping abilities, as in the 2001 version, viewers see animated yet highly realistic apes with subtle facial expressions and detailed gestures, communicating with the humans and each other nonverbally. Also, most of the chimps here, like in earlier films, have white sclerae in their eyes (which real apes and other mammals do not), making them more humanoid with their gazes, despite the otherwise realistic depiction of their bodies. The film begins with a godlike view of trees and then of wild chimps in Africa, shown in close-up with dark brown sclerae. Suddenly, they are chased by black humans. One chimp is caught and caged. It is driven away in a truck from the rest of its troop. The close-up of its agonized cry zooms into one of its eyes, with a brown sclera, golden iris, and black pupil—and then pulls back showing a brighter yellow iris “with flecks of green” (as Will tells the board meeting) and a white sclera. Thus, the transition to the next scene identifies the movie viewer’s gaze with the chimp “Bright Eyes” in a lab cage, who then completes a puzzle in record time, astonishing her handlers. The audience is led from a wild chimp’s alienation to a captive chimp’s intelligence, from the browns to the whites of the eyes, even though Bright Eyes goes suddenly wild and attacks human until she is shot and killed.
Sympathy is also evoked for the orphaned Caesar (Andy Serkis within the CGI) as a frisky youngster wearing clothes but swinging on things in and around Will’s home, and then as an adolescent let loose in the redwoods near San Francisco—with the movie viewer given his treetop perspective, involving shared primate spatial circuitry in the parietal lobes and cerebellum. As a baby, youngster, and adolescent, Caesar becomes an oxytocin-inducing object of care for Will, his father, and his new girlfriend, an Indian-American primatologist named Caroline (Freida Pinto). With the ALZ-112 brain boost, inherited through his dead mother’s blood when he was in her womb, Caesar soon learns American Sign Language (ASL) and eventually uses it to ask his foster father existential questions about whether he is a pet (when he sees a dog on a collar and leash like him), who his father is, what he is, and what happened to his mother. These expressions of an ape’s inner theater, with various stagings of self and other, encourage the movie viewer’s cross-species, body-swapping identifications with him.
So does the poignant triangulation of Charles’s awakening awareness and Caesar’s, through the viral drug given them illegally by Will—in an all-male trinity of (grand)father, young chimp, and scientific progenitor.36 Will’s research product, though leading to the death of Caesar’s mother and eleven other chimps, resurrects Charles, nurturing him to a new life, while also making Caesar more human. Women (Charles’s nurse and Will’s girlfriend) play only minor roles as maternal caregivers. But then a tragic flaw is revealed in the patriarchal hubris of Will’s biotech solution. His father slips back toward subhuman dementia as his diseased brain builds resistance to the viral drug. Caesar seems the first to notice this, while seated at the dinner table with Will and his father. The chimp sees that Charles is using the wrong end of the fork to cut his food and gently turns it around in the old man’s hand.37 Thus, while Caesar’s human acculturation increases, through family life and the viral drug, Charles’s declines. This also reflects an existential anxiety about the aging process that many movie viewers face, for themselves and family members, dramatically accelerated here.
Various aspects of Caesar’s development as a human-raised ape relate to an actual experiment in doing this, conducted in the 1960s–70s by psychotherapist Maurice Temerlin, his wife Jane, and their son Steve, with their “chimpanzee daughter” Lucy.38 Temerlin and his family first adopted a male chimp as an “exotic pet” (to go with a large collection of birds), but he died in a “freak accident,” choked while playing with his “security blanket” (2–3). Maurice and Jane, though “grief stricken,” immediately adopted a newborn female chimp, taking her away from her captive mother and making her their “child” (3–4). Lucy lived with them for 12 years (as Steve grew from preteen to adulthood), learning over 100 words of ASL.39 But then she became too physically strong to live in their home, near the University of Oklahoma. She was sent to an ape preserve in Gambia where she gradually became accustomed to living with other rehabilitated chimps, and then was released with them into the wild (through the dedicated work of Janis Carter). But Lucy died there a couple years later.
Caesar’s high-energy swinging throughout Will’s house and in the redwood forest reflects what Temerlin describes with Lucy being “far more active” than a human infant (8). Like Caesar in the film, Lucy quickly learned to hold her own baby bottle to drink (11). By 15 months of age, she was sitting at the table and using silverware, after watching other family members do so, without being taught (15). Like Caesar with Charles in the fork-turning scene, Lucy would comfort her “mother” Jane when she was in distress, by putting her arm around her, grooming her, or kissing her (165). The chimp was also very protective of Jane. When Maurice argued with his wife, Lucy would attempt to groom her or distract him, by getting him to play, or then bark and threaten him (177). With strangers she became more aggressive, as when children played roughly with Steve, or adults were visiting, because their status was lower to her than that of her family members (176).
Yet once, at the age of nine, with genitals swollen in full estrus, Lucy almost bit her “father” Maurice. He was being affectionate with Jane and they ignored Lucy, so she grabbed a phone and started dialing to annoy them. Maurice took the phone away and cursed her. Then Lucy charged him, screaming, and put her mouth on his arm, but stopped before breaking the skin. Her “scream of anger changed to a scream of terror. . . terrified of her own impulse to bite” (190). Temerlin understood this as an instinctual taboo against attacking a family member, with shame expressed afterward, perhaps akin to the incest taboo observed with her and by Jane Goodall with wild chimps (132–35). But Lucy would bite others to protect her family, toys, or territory, as when a housekeeper moved furniture she was sitting on, or simply to set a limit to aggression and establish “dominance” when humans did not (44–45, 63–64).40
Likewise, Caesar’s identification with Charles, as his grandfather, takes a tragic turn when dementia makes the old man get into an argument with a neighbor, Douglas. Caesar, as full-grown chimp, attacks the neighbor to protect Charles. (Earlier in the film, Douglas threatened the three-year-old Caesar with a baseball bat when he entered his yard.) Caesar leaps on Douglas, beats him with his fists, chases him, leaps on him again, and bites his finger. But the chimp’s face then shows regret and shame, as he returns to Charles’s arms, with other neighbors surrounding them and staring in horror. This may evoke fear and pity (plus other rasas ) in movie viewers who identify with Caesar’s tragic flaw of impulsive, protective rage and with his subsequent alienation from his home community.
As a danger to his human neighbors, Caesar is placed, by court order, in a primate shelter. The viewer’s sympathy is again evoked with the chimp’s agonized facial expressions and gestures when separated from Will and his girlfriend by a thick glass window in a door. After they leave, Caesar is tricked by a cruel keeper, Dodge (son of the shelter’s manager), into going from a large play room, through a wire-mesh tunnel, to a small cage, where he is trapped, while other apes around him start screaming and banging on their cages. Ironically, it is Dodge who then calls the shelter “a madhouse,” repeating what Taylor called the lab where he was held captive by apes in the original film. Yet here, traditional assumptions are challenged not with a human hero but with a chimp’s perspective as prisoner of cages, apes, and human handlers (like the start of the third film)— inverting the Judeo-Christian view of a God-given right to dominion over all animals.
Repeating the apes’ punishment of Taylor for misbehavior, Dodge, as sadistic villain in this film, turns a fire-hose on Caesar, punishing the rebellious chimp for throwing food at him. And yet, in a subsequent scene, movie viewers experience more of the apes’ own theater of cruelty, involving domination and scapegoating, when they are released into the common play area where Caesar first experienced the shelter—seen by Will and Caroline as a positive, stimulating environment when they left him there. With a large troop surrounding him, Caesar is attacked by the alpha chimp, Rocket, who tears the newcomer’s shirt off, chases him on artificial tree branches, and makes him fall to the ground. As with body-swapping identifications evoked in earlier scenes of the infant Caesar moving dynamically through Will’s home, or climbing and swinging through the redwoods at various stages of his maturing form, viewers here might merge their motoric mirror neuron and emotional contagion circuitry with the animated ape’s onscreen. But in this scene, they would also experience his tragic fall from the branches, in their inner theaters, extending the virtual uncanniness of the film—with Caesar struggling to stand then, yet falling again, made unconscious by a dart from Dodge’s gun.
When Caesar wakes in his cage, he finds a new friend, a circus orangutan, Maurice, who uses ASL gestures to communicate through the cage walls, warning him, according to the subtitles: “Careful. Humans no like smart Ape.” Using his intelligence to gain another ally without ASL, Caesar steals a pocketknife from a human visitor, turns it into a key that can unlock his cage at night, and also unlocks the cage of a large gorilla named “Buck.” (Lucy was also proficient with stealing and using a key to escape her home enclosure [Temerlin 94].) Caesar then shows Rocket his new ally, Buck, and the former alpha submits with a bow and extended palm.
Movie viewers, having first sympathized with Caesar’s loss of his mother as a baby, and then of his human family as a youth, see him mature now from an ape wearing human clothes and alienated from others in the shelter to its new leader—through body language. Unlike the earlier Planet of the Apes films with “civilized” talking apes, the viewer here becomes immersed in a “primitive” ape culture, with male chimps vying for status, sometimes brutally. Yet Caesar gains the trust of his fellow inmates, against the domineering alpha, through cleverness, kindness, and camaraderie, as they join with him then to escape from their common enemy, the unethical and sadistic human keepers.
Meanwhile, in the human realm, Will fights with his biotech boss, Jacobs, about whether to restart ape trials with an improved version of the viral drug, ALZ-113, in aerosol form, and then how fast to do so. The casting here of a black actor with an African accent as the Gen-Sys CEO evokes not just a “post-racial” worldview (Baum 116), but also the postcolonial role of African rulers and businessmen with difficult decisions about the use or abuse of natural resources, such as primates and other animals. Jacobs is the executive who quickly ordered the killing of a dozen apes at the start of the film, after Bright Eyes went wild. Yet now, after being told how ALZ-112 not only helped Will’s father with his disease but increased his intelligence, Jacobs orders Will to resume the trials with the new drug. As he later says, when Will wants to proceed more cautiously, “You make history; I make money.” Jacobs also threatens Will with blackmail, knowing that the scientist gave the drug illegally to his father.
However, Will has been influenced by Caroline, who cautioned him that some things are not meant to be controlled or changed, and by Charles, who refused to try the new drug (ALZ-113) and accepted death instead. Will chooses to be wary now about the risk in seeking godlike biomedical power, even as Caesar and his ape followers “rise” in their collective intelligence. Although Will bribes the shelter’s manager to release Caesar, the ape leader refuses to go home with his former father. He escapes on his own, steals the viral intelligence spray from Will’s home, returns to the shelter, and administers it to the other apes—causing a revolution there while evoking audience rasas of courage and awe.
The two heroes, human and ape, make different decisions in their parallel battles. Will quits his job at Gen-Sys, rather than continuing to counsel his boss about the risky drug trials. He also ignores the accidental spread of the airborne viral drug to a chimp handler, which eventually leads to a deadly epidemic in humans by the end of the film. Caesar, on the other hand, shows concern for his fellow apes in a human way, teaching Rocket to share a communal bag of cookies with the others. He tells Maurice that together they can become stronger, demonstrating this with a single stick, easily broken, and then a group of sticks, which are harder to break. This might evoke, for some viewers, the dangers of “fascism” (from the Italian word fasces for “bundle,” an early Fascist symbol). Caesar then escapes from the shelter and visits Will’s home, voyeuristically viewing Will and Caroline asleep together in bed, like the monstrous Ouran visiting Ruth in the first Moreau film. But Caesar does not dwell in family rivalries or perverse pleasures. Instead, he steals the new drug from Will’s refrigerator, as a benevolent thief, rebel, and ruler, returning to the shelter to liberate and hyper-evolve his peers.
Viewers are encouraged to sympathize with Caesar, the super-natural chimp, even as he grows more monstrous and fearsome: from the lab where his mother went wild to his home-life mischief and danger to neighbors, to his climbing to the top of the redwood forest (with a view then of the human city), to his caged socialization with other apes, and his rise to alpha power. At home, as a full-grown chimp, Caesar was shown staring at himself in the mirror, focusing on a “birthmark” (as Will called it) on his right shoulder. A similar moment of outer-self awareness (reflecting the LPFC character and DMPFC director in human viewers) occurs when Will offers to take his adopted son home from the primate shelter. Caesar looks at the other apes in the cages around him and into the eyes of the orangutan Maurice. Then he closes his cage door, identifying more at that point with the nonhuman apes, even across species, than with his family. 41 His alienation in losing his mother (like Caesar in the original film series), in being raised with humans, and in being trapped with hostile apes in the shelter, shifts now to a sense of purpose with his distinctive birthmark and monstrous intelligence (reflecting also the viewers’ MPFC actor and VMPFC stage manager ). Belonging to his new tribe, with a role to play in leading them toward freedom, means more to Caesar than belonging with a human family.
Strangely, or perhaps to minimize the strangeness of animated apes as lead characters, this film does not show their genitals. It also has Caesar wearing pants in the shelter, even after his shirt is torn off, until he returns there to share the intelligence drug. Female apes are not featured, unlike in previous Planet of the Apes films. Even the human females in Will’s home life, his girlfriend and his father’s nurse, are minor characters and few are shown at Gen-Sys. At the primate shelter, women are not employed, though two are brought there at night by Dodge and his friend, as a way of teasing their dates. But the women soon become scared of the apes, when the men taunt them, and insist on leaving. So this film does not explore gender dynamics like some of its predecessors. Nor are racial issues represented by ape species as distinct classes. Instead, it focuses audience sympathies and fears on the existential struggle of Caesar, as he negotiates survival—if not sexual—situations, involving group status and territoriality, through attraction, domination, and trickery.
Like Lucy and Chantek in their real-life human worlds, and various primates observed in the wild, Caesar tricks his superiors in the shelter. First, he grabs Dodge’s male friend by the shirt collar, through his cage, threatening him with violence, but actually stealing his pocketknife. Next, he fashions a key by tying it onto a stick, unlocking his cage and Buck’s. Then, after Buck enjoys some free time in the playroom, Caesar lures Rocket there and makes him submit—involving the animal values of attraction and domination, status and territoriality, freedom and belonging. Later, he refuses to go home with Will, but then goes there himself and steals the ALZ-113. He sprays it onto his fellow apes, without offering them a choice, and they inhale it while sleeping. The next morning, their eyes are green like his and they have white sclerae.
Caesar then lures Dodge into the playroom, after the other apes have returned to their cages. This causes Dodge to call another keeper, Rodney, who had been watching the original Planet of the Apes on TV, to go to the observation platform with a tranquilizer gun as his backup. Dodge uses a Taser rod on Caesar but the chimp then grabs his arm. Ironically, the human villain repeats Taylor’s heroic phrase from the original film: “Take your stinking paw off me, you damn, dirty ape.” In reply, Caesar speaks for the first time, “No,” and overpowers the human handler, knocking him unconscious. Caesar then stops the other apes from beating Rodney to death (after he failed to use the tranquilizer gun and left the observation platform). Yet when Dodge revives and approaches the apes with the Taser rod turned on, Caesar shoots him with the water hose, electrocuting him. The surprise on his face shows that Caesar killed Dodge by mistake, but also through the hubris of his newfound power. Ironically, Dodge dies by a similar error of hubris with his prior technologies of phallic control (the Taser rod and water hose). Thus, the scene gives a tragicomic twist to the death of this villain and to the reaction of his killer, our ape hero, shocked to see the deadly mix of electricity and water.
Some viewers might start to sympathize with the humans as Caesar’s super-natural, bright-eyed apes become an alien (or native) horde of invaders, pouring over the hills, from the shelter to the city—in the god’s eye view given to the film audience. Caesar’s wild tribe then breaks through the glass walls of the Gen-Sys laboratory, smashing equipment and freeing the test apes. Even Jacobs, Will’s main antagonist, might become a focus for movie viewers’ left-cortical, critic/scripter identifications, as he enters the Gen-Sys building and finds no human colleagues, but then stands in an atrium with broken glass and overturned chairs. The apes look down on him from the balconies above, unseen by him at first, yet viewed by the movie audience as a potentially vengeful chorus of right-cortical, scene-redesigning passions.
On the other hand, the apes (mostly chimps) might also remind viewers of World Trade Center victims on 9/11 as they leap through the glass of the Gen-Sys building several floors above the ground. Yet these primates land safely, super-naturally, and continue their vengeful rampage. Jacobs escapes from the building, too, and gets into a California Highway Patrol helicopter to rise above the fray, through that super-natural technology, wanting to “kill the leader,” as he tells the officers with him. We watch from the ground but also from above, along with Jacobs and the CHP officers in the helicopter, as Buck (the gorilla) bends the fence of the chimp enclosure at the zoo and releases his comrades there. The chimps, as right-cortical improvisers, also pull out some of the metal fence posts as spears to carry with them.
They climb up the outside of a building like King Kong, but then appear on the rooftop, like a primal tribe with spears. They crash through office cubicles and chase pedestrians in the street. Maurice and Buck hurl a sewer “manhole” lid and an uprooted parking meter at police cars. The apes also terrorize innocent people in cars stuck in a traffic jam on the Golden Gate Bridge. Such spectacles of primate terrorism provide many points for personal associations in viewers’ inner theaters—shifting potential sympathies toward the human victims, with the VMPFC stage/production manager’s balancing of order and freedom.
The usual melodramatic formula of action movies, with heroes facing more powerful villains, yet managing to win in the end through courage, earlier realizations, and the power of goodness over evil, becomes twisted in tragicomic ways during this final battle. The apes, as former sympathetic victims in the Gen-Sys lab and primate shelter prison, led by the heroic Caesar, turn from freedom fighters for animal rights into vengeful terrorists against San Francisco citizens. But as police start to get the upper hand with a blockade on the bridge and charge the apes on horseback, beating them with clubs, viewers’ sympathies may shift again, stirred by the movie’s soundtrack, toward seeing the apes as oppressed victims and heroic rebels.
When a gorilla, presumably Buck, pulls a cop off his horse, dominates him, and raises huge fists to pummel him, Caesar creates the potential for tragicomic, VMPFC awareness, with a Brechtian distancing effect. Like the female chimp to Caesar in the fourth film, this Caesar stops the silverback’s violence with a vocalized, humanlike “No!” Despite viewers’ intuition and motor-mirror neurons being engaged with the apes’ pain in being beaten and Buck’s courage against the cop, Caesar sets a limit to the gorilla’s vengeful rage. Buck, teeth bared, just roars at the cop’s face.
This film’s territorial space race, between city and forest, shows the apes climbing the suspension wires of the Golden Gate bridge while a helicopter cop, encouraged by Jacobs, shoots one off—again reminiscent of the various King Kong movies. Yet, Mother Nature aids the apes, with a fog that provides cover for their counterattack at the bridge blockade. Will, the scientist-parent, also tries to mediate, running there to find Caesar. Viewers’ sympathies are thus focused on the human scientist, his family-raised chimp, and the chimp’s right-cortical rebellion against left-cortical authorities. With Caesar leading the charge on horseback (like a Western hero), the apes attack the CHP and SWAT officers from above and below, as well as on the bridge, overwhelming them, dragging and tossing their bodies, and then celebrating their victory over the empty patrol cars while the cops flee. And yet, Will shouts Caesar’s name, perhaps as a superego, VMPFC reminder to him, like his own “No” to Buck earlier, not only about vengeance but also about hubris in the bright-eyed apes’ apparent victory.
A techno-angel of death appears then, rising over the edge of the bridge, as a helicopter cop sprays bullets at Will and the apes, who take cover behind the abandoned vehicles. Caesar heroically throws a chain at the chopper. Buck goes further, leaping from bridge to helicopter, despite being shot many times. He takes it down King-Kong-like, falling with it to the bridge explosively. Here, the viewer might identify with Buck’s supernatural heroics, and his tragic warrior’s fall, yet also sympathize with the humans in the helicopter—given their filmic point of view, as the ape leaps at them. But then the camera shifts to outer, overhead and lower angles, offering angelic or godlike views of the crash onto the bridge, as if the movie audience were watching from another, invulnerable helicopter. On the bridge, Caesar pulls Buck from the wreckage and watches his friend die, touching him gently and closing his eyes. He thus shows an advanced human-like awareness of death—again shifting the viewer’s perspective, with the face of the virtual ape as a window or mirror between inner theaters.
This leads to a more melodramatic moment of vengeance, unlike Caesar’s earlier “No” to Buck (or the prior Caesar’s decision with Governor Breck). Here, the ape messiah finds Jacobs, bloody but alive, in the wrecked helicopter as it teeters at the edge of the bridge. Jacobs pleads for Caesar’s help to survive. The viewer knows, even if Caesar does not, that Jacobs ordered his death at the start of the film, along with the deaths of the other lab apes, after his mother went wild under the influence of the drug. Jacobs was thus Caesar’s main antagonist throughout the film, though ironically he helped him and the other apes increase their rebellious intelligence by pushing for experimentation with ALZ-113. Perhaps Jacobs’s name also recalls the biblical Jacob who stole the birthright of his firstborn, twin brother Esau. Yet here, the apes steal an Eden-like inheritance back from the humans: a super-natural fruit in their bright-eyed, higher-order knowledge of the potential for good and evil.
As the ape alpha and savior, Caesar could show tragicomic kindness toward his enemy by taking Jacobs’s hand and pulling him from his personal fall into the bay below. But instead, he nods to Koba, a bonobo who suffered through multiple experiments at Gen-Sys and prior labs. The grey-eyed Koba gets melodramatic revenge by pushing the chopper off the edge of the bridge, punishing the evil black businessman while showing his own cruel grin.
Taking a police car, Will follows the chimps to the forest, where they swing through the trees. After an angry chimp leaps on Will, knocking him to the ground, Caesar arrives, sending the vengeful chimp away and this time extending his hand to help the human survive. Caesar also convinces Will, by saying, “Caesar is home,” that he and the other apes have found a better primate shelter and super-natural lab in their new redwoods territory. Sharing Will’s smile at this, the audience may cheer the apes’ melodramatic victory over corporate bosses, cruel keepers, and city cops. But there is a further tragic twist during the film’s final credits, setting up the sequel. Ironically, the intelligence-enhancing drug, as the good/evil fruit of biotech progress, which sacrificed the lab apes yet also led to Caesar’s knowledge revolution and return to Eden, becomes a deadly virus in its human subjects. It spreads quickly as a worldwide plague through airline travel, shown in branching lines on a global map—as if repeating the tragic fall of our ancestors, after their temptation of godlike knowledge at the biblical tree. This, along with the film’s earlier tragic twists, may remind viewers of their own hubris in assuming Judeo-Christian or scientific dominion over other apes and the rest of nature, without enough care and wisdom.
Uncannily, the sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (dir. Matt Reeves with the same screenwriters as the prior film, plus Mark Bomback), was released in summer 2014, just a few months before the Ebola outbreaks in West Africa, Europe, and the United States, with a virus carried by humans through airline travel. The sequel begins 10 years after the prior film, in 2026, with a small number of human survivors of the plague living in the ruins of San Francisco and with Caesar’s ape colony thriving in the forest across the bridge from them, without their need for technological power. The humans want to fix a hydroelectric dam, as their power supply, but it happens to be in the apes’ territory. Thus, the space race of dominion, attraction, and trickery continues in this latest installment of the series, but the planet is our own, with apes as neighbors, not masters, after being freed as lab and zoo specimens, not enslaved workers.
The film initially depicts the apes as tribal natives hunting deer in the woods—having evolved to the stage of humans tens of thousands of years ago, using wooden spears. While the rest of the troop moves on, a bear suddenly pins Caesar’s son, Blue Eyes, threatening his life. But his father, with the help of the experimentally scarred bonobo, Koba, returns to save him. Thus, an initial kinship is shown between Caesar, his son, and the more vengeful Koba from the previous film, with further tragic twists developing in this sequel, within the melodramatic thriller formula.
The apes have also built a village in the woods where the orangutan Maurice teaches the young chimps with images and words (such as “APE NOT KILL APE”) on the rock wall behind him—reflecting the prehistoric cave art of humans, as well as earlier films in the series. That village context appears when Caesar (with a John Wayne swagger) returns home to be with his wife while she is giving birth. Apparently, these apes have evolved a monogamous mating system, unlike the various species of wild apes and almost all mammals today (Connor).
Most of this film is about male alpha and territorial rivalries, within and between the ape and human groups, focusing on a leader who wants to build trust between the tribal species (Caesar for the apes and Malcolm for the humans) and a more bellicose leader (Koba for the apes and Dreyfus for the humans). Conflicts are also caused by the human Carver, who panics when found in the apes’ territory by Blue Eyes and Ash (Rocket’s son). Carver shoots and wounds Ash. But consilience is created by Caesar, recalling the kindness of his human family, lost to him now. He allows the current humans to come into ape territory to work on the hydroelectric generator. Malcolm, his wife Ellie, and their son Alexander form friendships while working with the apes. Ellie also helps Caesar and his sick wife with antibiotics. But Carver threatens their newborn baby with his weapon. And then Koba (with a humpback like Richard III or Thade) gets revenge for Ash being wounded—and for his own maltreatment as a lab test subject years before—by beating Carver to death. Eventually though, Koba kills Ash when he disobeys him, out of sympathy for the humans, evoking an ironic twist of rasas in the movie viewer.
Through shifting sympathies, fears, identifications, and projections, the movie audience is positioned as godlike judges to this cinematic experiment with evolving fictional apes. First, the apes’ home is shown—with the humans as intruders. Then Caesar and Koba, using sign language and a few verbal words, debate whether to fight the humans or make peace with them. We, the movie viewers, are brought inside ape politics, involving male chimps, the alpha Caesar and loyal Rocket, and their rebellious sons, plus Caesar’s advisor, the orangutan Maurice, and the bonobo Koba. All are naked (with white sclerae) but their genitals and sexual activities are never shown.
We then watch as Caesar, with red and white face paint like a native warrior and with white stripes on his chest like a skeleton, leads numerous apes on horseback and on foot, also climbing and swinging through the urban jungle, to confront their enemies in a show of force. Most of the apes are chimpanzees, but a few are gorillas. All, except Maurice, are black. Camera angles show, and give the point of view (POV), of a mostly white human group, crowded behind the walls of their San Francisco fortress, threatened by these American-Indian-like, dark-colored, terrorist invaders. Caesar tells the humans: “Apes do not want war, but will fight if we must.” Later, Malcolm reminds him: “War is not what you want. There must be another way.” And yet, the mass audience’s appetite for violence pushes this film toward bigger and bigger battles between apes and humans—and within their groups.
Dreyfus opens an armory to provide automatic weapons to the humans to defend their urban citadel. When Caesar is accused by Koba of favoring humans over apes, reasonable debate turns to rage and the alpha chimp beats up his bonobo rival. But later, Koba tricks two of the humans at the armory, by laughing, tumbling, and drinking with them—then stealing one of their guns and killing them. For the movie viewer, this mixes the rasas of humor, fear, and sorrow, with ironic twists as the ape mimics a circus stereotype of the silly chimp, but turns that against the more foolish humans, gaining dominance through trickery and weaponry.
Koba also uses the gun, while hidden, to shoot Caesar and then blames the humans for that assassination (and the burning of the ape village which he actually caused). He takes command after Caesar falls. But the former alpha, apparently killed by his friend like Julius Caesar ( et tu, Koba? ), returns from death’s door, aided by his son and their human friends, Malcolm and Ellie, who have medicine. This focuses viewers’ sympathies into a melodramatic mix of rasas: awe, sorrow, courage, and vengeful rage— aligned with specific ape and human characters, as good guys, using righteous violence to stop or slay the bad guys.
Caesar’s son, Blue Eyes, after defecting to Koba’s side, sees the evil emerge in the new alpha, especially after he kills Ash. So when Blue Eyes has a chance to kill the defenseless Malcolm, he restrains himself and follows Malcolm to where Caesar is healing in his former family home in San Francisco—evoking viewers’ memories of the previous film. Yet in this film, Caesar becomes more of a melodramatic action-hero messiah, getting revenge on Koba, killing him as “not ape,” and thus winning the battle within his tribe. Tragically, however, he is not able to save his tribe from further war with the humans. Malcolm informs him that Dreyfus, before he died, contacted another group of survivors, which are on their way to fight (setting up the sequel for 2017). This may also remind viewers of apocalyptic endings in the original series. But the audience is offered a choice then, too, through ironic rasa twists and cathartic distancing, not to go that way in real life.
There are many human and ape relationship movies not considered here, such as the King Kong series (1933, 1976, and 2005) and its various sequels, including Mighty Joe Young (1949 and 1998). There are other beast-people movies, such as The Relic (1997, scripted by two writers who penned the recent Apes reboot), with its human-fungus-animal “Kathoga.” Or the Percy Jackson films (2010 and 2013) with a satyr helper and centaur teacher for the human hero. Or The Wolverine (2013) with a “Viper Woman” as antagonist to a were-wolverine as superhero (who has steel claws coming out of his knuckles), in an American and Japanese, medical research and robotics context, or the Wolverine’s appearance, too, in other X-Men movies, or Men and Chicken (2015), a Danish absurdist film with five brothers who find that they were made from various animal elements on their father’s farm. Life of Pi (2012) deserves even more recognition with its complex, tragicomic twists of survival, competition, and friendship, between an Indian boy and several zoo animals on a life raft, including a tiger—showing various types of animals within human beings.
In this chapter, however, I have focused on lab-created monsters, with the Island, Fly, and Splice films, and on sex-driven transformations and bio-cultural chimeras with the Cat People and Apes movies (akin to the werewolf and vampire examples in Chapter 4). A scientist who hyperevolves animals into partly human “children,” or transports himself into a human-fly hybrid, or a scientist couple who become parents to an angelic/ demonic offspring, suggests horrific warnings about people playing God. But it also invokes the inner theaters of movie viewers, as collective Other to the characters onscreen, to develop new networks balancing the egoistic and libidinal potential of an MPFC actor, LPFC awareness of character, temporal-lobe audience of salient meanings, and limbic and brainstem stagehands (reflected together in the hybrid beast-person)—with DMPFC director, VMPFC stage manager, and rVLPFC operator as superego (shown in the beast-person, too, but more so by the scientist-parent).
Likewise, films about lusty were-panthers or about nonhuman apes as scientists, politicians, warriors, and religious leaders, with alternative cultures and super-natural powers, engage the viewers’ left-cortical critic/ scripter and right-cortical mime improviser/scene designer at different points in the mythic, sci-fi transformations. The initial Apes films reflected Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation and Civil Rights hopes about evolving new perspectives for our tribal passions, along with ideological revolutions of race, class, and gender. The 2001 movie continued such concerns into a new millennium with postmodern wit. The more recent Apes films combined these issues, from earlier in the series, with the scientist-god problem from lab-monster movies: first in a male-parenting, tragic aging, and big pharma context, and then in a post-apocalyptic, terrorist-clan conflict. And yet, by presenting computer-animated simians with human eyes, the last two films also reflect the mass audience’s immersion today in virtual, social-networking realms, with temptations of melodramatic good-versus-evil violence and illusions of videogame immortality— involving our brain’s motion capture (mirror neuron) and body imaging (or swapping) technology.42 The final chapter will reconsider the bio-cultural evolution of that inner theater, as expressed by the films discussed earlier, with comparisons to prehistoric cave art, especially regarding our animal-human instincts, social-ordering morals, and prodigious playfulness.