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Of Apes and Futurists

Posted on February 17, 2013
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After shaking my head over spending nine hours of a perfectly good Saturday watching TV, I have a few thoughts about the Planet of the Apes marathon that just ran on AMC. Most interesting to me was that the legendary sci-fi film franchise was born at about the same time as the World Future Society. In fact, the Franklin J. Schaffner-directed original (1968) was probably being filmed when THE FUTURIST magazine was putting out its first few mimeographed pages.


Never having seen any of the Ape films before, I appreciated the opportunity to watch them in sequence. Following the original were Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Conquest of the of the Planet of the Apes (1972), and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973).

The franchise spawned several generations of Ape fiction that continues to grow even now: I see a Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is in "pre-production" with a scheduled release date of 2014.

It's hard not to be charmed by the wit and humanity of chimpanzee protagonists Cornelius and Zira, so they kept me committed to the marathon at least through the end of Escape. At that point, I really wanted to see how the idea of the future as multiple lanes on a highway leading to different destinations would play out.

I think the writers really got it right on that particular view of the future, but there were still too many references to destiny and what is written for my taste.

The idea of proactively changing the future was also strongly present, especially in Escape: The sinister Dr. Otto Hasslein argued for doing something about all the world's problems, naming war and pollution (always big, but particularly critical in the late 1960s Zeitgeist) as most in need of attendance.

But then his solution went after the wrong problem. He wanted to kill the smart chimps to prevent the future they represented. Nobody thought to address the issue that created the problem in the first place: a global pet pandemic. Chase scenes and warring simians had more plot potential, I suppose, than pharmaceutical R&D to create a vaccine that would save mankind's beloved puppies and kitties.

Much of science fiction serves as an allegory for the present, so the heavy-handed bomb worship in Beneath could be expected. By the time of Battle, I'd given up hope of seeing any realistic vision of a future world. (There was even a battered school bus that somehow survived a thousand years after it had been built; even the windows were still intact before the battle.)

Without putting too fine a point on it, all ends well for the planet at the end of Battle, thanks to the accuracy of Hasslein's theory of lane changing. Species (races) begin to learn to live with diversity and equality, which was the only true hope for the future all along.

Cynthia G. Wagner is editor of THE FUTURIST.

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Night of the Living Dead Ape

Submitted by Patrick Tucker on Sun, 02/17/2013 - 11:59am.

The year 1968 also saw the birth of another genre of dystopian story-telling, the Night of the Living Dead franchise. The parallels between the ape apocalypse and the zombie apocalypse are remarkable and both speak to a sudden and acute fear of the future. But they seem to take very different points of view on the cause of man's ultimate downfall.

Franklin J. Schaffner's original classic seems like a condemnation of society as a whole, for the polite way we go about institutionalizing our worst crimes. The apes walk, talk, and consider themselves very refined. But they are still apes capable of violence, brutality, tyranny, and, most importantly, racial oppression. The movie ends with the realization, on the part of the human protagonist, that man's downfall has been caused not by apes, but by man. When we reached the apogee of human civilization, we destroyed ourselves. Therefore, it is our notion of "civilization" that is flawed. The apes are simply repeating our error. The planet of the apes is the planet of man. They are the same.

George Romero's zombie classic seems an indictment against human nature itself. Any pretense of civilization is swept away in the first few moments of the film. There is no caste system to revolt against. Before long, the human characters confined to the country house are tearing at one another as viciously as the zombies pawing at the doors and windows. The suggestion is that civilization is a flimsy screen that we employ to hide from ourselves the brutal truth of humanity's innate villainy.

How to view these two competing interpretations of man's demise in the context of the actual events of 1968? This was a year that saw the steady escalation of the Vietnam War beginning with Tet Offensive in January and the infamous My Lai massacre later that year, as well as race riots, police crackdowns against civil rights marchers, and the suppression of war protests across the country.

Importantly, 1968 also saw the landmark signing of the Civil Rights Act, suggesting that, in the midst of chaos, man can actually become more sensitive to injustice and brutality, not less. Perhaps these movies are a symptom of that.

About the author
Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and director of communications for the World Future Society.

Of Apes and Futurists (and zombies)

Submitted by Cynthia Wagner on Sun, 02/17/2013 - 1:15pm.

Thanks, Patrick. I think the World Future Society emerged at the right time in history. For anyone interested in that story, see Edward Cornish's series of articles, available here: The Search for Foresight.

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