My Planet of the Apes Memoir

The original Planet of the Apes is a 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle.  I've read it.  It's okay.  I guess Pierre Boulle wrote some other spy novels, and those were pretty good, and he was in love with a married woman, who promised to leave her husband, but ultimately went back to him, and so Pierre Boulle had to go on with a hole in his heart.  But his apes have gone on for fifty years, fascinating us.

I always preferred the Planet of the Apes movies to the later sci-fi bonanzas, the Star Wars movies.  The Planet movies weren't exaggerated fairy tales--they were difficult, and dark, and they showed a future that had gotten out of control.  That seemed, I guess, more persuasive to me than the heroic blah-blah-blah of the Star Wars franchise.

One time, when I was six, I was at my friend Dane Peterson's house with a couple other kids, and Dane's older brother Paul was putting us through an "astronaut training" cycle in Dane's basement.  We had to run down the hallway, knock over a chair, do five push-ups, jump onto and roll over the top of the ping pong table, and then, in the final move, leap over the top of a stack of folding chairs and land on a bean bag.  We would be timed in this little obstacle course, and depending on our time, we would have to go through further training in order to qualify for NASA.  We were all big-time sci-fi fans and Dungeons & Dragons nerds, so we were very capable of losing ourselves fully in this kind of imaginative play.  And, by this point, I know that I had already seen all four of the Planet of the Apes movies--the original, plus Beneath the, Escape from the, and Battle for the Planet of the Apes--so I was pretty into the idea of Taylor, i.e. "Bright Eyes," and qualifying for the mission that would eventually take me to the future Earth where the apes had taken over.

Well, when I came off the ping-pong table roll and went for the leap over the stack of folding chairs, I, in a very not-Bright-Eyes way, clipped the chairs and totally missed the bean bag, and smashed my chin on the tile basement floor, splitting it open.  Dane's mom Carmen Peterson (wonderful lady, RIP) then had to come home from work and pick me up and bring me into the doctor for stitches.  That was fine.  But afterwards, I felt a little plan forming in my mind.  I said to Carmen, "when something like this happens, my mom usually buys me something," and I got Carmen to take me a down a couple blocks to the JC Penney, where I'd been eyeing the Planet of the Apes book and record set (pictured above).  With the utmost grace, she spent the five or so dollars that the thing cost, and I went home with four stitches and a new ticket to Planet of the Apes.

You know... all the new P o A films have been mediocre at best.  Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is due out next summer, and hopefully that'll be the kind of epic, thought-provoking sci-fi that I found in the original.  My whole life, I don't know that I've encountered a scene as perfect as Charlton Heston falling to his knees under the ruined symbol of his former nation, understanding that he had traveled in time not in space, and he was seeing the future of his species.  But of course, I was maybe four years old when I first saw that film, so... my judgments were probably suspect.

Sadly, these last few years, with the rising sea waters, the incredibly hot summers, and the general tendency of everything toward increasing chaos, I've come to think of Planet of the Apes as a kind of best case scenario.  Sure, some of the Apes are anti-human (it's Ursus, the military commander, who says "the only good human is a dead human"), but some of them are on our side.  And hey, if some form of advanced intelligence survives a couple thousand years into the future, that's pretty good, right? I wouldn't have thought I'd get to this in a blog about Planet of the Apes, but my friend Earl Madary (RIP) once said something like "there is an ecstasy in life's unfolding over billions of years."  We don't really understand what we're involved in, here.  So, Planet of the Apes?  Well... maybe it's as good a theory as any.

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