104: Talking Apes

I've been watching Planet of the Apes movies this weekend as a way to prepare for next week's big-budget movie release, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Just the prequels (Rise of the Planet of the Apes from 2011, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes from 2014, and War for the Planet of the Apes from 2017) and none of the sequels to the 1968 original, which I have seen before and which I like just fine. The rest of the series has passed me by, until now. I'm not entirely certain why I didn't get into them before.

If, like me, you haven't caught up with these movies, the post-2011 Planet of the Apes series is about the slow apocalyptic transfer of power on Earth from humanity to a population of intelligent apes. Rise is about a present-day scientist (James Franco) whose Alzheimer's drug, delivered by a virus is great for conferring intelligence on apes, but turns out to be fatal to humans. Dawn picks up the story ten years after most of the human population has been wiped out by the virus, following ape society as they negotiate amongst themselves who they would like to be, especially once they're discovered by a small enclave of human survivors made desperate by the impending loss of electricity. A few years later, human-ape relationships have broken down, leading to War. This installment includes a plot thread in which the virus has evolved, making any human who catches it into a less-evolved being, incapable of speech.

It was the series' treatment of communication that really made me sit up and take notice. I can't help it; my academic background is in linguistics. What struck me was the first film's use of sign language, then speech, as a way to signpost the increasing intelligence of its main character, a chimpanzee named Caesar (Andy Serkis). Caesar's born hyperintelligent, and he learns to sign to make his feelings and intentions known. The movie's clearly on his side, although it's unclear just how much of a person Caesar is until he speaks out loud, in a reversal of one of the more shocking moments of the 1968 movie. In the original, Charleton Heston snaps at one of his captors to "get your paws off me, you damn dirty ape," shocking the apes because it's a sign that he's more intelligent than his nonverbal fellow humans. In Rise, a human who might as well be Caesar's jailor yells at Caesar to "get your paws off me, you damn dirty ape," and Caesar responds by shouting "No!" Caesar's defiance is as much of a shock to the human as Heston's original delivery of the iconic line. The movie uses it as confirmation that Caesar's more intelligent than his fellow apes. He almost "graduates" from signing to speech.

I find this detail somewhat troubling, if only because it reflects human attitudes toward intelligence and the ability to talk. Sign language is language, in and of itself; being unable to speak does not make a person any less human. But as a society, human beings do tend to assign a certain level of intelligence to a person's ability to speak out loud. The more eloquent you are, the smarter you're perceived to be, with nonverbal people, or people who speak in a language that isn't their native tongue, treated as less intelligent–like children, or worse. The humans in the Planet of the Apes series, at least post-2011, won't take the apes seriously until they realize that the apes can talk out loud, and therefore be reasoned with.

The movies' attitude toward speech differs from the attitudes of their human characters, especially in Dawn (my favorite of the three). Caesar and his apes code-switch. They use sign primarily, occasionally speaking out loud, and there even seems to be some dialectal variation, with some apes communicating with utterances that sound more like monkey calls than anything else. I was somewhat disappointed by the use of the loss of the inability to speak in War as a sign that human beings were regressing, growing less intelligent. The movie treats the loss of speech as a shorthand symptom for devolution. I'm wary about this attitude. I'll be curious to see how Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes frames ideas about speech and communication.

What I wrote/talked about:

For Seeing & Believing, I wrote a review of The Fall Guy, out this weekend.

What I'm listening to:

Disasterpeace has a new ambient album out this year called Standstill. It's part of the score for a video game, but it's also sort of a concept album, with each song named after different kinds of wildflowers. As a whole, Standstill has a kind of sonic glow to it, conferred by Disasterpeace's use of synths and reverb, that's been scuffed up slightly with chiptune notes. He manages to pull a natural soundscape out of the chirp and hum of his electronic instruments. Fuzz evokes the sound of wind in the grass, while small sharp notes imitate the sounds of tiny insects. The record feels unhurried, like a meadow growing. It's excellent writing music.