By: Gregory P. Kane
Not all anniversary observances are worth celebrating, and the 40th anniversary of the release of the film “Planet of the Apes” may be one of them.
But celebrating there has been. It started on the Fox Movie Channel on Thanksgiving Day with marathon showings of the 1968 film starring Charlton Heston and its four sequels. The whoop-a-thon has continued this month, with more showings of POTA and its sequels on several premium channels, as well as Fox.
There’s the obligatory pithy commentary, of course, about the film and its impact and its originality and its legacy. All the commentators so far have been white, which may be why not one of them has addressed, much less answered, this question: Isn’t "POTA" one of the most racist films ever made?
I’m not sure if the producers, director and screenwriter (who was “Twilight Zone” creator Rod Serling, who had some pretty liberal creds) intended it that way as a commentary on racism or race relations in 1968, but the racism - much of it subtle - abounds in the film.
Take, for example the Charlton Heston original. Three astronauts land on a planet - unknown to them, they’ve gone through a time loop and landed on Earth in the year 3978, thousands of years in the future - where civilized apes rule, and humans are hunted like animals. One of the astronauts is black, and I guess black folks circa 1968 were supposed to be grateful for that. But there is not one black human in the future Earth. And the setting is what’s left of New York City in the future, mind you.
All those black folks in New York today, and NOT ONE survived in the future? Oh, and there are no Latinos or Asians either. Every one of the future humans - the ones who survived - is white.
Subliminal wishful thinking on the part of the film’s producers? Or were they just too darned cheap to hire black, Asian or Latino extras for the film?
COMMENTARY....
1 comment:
Since I just discovered your blog, I am not entirely sure if this is meant as a joke or if you're serious, so my apologies if it was a joke and I'm just missing it. But Planet of the Apes was not a racist film at all--and it definitely was not one of the most racist films of all times. Pretty much every film produced in the 1970s that didn't have apes in it could take that award. Those determined to see racism, however, inevitably will.
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