Fifty Years of Planet of the Apes

It has been 50 years since Planet of the Apes was distributed.  Fifty years since a hoarse, half-naked, unshaven Charlton Heston growled “Keep your stinking paws off me you damned dirty apes!”  This movie, designed as an income producing sci-fi, turned into a cultural touchstone.  It has produced seven sequels.  But, most of all, it starred a naked Charlton Heston. 

            I rarely get ga-ga over actors, but Heston rumples my underwear.  [He joins a very select group that includes only three other Hollywood types: Kirk Douglas, Claude Akins and Raymond Burr.  I guess I like faces with character. But I digress.]   In Planet of the Apes, Heston is an astronaut who crash lands on a futuristic planet where talking, thinking, philosophizing apes are the ruling order and humans are slaves.  At the end of the movie, in a truly “Twilight Zone” moment of irony, he discovers that the planet of the apes is really future Earth.   

            Of course, the sequels and the collateral damage that comes from popularity have taken their toll.  Take the 2011 release of Rise of the Planet of the Apes.  Here we have all those angry apes on a rampage, riding horses over the Golden Gate bridge, hell bent for leather and mayhem.  Evidently, if you genetically modify apes, pissing them off in the process, they saddle up.  [By the way, isn’t going in to battle on horseback a little like bringing a knife to a gun fight? But I digress.]

Prior to the release of the movie, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, ruled that “…most use of chimpanzees for invasive medical research no longer can be justified—and that strict new limits should determine which experiments are important enough to outweigh the moral cost of involving this species that is so like us.”  Evidently, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s have all been cured, there is now free time for the NIH to worry about our primate kin.   There is even current talk about giving apes legal status. [Bringing to mind the sight of a chimp filing a decree of separation from its designated mate.  But I digress.]

            There are a few things that need to be clarified here.  First, chimps and humans do share 96% if their DNA.  Darwin was on to something. That means that there is much we can and have learned by using chimps for scientific research.  However, they are also large, expensive and potentially dangerous animals (even if you don’t give them superhuman intelligence and English saddles).  For these and many other reasons experimenting on chimps has been limited and dwindling to the point of rare, all without policy pronouncements.  Some things simply die a natural death and experimenting with chimps is one of those things. 

Since I try to be both a realist and only minimally hypocritical, I will say that I think medical and scientific research should be done only sparingly on animals.  It should be done when needed, and with a sense of human decency.  Obviously, the closer a living creature approaches a human countenance, the more human decency I want shown.  [Have you noticed that we don’t want chimps, puppies or cute little bunnies used in testing, but we don’t seem to give a crap about frogs, worms and beetles?  Is it life we respect or just cute life?  Darn, I’m digressing again!]

So now we are 50 years away from Planet of the Apes.  A money maker turned into a cult.  Apes are on our ethical radar and Charlton Heston rests gentle on my mind. 

Think light and keep the faith.