Analysis of Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes

Pierre Boule’s Planet of the Apes is one of the good ones. In spite of two major flaws, it stirs the thought pot, at times verges on hilarious (although mostly serious), and is expertly constructed.

Summary:

A couple goes “boating” in space and pick up a “message in a bottle.” The story they read is our main story.

A crew from Earth land on a planet where the humans (or at least creatures who appear human) are as unintelligent as beasts. They seem to hate clothes, for they strip the Earth men to their birthday suits. Why isn’t exactly clear and it becomes less so when we stumble into one of the major flaws.

When the apes appear, they wear clothes, which suggests that maybe they fear the clothes as a thing attached to apes. The apes seem to have a hierarchy or class structure and this later proved true, but the differences have ironed out to lumpiness. They round up the humans to cage.

Discussion (with Spoilers):

The whole point of the book is to show the simians as humans. Their behaviors are human and the humans, simian. The narrator tries to communicate his intelligence but his captors refuse to see it. Besides, like his fellow captives, he has no civilized tongue that can be understood. He slowly learns the language and with the help of a female primate, who encourages him to wait to reveal himself until he’s mastered the language and can explain himself at a scientific meeting.

There’s a huge difference here between the book and the shows (really, the first movie with Charlton Heston captures most closely what the book is up to). The books sets up the simians as humanity around the time the book was written—1960. The humans have advanced to a space-faring race, so there is a distance in civilization between the space man (our ancestor) and the ape men. But the ape men are as developed as we are. So we cannot claim technical superiority in the same way the French astronaut narrator can. The movie has the ape race less technologically advanced, so that we feel a distance between us.

Moreover, their ethics is ours. Much of it feels like a critic of how at least the French thought and did science. When the astronaut reveals himself, they let him live, not try to kill him as might occur in a movie—although the apes are dubious. The astronaut, when thought primitive, was held a cage with a beautiful female human and is forced to copulate with her although he feels a little like he’s mating with a beast. Still he falls for her. When she is with child, ape woman who has been helping our narrator, helps him escape to his intact space ship and the small nuclear family escape.

The first flaw is the race memory. At one point, though this has happened generations ago, presumably, a human-beast woman suddenly rattles off how the apes became the masters where they were servants and eventually the humans bowed out due to the simians’ greater strength.

1. Such a race memory, if such a thing could exist, would not be so detailed.
2. Humans would not bow out of any kind of superiority race to become dumb animals, discarding their abilities to speak and reason. Perhaps they’d fight. Perhaps they’d work together. Perhaps both.
3. (A blank for you to enter other problems with race memory or voluntarily losing intellect as a species.)

Another problem with this is that one of the doctors of the Earth crew loses his intelligence. At first I guessed he’d been lobotomized in an experiment (did that happen in one of the films?). But no. He voluntarily shucks knowledge just as these other former Homo sapiens did.

The ending and frame story are just shy of brilliant, and I wanted to love it though I do admire it still. Basically, the family returned to Earth to find it run by apes.

The space-faring couple who discover the message in a bottle (in the frame story) are also apes. This last is flawed brilliance. As it stands, it seems to suggest that apes are superior and will take over everywhere, no matter what. While it suggests that apes will conquer space as our descendants might one day and that the apes at the end are superior to us today, it might have better to suggest no species is superior. If the apes share our flaws, won’t they have our failings and deserve to lose their civilization to an entirely different species?

The book title is a misnomer. It should probably read Planets of the Apes, but maybe that reveals too much.

A thought-provoking book, nonetheless.