Fantastic Planet or La Planète Sauvage

In honor on Stefan Wul (pen name of dental surgeon and SF writer Pierre Pairault) on his 102nd birthday, we will discuss the movie based on his novel, Oms en série: Fantastic Planet. The script was written by Roland Topor and the director, René Laloux.

It won the 1973 Cannes Film Festival's Grand Prix special jury prize, was nominated for Nebula and British Fantasy awards. Rolling Stone listed as #36 among the greatest cinematic animations.

The main plot involves the Oms who are human-like creatures who have been enslaved as pets by the larger blue Traags, who have technology, power, strength, and size over the Oms. There is little one could do to exercise one's independence from the Traags. Our protagonist manages to escape and tries to convince and help the Oms have their independence.

Paradoxically, it is both a strange and familiar film. A number of factors contribute to this. 

1. the animation itself. It is both two-dimensional and three, sliding between them in the same frame
   
   
2. both surreal yet standard SF. So many of the events that strike us bizarre could really be standard biological behavior in an ecology we are just encountered--cruel and heartless even among the intelligent species
   
   
3. sexualized yet in a biological manner. Certainly, in 1973, this would have been standard preoccupation in much art of the era, but it is less provocative than mundane as if it were meaningless to the players
   
   
4. heartless everywhere yet, here and there and ultimately, humane
   
   
5. bewildering yet understandable. It seems to suggest that this distant alien although the beings may look like us, have minds far removed from our own. Yet one hardly needs to understand anything of what the characters say to get the gist of the story. In fact, much of the storytelling seems to through us off the scent.
   
   
6. described, apparently, as needing to be watching with mind-altering narcotics. But this isn't true. However, even the aliens partake in inhaling some cloudy substance.

Both sets of aliens are us. We are sometimes the powerful, sometimes the weak. Yet even the weak have strength and the powerful are powerless in certain regards.

Being at the tail end of a strange decade in the arts, which this seems to attempt all of the various rebellion's the arts were participating in at the time. Even a kind of cross-dresser, who seems initially oblivious to his dress until his fellow Oms mock it. The film is like an Easter egg, full of the things that was meant to take it out of its time made it fully part of that time. And yet there are interesting, science-fictional apparati to appreciate.

If you are looking for something strange, here you go.

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.

The Story that Explains the Mad Scientist Trope: "The Doctor's Heroism" by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

First appeared in Contes Cruels. Reprinted by Robert K. Brunner and Stuart David Schiff (also in 75 World Masterpieces).

The point of the mad-scientist trope has been lost. Some readers reject it as ridiculous. But it wasn't that long ago that scientists had a different frame of mind (see Nazi human experimentation and Tuskegee experiment): That scientific knowledge trumped the individual human.

Now we have medical research boards that check that human subjects are ethically treated. But the question remains: Are there areas where we still treat the individual human as unimportant, for whatever grandiose reason--for social, political, financial gain?

Of the mad-scientist tales I've read, this seems the quintessential work of its type. Mary Shelley and Nathaniel Hawthorne took on the trope memorably, but this one confronts the trope head-on, speaking more directly than others before it.

It's a simple story, so read it. I'm going to reveal "spoilers."

Dr. Hallidonhill is treating several patients for consumption. He tells one patient, who looks terminal, that the patient won't live and the doctor won't do anything.

"What do you think I am--a coroner?"

Apparently, bedside manner had yet to be invented. But the good doctor has a thought, possibly due to the valet:

"Are you rich?"

As a matter of fact...

So the doctor reveals a supposed cure he heard about but doesn't believe in: Go to Nice and only eat watercress for six months, prepared in multiple ways.

Spoilers: When the man returns--healthy as an ox--the doctor doesn't recognize the man. The man wants to honor the doctor. But the doctor shoots him in order to do an autopsy: What made this formerly sick man survive? When the doctor is about to go before the British Assizes, the narrator and some unnamed group find on behalf of the doctor:

"[T]he exclusive love of the Humanity of the Future without any regard for the individual of the Present is, in our time, the one sole motive that ought to justify the acquittal under any circumstances of the magnanimous Extremists of science."

Now I've suggested one interpretation above that goes against reading this statement as straight. I suspect some readers in the past agreed with this last statement, or else some experiments now regarded as criminal would not have taken place.

Essentially, this is a battle between the two Star Trek themes: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." (Star Trek II when Spock sacrifices his own life to save the Enterprise.) vs. "The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many." (Star Trek III when the crew put their lives and careers in danger to save Spock.).

The difference, though, is that one man offered his life as a sacrifice where those in experiments did not. Moreover, the sacrifice in "The Doctor's Heroism" was likely pointless. Better to study watercress and its components than the man. You could say, "Look at all these people dying of consumption." If you had a relative or relatives dead due to consumption, you might agree with the story's last paragraph.

A few phrases ought to clue us in, however:

1. "exclusive love of the Humanity of the Future" -- Great, you care about the future. When will the future arrive? Why exclusive?
2. "without any regard for the individual of the Present" -- When will we care for those around us? How can one care about Humanity without caring for the individuals that compose it?
3. "under any circumstances" -- Any? Is anyone willing to accept every circumstance brought under the banner of saving the future?
4. "the magnanimous Extremists" -- the author is complimenting then slapping (or at least sugar coating a bitter pill). Magnanimous defined: "very generous or forgiving, especially toward a rival or someone less powerful than oneself." (Merriam Webster). Monetarily, the victim may be more powerful, but the doctor is medicinally in the position of power here. In no sense is the doctor generous or forgiving to his patient whom the doctor doomed to die without hope. You could say that the doctor was generous toward the future, but we aren't given any proofs that the doctor actually found anything worthwhile.

Incidentally, the doctor's name may refer to this famous battle where the Scotsmen were defeated in an impossible-to-win battle, Halidon Hill. The Scots had to endure arrows as they crossed a swamp and climb up a hill to attack the Brits.