CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES -
JOHN JAKES
Back when I was but a callow, fragile youth - in between playing with my Action Man and chasing butterflies with a large net in fields of rape - I read the paperback novelization of Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes and was struck by its closing speech made by Caesar, the talking chimpanzee, following the uprising of the apes. The city is in flames and the city's governor is about to be executed. The governor's assistant is in chains and begs Caesar to bring to a halt what he sees as a futile rebellion:
'How can you possibly think this riot can win freedom for all your kind?' he asks 'Why, by tomorrow, the central government -'
'I promise you,' Caesar cuts in 'by tomorrow it will be entirely too late. If a small, mindless insect like an emperor moth can communicate with another over a distance of eighty miles, can't you see that - '
'An emperor ape might do slightly better?'
'Slightly? What we have done tonight every ape on earth will be imitating tomorrow.'
'Knives against guns? Kerosene cans against flame-throwers? Artillery? Jet aircraft? Missile submarines?'
''We will not win everywhere,' Caesar shrugs 'Perhaps not even in a majority of cities. But fire brings smoke and in that smoke from this night onward, my people will crouch. And conspire. And plot against the inevitable day of man's downfall. We both know that day is inevitable. The day of the writing in the sky. Look!' And Caesar turns to gesture at the ruined city. 'The beginning of that day is upon you even now.'
Great stuff. Particularly to a boy of 11 years-old or whatever age I was when I first read it. Radicalized, politicized, proselytized at such a tender age but in a good way! And great stuff still to this day though I suspect as a book now long lost to time and so far under the radar of younger generations that it's never going to be rediscovered.
Which means that Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes (as in the book more so than the film) is now simply an object of nostalgia. A curio from the 1970s to be collected rather than actually read. A book that has no remaining value apart from its attachment to the past. A problem with this, of course, being that to purchase a book for it only to sit unread on a shelf gathering dust is an act of utter meaninglessness because a book is not a Dead Sea scroll. A book is meant to be read or at least to be kept available to be read.
So here I am.
The immediately interesting thing about Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes (written by John Jakes based on the screenplay by Paul Dehn) is that published in 1974 it's set in the then far distant future of 1991. During this interim period all cats and dogs have been wiped out by a virus brought back by an astronaut returning from space. As a replacement for their pets, people start adopting small monkeys such as marmosets but on realizing how quickly the monkeys learn and how easy they are to train, the pets become larger until chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas start to be trained as servants - and then from servants to slaves.
This is the world that Caesar encounters on entering a city for the first time after growing up in a travelling circus, where the apes are kept subdued and controlled by gun and electric shock night-stick wielding police. For humans, or at least the richer elements, it's a life of near-luxury but for the apes - now doing all the menial jobs of the once-working class - it's a veritable Fascist state they are under, with the word 'No!' barked out relentlessly by police, bosses and masters day and night.
In real life, 1991 came and went and though the Gulf War started and the Soviet Union collapsed, apes were not enslaved and all the drudgery of all the menial jobs in the world remained the lot of the working class. In 1991 in real life there was no great revolution from below, ape-led or otherwise.
The comparison between the working class of the world and the enslaved apes is a far-stretched, tentative one at best but we're talking Planet Of The Apes here, not Das Kapital. To drill down into this comparison, however, the commonality is 'fear'. The apes are fearful of men due to the pain they can inflict via their cattle-prod truncheons and correction centres. Just as equally, men are also fearful of the apes due to knowing what they might one day be capable of.
'Why did you turn us into slaves?' Caesar asks the governor.
'Because your kind were once our ancestors,' the governor replies 'You're the beast in us that we have to whip into submission. You taint us. When we hate you, we're hating the dark side of ourselves.'
'Kill him!' Caesar orders his ape insurgents.
Might it be too much to suggest that in the real world the working class are fearful of the middle and upper class, or to be more precise they're fearful of the power the middle and upper class wield and their capability to take away what little the working class have and reduce them to homelessness and destitution? But that similarly, the middle and upper class are also fearful of the working class due to knowing what they might be capable of?
Is it possible I might be reading too much into what is after all just a stupid sci-fi book from the 1970s? Probably but then every good book should have a subtext to it or else it would be a flat drone or white noise at best. And Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes is a good book. It's sci-fi porn. It's revenge porn. It's revolution porn. Moreover, it's violent revolution porn.
'A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.' as Mao Tse Tung once declared 'A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.'
Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes is in a very roundabout way, a reminder of that.
John Serpico
