Taylor insists he isn’t running from humanity but seeking something better than man—a “world elsewhere,” like the one Coriolanus finds when he turns his back on Rome, or the heaven Milton’s Satan thinks the mind can make of hell. Can such a world exist, if every psyche carries civilization’s problems along with it? Wes & Erin take up the ape tribunal that tries scientific heresy while denying Taylor any rights under ape law, Rousseau’s case that violence turns moral only once we can take offense, and the imitative roots of culture, from joint attention to a generation gap among the apes. Upcoming Episodes: Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Wes: Welcome to part two of our discussion of Planet of the Apes. We spent most of the first part talking about Taylor's misanthropy and the way this little fantasy world that he enters is a counterpoint to his misanthropy and meant to challenge it. But, Erin, you in particular were making a point. Did you want to elaborate on that or say, just remind us of what that is from the end of part one? 0:38 Erin: Yeah, just that Taylor's misanthropy seems to deny, even in a way, his own humanity, any attachments to humanity, including his own history, ancestry, parentage, whatever that may be. And it strikes me in the quote that you mentioned at the end of part one, about when Taylor gives Landon a sort of endless dressing down and says, you wanted to live forever, didn't you? Well, you damn near made it. Except for me and Dodge, you've lived longer than anyone ever born. It just strikes me that this is a really weird idea of immortality. Right? It's immortality in a vacuum. And in a way, Taylor is sort of a man in a vacuum. I mean, he is. He's the last man on Earth. But I don't know, just thinking about it a little bit, one would want immortality for lots of reasons. Maybe acquiring wisdom, experiencing everything that Earth has to offer, not having to face the possibility of death so that in theory, one could continue to learn and create and see, you know, specifically see generations and generations of one's own Family, continue on. And none of these properties of immortality, even just the feeling of being alive for a really long time, apply to Landon. So, yeah, there's something skipped. There's something missing in Taylor. There's something right. This is a conceptual idea of immortality. It's not the, forgive me, the lived experience of immortality. Do you know what I'm saying? Like he's missing something. He doesn't get what it is really to be a human. And part of that, of course, is having human entanglements. 2:12 Wes: Oh, there were women. There was plenty of lovemaking, but not much love. I don't remember how that speech goes. 2:20 Erin: That's probably the most disturbing speech in the film. Yeah. I mean, I'd love to talk about, you know, no woman, like a mute woman, but there's a lot going on there. 2:32 Wes: Yeah. It's funny because Landon says to him, you thought life on Earth was meaningless. You despised people. So what did you do? You ran out. And Taylor responds, no, no, I'm not like that, Landon. I'm a seeker, too, but my dreams aren't like yours. I can't help thinking somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man has to be. Normally, an aspiration like that plays out in political terms in the direction of some imagined utopia. What's got to change? Well, we've got to change our political system. We perhaps have to change our character as human beings. This is a big subject, especially in the wake of the French Revolution, right. Schiller's letters on aesthetic education. The worry was, well, we can't just change the institutions and the political systems. Human character has to be ready for that. There has to be some sort of fertile soil in which to implant those political systems. But someone like Taylor has given up on that possibility at all, Right? The evolution, you know, small E of human character is replaced with something that has to be superhuman. It's a little bit more like Nietzsche. Right? We have to radically change or have to develop into the. Into the Ubermensch, which, of course, in his arrogance, he seems to think he already is that to some extent. But I think Landon's accusation lands because he's fled. And in that sense, this fleeing to other worlds, it reminds me of two characters. One of them is Coriolanus and the other is Milton's Satan. I might be reading a little bit into it because these are just two lines I always remember, but for Coriolanus, right? He's another very arrogant character. There's actually a lot in common with a character like Taylor. But he turns his back right on the Romans when he does that. He says, for you, the city. Thus I turn my back. There is a world elsewhere, and I love that way of putting it. It's not just that he's gonna leave the Romans and go to their enemies. It's a whole world. This isn't my world anymore. There's a new world. Same thing with Satan, right? Space may produce new worlds. Satan himself says, the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven, which Milton is highlighting how comically delusional Satan's state of mind is, which he does in many, many different places, right? There is only one universe, and it's controlled by God. There are no new worlds outside of it. But Taylor, I think, is subject to this kind of illusion that he's going to find some sort of world which he thinks it's just outside of the human psyche. There's something way more advanced than human psyche, but there are no such worlds, because to have a psyche is to have these problems implicit in it and in one's culture and one's civilization. So you dream of a world which cannot possibly exist. So is he fleeing away? You know, is he just running away, as Landon says, Or is he actually a dreamer who's pursuing something? Well, if he is a dreamer, what he's pursuing cannot possibly be. 5:59 Erin: I love this comparison, specifically to Milton's Satan, though I love the Coriolanus reference as well. But the Satanic parallel in particular, I think resonates because, of course, when Taylor and the others come upon the humans, they're eating of the fruit of a tree, right? And Taylor will. Obviously, the others won't be so effective at this, but Taylor will come in and shake things up with a new form of defiant knowledge. An old, new form of defiant knowledge. The thing I really love. I just. I would be remiss if I didn't mention about Taylor's whole superior speechifying is that it's. The entire sequence of this conversation between Taylor and Landon is shot so that their rear ends are right in the center of the screen. It really highlights the visible panty line that Charlton Heston has going on beneath his space suit. 6:51 Wes: Okay, I didn't notice this. 6:54 Erin: You also see him lift his hands over his head at several points and his spacesuit separates. You could see this, like, undershirt or sweatshirt underneath. Just, like, really shoddy construction overall. So I'm like, is this. Is this a joke? Like, are they. You know, are they punking Charlton Heston, Are they highlighting the fact that Heston is an ass? I mean, I don't know what. What that's about, but it really made me. It really made me laugh. I also, you know, I like what you point out about the fact that this kind of dissension between Landon and Taylor doesn't really indicate that they went through training together in a similar way. Their whole sort of plan for populating some new planets, that also betrays, it really betrays a lack of understanding of human reproduction. Like why. Why would they bring one woman for 7:45 Wes: three women and one man? Not. 7:48 Erin: Or at least two and two. 7:50 Wes: Yeah, you know, but. 7:52 Erin: Yeah, just utterly bizarre. 7:54 Wes: We have to accept that none of it makes sense in the end, but. 7:57 Erin: Well, it made me want to. 7:58 Wes: English speaking apes and all that. Or maybe, maybe we could make sense of that. But that he's not, you know, cued in by that, of course, as you pointed out. 8:07 Erin: Right, right. It made me want to place this, whatever, if we want to call, according to the Ubermensch standards, this, this blonde, delicate astronaut as being something like the height of civilization, then, you know, her immediate death obviously is a harbinger of what is to come. And it also seems to me to be highly symbolic. And the death specifically in the spaceship, the sinking of the spaceship, the similarity of the, you know, again, I saw all of these things on a axis plotting out Stewart, the spaceship flight, the paper airplane, the talking doll, and then speech itself, at least human speech. All these things reflecting something like the height of human civilization, which, you know, the film is critiquing. And I don't, you know, it's uncomfortable to say this, but I suppose I'll have to go there because the movie goes there. But it seems to me that part of what the film is saying by the end is, hey, you know, forget Stewart and the refinement or whatever that she represents and go find hardier stock to start over with because he needs some middle way. So this woman halfway, this mute Nova, who is halfway between a cave woman and some kind of a hippie figure like, you know, who doesn't need SPF 1000. She seems like a better deal and won't nag you. And it seems like there's this. The movie is saying something about the need for a vital infusion, a halfway point for Tayl
