Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture
2000; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoEric Greene, Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture. Foreword by Richard Slotkin. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, $14.95 (paper). After nearly thirty years, Eric Greene has finally outed the Planet of the Apes movies. No, he hasn't discovered a homo-erotic subtext in the hit science fiction series of 1968-1973: race is his major concern. But Greene's first accomplishment is simply to demand that the series be recognized, to be taken at least as seriously as audiences did originally and since, and to go beyond. Although the movies are usually undervalued in genre surveys or subjected to summary dismissal as camp, Greene's insightful analyses of the five original films, two short-lived TV spin-offs, comic books, toys, and other simian ephemera acknowledge the persistent place the series still holds in the popular imagination more than a generation after its appearance. Despite the indelible memory of the first movie's climax-its prominence signaled through parody by Mel Brooks and The Simpsons -Greene seems to be the first commentator to state flatly what should have been obvious all along: The half-buried Statue of Liberty awash in a coldly indifferent surf evoked one of the most iconically powerful images of '60s cinema, fully equal to similarly apocalyptic scenes in Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, The Wild Bunch, or 2001. As fans have long understood, the Apes movies, though varying in ambition and quality, have always been more substantial and provocative than cheap shots at Charlton Heston have allowed. Starting with the assumption that the films are resonant cultural artifacts of Nixonian America, Greene artfully negotiates the series' marked transition from Vietnam-embittered nuclear allegory to evocative and extended meditation on the country's tortured racial interface in the immediate aftermath of the '60s Civil Rights struggle. As the series progressed, audience sympathy shifted between the values of humans and apes (and between species/ethnicities of apes) in ways he attributes to a historically conflicted identification that exposed racist ideology both overt and unconscious in a surprisingly complex fashion. Here Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) emerges as a parable of the previous decade's bloody urban riots from Watts to Newark. Noting the film's appearance in the midst of the controversial Blaxploitation cycle, the author makes an intriguing if not altogether convincing stab at the complex issue of audience reception, citing anecdotal evidence that AfricanAmerican audiences cheered heartily for the slave revolt of the apes that climaxed the movie, while white audiences were made uncomfortable by the film's relatively high degree of graphic violence. Greene is a freelance writer and former graduate student who acknowledges the mentorship of the eminent cultural historian Richard Slotkin, known for his three influential studies of the American Frontier Myth. In some ways, Greene's book is an extended application of Slotkin's methodology-- particularly the emphasis on the racialist underpinnings of that formidable symbolic system-to the Apes movies. Greene uses Slotkin's discussion in Gun-fighter Nation (1992), of Heston's roles as implicit white supremacist redeemer in El Cid (1961), Fifty-Five Days at Peking (1963), and Khartoum (1964), to contextualize the star's place as archetypal Western male hero confronting another savage horde, now explicitly animalistic, in the original Planet of the Apes (1968). …
Referência(s)